From June 6 to July 13, 2024, Bigaignon presents a face-to-face between Ralph Gibson and Bernard Plossu. The “Gibson / Plossu” exhibition brings together for the first time the work of two of the greatest photographers of their generation. On the occasion of this unique meeting, the two artists each made a personal selection of prints from their own photographic collection, thus offering a perspective on their two great careers.
If Bernard Plossu is a Frenchman who has loved America since the start of his career in 1965, producing numerous photographic reports in Mexico, the American West and Midwest, Ralph Gibson is surely the most Francophile American photographer, named Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of France in 2002 then Knight of the Legion of Honor in 2018. Bernard Plossu drew his inspiration from travel throughout his life. Born in Vietnam in 1945, he took his first photographs in the Sahara with his father when he was only 13 years old. The destinations then multiplied in America, Africa, Asia and the Mediterranean, with an intensity inherent in photographing what he himself calls the “intermediate landscapes”. An intimate writing, an ode to everyday life and to the poetry of the banal, to which Bernard Plossu has dedicated numerous publications. For this exceptional exhibition, he selected thirteen prints from his series “The Still Hour”, a visual dialogue with the deserted and floating landscapes of the Mediterranean produced over more than thirty years.
Known for his mysterious and symbolic images, Ralph Gibson (1939) has built a body of work throughout his career that explores the surreal visual nature of the subconscious. Influenced in his childhood by the powerful lights of the movie sets where his father worked as an assistant director to Alfred Hitchcock, he was then be inspired by the nouveau roman, atonal music and even concrete poetry, which in turn shaped his dream like work recognized worldwide. On the occasion of his fourth exhibition at the Bigaignon gallery, Ralph Gibson has specially chosen his thirteen favorite prints from his archive, an extremely personal selection which will delight fans of the American master.
If they have each revolutionized contemporary photography by making daring artistic choices, they are also united by their love of books to which they have given a privileged place as a medium of experimentation and distribution for their respective projects. Bernard Plossu, the man with 300 books, integrated it very early into his creative process and almost each of his projects is the subject of an edition. For Ralph Gibson, while his first opus “The Somnambulist” constitutes in 1970 one of the most accomplished forms of the artist’s book, a work of art in its own right which allowed him to assert his visual signature, he continued, series after series, to master the art of publishing, and published some of the most significant books of the last fifty years. The images from the “Gibson / Plossu” exhibition resonate in us like old memories frozen in time, visual fragments that reveal ever more poetry. From these two very distinct photographic worlds emerge intertwining, echoes between their work, their views on line and material, their ways of brushing close to abstraction without ever falling into it, in absolute mastery of light and its contrasts.
Ralph Gibson and Bernard Plossu : Gibson / Plossu
From June 6 to July 13, 2024
Opening reception on Saturday June 8, 3-7 p.m.
Bigaignon
18 rue du Bourg-Tibourg
75004 Paris
www.bigaignon.com
Hours of operation
Tuesday – Saturday: 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.
