9 January 2024

Keep a Stiff Upper Lip! Gundula Schulze Eldowy and Robert Frank
Exhibition, 25 January – 1 April 2024
Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz

Invitation to press talk and press preview
Tuesday, 23 January 2024, 11 am
Exhibition halls open at 10 am

With
Gundula Schulze Eldowy, member of the Film and Media Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste
Helke Misselwitz, Deputy Director of the Film and Media Arts Section
Boris Friedewald, art historia
Conny Klauß, Secretary of the Film and Media Arts Section

For accreditation, please send an email to presse@adk.de

At the heart of the exhibition is the encounter between two artists from different worlds, and the intense dialogue they developed through photography. In her home of East Berlin, Gundula Schulze Eldowy (born in 1954) stood out with her multifaceted socio-documentary approach to photography and her unsparing yet sensitive nude portraits. On the opposite side of the Iron Curtain, the Swiss-American photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank (1924–2019) depicted a sobering countertype to the American Dream, as presented in his by now legendary 1958 photo book The Americans. After meeting in 1985 in East Berlin, they cultivate a life-long friendship that overcomes the Berlin Wall and the continents that separate them.

The exhibition traces Gundula Schulze Eldowy’s artistic path from East Berlin to New York, where in 1990 she spent three years at the invitation of Robert Frank. In New York city she meets numerous artists from Robert Frank’s circle of friends: his wife, the painter June Leaf, the photographers Ted Croner and Ann Mandelbaum, the writer Allen Ginsberg and various other characters of the beatnik generation.

Her 200+ photos featured in the exhibition are replete with references to Robert Frank and the mythic city of New York. Excerpts from the correspondence between Schulze Eldowy and Frank complement the exhibition. In a video installation by filmmaker Helke Misselwitz, the correspondence is presented as a diptych, projected onto two screens. Schulze Eldowy and Misselwitz are members of the Film and Media Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste.

The exhibition opening will take place on Wednesday, 24 January 2024 at 7 pm.
A catalogue by Spector Books (Leipzig) is in preparation.

Supported with funds from the Capital Cultural Fund

Press contact on behalf of the Akademie der Künste:
ARTEFAKT Kulturkonzepte, Stefan Hirtz and Ursula Rüter
Tel. 030 440 10 686, mail@artefakt-berlin.de

Exhibition announcement
“Gundula Schulze Eldowy. Berlin in einer Hundenacht” in the Bröhan-Museum
The Bröhan-Museum is showing early works by Gundula Schulze Eldowy, which also mark the beginning of her friendship with Robert Frank.
20 Jan. – 14 April 2024
More information is available at www.broehan-museum.de