The Fondazione Fotografia Modena presents Contemporary Photography from North Western Europe, on display at the Modena Foro Boario through January 10, 2016. Core of the exhibition is an important tribute to Norwegian photographer Tom Sandberg (1953 – 2014), whose works are meant to dialogue with those of other European artists on display. The whole installation « Around Myself » is organized by Filippo Maggia, Director of Fondazione Fotografia Modena.
The exhibition features the most recent photography purchases by the Fondazione Cassa di risparmio di Modena, which concern north-western Europe and have never been shown before: around 70 works by 19 artists, from Wolfgang Tillmans to Jonny Briggs, which together evoke the vibrancy and heterogeneous nature of the current trends of a geographical area that takes in Germany, the UK and Scandinavia.
Born in Narvik in 1953 and prematurely passed away in 2014, Tom Sandberg is one of the most celebrated Norwegian contemporary photographers.
The 2007 exhibition at MoMA PS1 entitled Tom Sandberg: Photographs 1989–2006 brought his work to the attention of the American public and critics, giving an international dimension to a reputation that had already been consolidated in Scandinavia.
In his thirty-year career, Sandberg almost always worked with large formats and black-and- white film, promoting an idea of pure, direct photography that is rooted in the American photographic tradition of the early twentieth century. Without ever lapsing into strict fanaticism, and maintaining at all times the maximum expressive freedom, the artist inherited from straight photography an attitude of enhancing the aesthetic qualities of the photographic language and reducing to a minimum any editing on the images, such as cropping or manipulations at the developing or printing stages.
For Sandberg, photography is a means to experiment with the world in an unhindered, non-hierarchical way. Whether the subject matter is a car parked in the street or the sinuous body of a model, the lush greenery of nature or geometric architectural details, his photographs embody a powerful seductive charge, nourished by the sensitivity that has always marked out the artist’s perspective. In addition, his works are a reflection on photographic vision itself: the formal purity of the images often moves towards abstraction, exposing the viewer to all of the enigmatic power and the potential for mystery implicit in the act of perception and in every form of representation.
EXHIBITION
Around Myself by Tom Sandberg
Contemporary Photography from North-Western Europe
From September 18, 2015 to January 10, 2016
Fondazione Fotografia Modena
via Emilia Centro 283
41121 Modena
Italy
http://www.fondazionefotografia.org
