Melanie Issaka Blueprint 9, 2021 C-type print on Deep Matte 82.5 x 65 cm
Melanie Issaka Blueprint 10, 2021 C-type print on Deep Matte 82.5 x 65 cm
Galerie—Peter—Sillem will present the solo show "Blueprint: Black Skin, White Mask" by Melanie Issaka.
What does it mean to be a Black body in a white space? Black and British, an African in Europe? Blueprint: Black Skin, White Mask explores the social and political contexts of Blackness, whiteness, and the space in between.
"In this series, I negate my body through cyanotype prints, a contact print, presenting a void white shape. My body is simultaneously displayed and removed, symbolising the hypervisibility and invisibility afforded Black bodies, allowing myself and the audience to assign our historicity and meaning. Blackness is multifaceted, extending beyond the skin. This series explores the physical and conceptual nature of the Black body and its relationship to the photographic agency." Melanie Issaka
Melanie Issaka (b. 1994, Ghana) is a visual artist and freelance photographer living and working in London, UK. She graduated from The Royal College of Art with a Photography MA, having previously studied Graphic Design BA at The University of Brighton. Melanie aims to develop a social practice concerned with documentation, representation and archiving with reference to the intersectionality of Race and Gender, as well as exploring the materiality of print and lens-based media.
Loredana Nemes Series: "Graubaum und Himmelmeer" Graubaum 47, 2021
Loredana Nemes Series: "Graubaum und Himmelmeer" Graubaum 9, 2019
This year the gallery presents the artist Loredana Nemes in a solo show.
Human beings as individuals, their relationships, their role in social webs as well as their fragility are themes that drive Loredana Nemes. The questioning of the individual leads to subconsciously given answers that teach her something about society as well as about herself. To find images for feelings like greed, fear, love or for the bewitching disorder of life that carry this energy as well as reflect the medium of photography is the goal of her work.
Inka & Niclas (1985, Finland / 1984, Sweden) are an artist duo who have worked together since 2007. They explore the relationship humans have with nature, working primarily with photography-based art. Their images examine the cultural perception of utopian landscapes and play with the synthesis of beauty, kitsch, and visual desire. The materiality of photography is crucial in their practice and is expressed in for instance the series Adaptive Colorations and Liquify. Here the photograph takes on a new form, allowing us to explore not just the image but also the sculptural shape it takes. The series Family Portrait features the artists together with their children in light-reflecting suits. Taking in overly romantic, one might say exemplary, settings, the costumes make them radiate light and become anonymous. By combining these opposing viewpoints the artists look into the ritualization of travel photography, and the depiction and consumption of grand scenery, themes they continue to explore in their work.
Julia Peirone (*1973, Argentina) explores issues of identity and the concept of gender in her photographic and film work. Her visual world is populated with girls and young women. Peirone stages her photographs, creates a setting and allows the models to move, capturing in-between moments, be it fragile or confident. Her series mirrors aspects of vulnerability, shame, and sexuality in a time that is heavily influenced by social media and its effects on the creation of identities. The artist is looking for the gap between reality and construction. Peirone's oeuvre poses questions about the strengths and limitations of the photographic image and the way we encounter ourselves in them. The modern-day visual culture favors self-glorification and an obsession with abstract ideals of beauty. In her photography, she focuses on these notions to explore young, mostly female teenagers' search for identity. In her new series Marilyn, Peirone asked girls to take on the iconic look of Marilyn Monroe with her camera acting as a mirror. In this intimate moment, the girls consciously or unconsciously explore how classic signifiers of femininity - painted lips, long eyelashes - can be a mask to hide behind or to gain power through.
Stephan Gladieu (*1969) began his career as a photographer in 1989, covering the news and the major conflicts that shook the world (the fall of Ceausescu, the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans, etc.). During these years working on feature stories, he developed a personal style based on portraits, combining aesthetic research and rigorous documentary work. Today, he focuses mainly on personal series dealing with historical, anthropological or sociological facts that are not well-known to the general audience (the Hereros genocide in Namibia, the secret societies of Benin, the daily life of North Koreans, etc.). He lives and works in Paris.
Gordon Clark (*1955 Johannesburg) is an acclaimed photographer and commercial director renowned for his spellbinding images of the African landscape and people. His photographs have been shown in several prominent museum and gallery exhibitions around the world. He photographs those rare individuals within society who challenge our inherent beliefs and jar our aesthetic aspirations. He weaves complex narratives by inserting subjects into deliberately choreographed natural environments, which compel viewers to interpret the powerful dilemmas at play within each subject’s life.
Through painting, photography, video or installations, Saïdou Dicko (*1979 Burkina Faso) transforms the representation of forms giving life to visual phenomena, to physical and psychological events of light, uniting the two extreme values that are at the heart of black and white contrast. He finds pleasure in bringing together the opposites to talk to us about equality, union, maternal love, freedom, humanity. Since 2013, he has been curator and scenographer, particularly in Morocco. His artistic work continues to evolve thanks to his travels, his experience, his various inspirations and always his quest for a better world. His new series The Shadowed People is a reflection of his many years of work and research. He lives and works in Paris.
"Growing up" means that we have to go through the process of confirmation or rejection, we all have to discard or save the objects of our childhood and thus make a final judgment of their value. In this process, nostalgia and sentimentality prevent us from being objective, and old junk can be an invaluable souvenir. It is in the role of the latter that objects appear in the works of Lucija Rosc, who in her photographs and objects depicts a world of seemingly random or completely non-functional objects, which on closer inspection reveal that they are the result of meticulous collecting and archiving of things from her childhood.
Boris Gaberščik From the series "FRUIT D’UNE LONGUE EXPERIENCE" Silver gelatin print on baryta paper, selenium toned 25,4 x 20,3 cm
Uroš Abram From the series "Body. Made in Me" Image takten with camera oralis Digital print on canvas 175 X 140 cm Unique piece
Boris Gaberščik keeps challenging the viewer with objects that come from his carefully planned collection activities. His studio is full of things that he has found on his travels to places near and far. He turns objects from everyday life into the main actors of his works, often looking as if they are about to lose balance. They display a strong sense of utility because he uses them to create compositions.
Uroš Abram photographs with the camera obscura improvised in his mouth: Body. Made in Me. His photos are articulated by expressive deformation due to the long exposition, entirely diluted contours and loss of detail, fingerprints and traces of saliva which contribute to the aesthetic of the image. Operator (the author) thus prints in traces of participation of his own body. He makes use of the sacral space for the consecration of the human body, its frail beauty and transience in the ethereal images of the photographed nudes.
Chervine was born in 1972 in Iran. He grew up in Paris and moved to New York in 2008. As a self-taught photographer, he trains himself during his numerous trips around the world and began to work for the press and fashion. Since 2015, he developed a personal work, photographing the city and the scenes that take place in it: a woman looks at the sun, a couple discusses in front of a café, a mother and her daughter cross the road, these anodyne moments, the photographer sublimates them with a chiaroscuro that dramatizes the scene and plunges us into a cinematographic imaginary.
FLORE "L'envolée", 2020 Silver print stained with tea and waxed by the artist
In FLORE’s work, memory acquires a unique temporality, oscillating between reminiscence and becoming. Her work is haunted by memory, a tentative reconstruction of a childhood lost, while also creating a time of becoming through an imagination that is unceasingly reborn, like a thread between Indochina and Morocco. Breaking beyond the bounds of the photographic medium, FLORE’s works manifest a particularly rich exploration of plasticity. Heliogravures, pigment prints of Polaroids, silver gelatine prints, marouflage on gold: each series proceeds by integrating and recomposing representations of fleeting moments which, in spite of their diversity, tell a coherent story.
In her artistic practice, Gemma Pepper seeks to suspend and transcend time and space and space, always searching for the link between the past and the present. Further she explores the meaning of nostalgia and memory photographs as aesthetic objects and cultural artifacts.
For the series Behind the dayLars Van den Brink (*1977) travelled for more than two years through the French, Swiss and Italian Alps. He slept in mountain huts or in a tent, and often photographed from the exact same location for about fourteen hours. During those sessions he saw the moon and stars give way to the sun, and the change in colour of the light and the landscape. The end result is a filtering and compression of compounded time; images that refer to classical romantic painting, but also to the contemporary landscapes used in games. By letting go of the unity of time and combining different shots, he distances himself from the analytical nature of photography and is able to create images that go beyond mere registration. In my latest work 'Behind the day' I use the possibilities contemporary technology offers to lift the unity of time. And thus I play with one of the classic characteristic of photography. Day and night, hours and minutes, they all become fluid within my work.
Margriet Smulders Nartificilia from the series Rococco 80 x 110 cm / 120 x 165 cm
Margriet Smulders Aturalia from the series Rococco 80 x 110 cm / 120 x 165 cm
The still lives by Margriet Smulders (*1955) are characterized by a sumptuous visual language. She finds inspiration in the Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century, in the painters of the Flemish Baroque, in eighteenth-century Italian and German ceiling paintings, in Greek mythology, in literature, poetry, contemporary society and in herself. Her photos are close to the tradition of the Dutch still life because of her dedication to material expression and her use of symbolism. In addition, her work refers to the colorful and limitless Baroque and Rococo ceiling paintings. "I want to lure you in my secret garden to ask you to lose yourself and forget everything. To choose for Eros as the life force that overcomes all degradation and despair."
Atong Atem Veil of Pearls, 2022 150 x 100 cm / 90 x 60 cm
Atong Atem Green Face with Veil, 2022 150 x 100 cm / 90 x 60 cm
MARS Gallery will be exhibiting a selection of photographic and video works by Atong Atem. Atem is an Ethiopian born, South Sudanese artist, writer and curator based in Narrm/ Melbourne. Working primarily between photography and video, Atem explores migrant narratives and postcolonial practices in the African diaspora, the relationship between public and private spaces and the exploration of home and identity through portraiture. MARS Gallery is the first and only Australian gallery to exhibit at photo basel. The gallery’s involvement also marks the event of the artist’s first showing at an international art fair. To celebrate this achievement, and to give a worthy introduction into Atem’s work, MARS will be presenting a range of pieces from across key bodies of work from Atem’s oeuvre, Surat (2022), To Be Real (2020), and new self-portraits.
Jerry Uelsmann (1934-2022) is one of the most influential photographers of his generation, because he did not only challenge with his montages the prevailing canon of his chosen medium, but he also anticipated an image language that came only into fruition in this perfection with the rise of digital imaging and photo editing technologies a few decades later. Since the 1960s, Uelsmann composed surreal visual worlds and narratives in long hours of tinkering with a selection of different negatives in his darkroom. With his light-sensitive photo paper in hand, he would march down a row of up to seven enlargers in order to manually expose one picture element after the other into the pre-visualized motif. Thus, the resulting dream landscapes, fantasies or nightmares are basically all unique prints, even though Uelsmann always tried to produce ten comparable prints of each image.
Roger Humbert Untitled, 1952 Photogram on Baryt paper, Unique 40,2 x 29,8 cm
Roger Humbert Untitled, 2021 From the series QUANT Fine Art Print, Unique 26,5 x 18,5 cm
Roger Humbert, born 1929, began creating photograms in the darkroom in the mid-1950s. Humbert and his photographic contemporaries were looking for a new modern, experimental visual language - a photography without a camera. He denied the image, detached himself from the object and understood light as a decisive, image-generating element. Using experimental light sources and form elements, Humbert created photograms from the 1950s to the 2000s. In recent years, Humbert has transferred his work in the darkroom to the digital image space, creating digital Concrete Photographs. Like its analog predecessors, the focus lies on the mysterious quality of light. This is now being explored using new, digital photographic techniques. In 2021, Fabian & Claude Walter Galerie already honored Humbert as one of the masters of Concrete Photography. The artist returns this year with some of his most recent works, which are grouped under the title Quant.
Galerie Catherine et André Hug presents a two-person booth showing works from two American artists Carl Corey and Kristin Bedford.
Kristin Bedford will be presented with "Cruise Night", a collection of unstaged photographs she made with the Los Angeles Mexican American lowrider community throughout Southern California and Nevada from 2014 to 2019. Lowriders are cars, usually large sedans, modified to ride very low to the ground. These are not high-performance vehicles, these are works of art. Lowrider culture is also a practice of devotion to one’s car, it is a question of culture of identity, truth, nostalgia and preservation.
Carl Corey "2412 Luck", 2008 From the series "Habitat" pigmented inkjet print on museum paper 111 X 111 cm
Carl Corey is an American photographer based in River Falls, Wisconsin whose work focuses upon the American Cultural Landscape with an eye towards areas of historical significance. Carl knows his country intimately from trips that criss-cross America, shining a light on small communities and unseen ordinarily unseen, his observations are like singular postcards identifying physical and and societal landmarks. Corey documents the past and the present all co-mingled with temporal. In 2019, Carl Corey received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography.
The land of red earth is the home of Zak van Biljon. Born in South Africa in 1981, the photographer spent his childhood and youth between Johannesburg and Cape Town. In 2003, he graduated top of his class from the National College of Photography in Pretoria. Ironically, he graduated with a degree in black and white prints - when he was influenced by the colors of the Rainbow Nation. In 2004, he moved to Europe. His main focus is on the staged use of light. In his latest art project he deals with infrared photography. The world seen in shades of red and pink offers a new and impressive insight into reality as we know it.
Patrik Fuchs is a photographic collector. Fascinated by the visual commons of our living worlds, by the trust towards the familiar. He traces the everyday, at home in Switzerland or on extended journeys across the continent. In the "ordinary" Fuchs searches for the typical, the aesthetic peculiarities, the beauty and the breaks. He encounters the supposedly banal in an unbiased manner; benevolent but incorruptible and direct. He works with the relationship between figure and function, between space and atmosphere, without allowing himself to be irritated by the presumable modesty of his objects. His photographs are serious but with a fine sense of the playful, the oblique. He is not a purist, but a lover of the simple and the invisible.
Sandro Livio Straube, born 1992 in Zurich, is an architect and photographer. Over a period of more than four years he photographed in the Val Lumnezia for the series "Mountains bleach". The limitation to an analog medium format camera and a fixed focal length, as well as the strict geographical perimeter, led to a sought-after narrowness and thus to a more intense perception. The photographs show what would otherwise soon disappear. As a silent observer, he dares to look reality in the eye for a fraction of a second- the moment of taking the picture.
Jürgen Schadeberg Miriam Makeba, Johannesburg, 1958
Jürgen Schadeberg Mandela Leaving His Treason Trial 1958
Bonne Espérance Gallery will exhibit key works from the career of the father of South African photography, Jürgen Schadeberg. Born in Berlin in 1931, Schadeberg emigrated to South Africa as a teenager and found a job with Drum Magazine, at the time the only publication for Black South Africans. He was a witness to social injustice in South Africa from 1950 to 1964 during the official implementation of apartheid. Following his exile to the UK from 1964 to 1985 he continued to focus on the human condition and the dramatic consequences of crises and social change on the vulnerable and disenfranchised. After his return to South Africa in 1985 he documented the promise of democracy and the birth of the rainbow nation, as well as the fragile condition of a South Africa ravaged by decades of poverty and inequality. Works by Schadeberg are part of the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Tate, The Victoria and Albert and the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Bonne Espérance Gallery is Paris’ only South African gallery and exhibits a wide range of emerging and established South African artists and designers.
