In the exhibition Face to Face, (LUMAS New York, SoHo) showcases new works by six international artists. The visualization of a person’s character requires the artist to have an excellent grasp of and critical eye for the essentials. The exhibition unites impressive portraits of extremely different personalities and situations, which draw the viewer into their spell – portrayals of celebrities and anonymous individuals alike.
About the artists
Since the 1950s, she has been known as one the of the most important portrait photographers in the UK: Jane Bown, born in 1925 in Dorset. She’s portrayed all the important personalities of her time: artists Francis Bacon and David Hockney, actors and directors such as Woody Allen and Dennis Hopper, fashion designers like Vivienne Westwood, musicians such as the Beatles and Björk, and important political figures including Richard Nixon, Margaret Thatcher, and the Queen. Her more than 60-year long working relationship with the Observer began with her first portrait in 1949 of the philosopher Bertrand Russell. His distinctive profile, giving off a silent pride, emerges from an abstract background in black and white contrast.
During the past 25 years of Swiss photographer Michel Comte’s career, renowned magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, Interview, Stern and GQ, have been publishing his images and portraits of the most beautiful women and world’s most significant artists of our time alike. What has gradually evolved, is an astonishing collection of work of great intimacy and understanding; images which allow an exceptional insight into the soul of whom Comte is portraying. Tina Brown, former editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and bestseller-author, once said: “Regardless whether Michel has a Hollywood celebrity or an orphan from the Third World in front of his lens, he takes both their pictures with the same sincerity and devotion.” Graceful female figures displayed from the side, back, and front. Sometimes a woman’s tilted head is truncated; sometimes a shoulder disappears from the frame. The rich colours of the figures are muted by a drop of subdued background. Details are painstakingly added and yet have an abstract effect when seen as a whole.
Every person has multiple facets that combined determine his or her personality. Thinking about these internal images has recently inspired the Swiss photographic artist Anna Halm Schudel to create unusual portraits. For these portraits, she set her sights on today’s and yesterday’s stars and celebrities in a highly original way. In her large-format photographic art, Schudel erects fascinating monuments to figures of particular charisma – Scarlet Johannsson, Keira Knightly, Barack Obama, and Marilyn Monroe.
Based in Vancouver, Eric Klemm traveled across the country to capture more than standard folklore. He got toknow Indians at festivals and on the street, and deliberately photographed them in front of a neutral background. Spontaneous trust was very important to him, as he sought an unadulterated view, free from the shadow of skepticism. His pictures are far from the romantic gesture of the century-old photographs of Edward S. Curtis. The openness with which Klemm encounters the descendants of the Great Warriors mirrors itself wonderfully in many portraits as a reinvigorated self-confidence. In the search for their visage, he gave them something of their inherent value in return.
The women Jacques Olivar photographs appear like the heroines of old Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films in the heyday of Kodacolor, when after the roar of the lion, passion, yearning, and drama inexorably unfolds. And at the same time the models he arranges and stages so theatrically seem absent, solitary, perhaps even melancholy.
What characterizes Olivar’s photos and makes them so filmic is the narrative condensed into one single image – a plot we have to puzzle together in our own imagination. Only few photographers like the Casablanca-born Olivar are in the position to stage every detail so precisely and simultaneously allow us the space to create our own photo narratives.
Face to Face
Works by: Jane Bown, Michel Comte, Erin Cone, Anna Halm Schudel, Eric Klemm,
and Jacques Olivar.
Until October 18th, 2011
LUMAS New York, SoHo
362 West Broadway. New York. NY 10013. USA.
Phone: (212) 219-9497
