The Seen and the Unseen

Lehndorff & Trülzsch developed an oeuvre of remarkably innovative staged photographs of body paintings — a synthesis of painting, photography, and performance — during an intensively creative period from the 1970s to the late 1980s. In The Seen and the Unseen, Lehndorff & Tru¨lzsch approach their artistic work from a new angle by interweaving the images of their work series, the facsimiled archive material (such as essays by Susan Sontag and Gary Indiana), contributions by critics Richard Milazzo and Jörg Scheller as well as contextual explanations and reference images. The book retraces the evolution of gender identities and the treatment of the female body against the backdrop of history and contemporary art in the second half of the twentieth century. “...that of one artist who is unseen... and another artist who is straining towards invisibility...” Susan Sontag, “Fragments of an Aesthetic of Melancholy,” in ‘Veruschka’ – Trans-figurations, 1986 “The method of Tru¨lzsch/Lehndorff restricts their assertion from physically altering what already exists in the environment. This is an art of reflection rather than an intervention...it could...be said, that the...objects... are examples of double photography, or teleplastic photography (sculptural photography).” Gary Indiana, “Imitation and Its Double,” Village Voice, April 9, 1985