Retrospective
To mark his 90th birthday, C/O Berlin, in collaboration with the F.C. Gundlach Foundation, is presenting the first major retrospective of Walter Schels’s work in Berlin.
Image gallery
Schwarzes Schaf, 1984
Featuring more than 300 works spanning nearly seven decades, the exhibition offers new insights into his body of work and focuses on a previously little-seen aspect of his practice: his experimental and transformative works.
Schels became known for his powerful black-and-white portraits. Newborns and centenarians, famous and unknown faces, animals and plants—his gaze always revolves around fundamental questions of human existence.
Even in Schels’s earliest series, created in the 1960s in New York, central motifs and working methods are already evident. In light of his experimental work, it now becomes clear just how much change, repetition, and materiality shape his photographic practice.
