Berlin's Schwules Museum Spotlights Germany's Modern Queer Movement in Photography as a Way of Life. Rüdiger Trautsch: 50 years of pictures

Rüdiger Trautsch not only carved a space for the documentation of Queerness, but also captured the beauty and artistry in his community’s everyday life: radical acts, during his career and still today, as Queer reality and history face continuing (but impossible) threats of erasement. His work includes photographs of the first gay protest marches in Münster and West Berlin in the 1970s up to the last Folsom events before Corona in Berlin. In between are celebrity shots of Warhol and Mapplethorpe, images of the legendary Hamburg house club Front, shots of bear parties, and his drag and couples series. Trautsch’s pictures move between documentation and art. They are indispensable visual material for queer historiography in Germany, but his work also offers moving individual shots that reflect a very special relationship to his subject. Photography as a Way of Life presents an overview of the five decades of Trautsch’s work, focusing on one motif: for photographer Rüdiger Trautsch, the camera was a means of making contact with people rather than just a device. In Rüdiger Trautsch’s life, photography became not only a cultural practice, but also a social one: taking pictures to make friends.

Photography as a Way of Life is on view through September 23rd at the Schwules Museum, Lützowstraße 73, 10785 Berlin

Tit Paintings, High Society And The New York Underground: Here Are Ten Things You Need To Know About Former Warhol Superstar Brigid Berlin →

Brigid Berlin is an American legend. Deranged and beautiful, her life is a head on collision between high society decadence, urine soaked carpet fibers and methamphetamine filled veins, forming a beautiful bouquet of rebelliousness. On view now at Invisible Exports, an exhibition explores the life and ephemera of this strange specimen, from her polaroid’s of Andy Warhol’s factory and the New York avant garde to her obsessive audio recordings to her wonderful tit paintings that make for fine framed prints on any discernable gentleman or gentlewoman’s desk. Just who is Brigid Berlin? – She is a rebel in the purest form. She is an artist and a documentarian. She was once a part of Andy Warhol’s circle and entourage. Today, Berlin is alive and well and, no doubt, as weird as ever. Click here to read ten things you need to know about Brigid Berlin. 

Paul Kasmin Gallery's Booth at TEFAF Maastricht, Netherlands

For this year's TEFAF (The European Fine Art Fair) Maastricht, Paul Kasmin Gallery has partnered with longtime gallery artist Bonetti for a site-specific installation made of reclaimed wood from Switzerland that continues his exploration of the dichotomy between contemporary art and design, nature and craft. The gallery is showcasing beautiful works by 20th century modernist masters, such as Robert Motherwell, Andy Warhol,  Sigmar Polke, Soutine and more. TEFAF will run from March 13 to the 22nd in Maastricht, Netherlands. photograph by Pieter de Vries, Courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery

Richard Avedon's Murals & Portraits @ Gagosian New York

Opening today at Gagosian New York, Richard Avedon's Murals & Portraits. Against the backdrop of America's social and political transformation, Avedon began to create four photographic murals between 1969 and 1971 which would be unprecedented in scale and pointed in subject. Between 20 to 35 feet wide and comprising up to five panels, the murals revealed a striking new format in which subjects were positioned frontally and aligned against a stark white background. This intensity of characterization and confrontational aspect typifies Avedon's portraits; his subjects exist larger than life, stripped of all artifice by an unflinching eye. His mural groupings featured emblematic figures: Andy Warhol with the players and stars of The Factory; The Chicago Seven, political radicals charged with and acquitted of conspiracy to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention; the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and his extended family; and the Mission Council, a group of military and government officials who governed the United States' participation in the Vietnam War. Murals and Portraits will be on view from May 4 to July 6 at Gagosian, 522 West 21, New York.

Warhol in Flowers

American photographer William John Kennedy’s exhibition of newly published prints of Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana is believed to be the only such images in existence capturing the artists with their works, among them Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe and Indiana’s LOVE. After almost half a century in storage, a select number of the nearly forgotten images were carefully chosen, and are now being published for the first time as a collection. On view now until May 29 at Site 109 Gallery in NYC.

Warhol: Fame & Misfortune

Andy Warhol: Fame and Misfortune -an exhibition exclusive to the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio - assembles over 150 objects in all media, drawn from the rich collections of the Andy Warhol Museum in the artist’s hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Looking at Warhol’s lifelong obsession with both fame and disaster, the works included in this broad survey juxtapose icons of popular culture, legendary entertainers, art world luminaries, and world leaders, with images of suicides, automobile accidents, skulls, and an electric chair. This diverse range of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and films spans the three prolific decades of Warhol’s career, beginning in the mid-1950s and continuing through 1986, the year prior to his death. Andy Warhol: Fame and Misfortune is on view until May 20.

Warhol's Empire

In celebration of the opening of Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964–1977, the Art Institute of Chicago will project Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire—a single, eight-hour-long nighttime take of the Empire State Building—from the museum’s Bluhm Family Terrace across Millennium Park to the upper stories of the Aon Center. Warhol’s work thus sets the stage for the artists featured in Light Years who redrew the boundaries of both photography and contemporary art. On view December 9 through December 10.

Andy Warhol's Headlines

The first exhibition to fully examine the works that Andy Warhol created on the theme of news headlines will premiere at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, from September 25, 2011, to January 2, 2012. Warhol: Headlines will define and present some 80 works—paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, film, video, and television—based largely on the tabloid news, revealing the artist's career-long obsession with the sensational side of contemporary media. Source materials for the art will be presented for comparison, demonstrating the ways in which Warhol cropped, altered, obscured, and reoriented the original texts and images, underscoring his role as both editor and author. After Washington, the exhibition will be on view at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt from February 11 to May 13, 2012.

Contemporary Magic: A Tarot Deck Art Project

"The Tarot deck is many things: revered diviner of knowledge, feared revealer of hidden secrets, and critiqued promoter of quackish myth. Regardless of one's take on Tarot card reading, it is certain that the history and imagery of these mysterious cards is ripe territory for contemporary artists to come up with their own interpretations of the 78 personas that make up the standard Tarot deck. And that is exactly what my divine colleague Stacy Engman set about doing as she assembled a group of some of today’s most dynamic artists and asked them to submit a new work based on a tarot card personally assigned by her. The resulting images are just as whimsical as the readings that emerge from an actual reading of the cards. The amazing group of artists included in the project created cards in a range of media (photography, painting and collage) and each infused an additional sense of allure and magic into this already heavily charged lam of mystery. Not only may viewers enjoy the actual works in the exhibition of the original cards, but they may also take them home in this unique catalogue in the form of a deck of Tarot cards in and of itself!" On view at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburg, PA until August 7th –www.warhol.org

Big Shots

Paloma Picasso by Andy Warhol

"Big Shots: Andy Warhol Polaroids of Celebrities" provides a look at a lesser-known but seminal body of work by the artist who was dazzled by celebrity and found much of his inspiration in the photographic image. Comprised of over thirty Polaroids of subjects ranging from Debbie Harry to Yves St. Laurent and Giorgio Armani to Yoko Ono, the pictures were taken between 1970 and 1986 on Warhol's favorite camera - the Polaroid Big Shot. Created by Polaroid for practical purposes like the quick creation of I.D. cards and passport pictures, the camera's fixed focal length and point-and-shoot mechanism were perfect for the snapshot-loving artist. www.danzigerprojects.com