Matt Saunders
Andreas Grimm, Munich, Germany
‘And now her face is slowly going white.’ So wrote Bertolt Brecht in his 1927 poem ‘Ballad of the Love-Death’, in which he describes a couple’s slow dissolve. That line, with its clear cinematic tenor, hovers like a spectral banner over Matt Saunders’ exhibition of new works at Andreas Grimm. Composed of mysteriously incandescent black-and-white portraits of Hertha Thiele—the German cult actress (1908–1984) who has long fascinated the American-born, Berlin-based artist—the show comprises both an extensive portrait of a single subject and an exploration of the medium of film itself.
Saunders’ photographic works use Thiele’s few films as their source material, including her work from the early Weimar period: the groundbreaking lesbian film Mädchen in Uniform (1931) and the formally experimental, Communist-themed Kuhle Wampe, made by Brecht himself in 1932. Taking frames from these films, the artist drew ‘film negatives’ with ink wash on small sheets of transparent Mylar. These negatives were then printed as large black-and-white photographs, in which the dark lines of ink became light sources, while any uninked surface is turned into a sea of black. The results of the hand-drawn negatives blown up on a photo enlarger are mostly stunning. Seen as an installation, the portraits appear like ghostly apparitions animating the gallery walls. Up close, a thin stroke of black ink becomes a wide swath of solarized gray, burning out into white at the edges. A miniscule black dot becomes a luxurious pool of ever-paler gradients. That solarized images first became a popular in the ’30s is yet another way that this body of work pulls the viewer into that decade.
Saunders favours Thiele in classic poses suggestive of pathos and emotional distance, which reminds that her films were made not so long after the silent-film era, when dramatic body language was de rigueur; eyes are downcast, chins tilted slightly away, shoulders turned in. In the moody Hertha Thiele (Mirror Scene) (2008), the actress shows us her back as she fixes her hair. Thiele’s hands are vague silver planes, infinitely suggestive and satisfyingly abstract. The mirror in which she watches herself is reduced to two thin shards of white, nearly swallowed by the black flood consuming each figure. That dark, ever-encroaching ground is a neat metaphor for both film and history—the explicit and implicit themes at work here—which reliably subsume their subjects with unfathomable intensity.
Some of the most formally pleasing, if politically disquieting, moments in the show are images of Thiele taken from Mädchen in Uniform, in which she wears a striped dress with a loose bow at the neck. With its long, shimmering ribbons of luxurious black and white, the dress is absurdly pleasurable—until it evokes the striped uniforms of the camps, and then of Thiele’s own courting by the Nazis (which she rebuffed, resulting in her long exile from the film industry in Switzerland). But Saunders’ images don’t only look backward. They also variously recall contemporary work based on photographic sources, namely Gerhard Richter’s seminal ‘18 October 1977’ (1988) series and Marlene Dumas’s cool, addictive portraits — not to mention less politically weighty fare such as Elizabeth Peyton’s slouchy portraiture. In a few works, in fact, the closeness to Dumas is uncanny—and perhaps it’s here where the trouble occurs.
With works so invariably attractive, there is the tendency for easy love and easier leaving. And it feels as though this thought may have worried the artist himself, driving him to complicate his process, and dress his ever-beautiful work in anxiously conceptual clothing. This is nowhere more apparent than in the exhibition’s title, ‘Censor’s Cuts’, a reference to both the censored versions of Thiele’s films and the images on view in the gallery, which Saunders chose not to include in his previous show of Thiele-related pieces in the Statements section of Art Basel last year. The parallel, however, doesn’t really work (it’s a bit grandiose, to say the least), and it feels like a conceit Saunders doesn’t need. The photographic works stand on their own, painting complicated, illumined portraits of both their subject, an uncommonly interesting actress, and of their maker, a fan in the most dedicated sense.
Quinn Latimer
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