Zeitung, Fundaziun NV Nr.13 Not Vital

12

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December 29 2020 – January 30 2021

cover Darrel Ellis, Untitled, ca. 1979 – 81

Resin-coated print and oil paint, 33 x 23 cm

fundaziun Not Vital thank you Allen Frame, Candice Madey Gallery, Catherine Schelbert,

Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, Daniele Agostini, Eric Powell, Galerie Crone,

Greta von Albertini, Not Vital, Peter Hujar Foundation publisher fundaziun Not Vital editor Giorgia von Albertini curators Sebastian Strenger and Giorgia von Albertini artist Darrel Ellis texts Alllen Frame, Sebastian Strenger, Not Vital graphic design Süsskind SGD layout Giorgia von Albertini edition 300 -

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DARREL ELLIS

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Peter Hujar Darrel Ellis (II), 1981 Vintage gelatin silver print 50.8 x 40.6 cm © 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC Courtesy of The Peter Hujar Archive, Pace Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco -

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------In 1983 Liliana Brosi, a gallerist from Chur, visited me in New York with the idea of making a show at her gallery of young American artists. In the 3 days she was there, we were able thanks to my friend Allen Frame - to organize 21 artists who brought their works to my loft on 712 Broadway. Liliana also had another request. She wanted to take the whole show back to Switzerland, flying Swissair. So, we made it happen. In the 80s everything was possible in New York, it seemed.

Among the artists who brought their works to the loft was the photographer Darrel Ellis, whom I had already known for a while.

When I first met him, I immediately felt close to him, his work, his smile, the way he looked at everything around the loft, with his eyes always directed inwards, his questions and, again, his smile.

I was able to acquire some of his photographs and Darrel also worked for a short while in my studio as an assistant. He always did things his way. Trying to divide the circumference of a circle of 121 inches by 11 he simply said that the result would be 1. He always saw everything as a whole and didn’t want to divide.

Darrel’s photographs - based on negatives that his father did before Darrel was born - were genuinely personal. He added enough to make these works his. A frame, a splash of color, a cut, always 1 item that transformed the work into something completely new.

It was Richard Brintzenhofe, who persuaded Darrel to draw from his father’s photographs. He did. And he did it well but to me his drawings were never as strong as his photographs, maybe because that 1 element that he so well added to his photographs was missing.

Visiting Darrel at the MoMA where he was working as a guard was like a gift. He was in his own world and while pointing out 1 detail in a Cézanne painting, he would smile.

I am so proud to show his work in my foundation in Ardez.

Darrel, I can see you here in the snowy mountains of Switzerland pointing to a bird flying in the sky and, not saying anything at all, you would simply throw a smile.

Not Vital 2020

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Allen Frame Darrel Ellis, my apartment, NYC, 1981 Chromogenic print 28 x 35.5 cm Courtesy of the artist and Gitterman Gallery, New York -

Darrel Ellis Untitled (Self-portrait in Greenpoint Apartment, Brooklyn, After a Photograph by Allen Frame), ca. 1990 Ink-wash and gouache on paper 40 x 58 cm Courtesy of Darrel Ellis Estate, New York; Candice Madey Gallery, New York; and Galerie Crone, Berlin, Vienna -

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AGAINST FORGETTING 1980s New York was an intense experience for the Engadine artist Not Vital. In the now legendary East Village he met the African-American artist Darrel Ellis, who died of AIDS and whose most recent posthumous exhibition was held at Galerie Crone in Berlin. Vital remembers him above all as a charming, intelligent young man who showed up at his studio out of the blue one day.

“He had no money, like most of us. And so one day he came and offered me his photographs. After I had purchased some of his wonderful works—they’re now in the holdings of my foundation—he asked me if he could work for me and I spontaneously agreed.” That was the beginning of a collaboration and friendship between the approximately 35-year-old artist from Sent, Switzerland, and Ellis, 10 years his junior.

Darrel Ellis died of AIDS in spring 1992. He was 33 years old, the same age as his father Thomas Ellis, who died a month before Darrel was born. Thomas had been flagged down by the police because of a parking ticket and died in the course of his arrest. Ellis knew his father only through the photographs that he had taken. His parents had run a portrait studio in Harlem and his father’s passion for photography found expression primarily both in pictures of his family and the black community of the 1950s in Harlem and the Bronx, as well as in generic photographs he made and shared with camera club amateurs, such as still life pictures, posing female figures, and studio portraits.

It is as if young Ellis’s life was already derailed before he was born. When his mother Jean gave him a box of his father’s photographs and negatives because she saw him drawing from one of his father’s few remaining matted photographs in 1981, the artistic portrayal of his ruptured life gradually became an obsession.

In the years that followed, Ellis transformed his father’s photographs into a multimedia oeuvre. He started by making contact sheets in the darkroom at the Whitney Independent Study Program, and by carefully drawing and painting the subject matter of his father’s photographs. A few years later, after first making his own photographs of his sister and friends in his mother’s apartment in the Bronx, some of which he distorted and re-photographed, he began to manipulate and re-photograph his father’s images. It was as though the distortion of the image were transgressive, and he had to experiment first on his own imagery, before turning to his father’s photographs. 1 Significantly, a look at Darrel Ellis’s photographs clearly reveals that they are distorted and appear to have holes in them though there were no punctures in the actual surfaces of the photographs themselves. In fact, everything occurred in the shooting process: Ellis projected his father’s negatives on small stepped reliefs, and then photographed that projection with slide film. 2 Many of the photographs appear to have unexpected white slashes across the subject and the repetitions in the pictures seem to falter, as if seen through an analog zoom.

“The idea of putting a photo on any surface other than photo paper gives you a lot of freedom. The process became [one] about animating the photo, about revivification,” Ellis once said. 3 Later, speaking about his father’s pictures, Ellis comments, “In a way, of course, all families have the disruption of this lack of unity, holes, as it were. But the black family is such a big issue today, and in a way there is no black family anymore.

And that’s part of my reverie; I grew up with that. When I look at those photographs sometimes, all I see is holes.” 4 Ellis’s painterly photographs represent a world that is marked by breaks and holes, allegorically symbolizing American society and particularly the unity of black families under threat.

Allen Frame, “One Family Legacy: Variations in Black and White.” In: Darrel Ellis, New York: Art in General, 1996, p. 17.

1

Ibid.

2

David Hirsh, “Darrel Ellis: On the Border of Family and Tribe.” In: Sunil Gupta, ed., Disrupted Borders: An Intervention in Definitions of Boundaries, London: Rivers Oram Press, 1993, p.125.

3

https://www.osmos.online/darrel-ellis-archives

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Like Ellis, other artists—Lyle Ashton Harris, Sadie Benning, Pepón Osorio, Zoe Leonard, Jack Pierson, Carrie Mae Weems und Felix Gonzalez-Torres, to name a few—called the “family values” of the Reagan era into question by incorporating their personal stories into their art.

Not Vital recalls the relationship between Ellis’s family history and his art: “Naturally I knew about the story of his father and that Darrel transformed and came to terms with it through his art. His father had been a photographer in Harlem with his own portrait studio, who changed professions, and then died. In the process of transforming these photographs, Darrel developed his own, highly distinctive artistic idiom.”

The two friends often met in the East Village, New York’s trendsetting gallery and club district in those days, where Ellis was living at the time. “We all showed our work there,” Vital says. “Everybody used to meet at The Bar, also frequented by Robert Mapplethorpe. It may well be that I first met Darrel there, maybe through Peter Hujar, who, like Mapplethorpe, took pictures of him in the early 1980s.”

Richard Brintzenhofe (1954 – 1995), Allen Frame (1951), Miguel Ferrando (1957 – 1996), Susan Spencer Crowe (1949), John Ahearn (1952), and the American photographer Nan Goldin (1953) were among Darrell’s friends and larger circle of acquaintances. Goldin included Ellis in her exhibition “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” (Artists Space, 1989), in which she presented a generation of artists in New York, all between 25 and 40 years of age, which had already passed away or was in danger of disappearing because of the AIDS pandemic.

With her exhibition, Goldin wanted to visualize the devastation of the pandemic by showing how it was represented in the work of artists of her community. She included artists who had passed away alongside artists who were still alive, some of

whom were living with AIDS and others who were experiencing the illness and deaths of their friends and colleagues.

For “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing,” Ellis made self-portraits based on photographs taken by Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe, both of whom had died of AIDS. At that time, Ellis had not revealed his HIV infection to anyone. In January 1991, Ellis had his first solo exhibition at Baron/Boisanté in New York, the same year that he was hospitalized for the first time and shared his condition with family and friends. 5 When Peter Galassi, photography curator at MoMA, learned from Allen Frame that Darrel Ellis had passed away in 1992, he told Frame that he had been planning to include Ellis’s work in “New Photography 8,” MoMA’s legendary review of contemporary photography. Galassi, like other curators at MoMA, knew Ellis not least because he had worked as a security guard at the museum. “New Photography 8” would have been Ellis’s international breakthrough, had he not tragically succumbed to AIDS just months before the exhibition opened in October 1992.

Sebastian C. Strenger Translated by Catherine Schelbert

Allen Frame, “One Family Legacy: Variations in Black and White.” In: Darrel Ellis, New York: Art in General, 1996, p. 21.

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Darrel Ellis Untitled (Self-Portrait), ca. 1982 Ink-wash on paper 28 x 21 cm Courtesy of Darrel Ellis Estate, New York; Candice Madey Gallery, New York; and Galerie Crone, Berlin, Vienna -

Darrel Ellis Untitled, 1979 – 81 Resin-coated print 33 x 23 cm fundaziun Not Vital -

Darrel Ellis Untitled, 1979 – 81 Resin-coated print 33 x 23 cm fundaziun Not Vital -

Darrel Ellis Untitled (Jean and Laure in Tree), ca. 1990 Resin-coated print 28 x 36 cm Courtesy of Darrel Ellis Estate, New York; Candice Madey Gallery, New York; and Galerie Crone, Berlin, Vienna -

Darrel Ellis Untitled (Laure, Easter), ca. 1990 Resin-coated print 28 x 36 cm Courtesy of Darrel Ellis Estate, New York; Candice Madey Gallery, New York; and Galerie Crone, Berlin, Vienna -

Darrel Ellis Untitled (Woman Dancing), ca. 1990 Resin-coated print 28 x 36 cm Collection Schönberger, Berlin Courtesy of Galerie Crone, Berlin, Vienna -

Darrel Ellis Untitled (Figure on Greenpoint Pier, Brooklyn), ca. 1991 Resin-coated print 28 x 36 cm Collection Schönberger, Berlin Courtesy of Galerie Crone, Berlin, Vienna -

Darrel Ellis Untitled (Couple Kissing), ca. 1990 Resin-coated print 21 x 26 cm Courtesy of Darrel Ellis Estate, New York; Candice Madey Gallery, New York; and Galerie Crone, Berlin, Vienna -

Darrel Ellis Untitled (Women in Front of Car), ca. 1990 Resin-coated print 21 x 26 cm Wienert collection, Berlin Courtesy of Galerie Crone, Berlin, Vienna -

Darrel Ellis Untitled, 1983 Ink-wash on paper 56 x 76 cm Greta von Albertini -

Darrel Ellis Untitled (Grandmother Lillian Ellis), ca. 1990 Ink and gouache on paper 43 x 50 cm Courtesy of Darrel Ellis Estate, New York; Candice Madey Gallery, New York; and Galerie Crone, Berlin, Vienna -

Darrel Ellis Untitled (Joseph Tansle, Artist’s Great Uncle), ca. 1990 Resin-coated print 28 x 36 cm Courtesy of Darrel Ellis Estate, New York; Candice Madey Gallery, New York; and Galerie Crone, Berlin, Vienna -

Darrel Ellis Untitled (Uncle Don), ca. 1990 Resin-coated print with oil paint 28 x 36 cm Courtesy of Darrel Ellis Estate, New York; Candice Madey Gallery, New York; and Galerie Crone, Berlin, Vienna -

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“ [ … ] DARREL BEGAN A SERIES OF SELF-PORTRAITS BASED ON PICTURES OF HIMSELF, FROM HIS MUSEUM SECURITY PHOTOGRAPHS TO SNAPSHOTS FROM THE 1980S TO PHOTOGRAPHS, SUCH AS MY OWN, THAT HE REQUESTED TO BE TAKEN OF HIM. ON THE ONE HAND, HE WAS SELF-CONSCIOUS ABOUT SEEMING NARCISSISTIC AS THE SELF-PORTRAITS PROLIFERATED; ON THE OTHER, HE WAS AWARE OF THE POLITICAL IMPACT OF ASSERTING HIS BLACK MALE PRESENCE AND OF ATTEMPTING TO REDRESS THE PAUCITY OF SUCH IMAGES SEEN IN ANYTHING OTHER THAN A NEGATIVE CONTEXT.” ALLEN FRAME “One Family Legacy: Variations in Black and White.” In: Darrel Ellis, New York: Art in General, 1996, p.18.

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Darrel Ellis Untitled (Self-Portrait from MoMA Security Guard ID Photo), ca. 1990 Resin-coated print 21 x 36 cm Private collection, Vienna Courtesy of Galerie Crone, Berlin, Vienna -

Darrel Ellis Untitled (Self-Portrait after a Photograph from an Unknown Photographer), ca. 1990 Resin-coated print with oil paint 21 x 26 cm Spreegold collection, Berlin Courtesy of Galerie Crone, Berlin, Vienna -

Darrel Ellis Untitled (Self-portrait After a Photograph from an Unknown Photographer), ca. 1990 Resin-coated print with oil paint 21 x 26 cm Courtesy of Darrel Ellis Estate, New York; Candice Madey Gallery, New York; and Galerie Crone, Berlin, Vienna -

f u n da z iu n

Not Vital Chasa Planta

7546 Ardez