The city as light. Life and light. Ray K. Metzker, born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, developed an emotional affinity with light waves early on throughout his career. The vast cities of Chicago and Philadelphia offered Metzker a world of opportunities to explore, and allowed him to express himself intensely in a field where his peers and predecessors, notably his professors Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design in Chicago, had already left their mark in the 1950s and 60s. Thanks to experimental learning delivered in this school, founded under the name New Bauhaus Chicago, in 1937, by the avant-garde artist and teacher Lászlò Moholy-Nagy, Ray K. Metzker, developed great visual mastery.
Going against the trend of street photography or humanist photography that was far too conventional for his creative audacity, he knew, above all, and as rarely, how to appropriate urban space, in its high and low lights.
This exhibition, the second of importance in Europe after that organized by the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne, at the end of 2007, allows us to celebrate him ten years after his death – on October 9th, 2014 – by presenting more than a hundred photographs. These black and white prints, with tonal values of incomparable richness, were produced by the photographer himself. They come from the estate of Ray K. Metzker in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as well as Galerie Les Douches in Paris, which represents him exclusively in Europe. Several emblematic series are brought together here, in the spaces of Fondation A: The Loop (1957-1959), Europe (1960-1961), Early Philadelphia (1962-1964), Pictus Interruptus (1976-1980), City Whispers (1980 -1983) and Composite from the 1960s.
What do they have in common? A geometric cut of the street, through its vertical and horizontal lines, a formal inventiveness – double exposure, superpositions of negatives, composite grids, abstract research… abstractions created or found – and, finally, a total control of light, with its dazzling flashes and imposing shadows.
They give the work of Ray K. Metzker a particular status in the history of American art of the 20th century: that of a man of modest origins, long underestimated, who freed himself from the codes of a narrative aesthetic to make the star of monochrome photography shine.
Françoise Morin and Philippe Séclier,
Exhibition curators
Ray K. Metzker : City Lux
Until December 22, 2024
Fondation A
Avenue van Volxem
1190 Brussels
www.fondationastichting.com
