Hannes Kilian »

Photographies 1937-1977

9 November 2019 – 31 January, 2020

Opening: Saturday, 9 November, 12-3pm
in the presence of Gundel Kilian

Johanna Breede PHOTOKUNST

Fasanenstr. 69, 10719 Berlin
T +49 (0)30-889 13 590
photokunst@breede.de
www.johanna-breede.com
www.facebook.com/Johanna-Breede
Tue-Fri 11am-6pm + by app.

Rosinenbomber, Tempelhof 1949
© Hannes Kilian

Hannes Kilian was the eye of a long century - one that was often as crazy and breathtaking as the characters it left behind. Sometimes, Kilian managed to capture this craziness in a single photo - sometimes knowingly and deliberately, sometimes by chance and en passant. This was also the case in 1977, when the photographer, born in Ludwigshafen in 1909, saw the mysterious silhouette of a small church in the shadow of the two large towers of the then-young World Trade Center. On a black-and-white photograph photographed from below, Kilian combines the three buildings into a structure-oriented composition: Neo-Romanesque arches cast their shadows before the then highest temples of postmodernism. What may have looked like in 1977, like a passing punchline in Manhattan's multi-layered architectural history, turned out to be a queasy anticipation for 9/11: The insignia of the old gods meet the new symbols of a capitalism that has become religious: tower against turret God against Idol - like a first prelude to the long-awaited next millennium.

Stuttgart 1965
© Hannes Kilian

Of all this, Hannes Kilian, who died two years before September 11, 2001, knew nothing. As so often in his long life as a photographer, it was rather fortune and coincidence that led him to shake hands with images like this one. Where other photographers tried to grab the world spirit by leaping over the great historical moments, the course of events for Kilian revealed itself more in the layering of banality and everydayness. Perhaps his penchant for the small and anecdotal was one of the reasons why he never achieved the same fame during his lifetime as some of his contemporaries. Throughout the many phases of his multi-faceted creations, Hannes Kilian remained an exceptional talent and a loner. He did not associate himself with the formalists from DFA or fotoform, nor did he move in the environment of the large editorial offices and press houses.

And yet this absence was only physical. The opening on November 9, 2019 exhibition "Hannes Kilian - Photographs 1937-1997" in the Berlin gallery Johanna Breede PHOTOKUNST proves how much the cosmopolitan solitaire from Stuttgart had an impressive contemporariness in terms of content and aesthetics. His ever recurring image experiments show clear parallels to the subjective photography of Otto Steinert, his journalistic works are inspired by the then-hip life photography. And no matter whether it's artistic or documentary: Hannes Kilian's pictorial language always draws on the avant-garde foundations of forms: Light-technical experiments or playful perspectives, such as in the now almost iconic night shot of the tower at the Pavillon de la Marine Marchande in 1937, tell of the continued existence of objectivity and new vision in the ruins of the post-war cities.

Equipped with such a vocabulary, Hannes Kilian keeps telling about Berlin: about raisin bombers and the construction of the Berlin Wall, Ernst Reuter and the Cold War. Especially his early work is a requiem to the divided city - to destroyed places and broken axles, to small dreams and renewed hopes. Every picture here is a story - a layering of time, signs and a lucky coincidence. Often it takes the distance of decades to discover even in the depths of such images the fullness of a century - a period of time, to whose relentless witness Hannes Kilian has become. (Ralf Hanselle)

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© 24 Oct 2019 photo-index UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
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Editor: Claudia Stein & Michael Steinke
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