Works of a Decade, the first retrospective exhibition of German artists Daniel & Geo Fuchs at ADN Galería, presents works from the series Conserving, Famous Eyes, Stasi and Toys, in which the artists developed during ten years original artistic projects (Conserving, Famous Eyes) and socio-political ones (Stasi, Toys), stressing each work with a personal style that can be defined as “analytic” and close to cataloguing. Each portrait, either from alive characters, dead subjects or puppets, has a mainly frontal perspective, as it was a passport-size shot; the aseptic rooms of Stasi reflect the coolness and the seriousness of the represented places: neutral colors, simplicity and rigidity of the lines and shapes, just like the regime was, tidy and ordered just like archives are.
Conserving
Human beings have always been fascinated by themes like life and death. The trilogy of Conserving, including Conserving Fish, Conserving Animals and Conserving Humans, is a sensitive confrontation between a part of our life that is usually suppressed and censured. The Fuchs follow new exciting paths in this photographic work. The expert use of light allows them to confer new life into the specimens described, most of which have been conserved in alcohol or formaldehyde during more than 300 years.
The attractiveness of these photographs is the astonishing beauty of chromatics and structures along with the magic expressiveness that invites the visitor to enter these unknown worlds.
Famous Eyes
In a series of Polaroid shots the artists capture an unbelievable number of famous people’s eyes, exploring the world of fashion, entertainment, literature, philosophy and art.
Mentioning Anke Degenhard in the exhibition catalogue, “Daniel and Geo turn their gaze to the familiar analogy between the eye and the camera, albeit in a manner which they reinterpret for this project in an entirely new fashion: namely, as both a metaphor and a motif.”
Stasi
On January 2004, Daniel and Geo Fuchs have been invited in Berlin as Artists-in-Residence of the Starke Foundation (Stiftung Starke) with the aim of working on new projects and on this occasion they realized for the first time the structural heritage of the GDR regimen in Berlin. More than 15 years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, some locations of the ancient Stasi (The Minister of State Security) are perfectly conserved and the offices furniture aren’t changed. Daniel and Geo Fuchs discovered and photographed, always using the same perspective, ancient rooms, still intact places, conserved like memorial monuments of injustice, revealing the desolation and coldness of the system. The artists did a research in the historical archives of this location and in their pictures they offer us a glance behind the procedures of the State Security and its melting of architecture, power and ineffectiveness.
Toys
Fascinated by archives and collections, the couple of artists Daniel & Geo Fuchs came across the Varol collection, maybe the biggest private toys collection in Europe, with more than 10.000 objects. The full immersion in this collection lead the artists to a photographs series dedicated only to this characters and robots, an investigation that lead to the Toys series.
The show is focused on questions about the self-promotion power of politics and actors using media in an interconnected world, made of entertainment and “war-games”.
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