René Groebli’s exhibition The Magic Eye was abruptly interrupted by the coronavirus crisis. However, it is possible to take a 3D tour. As soon as the gallery reopens, the exhibition will be extended with the addition of a few new discoveries from Groebli’s work. Details to follow.
René Groebli’s “Lying Nude,” taken in Paris in 1952, opens this week’s online exhibition. It was shot during Groebli’s honeymoon with his wife Rita in a Paris hotel room where they had secluded themselves for three days. The picture is a testament to the intimacy and closeness between the newlyweds – a form of familiarity that is difficult to achieve in professional constellations between artist and model.
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It is no wonder that the series became the pedestal of Groebli’s international career and that one of the photographs, the sitting nude, made its way into Edward Steichen’s trailblazing exhibition “The Family of Man” at the Museum of Modern Art New York. The stunning power of Groebli’s 1952 series still takes our breath away, the more so because we know full well that we are not looking at a model we might at most suspect of having an affair with the photographer but rather at the unmarred bliss of René Groebli und Rita freshly married in a hotel room in Paris. And we are all fully aware that the woman’s gleaming white dress, falling, gliding from her body into the rustling of blurred edges, betokens an encounter known to us from our own lives. The pleasure divined between the pictures in this series is as scandalous as the love and familiarity between two human beings is enduring and touching.
And so the chamber in Paris becomes the heart chamber into which we have all once fallen, into which we have all once sunk. In the hope that this narrow chamber will expand into the expanses of an entire life. In the hope that these split seconds will be burned into heart and mind – like René Groebli’s photographs on the retina of the viewer.
Stefan Zweifel, philosopher and curator
Click here for the online exhibition THE EYE OF LOVE.
Visit the 3-D tour of the current exhibition in the gallery: THE MAGIC EYE
Bildhalle
Stauffacherquai 56
8004 Zurich
Switzerland
