Floris M. Neusüss - Untitled - image-1

Lot 712 D

Floris M. Neusüss - Untitled

Auction 1176 - overview Cologne
17.06.2021, 14:00 - Photography
Estimate: 9.000 € - 12.000 €
Result: 8.750 € (incl. premium)

Floris M. Neusüss

Untitled
1964

Vintage photogram on gelatin silver paper. 250 x 101 cm (frame). Unique. - Light traces of usage. Flush-mounted to fibre board and in aluminium frame.

The present photogram was commissioned by the current owner from Floris Neusüss in Munich in 1964: as a graphic designer, he was entrusted with the design of an advertising campaign in which this motif, as well as other similar pictures, now lost, were used. The advertisements featured at the time in various magazines.
Neusüss created his first life-size full-body photogram in 1960, made without the use of a camera by directly exposing the photographic paper. Termed “nudograms” by L. Fritz Gruber, they were inspired by Yves Klein's body prints of naked models covered in blue paint. In contrast to Klein's more two-dimensional “anthropometries”, Neusüss' photograms evoke the impression of volume and spatiality due to their fine grey gradients along the contours of the depicted bodies. Weightless, the young woman seems to float through the deep black space around her as a mysterious shining light, holding aloft a delicate bunch of flowers. “Neusüss' photograms are phantasmagoria rooted in reality: he retains contact with the external, rationally experienced reality and yet allows dreamlike entities to create, as it were, their own reality.” (Quoted from: Jessica Ullrich, Lichtgestalten und Schattenwesen, in: op.cit., p. 17)

Provenance

From the photographer to the present owner, private collection, Munich

Literature

T.O. Immisch (ed.), Floris Neusüss. Körperbilder. Fotogramme der sechziger Jahre, exhib.cat. Staatliche Moritzburg Halle, Halle 2001, ill. p. 115