28 Vignon Street is delighted to present a new exhibition of never-before-shown works of artist Michael Wolf (1954-2019). This exhibition features a selection of Wolf’s series of sunrises, captured in the early morning from the rooftop of his home overlooking the coast of Cheung Chau in Hong Kong.

Michael Wolf was born in 1954 in Munich and grew up in Canada, Germany, and the United States. He studied fine arts at the University of California, Berkeley, and visual communication with Otto Steinert at the Folkwang School in Essen, Germany. Later, he worked as an editorial photographer for German magazines such as GEO, Time, Spiegel, and Stern, but his desire for a more personal artistic vision led him to Hong Kong, where he found his artistic voice and left his career as an editorial photographer behind.

Wolf drew inspiration from the constantly transforming mega-cities. From the architecture of the tower blocks in Hong Kong and Chicago to the relentless bustle of Tokyo’s metro, from privacy to voyeurism to the phenomenon of mass production of modern art, Wolf documented in each of his series a new perspective on urban life. His camera observed the urban structures, as well as the ways in which people adapt and reconfigure the urban landscape.

After living and working in Hong Kong for many years, Wolf left the city for a new home on Cheung Chau Island. Between 2017 and 2018, he captured numerous photos of sunrises between 5:30 a.m. and 7:30 a.m., overlooking one of Hong Kong’s many bays. The fleeting play of light and color, like a natural spectacle, differs markedly with his earlier work on Hong Kong. In those pieces, he emphasized the social critiques reflecting living conditions in overcrowded megacities and the associated issues of mass consumption and environmental pollution.

BOOKS

Reflecting on his work, Gruyaert said, “When I was living in London in the early 70s, there was a crazy television set in my house. By playing around with the antenna and tweaking the controls, I could suddenly obtain fascinating colors. This led me to spend a couple of months following the latest news, from the first Apollo flights to the Munich Olympic Games, as well as American and English TV series and ads. It made me see the world differently and question the growing influence of television.”

“In those days, VCRs didn’t yet exist, and I couldn’t freeze frames or rewind. I was face to face with current events, camera in hand, sometimes very close to the screen to frame things differently. It felt similar to street photography, where a good image is a small miracle that arises when you’re receptive and concentrated. With more advanced technology, the images might not have been as fresh, but merely the result of a conceptual exercise.”

“Discovering Pop Art in New York at the end of the 60s made me realize that our consumer society could be viewed with both insight and humor. I admired artists like Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, and Nam June Paik. I became a kind of bedroom reporter confronted with the ‘society of spectacle,’ seeing the world’s terrible reality through a screen.”

In 1974, Yves Bourde wrote in Le Monde, “The machine, sabotaged by flamboyant disrespect, is put back in its place, and its message becomes absurd and alarming.” Gruyaert’s work continues to resonate, challenging viewers to reflect on the pervasive impact of television on our perception of reality.

BOOKS

The works presented below are diptychs that each combine
a drawing by Arpais Du Bois and a photograph by Michael Wolf.

Gallery FIFTY ONE is pleased to present ‘Hong Kong Whispers’, a new publication by Hannibal Books. This book is the result of a close collaboration between Michael Wolf and Arpaïs Du Bois in which the artists produced works side by side in Hong Kong, back in 2014, fed by their experiences and discussions. ‘Hong Kong Whispers’ creates a fascinating dialogue between two contrasting but complementary artistic approaches: Michael’s stunning series of photographs and Arpaïs’s acerbic and ambiguous drawings. To celebrate this project, brought back to life by Barbara Wolf, Michael’s widow, the gallery will present a selection of paired images, each editions of 3, drawn directly from the book. Come celebrate the 10 year anniversary of their collaboration and Michael’s everlasting legacy. In loving memory of Michael Wolf.

In 2012, Michael Wolf and Arpaïs Du Bois embarked on a transformative journey, turning ‘Where we met’, an artistic collaboration between Arpaïs Du Bois and Yamamoto Masao (°1957) in 2011, which culminated in a book, inside out. “What a wonderful project” Michael remarked, igniting the spark of collaboration between them. In late 2013, during one of his visits to Arpaïs Du Bois’ studio in Antwerp, he casually suggested, “Hong Kong would be good for you”. Fuelled by a sense of suffocation and an urgent need for change, Arpaïs Du Bois decided to take a break from teaching at Sint Lucas Antwerp and accepted Michael’s invitation to visit Hong Kong starting February 2014.

Upon arriving in Hong Kong, Du Bois was overwhelmed by a wave of emotions, surrender, wonder, absorption, overstimulation, and alienation, yet amidst it all, a strange sense of recognition. Together, and at times alone, they delved into the enigmatic biotope of the city’s back alleys. During their explorations, Wolf revealed hidden facets of the city, such as brightly lit rooms filled with the fervour of gambling. They walked in silence, and exchanged stories, attempting to articulate the ineffable—specific lights, colours, and emotions. And amidst it all, they savoured the simple pleasures, like finding the perfect tofu at sundry stalls. 

In the chaos of Hong Kong’s streets, Arpaïs Du Bois sought to immerse herself in the essence of the city, absorbing its sights, sounds, and sensations, allowing the white noise to clear from her mind. As their time together drew to a close, they sat on Michael’s studio floor, envisioning the book they would create, a testament to their shared experiences and memories.

Years passed by, and tragically, Michael passed away in 2019. However, in 2023, Barbara Wolf, his widow, breathed new life into their project, bringing Michael back into our midst. Now, in 2024, a decade after Arpaïs Du Bois’ Hong Kong journey and five years after Wolf’s passing, this book stands as a collection of emotions—a tribute to their shared journey.

Join us on Saturday, May 4th, where Arpaïs Du Bois will be signing copies of the book. We are looking forward to welcoming you at gallery.

Jack Garofalo was so skilled at slipping in almost anywhere that he was nicknamed La Ficelle – The String. First it was into the world of reporters, where he was invited by happenstance, thanks to his friend Daniel Filipacchi, who gave him his first Leica and opened the doors to Paris Match. Jack stayed there for 40 years, leaving the magazine a treasure trove of tens of thousands of photos. But what “Kiki” did best was wind himself around the hearts of his models – from the Shah of Iran, who lent him all his armoured vehicles for one picture, to Hemingway, whose entire bar he knocked back on one memorable night, his very first story.

His great friend Federico Fellini had asked him to play a paparazzo in “81⁄2”, but Jack preferred summer games of belote with Brigitte Bardot in Saint-Tropez. With a mixture of cunning and light- heartedness, which often enraged his bosses, his audacity could unnerve the toughest ones.
One day, he took André Malraux out on the waters of India’s Ganges River. “Stop your twitching, Minister, you’re going to capsize the boat.” No-one had ever dared speak to the writer like that and Malraux exploded with laughter. “Chic et voyou,” as they say at Match – the stylish lout, the gentleman brat.

Born in France in 1952, Simon Chaput moved to New York City in the early 1980s, and quickly became immersed in the downtown art scene through close friends Christo and Jeanne-Claude. It was during this time that he met Isamu Noguchi, who inspired him to revisit his childhood passion for photography.

This rekindling led him to India, and the Jantar Mantar. Over the course of a year, Chaput spent time traveling to different places, and photographing the stone observatories that were built in the 18th century for the study of astronomy. It was in these early pictures that he developed his unique, poetic, and abstract style of light playing with negative space, a style that continues in his series on New York, Waterfalls, and Nudes.

While in the process of moving his studio of 30 years from Manhattan to Miami, Chaput discovered these previously unprinted images. He realized how influential they are to his whole body of work, and an intense printing session followed in his beloved darkroom. Perfectly capturing the striking combinations of geometrical forms of the Jantar Mantar, Chaput presents mysterious and romantic locations where one could spend hours in visual exploration. Indeed, he spent hours waiting for the right light and angles, and for the many visitors to have left the famous Indian sites.

Katrien De Blauwer (Belgium, 1969) takes the viewer on a journey between dream and reality. With ‘she won’t open her eyes’, the artist adds a remarkable concept series to her oeuvre, filled with formal experiments that mark a shift in her imagery.

The work of Katrien De Blauwer is always partly autobiographical. Although she uses material taken from vintage magazines and turns it into anonymous and universally recognisable images by cutting out the faces, she reassembles and appropriates this found imagery into a new, very personal narrative that is far removed from its original meaning. Created in a spontaneous and intuitive manner – mainly guided by her own emotions – De Blauwer’s photomontages depict her personal life story and memories. In a same way, the series ‘she won’t open her eyes’ found its roots in a personal experience, arisen in a period in which the artist experienced a lack of sleep and started to reflect about the concept of sleep and dreams. A book she read at the time – ‘The House of the Sleeping Beauties’ (1961) by the Japanese writer and Nobel prize winner Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) – would eventually become the starting point of this new series.

From 1961 to 1980, Marcel De Baer (Geraardsbergen, 1922-2014) was a Forensic Expert (specialised in collisions) for the public prosecutor’s office of the district of Oudenaarde, Belgium. In this capacity, he came at the scene of every major traffic accident that took place in the area to report on what had happened based on photos, measurements and technical drawings.

His pictures, despite their macabre theme and the fact that they were made for strictly utilitarian purposes, possess a fascinating, accidental beauty. De Baer’s grandson, visual artist Erik Bulckens, recently started his mission to inventorize and promote this extraordinary archive.

Since De Baer kept a copy of every file intended for the court for his own archive, these were preserved until now. After De Baer’s death, a total of approximately 4,000 reports and ten thousand images – both prints and negatives – were found by Bulckens in his grandparents’ attic. They immediately caught his attention because of their visual aesthetic. It’s the vintage prints – all developed at home by De Baer’s daughter – that are part of this exhibition.

These pictures of a.o. skid marks, chalk lines, car wrecks, scratches, dents and even blood spatters, to which De Baer added arrows, numbers and annotations that correspond to descriptions in the original files, provide an insight

into how he analyzed and reconstructed accidents. Since most crashes took place in the early hours, few people can be seen here. In these strangely stilled images, the metal seems to lie almost peacefully in the morning mist, contributing to the film noir atmosphere the photos radiate. Other images do show human presence in the form of groups of bystanders, or police officers who perform re-enactments of what happened in a somewhat surrealistic way. The latter provide, presumably unintentionally, some comic relief.

These images can be regarded as time documents – testifying a.o. to road safety in its infancy – but above all possess a remarkable beauty. This is not only due to the nostalgic atmosphere, the aesthetic of the old cars (often a Volkswagen Beetle), and the sculptural qualities of the car wrecks, but also to the contribution of the photographer. Although technically very well trained, De Baer had no artistic background nor ambition. For him, his photos were purely informative, taken for the purpose of research. However, these incentives seem at odds with his thoughtful lighting, framing, composition and attention to detail. He could have captured the damaged vehicles in a snapshot, but instead took the time to search for the perfect frame that also included seemingly unimportant information such as the surroundings or a crowd of onlookers. Was it De Baer’s formal control of the medium that unintentionally produced artistic images, or was there more to it? It is part of the mystery of this man who always performed his job conscientiously and dutifully and never left the house without his suit and hat on, even when he was called up in the middle of the night.

These atmospheric, poignant, melancholic and sometimes humoristic photos evoke associations with Weegee’s well-known crime pictures from the 1930s and 1940s (although these posses a much higher shock factor) or Andy Warhol’s 1962-63 ‘The Death and Disaster Series’ in which, by repeating press images of a.o. car accidents reflected on how the widespread publication of this kind of gruesome images renders readers immune to their impact. However, De Baer’s photos can best be compared to those of police photographer Arnold Odermatt (1925-2021) who photographed car accidents in the Swiss canton of Nidwalden between 1948 and 1993. Odermatt’s photographs possess the same skilful precision and also transcend the mere description of facts. Although Odermatt clearly acted more from an aesthetic point of view – in addition to the images he made for the police report, he also took additional, more carefully composed photos for his own use – his archive likewise raises the question whether a photograph can be regarded as artistic regardless of its initial, utilitarian intention.