Bradwolff & Partners – Reflections & Perspectives: Katrin Korfmann (1971), Eva- Fiore Kovacovsky (1980) & Jaehun Park (1986) (images 1-2)
Katrin Korfmann is well known for her characteristic bird’s eye view. The works she creates stem from observing encounters in the public space of our daily lives. During Unseen, we will be presenting two of her new works. Bright colours and sharp shadows subtly seduce the viewer into the position of macro and micro voyeur.
Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky allows nature to resonate in her artistic practice as something that gains territory on the one hand and is framed by humans on the other. Her photograms are experiments that investigate what happens when prints of nature are placed back into nature. On view during Unseen is a grid of photograms, portraying her search for the possibilities of human existence in nature without undermining nature. She gives nature its own voice that reverberates poetically through the images. Her new book is published by Roma and a preview will be available during Unseen.
Jaehun Park is part of the UNBOUND presentation
Their works shift your gaze and put the – often uncomfortable – relationship between people and their environment in a different perspective. Culture and nature are regularly regarded as two diametrically opposed entities, humans are still trying to influence nature, to tame, restrict and bend it to their will. But does nature allow this? Culture and nature are not opposites. Through the eyes of our photographers perspective switches from inside to outside, where we are the instigators of our climate emergency yet also realise that not everything can be engineered.
bradwolff & partners
1093 md amsterdam oost
+31 6-513 999 54
[email protected]
www.bradwolff-partners.nl
Contour Gallery: Jan Pypers, Margriet Smudlers, Tjitske Oosterholt (images 3-4)
Jan Pypers ( Belgium 1982)
These days, many photographers are making concerted efforts to transcend the medium, for instance by combining analog and digital techniques in innovative ways. This includes Pypers, who makes carefully elaborated scale models for his photos, that are reminiscent of film sets. The artist has a background in the film world, where he developed a cinematographic eye and became acquainted with the possibilities of film sets, including forced perspective. Pypers takes the smallest details into account in its carefully built scale models. He subsequently edits the photos on his computer in post-production. When the image is complete, he destroys the scale model, leaving the photo as the only piece of evidence that this miniature world ever existed. The resulting images are exquisite, mysterious, poetic and dreamlike. They challenge your imagination, raise questions and are alienating and recognisable in equal parts.
Margriet Smudlers ( NL 1955)
Margriet her photography is reminiscent of eighteenth-century ceiling paintings that offer a glimpse into eternity. With flowers, fruit, shells and water – the fruits of nature – Smulders creates sumptuous paradises. She paints heavenly vistas in bright blue, snow white and soft pink: “These are the light and soft pastel colours of the Rococo. We now desperately need the zest for life and liveliness that speaks of this style period. In my view, Rococo is an encouragement to reap the fruits of life. So, let’s get drunk and enjoy.” Margriet invites us to indulge in an abundance of colours and shapes, of her Rococo Fruits. If we lose ourselves in beauty, we can handle the unruly reality, Smulders believes. That’s why she urges us to stop and look.
Tjitske Oosterholt ( NL 1991)
Tjitske aims to combine both intuitive and experimental visual imagery mainly through the use of photographic techniques, with research on our experience and perception of the world. With a growing desire to contribute to a more sustainable, circular and responsible approach to art practice, Tjitske’s interest in the transience of the natural world and our relationship to it is taking a centre stage in all creative explorations. Is it possible to become one with nature, forget about ourselves for just a moment? How do we justify our appropriation of the landscape? How do we view the impact we have on our surroundings?
Contour Gallery
3014 TX Rotterdam, The Netherlands
+31 6 14794219
[email protected]
www.contour.gallery
Deepest Darkest – Barry Salzman: How We See The World: (a century of genocide). (images 5-6)
At this Unseen, we will be showing a selection of Salzman’s most recent work from the project shot in Bosnia earlier this year, along with a selection of previously unexhibited works.
To quote from Salzman’s project statement:
The essential ethics of seeing underpins my landscape works.
In this ongoing project, started a decade ago, I focus on the recurrence of genocide and our collective responsibility as public witness. I use the landscape metaphorically to draw connections between each of these disparate and dark moments in modern history, while suggesting that we, as members of an amorphous humanity, form the true connective tissue between them. …
Western governments have repeatedly and consistently failed to act in time to stop perpetrators of genocide. … my work examines our role and responsibility as public witness.
In contrast to the specific locations I shoot, the images are intentionally non-specific. My intent is for the photographs to counter the way information on this topic is typically disseminated – through the precise lens of the photojournalist, historian, or documentarian. … In creating a “veiled view,” by moving the camera during the exposure, I reflect on the self-imposed veils through which we bear witness, suggesting that it is our veiled societal view that continues to upend our unfulfilled promise of “never again.”
Metaphorically, the landscape – like us – witnesses all. It sheds its leaves in cover-up and complicity. But through its rebirth, so it rejuvenates. It carries with it the traces of the past and promises of the future. It triumphs over trauma. It is inextricably intertwined with our darkest moments and brightest days.
In these works, I am preoccupied with making aesthetic images not documenting brutal facts. By creating these images, my hope is to provide for moments of reflection as viewers interpret the work in their own way and re-engage with subject matter we think we know.”
Deepest Darkest
Cape Town, South Africa
+27 79 138 4203
[email protected]
http://www.deepestdarkestart.com
Echo Fine Arts – French Riviera: Olivier Valsecchi, JeeYoung Lee, Cecilia Paredes & Dean West. (images 7-8)
On the occasion of Unseen 2022, Echo Fine Arts will premiere Olivier Valsecchi’s exclusive series entitled Black Dust, as well as JeeYoung Lee’s Into the Mist for its European debut. Additionally, “photo performances” by Peruvian artist Cecilia Paredes will be exhibited for the first time in the Netherlands, alongside Still Life photographs by Florida-based artist Dean West.
ECHO FINE ARTS
Online gallery based on the French Riviera
+33 (0)6 32 00 28 89
[email protected]
Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS : Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann (1980) Tabak Trafik Project (Artist residency Secession & Beethoven Hotel, Wien 2022) (images 9-10)
Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann’s research and production evolves at the intersection of several fields including domesticity, psychology and feminism, exploring a range of issues related to habitus, the circulation of goods and typologies of gesture. Her artistic practice revolves around the notion of para-architecture (that which lies alongside or beyond architecture), which she sees as a working method. Badaut Haussmann uses sculpture, image, text, video and sound, while favouring installation, the exhibition being her main medium.
For Badaut Haussmann, her residency at the Secession in the spring of 2022 was an opportunity to solidify a research project that the artist had wanted to undertake in Vienna for some time, around a central element of Western culture and an important facet of Viennese history: the cigarette.
Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS
1016 AH Amsterdam The Netherlands
+31 6 494 85 207
[email protected]
www.edbprojects.com
Foreign Agent – Lausanne: Lisandro Suriel (images 11-12)
Foreign Agent is a young dynamic contemporary art gallery based in Lausanne, Switzerland, showcasing emerging and established contemporary artists and designers from Africa and the Diaspora. For Unseen, we are presenting Lisandro Suriel’s latest work titled “Realms of Soualiga”.
Lisandro Suriel is a photographer of magic realism and artistic researcher from Saint Martin. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and received his Masters of Art by research in Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam. As part of his Master’s thesis he analysed early twentieth century illustrations of West-Indian mythology in relation to cultural aphasia. This research forms the foundation of his ongoing artistic project Ghost Island.
By visually deconstructing New World-imagination, Ghost Island explores the spectral identity of our ancestors throughout the Black Atlantic. As an extension of Ghost Island, Realms of Soualiga stands for Suriel’s own insular background in Saint Martin, which was originally called Soualiga before colonial intervention. Thus, Realms of Soualiga connotes the New World-condition of complex overlapping histories, hauntology, and immateriality. Lisandro Suriel proposes that the imaginative lens is arguably the best with which to view how folkloric figures act as an agent in history and animate cultural memory. Consequently, he seeks to employ The West Indies’ own unwritten vestiges of an intelligent imagination embedded in landscape, architecture, and people to generate imaginative linkages to a political past and social identity.
FOREIGN AGENT
Lausanne | Switzerland
+41 21 90 90 007
[email protected]
www.foreignagent.ch
Fragma Gallery: Matthieu Litt (images 13-14)
The Arctic universe, our former virgin land both inhospitable and wild, has turned into the Eldorado of the future. This work traces a region to its downfall, attempting to draw us closer to the essence of image capture, memorialisation, and our nostalgic yearning for the immediate past. Here is a landscape so grandiose that attempting to frame it into a single image seems perpetually inadequate.
These hyper-real photographs almost defy reality, alluding to our sense of the real and virtual, and our obsession with looking to other planets — while neglecting what we have here on earth. Our idyllic vision of the far North will soon be gone, as changes to our environment bring both opportunity, and equally, the opposing value of loss. Photography, despite having a fraught relationship with truth from its inception, still possesses a certain ability to command visibility amongst even the ignorant, especially in processing and comprehending loss — as is arguably its essence.
Transformation and loss are the basis of this work, built on the multitude of layers accumulated over centuries and millennia, as little by little they are reduced to nothing. In this series, past and future are conflated in the same image — the absence of ice, as much as the presence of thick glacial layers stubbornly resisting death. Photographic negatives are over and under exposed in a mimetic gesture of natural forces transforming the Arctic, as rain replaces snow, and the material becomes immaterial.
FRAGMA GALLERY
8500 Kortrijk Belgium
T. +32(0)56 35 65 34
M. +32(0)477 34 68 07
[email protected]
www.fragmagallery.be
FRANCIS BOESKE PROJECTS – DANIELLE KWAAITAAL | 30 YEARS (images 15-16)
Danielle Kwaaitaal had her first solo show in 1992 @ Bloom Gallery, Amsterdam.
30 years later she returns to Amsterdam @ UNSEEN with three special made anniversary works in an edition of 3 + NFT
Kwaaitaal doesn’t want to party alone @ UNSEEN, to celebrate 30 years she invited four artists who inspired her. One Artwork of each artist will be presented at the booth of Francis Boeske Projects for one day
15|09 Gerald van der Kaap
16|09 Lieven Hendriks
17|09 Fleur van Maarschalkerwaart
18|09 Saskia Olde Wolbers
And you: do you come along?
Francis Boeske Projects
1024 BE Amsterdam
+31 (0)6 819 766 36
[email protected]
www.francisboeskeprojects.nl
