In the mid-1920s, Carl Strüwe (1898-1988), a self-taught photographer and microscope enthusiast, fascinated by the scientific works of Ernst Haeckel and Heinrich Schenk, founded his own artistic genre, microphotography. In 1926, he made a simple black and white shot of the section of a whale's buccal bone, entitled White on gray in suspension. He often made the samples himself, which allowed him to develop a rectangular diaphragm that he slipped into the tube of his microscope, thus giving his field of view a format of a painting. Thank to it, microbiology penetrates dramatically the world of art: liquids, chemistry, bacteria, the animal and plant environment in which we live reveal their essence and show us their unknown face: an allegorical universe of forms, which in associative way remind us of the constructions, symmetries, inventions and works created by man. Strüwe begins to place his microphotographs in exhibitions and avant-garde journals already in the 1930s, but it is only twenty years later that he really enters the world of experimental photography.On the occasion of the 2019 edition of the Festival Photo Saint Germain des Prés, with the exhibition Carl Strüwe. Aventure intérieure, the gallery Le Minotaure wishes to tribute this artist still so unfamiliar in France.
Galerie Le Minotaure
The Galerie Le Minotaure, created in 2002, is situated Rue des Beaux-Arts, at the former address of the famous bookshop from whom it preserved its name. His founder, Benoit Sapiro, is fascinated by Russian and Central Europe artists of the first half of the 20th century. Benoit Sapiro dedicated himself to helping rediscover the first half of the 20th Century Russian and Central Europe artists for more than twenty years, with a constant and passionated action.