Secret Secretions

ChertLüdde is pleased to present Secret Secretions, a solo exhibition by Annette Frick as part of the European Month of Photography 2025. Widely recognized for her portraits of Berlin's queer and punk subcultures, this exhibition highlights a very different series: cameraless prints from the early 2000s that explore the "seeds of life"—flora and semen, with all their complexities and similarities. Employing the photogram technique famously used by Man Ray, Frick created the exhibited prints and a two-part film using sheets of photosensitized paper sourced from the former GDR. With minimal financial resources, she embraced this rudimentary yet evocative photographic method, exposing the paper to light to produce blooming, oozing compositions. The large-format prints, which use sperm to cast unusual shapes, are a direct response to Marcel Duchamp's Paysage Fautif (Faulty Landscape) from 1946, while the smaller, and often double-sided, floral elements provide a more subtle counterpoint. Together, these elements form a poetic, black-and-white landscape of organic forms. Annette Frick (b. 1957, Bonn, Germany) has spent the last three decades producing photographic works both marginal and experimental in subject and style. Documenting Berlin's various subcultures, her analog monochrome images reveal moments of carnivalesque joy and freedom in the lives of people existing outside the heteronormative orders of urban society. From 1978 to 1988 she studied Fine Arts at the Fachhochschule für Kunst und Design with Arno Jansen, Daniel Spoerri and Robert van Ackern, where she also completed her Master of Fine Arts in 1988. At the same time, she worked as a photographer for various scientific institutes, published texts on art and photography, and founded the Hafensalon in her Cologne studio together with Achim Riechers and Doris Frohnapfel. She received the Emprise Art Award Düsseldorf in 2006; completed a research study for the DEFA Foundation with her film on Herbert Tobias in 2008, shown in the Panorama program of the Berlinale in 2011; and received the Cité Internationale des Arts scholarship Paris in 2016/2017. In recent years, her solo exhibitions have been shown in Frankfurt, Cologne, Berlin, Bremen and Leipzig. She won the Ellen Auerbach Fellowship from the Akademie der Künste in 2018 and the Dieter Ruckhaberle Prize in 2020. She was also among the 2020-2021 grantees from the Pollock Krasner Foundation.

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