ringl + pit @ Robert Mann Gallery, NYC - Grete Stern + Ellen Auebach Photography Exhibition

ringl + pit

Robert Mann Gallery, New York

October 23 - December 6, 2025

At the height of the Weimar Republic, an artist duo experimented with gender roles and consumer culture, subverting a commercial world dominated by cheerful faces and brightly illustrated pages. They photographed wigs, mannequins, and merchandise in unorthodox still lives, tapping into Berlin’s vibrant, avant-garde spirit. Their work transcended traditional advertising, highlighting touch, texture, and enigma. Their name: ringl + pit.

Robert Mann Gallery presents ringl + pit, an exhibition featuring rare studio photographs alongside an exceptionally limited-edition portfolio of the duo’s life work—much of which has been rarely exhibited to the public.

ringl + pit were the childhood nicknames of Grete Stern (ringl) and Ellen Auerbach (pit). Both trained under Walter Peterhans, the pioneering photography instructor at the Bauhaus, who emphasized precision, formal clarity, and graphic design. In 1930, Stern and Auerbach founded their Berlin-based studio, ringl + pit, blending avant-garde experimentation with commercial portraiture and advertising. Their work emerged during a period of increasing independence for women in Germany, both socially and artistically.

Their photographs challenged conventional advertising norms through striking, surreal, and meticulously composed images. Working collaboratively, the women alternated roles behind the camera and on set, constantly refining each shot until it felt just right. The studio quickly gained a reputation as one of Germany’s most innovative, producing crisp, compelling images that merged modernist aesthetics with subversive wit. Their work was widely recognized, earning international awards and appearing in influential publications such as Die Gebrauchsgraphik and Cahiers d’Art.

Among their most iconic works is Komol Haircoloring Advertisement, an advertisement for hair dye that disrupts traditional beauty standards with artificial hair, a paper cutout silhouette, and metallic mesh. In the Güldenring Cigarettes Advertisemen, they defy convention by omitting both the pack and the hand, instead focusing on a single cigarette protruding from a cellophane wrapper. Their textile commission for Maratti captures a seam running down a luxurious swath of fabric—eschewing the expected female model and instead emphasizing craftsmanship and tactile detail.

The exhibition also includes two rare self-portraits. In pit with Veil, Ellen Auerbach is shown in a stylized headpiece, her sideways glance withheld from the viewer, hinting at the portrait as a form of disguise. In contrast, Grete Stern appears in a tight close-up, her bespectacled face framed with intense, inward focus. Together, these portraits reveal the duo’s deep artistic dialogue—an exploration of selfhood, queerness, and mutual expression. Their work captures the intellectual and creative energy of Weimar-era Germany, a time of extraordinary cultural ferment that was tragically cut short by the rise of the Nazi regime. As progressive Jewish women, both Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach were forced to flee the country in the early 1930s.

Ellen Auerbach eventually settled in New York; Grete Stern made her home in Buenos Aires. Though continents apart, the two remained lifelong friends. In 1985, they co-published Fotografie ringl + pit, a carefully designed portfolio that echoed the aesthetic and material choices of their early 1930s studio work.

Taken together, their photographs illuminate how Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern not only participated in, but helped define the avant-garde spirit of their time. Through humor, experimentation, and a refusal to conform to prescribed gender roles, they carved out a bold new space for visual expression. Their work endures as a testament to photography’s power to question representation, defy convention, and assert identity.

The exhibition ringl + pit is presented in conjunction with Yale University of Art Gallery’s The Shared New Vision of ringl + pit, on view through December 7, 2025. 

ROBERT MANN GALLERY

508 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

robertmann.com

Photographic collages @ RoseGallery, Santa Monica, CA

Her First Meteorite. Photographic collages

RoseGallery, Santa Monica, CA

Through 28 November 2015

Ken Graves 

Heat Source, 2003 

(c) Ken Graves, Courtesy RoseGallery

ROSEGALLERY presents Her First Meteorite, a selection of unique photographic collages by Carolle Benitah, James Gallagher, Melinda Gibson, Ken Graves, Stéphanie Solinas, Annegret Soltau, and Grete Stern. 

Found, sliced and assembled, the photographic collage establishes experimental and introspective forms through the combination of familiar and obscure images. The montages from the various artists each evoke a distinct entry into surreal worlds, bound together by connected and intertwined photographs. With found objects and images, the spontaneity of discovery and combination counters the intricacy of the details in the works.

Although half a century apart, Ken Graves’ collages and Grete Stern’s Sueños both reimagine worlds for the figures on the page. Graves pulls from magazines of Stern’s period, the mid twentieth century, and creates moments not bound to time. Celestial and earthbound settings often mingle in his works to create a space free from our known society yet afloat in cultural commentary. Whether a comical social critique by Ken Graves or James Gallagher or an intimate family portrait threaded by Carolle Benitah, the collage generates newfound connections between recognizable forms, creating a unique image independent from our reality while strangely familiar.

In the early twentieth century, Dadaist montage rejected reason. With ideologies regarding identity at the forefront of political strife, surrealist art attempted to escape the categorization of the self. Allusions to the other, the alternate, and the unknown frequent a surreal image. Examining her own identity, Annegret Soltau states, “to me relying on one permanent identity makes no sense. It makes no sense if you are always supposed to be ‘the self,’ the one and only ‘self’.” The multiplicity of her own image, spliced and sewn, demonstrates the substance of the female identity through a critique of the documents that dictate and constrict a woman’s role. In a literal interpretation of multiplicity, Solinas’ Phénomènes depict forty-four sets of twins. Displayed in the manner of a 19th century scientific document, the organization creates a detachment, implying the otherness of the twins in the photographs. Using recognizable imagery in new contexts, these collages present alternate perceptions of our own world, providing a surreal space left for interpretation. 

ROSEGALLERY

Bergamot Station Art Center

2525 Michigan Avenue, G5

Santa Monica, California 90404

www.rosegallery.net