The exhibition The Burnt Sea by renowned Australian artist Janet Laurence (b. 1947) presents an installation conceived especially for the Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung. Incorporating Alfred Ehrhardt’s iconic coral photographs from the 1930s and 1940s, Laurence creates an experiential setting that poetically conveys the fragility and loss of the marine world. Printed on nearly weightless silk voile fabric, the coral images appear transformed, fragmented, fragile and vanishing. Lighting and currents of air are used to turn the fabric veils into a floating work of art—as if buffeted about by the ocean’s waves—underlining nature’s ephemeral beauty while also drawing attention to its endangered status.

Vernissage on Friday, September 13, 2024, 7pm
The artist will be present.

The exhibition Joan Fontcuberta: What Darwin Missed presents a new series of around forty works specially conceived for the Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung by internationally recognized Catalan photographer, curator, essayist, and lecturer Joan Fontcuberta (b. 1955). The artist is renowned for his playful way of engaging audiences but also addressing the boundaries between reality and fiction. His works reflect on the role of photography in representing reality and frequently deal critically—but always humorously and provocatively—with the image in scientific disciplines such as botany or zoology.

A group exhibition with Mandy Barker, Caleb Charland, and Maija Tammi
Curated by Peggy Sue Amison

How does humanity’s conception of time shift when confronted with illness or death? What are the deeper implications surrounding the plastic materials we handle every day? Are there energies in nature imperceptible by the human eye? Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung presents an exhibition that tackles these questions and more in the group show Imagine Another Perspective.

Rolf Tietgens (1911–84) is regarded one of the most important photographers of the 1930s, but only a handful of people in Germany are familiar with his oeuvre. His work fell into obscurity after he emigrated to New York at the end of 1938, threatened with persecution as a homosexual artist in Germany. Since he never returned to his homeland, his body of work remained forgotten for quite some time. Today his book Der Hafen (The Port), published by the renowned Heinrich Ellermann Verlag in 1939 to mark the 750th anniversary celebrations of the port of Hamburg, has to be considered one of the preeminent photo books of the 1930s. It can be regarded as the most sophisticated elaboration of this subject matter in the history of German photography.