The Alchemist

Heinz Hajek-Halke. Late Photo-Graphics

Heinz Hajek-Halke

What László Moholy-Nagy did for the photography of the Bauhaus and of the 1920s, Heinz Hajek-Halke accomplished for the 1950s and Abstract Art. Hajek-Halke (1898 – 1983) was an artist who worked in a genuinely photographic manner: what he achieved in the darkroom in terms of physical-chemical work could well be called alchemy; even today, no digital software program is able to achieve the same effects. Among the photographic artists of the twentieth century, Heinz Hajek-Halke was a maverick who did not belong to any school and nonetheless influenced many others. Already famous as a poster artist in the early 1930s, he reached artistic maturity in the 1950s. He is one of the great abstract artists and also one of the first artists in photography in this regard. The Akademie der Künste has over 200 photographic works from his later years, which is being presented comprehensively for the first time in the exhibition on Pariser Platz. The exhibition offers one of the few rediscoveries that can still be made in twentieth-century art photography.