NEW YORK, NY.- The Steven Kasher Gallery is presenting Carl Str黽e: Microcosmos, the first solo exhibition of the German photographer in the United States since his 1949 solo show at the Brooklyn Museum. This survey features over 50 black and white prints made by the artist of his microphotographs from 1926 through 1959, all part of his project Formen des Mikrokosmos (Forms of the Microcosmos). A graphic designer and photographer, Carl Str黽e (1898-1988) is considered the father of microphotography as art. He deserves to be rediscovered as a significant protagonist of early twentieth-century German photography and as an important link to the international abstract photography so widely practiced today. This exhibition is mounted in conjunction with our concurrent show Gottfried J鋑er: Photographer of Photography. J鋑er was deeply influenced by Str黽e and owns the Str黽e archive.

A self-taught photographer, Carl Str黽e made his first photograph through a microscope, called White Suspended over Grey, in 1926. This is the beginning of his three-decade artistic masterpiece: Formen des Mikrokosmos, which resulted in a set of 280 microphotographs, and in a 1955 book of that name. He did his last microphotograph, Finale, in 1959. Starting in 1927, microphotographs by Str黽e were published in important avant-garde magazines including Atlantis (Berlin), Arts et Metiers Graphiques (Paris), graphis (Zurich), and striven (Amsterdam). Str黽e had his first solo show in 1947, followed by 15 solo shows in Germany, France, and the United States. Carl Str黽e was included in iconic exhibitions: the first edition of photokina in 1950, the 1951 Subjektive Fotografie curated by Otto Steinert and The New Landscape in Art and Science organized by Gyorgy Kepes at MIT, also in 1951.

Carl Str黽e did not present microphotography as scientific evidence. Rather than using the usual circular image produced by the microscope he innovated a rectangular lens frame based on the standard Western format for painting and drawing. Str黽e’s photographs emphasized the basic geometric structures of microscopic organic life. He portrayed the microcosm as an abstract world similar to the images of Cubism and Constructivism.

Carl Str黽e’s artistic microphotographs of the 1920s are associated with the New Objectivity of Albert Renger-Patzsch (Die Welt ist sch鰊) and Karl Blossfeldt (Urformen der Kunst). While Renger-Patzsch dealt with whole scenes and Blossfeldt with plant details, Str黽e pushed the vision of the New Objectivity one step further, into the invisible world. In the postwar period he made montages that used experimental techniques such as multiple exposure and solarisation, in tandem with younger photographers associated with the Subjektive Fotografie movement of the 1950s.

For Str黽e’s 1949 solo show at the Brooklyn Museum the press release stated that Str黽e’s photographs “often remind us of modern artists such as Klee or Kandinsky and yet they do not encroach upon the field of painting. Rather they suggest possible sources and explanations for modern abstract art, unearthing a whole world of beauty invisible to the naked eye.” In the introduction to his 1955 book, Str黽e cited Fernand Leger, Paul Klee, Willi Baumeister and Paul Cezanne as other artists advocating “to study sphere, cone and cylinder.”

In 1945 bombs destroyed Str黽e’s studio in Bielefeld. He lost most of his photographic prints. In his later years Str黽e participated in numerous exhibitions and publications. In 1982 a retrospective on his work was shown at the Waldhof Cultural History Museum in Bielefeld, his native town. In 1986 he received the Cultural Award of Bielefeld. Carl Str黽e died on January 7, 1988. In 2012 the Bielefelder Kunstverein mounted an exhibition Carl Str黽e in the Context of Contemporary Photography that pointed out the relevance of Carl Str黽e’s work for contemporary artists such as Liz Deschenes, Jan Paul Evers and Jochen Lempert. A monograph about his life's work was published in 1982; published in 2011 was Gottfried J鋑er’s Microphotography as Obsession: The Photographic Work of Carl Str黽e (1898-1988).

Carl Str黽e’s photographs are held in the permanent collections of major art institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Museum f黵 Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg; and the Kunsthalle, Bielefeld.