Vivian Maier for FIFTY ONE celebrates five years

FIFTY ONE celebrates five years

In collaboration with Analix Forever

10/06/2005

01/08/2005

Gallery FIFTY ONE

We are proud to announce that it has already been five years that Fifty One Fine Art Photography launched its first show. We would like to invite you to celebrate this anniversary with us. For this occasion we invited Analix Forever from Geneva. They will present the following artists:

Mat Collishaw graduated from Goldsmith’s College and has evolved along with the YBA scene. He has been exploring thoroughly the delicate links between attraction and repulsion and the observer and the observed. He is fascinated by the history of image and the strong metaphors of death inherent to the act of taking photographs. In his choice of subjects as well as in the way he mounts and frames his photographs (and projections), Collishaw associates baroque features with contemporary issues and aesthetics. This is further underlined by the way he uses religious images that he reinterprets, revealing themes such as cruelty, imprisonment and suffocation. He has become a master in the art of provoking intense and ambiguous emotions in the viewer. Collishaw also often stages himself in his photographs, using his own image to create artificial and fictional situations amplified by the artifice of actually being both behind and in front of the camera.

One of the youngest emerging yet already recognised Italian artists, Luca Francesconi explores altogether performance, video, photography and installation. The relationships between unity and multiplicity and human action versus that of nature are underlying themes to his work. Inspired by Giuseppe Penone, Francesconi is in the process of developing the use of natural energy as mode of expression; observing, touching, breaking, burning, chipping… His photographic work often reports minimal interventions of man onto nature, whether physical or intellectual. Intertwined growing trees painted in red – the colour of passion – or the tip of a mountain crossed by the line of obscurity which divides day from night, are significant examples. Francesconi embodies himself the complex dichotomy between poetry and power.

Fraser Sharp also graduated from Goldsmith, though eleven years later. In his art, he concentrates on lost memories from childhood, preferably his own. The photographic work is essentially self portraits. On the one hand, photographs recovered from films forgotten for decades, depicting a blurred vision of real childhood. On the other, self portraits on polaroids, which he then covers with a mask made of earth mixed with pigments, fading the present to reveal a fake childish past. Two very different approaches to the same scope: photographing the dreams. His. Ours. And drawing an identity constantly hesitating between laughter and fear, past and present and tenderness and bitterness. Sharp has been named as the magician of memory.

Young Swiss artist, graduate of Fine Art School in Lausanne, Switzerland, Nathalie Rebholz presents her work as a projection of her dreams, as the expression of her desires and a representation of womanpower. She explores the fantastic, addresses universal myths such as those of Eve and Lillith, and sees her work as a mystic quest. Flying bodies, a luxurious nature, intense colours: « First of all, it should be beautiful ». In her photographic work, Rebholz essentially refers to Jeff Wall whose staged scenes and very polished style inspire her and integrates these qualities into her work so as to transform everyday life scenes in quite absurd and kitsch representations.

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