The revolution of colour
Grisebach shows vintage bags and fashion by Roberta di Camerino together with works by Georg Karl Pfahler
Black velvet, red velvet, in between a rich hunter green, placed next to each other in three stripes. Four velvet triangles in red, blue-grey, purple and yellow that fold into each other. When everyone else was still using brown and black leather to avoid attracting attention with their handbags, which had to be one thing above all else, quiet and functional, Giuliana Camerino (1920-2010) was already two steps ahead. With her Venetian label Roberta di Camerino, she brought powerful and sophisticated colour and shape creations to the stuffy market of the fifties. Giuliana Camerino transformed the handbag from a barely recognised accessory into an object in its own right.
The legendary Bagonghi bag, for example, inspired by a traditional doctor's bag, toured the world with Grace Kelly. Liz Taylor, Gina Lollobrigida and Isabella Rossellini were regular customers - and not least Madonna, who was occasionally spotted with a Caravel bag on her arm. Long before Gucci made the G its own logo, Roberta di Camerino bags were emblazoned with a bold brass R. Giuliana Camerino was probably the inventor of the It bag. Long before anyone knew what it was.
Time to rediscover this visionary designer. Grisebach was able to persuade Monika Gottlieb, one of the most important German collectors of vintage fashion, to exhibit a cross-section of her extensive Camerino collection in Berlin. With a representative selection of bags in particular - abstract art for the arm - but also a gallery of complete looks - Camerino later also began to design dresses with captivating trompe-l'œil effects - this is probably the first opportunity in Germany to discover the work of this now forgotten Italian designer in such a comprehensive way.
Giuliana Camerino founded her manufactory in Venice in 1945 under the name: Roberta di Camerino. The name came from the classic musical of the 1930s: "Roberta" with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire - Giuliana Camerino loved this film. She sold her brand in 2008 and died just two years later in Venice at the age of 89. Since then, things have become quieter around the dancer among fashion designers, who summed up the secret code of her explosive creations in a clear formula: "All colours are beautiful and go well together. If, for some reason, two colours seem to clash, there's a very simple solution: add a third and it's a perfect match."
Georg Karl Pfahler (1926-2002), whose works we are juxtaposing with Giuliana Camerino's objects in this exhibition, also had his very own approach to colour. Deeply influenced by his teacher Willi Baumeister as well as by Barnett Newman's colour field paintings - both appreciated each other, Newman even took the opportunity to hang a Pfahler show at the Fischbach Gallery in New York in 1964 - Pfahler found his most concise expression in the 1960s at the latest. In 1960, he called his style "formative": for him, the entire picture represented a uniform field of colour and surface. He created forms through colours. He did not ascribe any existence to lines, defining them solely through colour and form. Georg Karl Pfahler's works have lost none of their appeal and quality to this day, as they define their pictorial surfaces and spaces impressively, even programmatically.
Our exhibition brings both positions into a mirror and tension relationship and invites you to experience precisely that moment in which two artists explore the interplay, if not the clash, of colour values with their own expressive possibilities and materialities as if under a magnifying glass.
Opening
14 January 2019, 7 pm
Grisebach, Fasanenstraße 27, 10719 Berlin
Exhibition
15 January to 23 February 2019
Mon. to Fri. 10 am to 6.30 pm, Sat. 11 am to 4 pm
Berlin, 21 December 2018