Press release

ANTON CORBIJN. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD 7 JUNE 2018 TO 6 JANUARY 2019

This year, the Bucerius Art Forum is dedicating an extensive show to photographer Anton Corbijn. For over four decades, Corbijn has shaped the image of bands and musicians such as , and with his iconic portraits. The exhibition Anton Corbijn. The Living and the Dead presents some 120 works from his 40-year career, including around 20 previously unpublished photographs. The musician portraits, made for the most part on commission, are juxtaposed with around 40 of the artist’s freelance works in order to explore the question of when photography becomes art. The exhibition is the Bucerius Kunst Forum’s contribution to the 2018 Triennial of Photography .

From 7 June 2018 to 6 January 2019, the Bucerius Art Forum will host a large-scale exhibition on the work of Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn (b. 1955). Anton Corbijn. The Living and the Dead features iconic portraits of musicians and bands including , Depeche Mode, Tom Waits, U2 and that made Corbijn famous. At the centre of the show is his most autobiographical series: a. somebody. For these photos, Corbijn disguised himself as various deceased musicians and posed in the rural surroundings of his hometown of Strijen. The music of these idols, among them John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, was formative for Corbijn, helping to free his spirit from his narrow-minded provincial origins and his pious parents’ fixation on life after death. “I wanted to be freer, and the music represented that for me," says Corbijn. The exhibition at the Bucerius Kunst Forum includes some 120 analogue works by Anton Corbijn, including previously unpublished photos. Curator Franz Wilhelm Kaiser has divided the show into two parts. The first part is devoted to portraits of musicians, mostly commissioned works, and shows a selection of around 80 of Corbijn’s best-known photographs spanning 40 years. They belong to various series, each with its own format and tonality. Many of the photographs from these series went on to become iconic images. Corbijn’s imperfect, narrative style helped shape the image of a number of artists, aiding their efforts to stand out from the rock musicians of the older generation. The fact that many of the musicians Corbijn photographed died relatively young is something that has long preoccupied him, bringing the subject of death into play retrospectively as an element in these series. In his contract work, Corbijn fought early on for the creative freedom to realise in parallel his own motifs and visions.

In the second part of the exhibition, the mostly commissioned photographs are juxtaposed with the freelance series a. somebody. For this two-part series, Corbijn dressed up as various deceased musicians and photographed

For additional press information and images, contact: Julia Meyners, Press and Public Relations, Bucerius Kunst Forum, Phone: +49 (0)40/36 09 96 78, Fax: +49 (0)40/36 09 96 71, [email protected]

himself in the rural environs of his hometown of Strijen. These colour images are juxtaposed in the show with vertical black-and-white photographs taken in the studio, resembling passport photos. These studio shots are arguably the artist’s most free-form works. The second part of the exhibition at the Bucerius Kunst Forum also features the debut of Anton Corbijn’s Cemeteries, a previously unpublished series from 1982 in which the artist captures in his signature style not people but tomb monuments. These very personal images reflect Corbijn’s spiritual liberation from his provincial childhood and the religious fixation at home on life after death. Like many photographers, Corbijn has long worked at the crossroads between free and applied photography. Based on his portraits of bands and musicians, his self-portraits in the guise of various musicians, and the never-before- shown Cemeteries series, the exhibition not only explores Corbijn’s preoccupation with “the living and the dead” but also addresses a rarely asked question: When does photography become art? The exhibition catalogue with essays by Daria Dittmeyer-Hössl, Franz Wilhelm Kaiser and Marie-Noël Rio is being published by Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, Munich (approx. 170 pages with illustrations of all exhibited works, €39.80 at the show, German/English edition). The exhibition is the Bucerius Kunst Forum’s contribution to the 2018 Triennial of Photography Hamburg.

For additional press information and images, contact: Julia Meyners, Press and Public Relations, Bucerius Kunst Forum, Phone: +49 (0)40/36 09 96 78, Fax: +49 (0)40/36 09 96 71, [email protected]