Georg Freuler. Moment and truthfulness

Curated by Kiki Seiler-Michalitsi

Kunst Raum Riehen is showing the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the Riehen-based photographer Georg Freuler, who is considered a master of social photography. 

Born in Basel in 1938, Georg Freuler grew up near the Rhine port in Kleinhüningen, initially attended the Basel School of Applied Arts, specializing in painting and graphic art, and later completed an apprenticeship as a retoucher. Under the influence of the pioneers of socially critical photography, in particular the Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank and his influential photo book "The Americans" (1958), Georg Freuler began to focus on 20th century Swiss photography, independently developing "social photography" further and becoming a photographic legend in his own right.

For more than 60 years, Georg Freuler has used his camera to capture the outcasts of society, those living on its margins, in often seemingly bizarre surroundings, capturing human existence in the poor and slums of the world relentlessly and yet full of humanity on photographic paper: in New York or in East Asia's slums, in Amsterdam, Hamburg or Zurich/Letten, in desolate industrial suburbs and backyards, in the pubs of Basel. The exhibition shows a large selection of his legendary black and white photographs – they are snapshots and contemporary documents in one.

The photographs showing the desolation of the open drug scene on Zurich's Platzspitz, which has become internationally known as "Needle Park", or in Zurich/Letten are on public display for the first time. Georg Freuler looked at the face of misery, the emaciated, maltreated bodies of the addicts, marked with festering wounds and puncture marks, empathetically and compassionately – far removed from any voyeurism, as if he were one of them. The images look at us with a defenseless but never revealing directness, silent and communicative at the same time.

Georg Freuler sought his motifs in their traditional world. On nightly forays through the pubs of Basel (Hasenburg, Farnsburg, Schmaler Wurf and others), he photographed great artists such as Kurt Fahrner, Niklaus Hasenböhler, Max Kämpf, Werner Ritter and Irène Zurkinden: engrossed in lively discussions, claiming the manifest superiority of painting over photography, drinking. He photographed bohemians and students who had ended up in the gutter, philosophers and prostitutes, theater actors, writers and musicians. He photographed city originals, invalids and the nameless night owls sitting in front of a glass, lost in oblivion and the promise of comforting drunkenness; he gave a face to the shabbily dressed invisible. The images, composed of nocturnal light, shadows and mysterious blurriness, have a dramatic and painterly effect, evoking associations with iconic art-historical depictions of famous absinthe drinkers (Manet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso and others).

Georg Freuler's fascination with people and their inner and outer worlds is also evident in his studio works: Full-length portraits of women and men, in classical, bust-like frontality or in profile against a context-free background, often created out of darkness. With an almost painterly quality, their graceful posture, expressiveness and impressive uniqueness are reminiscent of Rembrandt's portraiture and Klimt's painted beauties.

Photographs that Georg Freuler took in New York, Berlin and Dresden also deserve special attention in the exhibition. They show aesthetic coincidences along the way, banal occurrences with situational charm, whereby his focus was primarily on people. Using a black-and-white aesthetic, he photographed people working with his Leica, people walking or hurrying indifferently past homeless people, people in front of department and fashion stores, shop windows with their displays. He photographed the glamorous and the shabby, the discrepancy between rich and poor, children playing war in gaping gaps between buildings, reality in all its harshness.

Georg Freuler's photographic work has been recognized in various exhibitions and with several prizes and awards.