In a classic example of their irresistible, attractive portrait photography, Michael Clegg and Martin Guttmann depict the curators of the evn collection: Brigitte Huck, Heike Maier Rieper, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Markus Schinwald, and Thomas D. Trummer. The result is a stretching of image and content that oscillates between sparseness and opulence, glamour and discourse.

Since the 1980s, photographic portraiture has been arguably Clegg & Guttmann's most important transmitter: single portraits, couples, and multi-figured groups remain among the most exciting this genre has to offer. The frame of reference is the aesthetic conventions of historical portraits and group paintings from the 16^th and 17^th centuries. For Clegg & Guttmann, Dutch painters from Frans Hals to Rembrandt, Italians from Titian to Caravaggio, are the reference material for a complex grouping of works that stage collective structures, social structures, and power relations with the instruments of historical representational and family portraits, placing individuals in an environment that reveals their cultural, economic, and social background.

Clegg & Guttmann know the codes of status, influence and capital. They develop a look for “rich and beautiful,” a fiction of what has value, impact and appeal in reality. This type wears fashionable black: the men white shirts and dark ties, the ladies effective accessories.

With the seminal work Executives of the Steel Industry versus Executives of the Textile Industry (1981), Clegg & Guttmann establish the aesthetic: twelve men (older family members, colleagues, and actors from the artists' circle of friends), are lined up in an Old Master-like darkness. A strong light source illuminates faces, hands and white shirts. No one smiles or seeks eye contact with the camera.

These are commissioned works, for which collectors and wealthy diamond dealers are just as happy to be portrayed as curators and gallery owners.

Works from the series of Collaborations made exclusively with artists are also in the evn collection: the portrait of the dandy and anarcho-aesthete Martin Kippenberger in a proto-Margiela suit with avant-garde-ish separated sleeves, as well as that of the great incunabulum Franz Erhard Walther with object titled Cardinal Red (1993).

As in the 19^th century, Clegg & Guttmann use concrete photographic backgrounds as wallpaper backdrops, suggesting entire world views and world images through these images of space or quotations from art history. Clegg & Guttmann mount them behind their models in such a way that the staging, and the stage, become clear. These lengths (in our case a lavish curtain) conceal parts of the space, while paper edges and rolled-up corners reveal the proceedings.

Image organization, composition, and lighting semantics situate the genre of portraiture on the threshold of drama, installation, and epistemology, linking, using a clandestine frame of reference, moods, gestures, and postures whose narrative content seems to fall out of time.

Brigitte Huck, 2021 (translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh)