The highlight of the 2012 edition of Photo Levallois is the exhibition devoted to Jan Groover , who died earlier this year.
Born in the United States in 1943, Groover abandoned abstract painting in the early 1970s to experiment with photography, a medium in which she felt more free, liberated from the seriousness she thought painting required.
Her early photographs are undoubtedly products of their time, showing the influence most notably of Minimalism, in which the work of art and its subject are diminished in favor of its relationship to the viewer and the surrounding space.
Groover quickly established the methods to her approach. She rejected the conventional idea of photography as a document, working instead in terms of relations between the elements in an image, and among groups of images. She sought to develop a specifically photographic vocabulary that would produce images resistant to the wear caused by successive examinations of the picture. But the artist advanced cautiously, and her work matured slowly until 1975 when it first attracted notice.
Polyptychs are enigmatic groups of two or three large color photographs with disconcerting subject matter, depicting public spaces crossed through with vehicles that alter the composition of its various parts. Groover isn’t suggesting we consider these rugged landscapes to be perspectives on reality, but as a formal game about the structure of photographic space and the capacity of the images to change according to their arrangement.
Paul Frèches
Read the full text of this article in the French version of Le Journal.
Photo Levallois 2012
Tribute to Jan Groover
05.10.12 – 25.10.12
Salons d’Honneur et Péristyle de l’Hôtel de Ville
Place de la République
92300 Levallois – France
