Dutch photographer Paul Kooiker is not interested in a single beautiful image. Through tenacious repetition and seriality, his narratives take pleasure in and complicate the perceptions of the female form. His highly-sexualized voyeuristic nudes are often over-exposed or out of focus, exploring the limitations of photography and questioning what is beautiful, ugly, sexy, criminal, hedonistic, or pornographic. Each image represents a complex dual between the subject and the observer. The result is a beautiful synthesis of the classical and the radical, the sacred and the profane, the real and the imaginary.
Until October 25th, his series Sunday, Hunting and Fishing, and Room Service will be on view in Steven Kasher Gallery, New York. The series Sunday features “eccentrically posed, robustly built women with flesh so palpably rendered that their bodies attain an artless poetic grandeur,” says Kooiker. In the early series Hunting and Fishing, Kooiker probed the limits of figuration with extremely out-of-focus nudes fleeing his camera, leaving the viewer to witness the sport of voyeurism. In the 2008 series Room Service, Kooiker made over 100 images of naked women against a background of bookshelves. This series compares the desire for knowledge/power to lust.
Opening in October 2014, Kooiker will be the subject of a major solo exhibition titled Nude Animal Cigar at the Fotomuseum in The Hague.
EXHIBITION
Paul Kooiker: Sunday
September 11th – October 25th, 2014.
Steven Kasher Gallery
515 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001
