A celebration of French photographer Denis Brihat’s legacy on the occasion of his 90th birthday, the exhibition Vital Forms: A Celebration of Denis Brihat brings together a selection of prints that represent the peak of the artist’s unparalleled stylistic and technical achievements. Born in Paris in 1928, Brihat has lived and worked for sixty years on the isolated Plateau des Claparèdes in Provence – a region that also served as home and inspiration for Paul Cézanne and Samuel Beckett.
The transformative power of the natural world in its most vital and elemental forms is both the subject of Brihat’s photographs and the technical basis for his prints. With a generous eye, Brihat unearths and brings to light the dazzling beauty of a humble onion, a wisp of wild oats, and a bumpy, speckled pear; he lavishes equal attention upon each of a gardenia’s individual petals. In much the same way, he mines the earth for the tools he brings to the darkroom: the salts of gold, iron, selenium, vanadium, and uranium, among other metals, with which he meticulously and laboriously tones each black-and-white print.
The reaction of these metallic salts with the silver salts in the emulsion produces Brihat’s distinctively vivid and luminous hues. This results in prints that are more aptly termed, in the artist’s words, “photographic paintings” – richly textured, essentially material works of art that are quite unique in color photography.
Vital Forms: A Celebration of Denis Brihat
27 March 2018 – 19 May 2018
Nailya Alexander Gallery
41 E 57th St #704
New York, NY 10022
USA
