The Companions

Benjamin Katz has been striding the art world since the 1960's. Always carrying a Leica, if not two, in his breast pocket. Confederated and sometimes amused, he is observing everything this microcosmos has to offer. Capturing creators, dealers, patrons and other non-professional “his very own way”. Benjamin Katz takes his pictures spontaneously and without any flashlight. They are snapshots capturing life, its motives and themes, but also capturing Katz himself. Mostly hand developed, the photographs reveal a rare mixture of elegance, melancholy, romance and humour. The unique Katz touch.
His portraits of Beuys, Polke, Baselitz, Richter and other great artists are extraordinary and rightly exhibited in the world's biggest art institutions. However, his numerous other photographs are hardly known: photographs for which Katz puts the focus off his artist friends, revealing the surrounding (studios, restaurants, parks) and disclosing the context (walks, suspension, receptions) in an extended view. Katz himself is setting the frame for his art. These landscapes, insights and still lives are taken with the exact same technic, which he uses for his portraits: black and white, without flashlight and without lavish preparation. A kind of photograph that one would tend to call a portrait: portraits of trees, portraits of cups and bottles, portraits of steaks (!) as well as portraits of abandoned studios, sometimes without their owners, but still «inhabited».
For the first time, Benjamin Katz presents these “other” photographs. Through these pictures, he tells us much more, than what is portrayed. Photograph by photograph he shows us his own history of art.

Elegance, romance and humour also describe best Michel Würthle. Although the elegance of the Vienna-born is more flaming, the idea of romance darker and the humour more cutting. Driven by his dandified anti-conformism he left Vienna and the Art Academy for Naples and Rome, to spend a season in Africa and then move to the Paris of ´68. In 1972, he started his “Exile” in Berlin together with Ingrid and Oswald Wiener. Together with a business partner he took over the famous Paris Bar in 1979. Over the decades he became a legend of Berlin Nightlife.
Michel Würthle's deep friendships to numerous artists are widely known. Often he was the first to collect their art. Less known are certain boozy conversations which laid the foundation of some four-handed paintings, collages and texts (in collaboration with Haralampi Oroschakoff, Damien Hirst, Cosima von Bonin, Martin Kippenberger, Daniel Richter, Walter Pichler, Herbert Volkmann and others). As well as the fact, that his lust for life and nocturnal odysseys inspired him to own drawings and lithographies, that are sometimes pornographic and always black humoured. But his chronicles, that approach the ones of Otto Dix and George Grosz, also have a sunny side: The drawings made on Syros, his asylum. There, united with his beloved wife Caterina, an amazing richness of colourful landscape sketches illustrates his plan of an utopian valley, with houses, halls, studios and basins, souk and cafe Rimbaud & Rambo... A kind of Phalanstère for artists.

The Bourouina Gallery is proud to present these two exceptional personalities. Two, that accompany the stars of contemporary art since decades without ever being overshadowed by them. Benjamin Katz and Michel Würthle enter into an artistic dialog and we benefit from their peculiar view on the world - and their remarkable juvenility.