Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach : Lita Albuquerque, Renaud Auguste-Dormeui, Ken Ohara, Thomas Devaux
Lita Albuquerque (Us 1946) (images 1-3)
In a set of 5 photo-drawings of her installation at the Pyramids in Giza in 1996, Lita Albuquerque layers graphs, symbols, honeycomb structures and a replica of the map of the stars she created in situ for her Sol Star desert performance for the Cairo Biennial, where she represented the United States and won first prize. Albuquerque is a female Land Artist known for her use of pigment in her large-scale, site specific ephemeral works. She was recently included in Groundswell – Women of Land Art at the Nasher Sculpture Center, and the Light & Space exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary, and held a solo show at La Patinoire that brought her Land Art indoors for the first time in Europe.
Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil (Fr 1968, lives & works in Paris) (images 4-6)
In D’après nature, Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil has created a series of painted postcards that overlay nostalgic iconography with unforeseen disaster. He uses found historic photographs and engravings of monuments that he manipulates to insert a record of fires that devastated the sites in subsequent years. The repetition of his process for the treatment of the various locations extends into an immersive language evoking derridean hauntology —- “time is out of joint” and an unsettling historiography of triumph and catastrophe. Auguste-Dormeuil is laureate of the Prix Meurice pour l’art contemporain, a former resident of the French Academy in Rome and has exhibited at Villa Medici, MACRO, Palais de Tokyo and others.
Ken Ohara (Jp 1942, lives & works in NYC) )(images 7-9)
Using a set of strict parameters, Ken Ohara created ONE, a series of tight portraits of over 500 ordinary New Yorkers whose probing and repetitive framing trouble notions of similarity and difference, constructions of identity, and gather our simultaneous diversity and universality as humankind. Collected into a telephone-book like tome, Ohara’s indexical artist book was originally published by Tsukiji Shokan in 1970. Ohara has exhibited at MOMA, LACMA and others, and earned a Guggenheim fellowship.
Thomas Devaux (F 1980) (images 10-12)
In Thomas Devaux’s series The Shoppers, the artist pushes photographic processes to a painterly extreme. Devaux has created a system that uses abstraction, dichroic glass and surveillance imagery to build his lauded series. Fantasized and sublimated, The Shoppers are caught in the drudgerous quotidian encounter of requisite consumption — paying for groceries. With their evanescent glow and entrancing glass, spectral, specific and yet anonymous, The Shoppers stands as an icon for all of us: relentless, largely unconscious, consumers. Devaux has recently had exhibitions and events at the Centre Pompidou, la Maison Européenne de la Photographie, and the Louis Vuitton boutique in Paris, and his work is held in prestigious private and public collections, including that of the BNF.
Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach
15 Rue Veydt
1060 Bruxelles, Belgique
+32 (0)2 533 03 90
contact(ad)prvbgallery.com
Rossi Contemporary Brussels: Lore Stessel
Lore Stessel (BE 1987 , Lives and works between Brussels and Leuven, Belgium) (images 13-15)
Lore Stessel’s practice centres around movement. A visual language of dance without words, as spoken words come short on meaning. Her photographic body of work binds shared moments between dancers and their surroundings. It is the return of her first shared moments with the dancers – shifting the focus to the more intimate mundane, to what comes before and after the dance. A slowness where dance resonates. Lore puts the focus within: on that of reflecting and connecting. She fills the voids with natural elements, whereas before she would fill those with blank white spaces: “The density of the bodies and gestures need the ability to breathe within the landscapes”. Movement happens within and in-between the pieces. There is stillness, but no standing still. Lore Stessel describes it herself: “A picture sets time. Movement is something lucid and luminous. By capturing, framing, and translating it into something eternal to look at and dwell on, movement stretches itself into time. From that moment onwards, the viewer is in full control. Complete stillness arises.” Lieve Shukrani Simoens.
Rossi Contemporary
Rivoli Building, ground floor # 17,
chaussée de Waterloo 690 (Bascule),
BE-1180 Brussels
+32 (0)486 31 00 92
www.rossicontemporary.be
Is this all?
The previous overview is certainly not all the photography at the fair: with almost 180 galleries, a lot more is offered. Like the Paris gallery AFIKARIS, which is showing work by the artist Saïdou Dicko (1979) from Burkina Faso. He lives and works in Paris, France. Saïdou is a self-taught visual artist (photographer, videographer, installer and painter). At the age of five, Dicko, a Fulani Shepherd, learned to draw by outlining the shadows of his sheep on the soil. In 2005, he started photography. Six months later he won a prize, the first in a long series – and shadows are still present in his images… (image 16)
Copenhagen’s Martin Asbæk Gallery presents work by Elina Brotherus (Fi 1972), one of the North’s most important artists. Her work alternates between an autobiographical and an art-historical approach. Many of Elina Brotherus’ images are self-portraits that investigate the relationship between individual and space, both in relation to interiors as well as landscapes (image 17).
Düsseldorf’s Van Horn gallery will in turn present work by Anys Reimann (1965, lives and works in Düsseldorf). Reimann is a montage collage artist whose oeuvre gives voice to women of colour. For me, one of the most relevant artists currently exhibited in the UNIQUE project at Hangar in Brussels (until June 8th) We will definitely come back to this exhibition and to this artist (image 18)
Finally, the Cologne & Paris-based Thomas Zander gallery promises a lot of great stuff. From classic work by Robert Frank (1924-2019) (image 19) and German conceptual artist Lothar Baumgarten (1944-2018) (image 20), they also show younger artists like Poland’s Joanna Piotrowska (1985)(image 21) and Tarrah Krajnak (1979, Peru/US) (image 22), who is certainly known to readers of L’Oeil de la photographie/ Eye of Photography. This gallery will also be showing Lewis Baltz, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Peter Downsbrough, Ed Ruscha & James White.
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