WOLFGANG TRÄGER

Curators: Anna Loporcaro, Christophe Gallois

For about 20 years, German photographer Wolfgang Träger  has been producing reports on the international artistic scene, and especially on various important artistic events such as the Venice Biennale, the Documenta in Cassel or the touring biennial Manifesta, whose second edition took place in Luxembourg in 1998. His “photographic promenades” are regularly published in the German contemporary art magazine, Kunstforum. As well as views of exhibitions, the work of Wolfgang Träger includes, above all, portraits of artists, taken from life, notably during setting up exhibitions or event openings. To realise these portraits, Wolfgang Träger does not ask his subjects to pose. On the contrary, he is interested in what their work gestures, their spontaneous postures can tell us about their personalities and their work. 

The exhibition at Mudam is structured around two groups of works. A first series was thought up as a meeting between two collections: the collection of portraits by Wolfgang Träger, which today consists of over a thousand portraits of artists, and the Mudam collection. This series thus concentrates on portraits of artists in the museum’s collection who have been portrayed by the photographer. You find well-known artists, such as Marina Abramovic, Richard Long and Bruce Nauman, and artists having recently emerged on the international art scene, like Roman Ondák and Tobias Putrih, or Luxembourgers, Su-Mei Tse, Simone Decker and Bert Theis.

A second group of works is concentrated on the group of artists which, in the collection of portraits by Wolfgang Träger, have a special place: the Fluxus artists, a multidisciplinary artistic movement who have worked since the 1960s at pushing the boundaries of artistic practices and between art and life. Wolfgang Träger has regularly accompanied the group since 1989, and the privileged relationship that he has formed with these artists has enabled him to discover “the lightness and humour with which they always produce their performances, while laughing at themselves and remaining faithful to their works”. On the subject of Wolfgang Träger’s photographs, the Fluxus poet and artist, Emmett Williams, asserted in the following way that he found “sometimes worrying his manner of showing in our faces our exact thoughts on what we are doing or on what we have just done”. An acuteness of eye that is found in all his photographs.