An Exhibition Catalog

Rudy Burckhardt is the catalogue of the 1998 exhibition of the Basel-born photographer and filmmaker at the IVAM Centre Julio González in Valencia.

The exhibition ran from 8 July to 20 September 1998. IVAM’s page says it showed more than seventy photographs, among them portraits of artists, together with 15 paintings and collages, and that 25 films were screened during the run. The catalogue reproduces the works on view, with 25 color and 133 black-and-white illustrations, and adds a biography, filmography and bibliography. It also carries a selection of Burckhardt’s own writing and texts about him by Vincent Katz, who curated the show, and Robert Storr. The text is in Spanish and English, and IVAM lists a paperback of 197 pages measuring 24 by 25 cm.

Burckhardt (Basel 1914 to Searsmont 1999) took his first photographs while preparing a doctorate that he abandoned in 1933 after a trip to London. His London pictures became the first of his City series. In 1935 he moved to the United States and worked in New York as a photographer, filmmaker, painter, teacher and occasional writer. His portraits of Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Rothko, Joan Mitchell and others of the Abstract Expressionist generation are among his best-known work. IVAM describes most of his films as non-narrative, documentary or poetic.