DIETMAR BUSSE

THE LIVES OF BIRDS

MAY 8 - JUNE 22, 2025

Opening Thursday May 8, 6:00 - 8:00

FIERMAN presents The Lives of Birds, Dietmar Busse’s fourth solo show with the gallery.  Busse has established himself as a singular voice in the world of photography, from his fashion and editorial work to his intimately staged self-portraits and relentless pursuit of darkroom chemical experimentation.

His latest photographs and camera-less chemical paintings depict poetic fragments of a family tableaux: a mother, father and child in degrees of bucolic splendor and unspeakable darkness.  Busse’s images are both archetypal and autobiographical, as he imbues photography’s truth-telling potential with feverish emotional transparency.  A story teller at heart, Busse engages his own family narrative to explore universal truths.

Central to the show are new photographic self-portraits.  The artist’s painted form covered in flowers hovers between peacock and shrinking violet, display and camouflage.  The photographs re-stage Busse’s performative self-portraits from 1999-2003, My Life as a Flower. Vintage Polaroids from My Life as a Flower are concurrently on view at CLAMP opening Friday May 9 and running through July 3.

A suite of new bird portraits and paintings of flowers complete the sylvan scene.  Busse’s birds are rendered in close-up with deft brushwork, colorful plumage on full display, eyes beseeching the viewer’s gaze with anthropomorphic urgency.  The bird portraits carry the same emotional transparency he captures in his formal, sitting-based photographic portraits.

Dietmar Busse (b. 1966) lives and works in New York. He was born in Stolzenau, Germany and as a young man learned the world of photography in Madrid before relocating to New York in 1991.  His recent solo museum exhibition Dietmar Busse, Fairy Tales 1991-1999, at Amant, Brooklyn, NY, was reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Cultured, The Guardian, and Paper Magazine.  His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York;  CLAMP,  New York; FIERMAN, New York; Halsey McKay Gallery, New York; the Museum Schloss Moyland, Bedburg-Hau, Germany; Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam; Invisible-Exports, New York; Museum Sinclair Haus, Bad Homburg; the Leslie Lohman Museum, New York, among other venues. His work has been publicized in The New Yorker, TIME, The London Independent, The New York Times Magazine and Interview, among other publications.