Julia Garimorth

Christine Ljubanovic’s portrait photographs of famous artists, curators, critics and writers lie between classic portraits and experience reports. Developed as a complete contact sheet, they are living reports of the artists’ encounters and also include the environment of the subject of the portrait. The publication shows for the first time an overview of conversation portraits by Christine Ljubanovic which have been created over the past forty years. During this time she met, amongst others, Thomas Hirschhorn, Gisèle Freund, Yoko Ono, Peter Weibel, Arnulf Rainer, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Alfred Pacquement and Raoul Schrott, who has also contributed a poem to the volume. With the selection of 60 portraits she has thus produced a comprehensive picture of today’s artistic and cultural scene. In each case the artist and the subject of the portrait chose the meeting place together, so that it provides the framework for the photographic conversation.

This catalogue presents over 800 artworks from the collection of Germany's most internationally renowned art dealer, Michael Werner, part of which belong to his donation to the Musee dart moderne de la Ville de Paris. This is a collection that stands out for its commitment to trends defying accepted art canons and, especially, to the work of the painter-sculptor ranging freely and impartially through the fields of painting, sculpture and drawing. Rather than focusing on avant-garde movements, the exhibition takes an idiosyncratic look at the art of the 20th century and offers a novel reading of the modern and the contemporary. Thirty-nine artists are represented in twenty chapters, where they are juxtaposed with quotations by contemporary critics. Texts by Pierre Rosenberg, Eric Darragon and Fabrice Hergott focus on the collector, while essays by Pamela Kort, Wolfgang Kersten and Ulrich Leben explore the historical context of the collection. The appendix lists the works in the collection, all the Michael Werner Gallery shows from 1963, and a bibliography of its numerous publications.