First exhibited in 2019, this is the first time The Crimson Line series has been shown in Europe; a meditation on the impact of hard industry on the visual environment, Trent Parke uses the fleeting colours of twilight to irradiate an overlooked, unappealing and often-ignored world.
Last year Trent Parke worked alongside STANLEY/BARKER Books to publish a revised version of the series, containing never before seen images in a tonal progression from one image to the next. Mirroring this format, Michael Reid Berlin has selected a series of works that encapsulate the series, and is presenting them in Parke’s intended order, contiguously spanning our gallery.
Hailing from the steel city of Newcastle, and growing up with his father working at Tubemakers, it was only a matter of time before Parke was drawn to the jagged, industrial landscape that surrounds the Adelaide beachside suburb where he lives. One of Parke’s only early childhood memories is accompanying his mother to pick his dad up from work, travelling through a vista of ship yards, chimneys, and the BHP steelworks.
Parke has always been interested in the transformative powers of light but it was the ephemeral colours of dawn and dusk, the great multitude of reds that made him curious about the colour crimson. He discovered the colour that is used in commercial products is harvested from the crushed and boiled bodies of the female scale insect, the Cochineal. A minute insect that inhabits the pads of the prickly pear cactus, farmed intensely for their crimson dye.
Trent Parke : The Crimson Line
1 – 30 October 2021
Michael Reid Berlin
Ackerstraße 163
10115 Berlin, Germany
