BLASPHEMY

Meret Oppenheim& Magritte 

Going into the second part of my research I was looking into Blasphemy and especially post-war art. This time was an incubator for the appearance and also origin of all possible fetishes, trends and sexualities. They became extremer or much more defined. There was no regime or neighbour you had to be afraid of.

Artists were free to do anything since the state was not able to express any sense of authority or censorship, still traumatised by the time of Hitler's extermination of everything different and special. 

Two really inspiring women Meret Oppenheim and Carolee Schneemann (both favourite artists of my customer I found through target market research)  who both experienced the war and often referenced their work by using their experiences, explored an imaginary world, Oppenheim through surrealism and Schneemann through exploring all facets of sexuality in a provoking and educating way. Even though some images might seem to represent something disturbing the lack of colour within the photography adds a sense of harmony. 

Another great artist I found in a book called "Großstadt Dschungel" which is about a completely different era, the new realism in Berlin after the wall came down is the photographer Miron Zownir who captures the trans-scene in Berlin in the early 80s, much later but still in black& white. Even though it's a huge time gap it almost feels like both share a similar aesthetic of liberalism I definitely want to come back to in my later research. 

"Zownir creates a mysterious sense of timelessness that takes the viewer to the realm of hyper-reality. It is impossible not to feel an intense emotional response when exposed to Zownir's work. He is one of those rare artists whose empathy burns through his images, championing misfits and dreamers who live out their lives a long way beneath the radar of "acceptable" society - just in between the blank spaces of the newspaper obituaries, and the dark shadows of the tenement housing blocks."

(DAZED & CONFUSED)

Zownirs and Schneemanns work