In their exhibition "Portraits of Artists," the Julian Sander Gallery presents a selection of works by photographer Oliver Abraham. The term "Artists" is broadly defined: In addition to visual artists such as Ed Ruscha, Gilbert and George, Richard Serra, and Taryn Simon, the curated show by artist and gallerist also features other creative minds from different areas of artistic creation, such as musician Patti Smith, the recently deceased filmmaker David Lynch, and the curator Kasper König, who also passed away last year.
Oliver Abraham, who graduated in 2004 as a master student under Arno Fischer at the Berlin school "Photography am Schiffbauerdamm," took his first artist portrait as early as the late 1990s, then still using a Rollei medium format camera. Since then, he has continuously developed his series; since 2004, he has been photographing with an 8×10 inch large format camera. The earliest photograph in this exhibition dates from this time, a portrait of painter, filmmaker, and actress Martha Parsey, with whom Abraham is now married. In the same year, he creates the portrait of his teacher Arno Fischer. While in these two cases the subjects are closely connected to the personal life and career of the photographer, his decision on whom to photograph is fundamentally based on fascination with the artists and their specific work, as well as engagement with their life stories.
Regularly, he travels across Europe by car with heavy equipment and captures the portrayed individuals in these trips, mostly in just a few images, from close distance, against a neutral background and in natural light. The latter is of particular importance to him, as he emphasizes: "Natural light creates different situations for each portrait, making every session a unique, non-reproducible event." Unforeseen elements, like the light incident caused by a not entirely correctly closed bellows of his old camera in the portrait of David Lynch, make Oliver Abrahams' works exciting results of the planned and the random. At the same time, they underline the craftsmanship of his purely analog work. Or as Jean-Christophe Ammann once put it: The purism of the strict black-and-white gelatin silver prints highlights the timelessness of the images.
