Jean-Luc Mylayne | The Autumn of Paradies

The Autumn of Paradise is the first institutional solo exhibition by the artist Jean-Luc Mylayne (*1946, France) in Germany. With a major tour in France, Switzerland, China, Germany, and the Netherlands, Mylayne’s oeuvre is being presented to an international audience for the first time. Mylayne has concentrated on encounters with birds for over 40 years, which he captures with analog camera systems—a Hasselblad medium-format camera and a Sinar view camera—and with lenses cut and ground in various ways. For each photograph he usually invests several months in pursuit of the right composition. He also addresses temporal aspects of the creation and perception of photographic images. The exhibition presents some 40 large-scale photographs taken between 1979 and 2008.

Together with Mylène Mylayne, his wife and artistic partner, the photographer traveled along with the birds from rural southern France to the steppes of the southwestern United States. Jean-Luc Mylayne’s photographs depict the transitions between pristine nature and rural landscape with an interest in light and place, often with an emphasis on the azure sky. In addition to dominant nature, houses, streets, fences, and walls in the distance or on the edge of the picture appear as traces of human civilization.

Mylayne’s photographs approach the animals in very different ways: sometimes clearly as a portrait, while in other pictures the viewer’s eye must search through the picture to find the feathered protagonist. The focus is not on the geographic context of the scenery or the specific characteristics of the birds, but on the temporal engagement with a partner on even footing. Mylayne always focuses on a bird as an individual, not as a member of a particular species. He creates his pictorial compositions out of the precise choice and combination of lighting, weather, season, as well as the cropping of the picture and the placement of the bird. Each “tableau“ is precisely thought out.

Jean-Luc Mylayne was born in France in 1946. His works have been featured in numerous solo exhibitions at venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Arts Club of Chicago, Lurie Garden, Millenium Park, Chicago (2015); the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2010); the Musée d’Art contemporain de Lyon (2009); the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York (2007–2009); the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, New Mexico (2004, 2005, 2010); the Musée des Arts contemporains, Grand-Hornu, Belgium (2004); and the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC, Paris (1995). Mylayne’s works have also been featured in group exhibitions at the S.M.A.K., Gent (2017); the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); the Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen (1998); the 10th Biennale of Sydney (1996); and the Kunsthaus Zürich (1995). The work is regularly exhibited at Barbara Gladstone Gallery New York, Brussels since 1997 and at Sprüth Magers Berlin, London, L.A. since 2002.

The exhibition is a collaboration with the Foundation Vincent van Gogh, Arles, the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, the Long Museum, Shanghai and the Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam.