The Seen and the Unseen
Combining archive material with a wide selection of photographs of body paintings produced by the duo in the 1970-1980s, this publication retraces the evolution of gender identities and the treatment of the female body in visual culture from the 1950s to the present.
Lehndorff & Tru¨lzsch developed an oeuvre of remarkably innovative staged photographs of body paintingsa synthesis of painting, photography, and performanceduring an intensively creative period from the 1970s to the late 1980s. In The Seen and the Unseen, Lehndorff & Tru¨lzsch approach their artistic work from a new angle by interweaving the images of their work series, the facsimiled archive material (such as essays by Susan Sontag and Gary Indiana), contributions by critics Richard Milazzo and Jörg Scheller as well as contextual explanations and reference images. The book retraces the evolution of gender identities and the treatment of the female body against the backdrop of history and contemporary art in the second half of the twentieth century.
“…that of one artist who is unseen…
and another artist who is straining towards invisibility…”
Susan Sontag, “Fragments of an Aesthetic of Melancholy,” in “Veruschka Trans-figurations,” 1986
“The method of Tru¨lzsch/Lehndorff restricts their assertion from physically altering what already exists in the environment. This is an art of reflection rather than an intervention…it could…be said, that the…objects… are examples of double photography, or teleplastic photography (sculptural photography).”
Gary Indiana, “Imitation and Its Double,” Village Voice, April 9, 1985
Vera Lehndorff (born 1939 in Kaliningrad, Russia) studied painting and design at the Fachschule für Gestaltung in Hamburg from 1958 to 1961. In 1961 she moved to Florence. Lehndorff’s modeling career began there. She made her international breakthrough in 1966 in Michelangelo Antonioni’s cult film Blow-up, after which Veruschka, as she came to be known professionally, became a 1960s fashion icon. During the 1968 shoot in Rome for Franco Rubartelli’s film Veruschka, poesia di una donna (1971), she experimented with body-painting, progressively transforming her appearance in her own artworks as well as in collaboration with Holger Trülzsch, whom she met in 1969.
Holger Trülzsch (born 1939 in Munich) studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1960 to 1965. Trülzsch works in a wide array of different media, ranging from painting, drawing, photography and film to sculptures. Also an accomplished percussionist, Trülzsch teamed up with Florian Fricke to form the electronic music group Popul Vuh. They composed and performed the soundtrack to Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), and recorded their first album, Affenstunde, in 1969 in Peterskirchen, Bavaria, where he first met Vera Lehndorff.
