veronika kellndorfer at the j. paul Getty Museum
December 17, 2019
Installation view of Veronika Kellndorfer, Succulent Screen, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019, Photo: Veronika Kellndorfer
Christopher Grimes Projects is pleased to announce Veronika Kellndorfer's work Succulent Screen, will be featured in the J. Paul Getty’s Department of Photographs’ upcoming exhibition Unseen: 35 Years of Collecting Photographs.
During a 2003 stay at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, a gathering place for exiled European artists during World War II and now home to a residency program for artists and writers, Kellndorfer photographed the iconic Freeman House—a modernist house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1924. Succulent Screen arose from this study and entered the Getty's permanent collection in 2018.
The Getty Museum holds one of the largest collections of photographs in the United States, with more than 148,000 prints. However, only a small percentage of these have ever been exhibited at the Museum. To celebrate the 35th anniversary of the founding of the Department of Photographs, the Getty Museum will exhibit 200 of these never-before-seen photographs and pull back the curtain on the work of the many professionals who care for this important collection in Unseen: 35 Years of Collecting Photographs, on view December 17, 2019-March 8, 2020. “Rather than showcasing again the best-known highlights of the collection, the time is right to dig deeper into our extraordinary holdings and present a selection of never-before-seen treasures."
"I have no doubt that visitors will be intrigued and delighted by the diversity and quality of the collection, whose riches will support exhibition and research well into the decades ahead,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. The exhibition includes photographs by dozens of artists from the birth of the medium in the mid-19th century to the present day. The selection also encompasses a variety of photographic processes, including the delicate cyanotypes of Anna Atkins (British, 1799–1871), Polaroids by Carrie Mae Weems (American, born 1953) and Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015) and an architectural photographic silkscreen on glass by Veronika Kellndorfer (German, born 1962).
Unseen: 35 Years of Collecting Photographs is on view December 17, 2019-March 8, 2020 at the Getty Center. The exhibition is organized by Jim Ganz, senior curator of photographs at the Getty Museum in collaboration with Getty curators Mazie Harris, Virginia Heckert, Karen Hellman, Arpad Kovacs, Amanda Maddox, and Paul Martineau.