BERTIEN VAN MANEN – LET’S SIT DOWN BEFORE WE GO
2012-01-23Van Manen’s work is a meditation on human existence, revealing the truth of particular lives. Selected from her travels through Uzbekistan, Siberia, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Moscow and Tartarstan since 1990, van Manen’s photographs are characterized by the intimacy she achieves with her subjects, with whom she spent countless hours sitting at their tables, lodging in their homes, immersed in their reality.
Van Manen provides a window into Russian lives following years of struggle under the Communist regime. As critic Ryszard Kapuściński notes in his introduction to van Manen’s 1995 book, A hundred summers, a hundred winters, the artist’s lens penetrates the “most inaccessible of places—the homes of ordinary people—in order to show us how millions of Russians live and sleep, what they eat, what they look like in their everyday life, in their flats, at their tables, in their beds.” In the case of the former Soviet empire, people were conditioned to be fearful and suspicious, long forbidden to exhibit whom they really were to the rest of the world.
Opposite – Beach at Lake Baikal, Siberia, 1993
Exhibition runs through to February 11th, 2012
Yancey Richardson Gallery
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor
New York
NY
10011
