Diane Arbus at Martin-Gropius-Bau

The Martin-Gropius-Bau presents a selection of two hundred photographs that afford an opportunity to explore the origins, scope and aspirations in the photography of Diane Arbus. The exhibition includes all of the artist’s iconic photographs as well as many that have never before been publicly exhibited.

Even the earliest examples of her work demonstrate Arbus’ distinctive sensibility through the expression on a face, someone’s posture, the character of the light, and the personal implications of objects in a room or landscape. The final room of the exhibition is devoted to extensive biographical and critical documentation
of Diane Arbus' life and oeuvre.

Diane Arbus (New York, 1923–1971) revolutionized the art she practiced. Her bold subject matter and photographic approach produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its steadfast celebration of things as they are. Her gift for rendering strange those things we consider most familiar, and for uncovering the familiar within the exotic, enlarges
our understanding of ourselves.

Arbus found most of her subjects in New York City, a place that she explored as both a known geography and as a foreign land, photographing people she discovered during the 1950s and 1960s. She was committed to photography as a medium that tangles with the facts. Her contemporary anthropology—portraits of couples, children, carnival performers, nudists, middle-class families, transvestites, zealots, eccentrics and celebrities—stands as an allegory of the human experience, an exploration of the relationship between appearance and identity, illusion and belief, theater and reality.

Date: until September 23.
Location: Martin-Gropius-Bau. Niederkirchnerstraße 7. Corner Stresemannstr. 110. 10963 Berlin. Germany.
Opening hours: from Wednesday to Monday from 10am to 7pm.