EXHIBITIONS \ Alexander Gronsky

I like to keep you updated on interesting looking exhibitions, it doesn’t matter where there are as we have followers all over the world, so if you can’t get to see them on the wall you can see them here. I was alerted to this photographer by someone we have featured before, Jane Buekett.

The Wapping Project Bankside is pleased to announce Estonian photographer, Alexander Gronsky’s first exhibition with the gallery.

Gronsky’s Pastoral series of large format photographs of Moscow’s suburban areas are reminiscent of the arcadian images created by 19th century landscape painters and reconstructs them in a way that jars with the romantic representations of a bygone era. Once defining borders becomes blurred in these photographs – the divisions between urban and pastoral, utopian and dystopian and the actors within these spaces are rendered ambiguous. Gronsky’s arresting use of colour and intelligent compositions are alluring, but these layered works are a study of how people inhabit a territory and what becomes evident in these images is the effect human life has on the environment in this Apothocene age.

Included in the exhibition are three works from Gronsky’s Reconstruction series that documents reenactments of historic Russian battles whilst simultaneously rendering them anachronistic with the inclusion of onlookers into the frame, constructed as triptychs, these works are filmic in nature and alludes to a panoramic view of an important battle whilst titles such as “Siege of Leningrad”are reminiscent of a Hollywood film. Continuing Gronsky’s study of perspective, in these works it appears formal whilst the colouring offers a certain flatness to the photographs.

The images are very reminiscent of the work of Nadav Kander who I really appreciate, we have also featured his work before here and here , you can see more of Kander’s work on his site here

This link will take you to Alexander Gronsky’s site

The exhibition is here

The Wapping Project Bankside
Top Floor, The Bishop’s Palace
Ely House
37 Dover Street
London W1S 4NJ

14th April – 29th May 2015

Nadav Kander Exhibition: Dust review – haunting and painterly

At the first talk in the Photography Oxford Festival series there were a panel who put forward the view that there was no outlet for serious writing on photography in the UK. They of course completely missed the point that as in all areas, music, art, literature etc. now the venue is the web. Bloggers do for nothing what the ‘critics’ want to be paid for. Bloggers might not always be professors or experts but their views are valid, the democratisation of comment is now the norm. Even though this is the case I always find Sean O’Hagan in the Guardian a good read and this review of a new Nadev Kander exhibition at Flowers Gallery, London by Sean is on the button, it is long by web standards but worth the time, a short extract..

As shown in Nadav Kander’s new series, Dust, they possess a strange, sometimes eerie beauty that he captures in his signature style: large-format landscapes full of stillness and light that continue his visual exploration of what he calls “the aesthetics of destruction”……Kander thinks big. The size of his prints reflects his ambition as well as his acute understanding of scale and architectural eye for composition. In their beauty, though, they also accentuate the paradoxical nature of his approach: the rendering of the desolate sublime. In his catalogue essay, the novelist Will Self writes: “These images do not make beautiful what is not, they ask of us that we repurpose ourselves to accept a new order of both the beautiful and the real.” I am not entirely convinced by that claim. Digitally printed to a degree of verisimilitude that the darkroom could never produce, Kander’s images possess a hyper-real aspect that to me makes them seem oddly unreal...read it all here

try to get to London to see the exhibition, the website makes it all look very enticing

Nadav Kander: Dust is at the Flowers Gallery, London until until 11 October

 

 

Nadav Kander awarded First Prize in Staged Portraits Singles

One of our favourite photographers over here at OSP towers is Nadav Kander, it is good to see he has won 1st prize in the World Press Awards for a staged portrait.

Nadav Kander’s portrait of English actor Daniel Kaluuya has won him a World Press Photo prize.

Lauren Heinz at the BJP speaks to him here

The naked and the dead: Nadav Kander’s nudes

Nadev Kander is one of my favourite photographers. His work is so diverse but never dull.

Jonathan Jones in the Guardian says “Nudity never loses its power to shock, and Nadav Kander’s latest images are no exception. The acclaimed photographer talks sex, death and airbrushing”

See more pictures here

Chloe Dewe Matthews photographer

The ever eagle eyed Norman McBeath took time out from his hectic schedule of cornering the market in portraits of poets to recommend this photographer he had unearthed. As the last post was about rising stars in photography I thought we should add our own views and although I knew nothing about Chloe I was very pleased to see she once was at college in our home town of Oxford. This link for The Ruskin School of Art heralds her as one to watch, so maybe we are onto something.

Her images fit perfectly into a way of seeing that I find absorbing and beguiling, she reminds me of Nadav Kander in her approach although I do feel she is much more about people than atmosphere as many of Kander’s work exhibit.

The Telegraph featured Chloe as one of The five most promising new artists of 2011: in pictures

and The Guardian had this to say

“The 29-year-old documentary photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews was a few months into an overland trip from China to the UK in 2010 when she stopped in Naftalan, Azerbaijan. She had heard about a sanatorium where locals – since the days of Marco Polo in the 13th century – have sworn by the therapeutic benefits of bathing in sludgy crude oil heated to 37C and she thought it might make a diverting subject for a portfolio of pictures. Dewe Mathews says, “I remember thinking, ‘Would this interest anyone at all? Well, I might as well just do it anyway.'”

Validation was not long in coming: in June last year, she was signed to the photo agency Panos Pictures; then, in November, her series Caspian, including images from Naftalan, won the 2011 international photography award run by the British Journal of Photography. More enduringly, she now had a blueprint for a lifetime’s work: “I was away for nine months, but I realised it could be a long-term thing, almost a recce for my career.”

Dewe Mathews is smart and assured, and her approach is fearlessly single-minded: for example, she crossed Asia and Europe entirely by hitchhiking. “If you’re on a bus the whole time, you have that lovely staring-out-of-the-window thing,” she says, “but it’s not the same as going from one person’s car with all sorts of funny things hanging from the mirror and them telling you their stories. It makes for a much more fertile atmosphere.”

She returns to Russia this month to continue the Caspian series and will exhibit the new photographs next October at the 1508 Gallery in London. This time, however, she has been forced to make arrangements for the transport. “It will be too cold to stand out on the road,” she sighs, genuinely disappointed. “But I’m going to do couch surfing, so hopefully I will hear stories that way.”

I suggest you go to her website and see a selection of remarkable images, here is the link