DIETMAR BUSSE
Garten
May 18th - June 25th
FIERMAN presents Garten, Dietmar Busse’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, following A Northern Land where Young Men Go to Sing with the Trees (2018) and Today I wanted to die again (2020). Busse’s latest exhibition represents a self-examination of over thirty years of his own masterfully inventive approach to the medium of photography. Since arriving in New York from rural Germany via Madrid in 1991 and promptly becoming a sought after name in the world of fashion photography, Busse has forged his own expansive aesthetic path. Unlike in his previous exhibitions at the gallery in which Busse showed single bodies of work made with the same process, from darkroom experimentation to chemical painting and camera-less photography, Garden presents a holistic view of the artist’s multivalent practice.
The subject matter of Garden reflects the artist’s emotionally infused view of the natural world. Animals are ciphers; flowers represent both exuberance and mortality. The title Garden also functions as a metaphor for thirty years of the artist’s ever restless practice. Busse’s constantly evolving interrogation of the medium of photography has led to a plethora of technical wizardry. On view in Garden will be uniquely altered photographic portraits in silver gelatin, staged self portraits in Polaroid, dark room paintings, and for the first time Busse’s colored pencil drawings. Like the carefully tended farmhouse kitchen gardens of Busse’s youth, Garden reveals both careful cultivation and latent wildness. The exhibition evinces a technical looseness that accompanies the mastery of a medium.
Around 2000, amidst the emergence of digital photography and tired of serving the demands of commerce and client, Busse stepped away from the world of commercial photography and took an inward turn. The earliest work in Garden, a series of romantically intimate self-portraits and still lives entitled My Life as a Flower, stem from this period. Alone in his studio, Busse adhered flowers to his painted body and took self-portraits, often with the remote shutter release visible in hand. The resulting images are darkly playful, both whimsical and melancholic. A photograph of the artist’s hand presenting a trio of flowers serves as homage to the artist’s mother, an ever present source of inspiration. The artist’s latest chemical paintings draw from this series, as Busse paints and collages figures and faces adorned with fantastical flora using only the materials of the darkroom.
DIETMAR BUSSE & ALLEN FRAME IN CONVERSATION