AUDREY HEPBURN – PORTRAITS OF A ICON

Posted on 2015-06-22

This fascinating photographic exhibition will illustrate the life of actress and fashion icon Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993). From her early years as a chorus girl in London’s West End through to her philanthropic work in later life, Portraits of an Icon will celebrate one of the world’s most photographed and recognisable stars.

A selection of more than seventy images will define Hepburn’s iconography, including classic and rarely seen prints from leading twentieth-century photographers such as Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Terry O’Neill, Norman Parkinson and Irving Penn. Alongside these, an array of vintage magazine covers, film stills, and extraordinary archival material will complete her captivating story.

Exhibition runs through to October 18th, 2015

National Portrait Gallery
St Martin’s Place
London
WC2H 0HE

www.npg.org.uk

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HANNAH COLLINS

Posted on 2015-06-22

British artist Hannah Collins (b. 1956) is known for her large unframed photographs that create immersive spatial experiences, and installations that involve film and sound. Her summer exhibition at Camden Arts Centre reveals Collins’ capacity to convey the emotional and psychological aspects of spaces steeped in cultural and social history.

Gallery 1 introduces Collins’ vast unframed prints whose scale envelopes the viewer. Spanning her career to date, they are mostly interior scenes of apparent inhabitation. They include two early works made in East London – Thin Protective Coverings (1986) and The Violin Player (1988) – involving makeshift furnishings, mattresses and cardboard that provide temporary comfort and refuge. Another image shows the traces of life inside the hut where Nelson Mandela spent his teenage years, alienated from his family. Nearly all of these places are unoccupied, inviting the viewer to imagine the lives that were once lived there.

Exhibition runs through to September 13th, 2015

Camden Arts Centre
Arkwright Road
London
NW3 6DG

www.camdenartscentre.org

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MATTHEW JENSEN – FEELS LIKE REAL

Posted on 2015-06-15

Drawn from several seminal projects Jensen has developed over the past six years, the photographs in Feels Like Real weave together ideas about travel, observation, ephemerality, and the landscape. Throughout, the artist acts as a patient observer, moving through the world both physically and virtually, toggling between low and high tech modes of engagement.

In the series The 49 States, Jensen embarked on a virtual road trip of America using Google Street View in its early and low-resolution days. Because there exists a near infinite number of views to be captured and stitched together to create each stateʼs representative landscape, what results is a synthesized view of small town America. Noting that “the sun used to be the only thing to touch the entire earth and now Google does as well,” Jensen chose only images in which the sun is shining directly into the cameras. He initiated the project at a time when the technological world was evolving exponentially but Hawaii had not yet been mapped. He has purposefully left this one state missing as an acknowledgement of the moment in time before all 50 U.S. states were represented on Google Street View.

Opposite – 14 Hour Sunset, Over the Alaskan Range, 2010

Exhibition runs through to June 20th, 2015

Yancey Richardson Gallery
525 West 22nd Street
New York
NY 10011

www.yanceyrichardson.com

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TOMOKO YONEDA – BEYOND MEMORY

Posted on 2015-06-15

Tomoko Yoneda’s photographs of landscapes and interiors might seem on first glance beautiful locations without any historical importance. We can enjoy the considered and tranquil view and then move on to another equally beautiful scene.

Yoneda seduces us with her images and on first viewing it is easy to miss the clues to the other narratives within the pictures. After reflection we realise that these photographs depict something more complex and troubling. Upon reading the captions we learn that the histories of these locations undermine the alluring nature of the scene before us. Every building and every landscape has been marked in some way by destructive forces.

Only after extensive research and investigation does Yoneda pick her subjects. . The sea, the forest, flowers or derelict buildings have been chosen to illuminate historical conflicts from the late nineteenth century to the present. The artist has asked these nonhuman forms to ‘speak’ to us about the past. The historical range of the exhibition covers the First and Second World Wars, the Second Sino-Japanese War through to the aftermath of the Cold War. The geographical range of the exhibition extends from northern Europe, to Brazil onwards to Bangladesh, and from Japan to China by way of Taiwan.

Exhibition runs through to August 7th, 2015

Grimaldi Gavin
27 Albemarle St
London
W1S 4DW

www.grimaldigavin.com

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RICHARD PRINCE – PORTAITS

Posted on 2015-06-15

New Portraits.

In 1984 I took some portraits.
The way I did it was different. The way had nothing to do with the tradition of portraiture.
If you wanted me to do your portrait, you would give me at least five photographs that had already been taken of yourself, that were in your possession (you owned them, they were yours), and more importantly . . . you were already happy with.
You give me the five you liked and I would pick the one I liked. I would rephotograph the one I liked and that would be your portrait. Simple. Direct. To the point . . .

Foolproof.

I started off doing friends. Peter Nadin. Anne Kennedy. Jeff Koons. Cookie Mueller. Gary Indiana. Colin de Land.
They didn’t have to sit for their portrait. They didn’t have to make an appointment and come over and sit in front of some cyclone or in front of a neutral background or on an artist’s stool. They didn’t have to show up at all. And they wouldn’t be disappointed with the result. How could they? It wasn’t like they were giving me photos of themselves that were embarrassing.

Social Science Fiction.

Another advantage was the “time line.” If you were in your sixties and you gave me a photograph that had been taken thirty years earlier, and that’s the one I chose, your portrait ended up in a kind of time machine. I couldn’t go forward, but I could go backward. Vanity. Most of the people I did liked the younger version of themselves. So the future didn’t really matter. Half of H. G. Wells was better than no half at all.

Exhibition runs through to August 1st, 2015

Gagosian Gallery
17-19 Davies St
London
W1K 3DE

www.gagosian.com

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