Bernd and Hilla Becher

Nine vintage silver prints mounted on original card. Signed by Bernd and Hill Becher in pencil on the card. Each print sequentially numbered in pencil on the verso. Mounted and framed. With two gallery labels affixed to the back of the frame.

Zwirner & Wirth, New York
The Sender Collection, New York

These prints are in very good to excellent condition. A few prints with tiny losses of gelatin at the corners.
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The singular vision of Bernd and Hilla Becher has imparted one of the most significant photographic inquiries and influential artistic legacies to emerge from the post-war era. Designated the “great encyclopaedic artists of their generation”, the crystalline poesies of the Bechers’ lifelong taxonomy of industrial buildings has imparted an approach to photographic objectivity that itself has come to transcend the medium (Armin Zweite, ‘Bernd and Hilla Becher’s “Suggestion for a Way of Seeing”: Ten Key Ideas’ in: Armin Zweite, Ed., Typologies of Industrial Buildings: Bernd and Hilla Becher, Munich 2004, p. 21).

Itinerant, labour intensive and rigorously disciplined in method, Bernd and Hilla Becher travelled throughout the mining regions of Germany, France, Belgium, England, Italy and later America in an encyclopedic pursuit of “a Natural History of industrial shapes” (Ibid., pp. 9-10). Articulated entirely in black and white, the Bechers used a tri-pod bound large format view camera to achieve their sharply focused, objectively distanced photographic archetypes of industrial works. Collectively known as the Typologies when imposingly collated together, the minutiae and marginal differences of juxtaposed gas tanks, cooling towers, blast furnaces, and grain silos assembled in grid-formation (always in groups of three, six, nine, twelve, fifteen or twenty-four) at once embody a socio-historical imperative to preserve these inadvertent monuments of declining modernism whilst setting forth a morphology that runs parallel to, and even overrides, their historical implication. Designated ‘anonymous sculptures’ by the Bechers in early interviews, the un-dramatic framing and consistent grey-scale treatment of these structures provided the crucial framework for their project: a formal appreciation for an entire lexicon of functional beauty within a diminishing world of unintentional paeans to modernist human ambition.

Under the Becher’s watch, the first official class of Photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf swiftly acquired legendary status; indeed, the list of the Bechers’ first generation of students is as extraordinary as the class’s ascent to pre-eminence. Between 1976 and 1986 Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte and Andreas Gursky, studied together within the tightly-knit milieu of Bernd Becher’s select group of tutees. Driven by the Bechers’ infectious dedication to their practice and steadfast belief in the autonomy of their medium, the remarkable success of this primary cohort of alumni signalled a turning point in the history of photography.