When the hippie trail turned towards India, Charles Wilp also set off from Düsseldorf in 1977, overcoming his immense fear of flying and visiting the newly revived ashrams. Under the expert guidance of Saraswati Albano-Müller, an Indian woman living in Germany, Wilp gained access to numerous of these monastery-like meditation centers, whose oriental mysticism and Hindu and Buddhist rites exerted a great attraction on seekers of meaning from all over the world.

On the road with a camera and film crew, Wilp impressively documents this search for individual freedom, peace and love in an “optical essay”. The photo book “Freiheit empfinden”, described by Wilp himself as a “trend observation”, forms the starting point for the exhibition “THE YELLOW GENIUS”, which presents the unique photographic documents of this early trip to India for the first time in public at the WELTKUNSTZIMMER as part of the Düsseldorf Photo Festival.

Charles Wilp (* September 15, 1932 in Witten, † January 2, 2005 in Düsseldorf) began his wide-ranging career as an advertising guru and artonaut as a photographer. He was already drawn to Paris as a student, where he became Man Ray's assistant. Back in Düsseldorf, he joined the newly forming, rebellious art of the 1960s around ZERO, Yves Klein and Joseph Beuys and created his very own, expanded concept of art: for Wilp - “The Yellow Genius” - advertising campaigns, fashion, space travel, photography and travel reportage were all part of art as a matter of course. Based on this cross-genre understanding of art, which Charles Wilp developed from photography and film, he must be seen anew today as an artist who did not want to contain art, but to liberate it.