ENRIQUE BOSTELMANN: APERTURES AND BORDERSCAPES

Enrique Bostelmann: Apertures and Borderscapes takes boundaries—literal, figurative, and fluid—as the organizing principle for an exhibition of selected works by the genre–bending photographer. Over his forty-year career, Enrique Bostelmann (1939–2003) fused modernist formal elegance, social documentary, conceptualism, and humor with experimental vision. Bostelmann’s work is critically acclaimed across Latin America and internationally, initially for America: un viaje a través de la injusticia (1970), one of the first photobooks and a groundbreaking document in protest photography at a time of political upheaval. The volume chronicles Enrique and Yeyette Bostelmann’s road trips throughout Latin America in the 1960s, during which the camera enabled them to traverse and dissolve national, cultural, socio-economic, geographic, and artistic borders.

Later, Bostelmann’s darkroom and studio became spaces of experimentation and conceptualism, within photography and across media. This exhibition contends that this porous approach to the medium grew to be a defining facet of Bostelmann’s practice. within photography and across media.

For all of Bostelmann’s boundary crossings, his work remains largely unknown to U.S. audiences. Although his work has been exhibited internationally, this will be the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work since 2013 (Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City) and the most comprehensive selection to be shown in the U.S. to date. The last exhibition of Enrique Bostelmann’s photography in the U.S. was Histories of Memory, held at the Americas Society in NYC in 2003. That exhibition comprised a specific body of work completed between 1998 and 2003. The current project portrays many of the facets of Bostelmann´s photographic view as it evolved over the course of his career.

Apertures and Borderscapes unites diverse works by the artist with newly recorded interviews with Bostelmann’s creative collaborators and family members. This material is assembled in a short, bilingual documentary film that accompanies the exhibition. Transcriptions of the family’s interviews also appear in a bilingual publication alongside essays by art historians and curators.

Enrique Bostelmann (b. Guadalajara, 1939, d. Mexico City, 2003) was raised in Mexico City. When he was eighteen, he received a grant to study photography at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für graphie in Munich, where his experimental work was influenced by German subjective photography principles. His practice as a professional photographer started in 1961 in Mexico City. In his early practice, Bostelmann captured rural Mexico and Latin America, as portrayed in the book América: un viaje a través de la injusticia. Throughout his career, Bostelmann became increasingly experimental through his intensely conceptual approach.

Bostelmann’s work has been exhibited in Mexico, the U.S., and Europe. It is included in the collections of institutions across the globe, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museo Reina Sofia, and the French National Library.