We are pleased to participate in this online edition of BA Photo featuring classic and recent works by a contemporary master, Alberto Goldenstein and vintage photographs by the modern master Anatole Saderman in collaboration with the dancer and visual artist Biyina Klappenbach, a serendipitous finding of contacts and extensions that allows her to recover from oblivion as the avant-garde artist that she was.
In the 1990s, Goldenstein (1951) was a central figure in the art scene that emerged in Buenos Aires around the Centro Cultural Rojas, a key moment in the development of local art, based on the spontaneous, the emotional, the beauty and visual richness found in everyday culture. A period of Argentine art that is now being revalued and investigated both from collecting and from art history, with a series of exhibitions in institutions such as the Amalita Collection and the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, where Goldenstein had a retrospective exhibition in 2018.
Goldenstein introduced in Argentina a novel approach to photography, based on the plasticity of the use of color and his way of capturing the everyday – the surrounding urban landscapes and people – as he meets them and travels without a prior plan, turning the camera in the extension of his subjectivity, of his internal gaze. At BA Photo we present a selection of vintage copies of one of his most emblematic photographic works, the Mar del Plata series, 2001, together with a group of recent works, where under the title Goldenstein Conversation he explores the possibilities of dialogues, attractions and associations between images. We are also offering some photographs of Goldenstein in a more extensive and accessible edition.
The photographer Anatole Saderman (1904-1993) needs little introduction, since together with Grete Stern, Horacio Coppola and Annemarie Heinrich he is one of the iconic representatives of modernist photography in our country. His work, with the portrait as one of its main and most representative subjects, stood out from the beginning for its intimate and spontaneous character, always seeking to establish a very strong relationship and complicity with the person who was on the other side of his camera. Biyina Klappenbach (1904-1994) was a pioneer of modern dance in our country, a true multidisciplinary artist with a comprehensive vision of her performances that included costume design and set design. An energetic and avant-garde woman, whose practice could be considered a precursor of performance art, has however been forgotten by art history until recently, when Alfredo Srur, founder of CIFHA (Argentine Historical Photographic Research Center) rescued this series of contacts and vintage prints documenting a collaboration between Biyina’s performative gestures and Anatole Saderman’s gaze, taken in the late 1930s.
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