NEW YORK, NY.- Sous Les Etoiles Gallery will present its new exhibition titled Generative Aesthetics featuring the two artists, Gottfried Jäger and Manfred Mohr.

The exhibition is on view from September 14th to November 2nd, 2024. The opening exhibition will be held on Saturday September 14th, 2024 from 4 to 7 PM with Manfred Mohr in attendance.

Two German artists which both careers started at the time of the New Tendencies, the groundbreaking Art Movement that emerges in Zagreb, Yugoslavia in 1960s, making the foundations of an information aesthetics, that create innovative works. Gottfried Jäger and Manfred Mohr were influenced by the publication of the book “Aesthetica” from Max Bense, a semiologist and philosopher, that elaborated the foundation of a programmed aesthetic based on mathematics, and Herbert W. Franke, a pivotal figure in bridging the gap between art and science and the forefather of computer art.

By extension, the application of the information theory on several field of creativity revolutionized the artistic expression. It was then the beginning of a new visual research using computers, and the establishment of an aesthetic of information as the theorical base of these trends.

It is the first time those two artists are reunited in a duo show in United States. It is the occasion for Sous Les Etoiles Gallery to introduce new vintage series of works by both Gottfried Jäger and Manfred Mohr.

Gottfried Jäger (b.1937) is one of the most important photographers and photo theorists of the post-war period. Alongside Otto Steinert (Essen) and Bernd & Hilla Becher (Düsseldorf), Jäger influenced generations of photographers with his non-representational photography and his teaching at the FH Bielefeld.

Jäger has been part of some of the most iconic computer art exhibitions of the 1960s, such as New Tendencies (1969) in Zagreb, Experiments in Art and Technology (1968) at the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the groundbreaking Generative Fotografie (1968) at the Kunsthaus Bielefeld in Germany. Gottfried Jäger’s has been featured in a major group exhibition at the Tate Modern in London, Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art. In 2023, a career retrospective was organized at the Sprengel Museum Hannover.

Manfred Mohr (b.1938) is considered as a pioneer of digital art. Within a few years, his art transformed from abstract expressionism to computer generated algorithmic geometry. Encouraged by the computer music composer Pierre Barbaud whom he met in 1967, Mohr programmed his first computer drawings in 1969. Mohr’s first major museum exhibition, Une Esthétique Programmée, took place in 1971 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. It has since become known as the first solo show in a museum, of works entirely calculated and drawn by a digital computer. During the exhibition, Mohr demonstrated his process of drawing his computer-generated imagery using a Benson flatbed plotter for the first time in public. Mohr’s pieces have been based on the logical structure of cubes and hypercubes—including the lines, planes, and relationships among them—since 1973.