GENERATIVE AESTHETICS

Sous Les Etoiles Gallery is pleased to present its new exhibition titled Generative Aesthetics
featuring photographer and artist Gottfried Jager and Manfred Mohr.
Two German artists which both careers started at the time of the New Tendencies, the groundbreaking Art Movement that emerges in Zagreb, Yugoslavia in 1960s, making the foundations of an information aesthetics, that create innovative works.
Gottfried Jager and Manfred were influenced, by the publication of the book “Aesthetica” from Max Bense, semiologist and philosopher, that elaborate the foundation of a programmed aesthetic bases on mathematics. By extension, the application of the information theory on several field of creativity revolutionize the artistic expression. It was then the beginning of a new visual research using computers and the establishments of an aesthetics of information as the theorical base of these trend.
It is the first time those two artists are reunite in a duo show in United States. It is the occasion for Sous Les Etoiles Gallery to introduce new vintage series of works by Gottfried Jager and Vintage hand drawing by Manfred Mohr.

In the mid-sixties, Jäger developed the idea of Generative Photography, which in his words consists of “finding a new world inside the camera and trying to bring it out with a methodical, analytical system.” Generative photography is a kind of “productive photography” that breaks away from the idea of the exactness of photographic reproduction. It no longer merely reproduces objects, but produces new forms trough light and shade, the possibilities of waves and diffraction… The first comprehensive work of Gottfried Jager was the Pinhole Structures, based on seriality, representing the epitome of his Generative photography and whose beauty would resemble mathematical formulas.

Gottfried Jäger (*1937) is one of the most important photographers and photo theorists of the post-war period. Alongside Otto Steinert (Essen) and Bernd & Hilla Becher (Düsseldorf ), Jäger influenced generations of photographers with his nonrepresentational photography and his teaching at the FH Bielefeld. With this approach, he is the forerunner of a new generation of photographic artists such as James Welling, Walid Beshty, Liz Deschenes, Marco Breuer and others. Jäger has been part of some of the most iconic computer art exhibitions of the 1960s, such as New Tendencies (1969) in Zagreb, Experiments in Art and Technology (1968) at the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the groundbreaking Generative Fotografie (1968) at the Kunsthaus Bielefeld in Germany. Gottfried Jäger’s has been featured in a major group exhibition at the Tate Modern in London, Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art until October 2018. A career retrospective was organized at the Sprengel Museum Hannover in 2023.

Manfred Mohr: Born in 1938 in Pforzheim (Germany), Manfred Mohr is considered a pioneer of digital art. After discovering Prof. Max Bense’s information aesthetics in the early 1960’s, Mohr’s artistic thinking was radically changed. Within a few years, his art transformed from abstract expressionism to computer generated algorithmic geometry. Encouraged by the computer music composer Pierre Barbaud, whom he met in 1967, Mohr programmed his first computer drawings in 1969 after learning the Fortran IV programming language to create compositions that he executed as ink drawings.He started his research in 1969 at the Faculty of Vincennes, Paris in the group “Art et Informatique,” where he co-founded the seminar. Initially he did not have a plotter at this facility and had to draw his computer calculations as printed out x-y points by hand on paper.