On June 4, 2026, the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg will open under the title “Alliance, Infinity, Love – in the Face of the Other.” Deichtorhallen Hamburg will present the first of a total of four Triennial exhibitions at the Deichtorhallen.
Image Above: Jimmy DeSana, Coffee Table, 1979 © Jimmy DeSana Info: 8271px x 5941px
As one of the most important German fashion photographers from the 1950s to the 1980s, F.C. Gundlach played a decisive role in shaping the aesthetic stylization of the female body; as a private collector, however, his passion was directed toward more provocative, darker, and more profound forms of corporeality. Extravagance and queerness are expressed in these works just as much as vulnerability and nonconformity. Through around 300 works from the F.C. Gundlach Collection, the exhibition “Cocktail Prolongé” explores the diverse ways in which the body can be staged—always examining how the body functions as a medium for representing roles, fantasies, and desires, as well as critical demands.
Among the roughly seventy photographers represented in the exhibition are Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Hans Bellmer, Erwin Blumenfeld, Katharina Bosse, Bill Brandt, Larry Clark, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, Greg Gorman, Jenny Holzer, Richard Kern, Jürgen Klauke, Les Krims, Robert Mapplethorpe, Irving Penn, Jimmy DeSana, Cindy Sherman, and Joel-Peter Witkin, among others.
More than 300 exhibits are presented, ranging from around 1900 to the present day. Technically, the works span a wide spectrum—from albumen and silver gelatin prints to Cibachrome and dye-transfer prints, as well as the platinum–palladium process and digital photography.
The works presented, which F.C. Gundlach has collected since the mid-1970s, are highly relevant today not only because of their avant-garde, nonconformist aesthetic and their role in making the queer community visible; they also reveal a fascinating and deeply intimate, because personal, aspect of his private collection: the vulnerable and the defiant, the tamed and the untamed, the patient and the restless body, as it is represented from a wide variety of perspectives and motivations. The selection and presentation are particularly striking because they reveal a different side of F.C. Gundlach: not the celebrated fashion photographer, but an artist-collector with a radical openness toward counter-images, ruptures, and genuine dreams—toward everything that defines the human being and the body beyond social attributions.
The exhibition presented as part of the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg is also intended as a tribute to F.C. Gundlach, who would not only have celebrated his 100th birthday on July 16, 2026, but was also the initiator of the Triennial. The exhibition title is inspired by the collector’s habit of inviting friends and acquaintances to a cocktail prolongé to view works from his collection together, exchange ideas about them, and arrange them in ever-changing constellations that highlight different relationships, thereby celebrating photography in its inexhaustible potential.
In this sense, the exhibition itself becomes an invitation to discover the diversity of perspectives from which photographers since 1900 have consciously and unconsciously staged the human body in a critical way, thereby also visualizing social tendencies. This is precisely where F.C. Gundlach’s private view of the body is reflected, his great pleasure in looking, discovering, and marveling. The works in his collection, which he brought together under the motto “The Image of the Human Being in Photography,” reveal inclinations, viewpoints, and tendencies that, as a professionally working fashion photographer, he could never have realized in his own work. At the same time, this underscores F.C. Gundlach’s visionary strength and courageous independence as a collector of photographic art, as he relied entirely on his own perception and aesthetic judgment.
In parallel with the exhibition “Cocktail Prolongé: F.C. Gundlach Special,” the Bucerius Kunst Forum will, from May 8 to August 16, 2026, present the exhibition “F.C. Gundlach. You’ll Never Watch Alone,” focusing on the multifaceted work of F.C. Gundlach as a networker, photographer, collector, entrepreneur, and patron.
WHEN?
EXhibition dates: Friday, 5. Juny to, 22. September 2026
WHERE?
Deichtorhallen Hamburg
Deichtorstr. 1–2
20095 Hamburg
