Till Brönner: MELTING POTT

Germany's only jazz star, trumpeter, composer, radio producer and professor at the Carl Maria von Weber University of Music Dresden, Till Brönner surprised the public with a new instrument in 2017. Armed with his Leica camera, he travelled through the Ruhr region for more than a year, initiated and supported by the Brost Foundation in Essen, photographing people, workers and celebrities, children and rockers, sportswomen, priests and imams, winding towers, shops and industrial plants, architecture and landscapes. With more than 200 pictures, Brönner's exhibition "Melting Pott" was shown for the first time in 2019 at the MKM Museum Küppersmühle in Duisburg.

The curators of the Purple Path, together with the curators of the KohleWelt-Museum Steinkohlenbergbau Sachsen in Oelsnitz / Erzgeb. have now made a selection of more than 60 - mostly black and white photographed - works: Miners in Bottrop or steel workers in Essen at work and in their leisure time. Pictures of children from Dinslaken, Dortmund, Essen, Gelsenkirchen or Recklinghausen are juxtaposed with typical Ruhrpott architecture, which can often also be understood as social studies. As in the railway station in Flöha or the hospital church in Lößnitz, art also opens up a new space in Oelsnitz / Erzgeb. For the first time, the former Oelsnitz miners' washhouse will be opened up, creating an appropriate and worthy context for Brönner's work.