SAN SEBASTIÁN.- Alberto Schommer…approaching modernity, an exhibition bursting with the work of this Vitoria/Gasteiz-born artist, is the exhibition proposal of the
Kutxa Kultur Artegunea during the second year of life of this new gallery located within the Tabakalera building.
The exhibition, which is on view from 2 December 2016 until 19 March 2017, comprises 87 works and reviews the career of the person regarded as a brilliant artist and father of modern photography in Spain and Europe.
All Schommer’s work is characterised by a powerful personality and a constant desire to achieve a formal break, which led him to explore all kinds of aesthetic territories.Here is his platform approaching Modernity.With this exhibition the Kutxa Kultur Artegunea will be embarking on a programme that the gallery will be devoting exclusively to photography in the course of 2017.
Most of the works on show belong to the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao and are part of the donation Alberto Schommer made to the museum following the exhibition entitled Alberto Schommer. Retrospectiva 1945-2009 curated by Alejandro Castellote in 2016. The exhibition is supplemented by lesser-known works belonging to the Schommer Foundation, in accordance with the selection by Nicolás Casla, the photographer’s nephew.
“Schommer’s work is a whole lifetime.The lifetime that he devoted to art of course, but something else, too. With his photos Schommer produced a second human group, with its cities, parks, dances, governors, bishops, children and ghosts. At the end of the day, it was a universe that will always remain as the testimony of an artist who when working would give his work countless doses of love and poetry and unlimited ways of seeing it and telling it,” according to Vicente Verdú.
The exhibition
The photographs that make up the exhibition have been grouped into series and divided into three main sections:
Early period
This covers the decade from 1950 to 1960. It was in Vitoria-Gasteiz, the city where he was born, that he produced his first imagesin a way that confirmed him as an author: careful compositions with a personal grammar, far removed from the prevailing late pictorialism. He joined AFAL, a group of photographers with whom he shared his reformist concerns, and with whom he had his first exhibitions at home and abroad. He continued exploring new formal solutions related to German subjective photography, which revealed the influence of the neorealist aesthetic of Italian cinema or the essays of a humanist nature of the major international illustrated magazines. In Madrid he frequented the ZAJ group, photographing its musical aesthetic, and formed the Orain group with his friend Jorge Oteiza, and together with Gaur of Gipuzkoa, Emen of Bizkaia and Danok of Navarre, a renewal of Basque avant-garde plastic art was fostered.
Urban settings and landscapes
In the series entitled Máscaras (Masks) begun in 1985, in May 2014 Schommer was rubbing shoulders with paintings by the masters Velázquez and Goya at the Prado Museum. This series of faces in which the passing of time turns the wrinkles of the protagonists into metaphorical landscapes of their biographies while retaining a conceptual likeness with his black landscapes came about by means of a single zenithal light and by chance.
Mise en scène and Experimentation
Alberto Schommer eschewed merely transcribing reality and built up works that positioned themselves on the limits of photography using all kinds of techniques and mediums linked to formal experimentation. A good example of this are his Psychological Portraits, published in the Sunday edition of ABC newspaper in 1972. With the baroque style of his portraits close to a surrealist aesthetic, he managed to provide the background of the power, economy and culture of Spanish society between 1970 and 1980; thus, later and through El País newspaper, he managed to become a visual chronicle of the transition.
Schommer gave free rein to his imagination and managed to breathe life into colour methacrylates, sheets of glass, broken mirrors, steel cables until producing a series of contemporary still-lifes in a kind of “photopainting” which reminds us of his early oil paintings. Another coincidence led him in 1973 to his first “Cascographies” using craquelure performed in advance on photographic paper. These works were later to evolve towards photographic sculptures thus adding a third timeless, conceptual, physical dimension, similar to the textures resulting from the deterioration of classical sculptures.
Alberto Schommer was born in Vitoria-Gasteiz in 1928. The son of the German photographer Alberto Schommer-Koch and Rosario García of Vitoria-Gasteiz, he began his artistic career as a painter, although he also worked in his father’s studio.
In 1952 he travelled to Hamburg to study photography. He continued painting and travelling across Europe visiting museums.Due to his restless mind and awareness that photography was the technique he wanted to use to describe reality, he gave up painting once and for all to devote himself fully to photography.
In 1960, after meeting the director of the Publicis agency, one of the major French advertising companies, he travelled to Paris. He met the leading Parisian photographers and was contracted by Cristóbal Balenciaga as the official photographer of the Fashion House. Back home, he spent a period of time taking photos of all the personalities who passed through Vitoria-Gasteiz. He tried to provide a different way of looking at the classical world of the portrait. He also worked taking industrial photographs for well-known architects.
In 1966 he set himself up in Madrid and his success was so great that he had to move from his studio on Ferraz street to a bigger one with a set enabling him to produce advertisements. He worked for ABC and El País newspapers, and as King Juan Carlos’ official photographer he accompanied the king around the world on his many trips.
1989 was a watershed in his career; leaving the portrait at its peak he went out into the street again with small cameras, as during his early years. In 1996 he was admitted to the Royal Academy of San Fernando with his speech entitled: “In praise of photography”, in which he asserted that “photography is the way of showing the world just as it is”.
In 2013, he received the National Photography Award. One of the aspects most appreciated by the panel of judges and which prompted them to award him the prize was his innovative character. In the words of the photographer himself, 2014 was “a year of solitude and success”. Because of the death of his wife and because he had become the first photographer to have an exhibition at the Prado Museum.
He died at his home in Donostia-San Sebastian on 10 September, 2015 leaving behind a legacy of over 60 books covering his famous series of photographs.
