This exhibition is the sixth in the series ‘Starting a Photography Collection. Ten Exhibitions in Ten Weeks’; an ambitious program of weeklong exhibitions in the run-up to Photo London fair this May. This specially curated series covers a wide spectrum of photography from the nineteenth century to the present. To mark the 25th anniversary of his death in 1991, James Hyman Gallery presents an exhibition of one of the greatest American photographers of the twentieth century, Aaron Siskind (1903 – 1991).
From the late 1940s Siskind increasingly abstracted his images of the urban environment, often using formal devices such as a front-on approach to emphasise the picture surface. A founding member of “The Club”, the New York School cooperative salon, his milieu was that of the Abstract Expressionist painters who were his friends and colleagues. The recurrent exploration of texture, graffiti and paint marks echo not just the walls that Brassai photographed in Paris, but also the language developed by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Cy Twombly. The influence went both ways, In 1958 Kline named one of his paintings Siskind and Siskind in turn did a series entitled Homage to Franz Kline.
The exhibition focuses on Siskind’s large prints of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which an enlarged scale contributes to their dramatic wall presence.
“Siskind’s modernist vision of facade, often daubed in paint drips and graffiti are some of the seminal urban images of the twentieth century. Formally simple, they nevertheless possess a richness of texture and details that continues to engage and re-engage. Accumulations of encrusted layers, like the rings on a tree trunk, reveal the passage of time.”
James Hyman
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