
Bill Henson, UNTITLED, 1998/1999/2000, photo courtesy of the artist and Robert Miller Gallery, New York
After a week over on the NYPH 2010 blog, it’s good to be home. Today’s post brings you news of a photo show in New York featuring works by Australian treasure Bill Henson, two calls for entries for the Host gallery and Foto8 Summer Show in London, plus a deadline extension until midnight Sunday 18 April for the Press Photographer’s Year 2010. There’s also the launch of an online photo mag, Square Magazine.
PHOTO SHOW – IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS
In Praise of Shadows is an exhibition of works by Dirk Braeckman and Bill Henson and is on show at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York until June 12. If you’re heading to the Big Apple, or to the New York Photo Festival 2010 running from May 12-16, there’s no excuse to miss the show. For those who are unaware of Henson’s work, I urge you to delve further into the psyche of this intriguing artist.
Henson’s photographs “demonstrate the artist’s interest in the duality of nature and artifice, in adolescence, and in the distinction between male and female. These beautiful and mysterious images are characterized by chiaroscuro, translucent skin tones, and jewel-like colors that add an ethereal quality to ambiguous settings, ” says the press release and I couldn’t agree more.
I reviewed Henson’s bold and rather beautiful book, Mnemosyne, in HotShoe, five years ago and was fortunate enough to attend the opening of a retrospective of his work held at the National Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney in 2005, before it transferred to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
As I wrote at the time: “In Henson’s work there is also the sensation of being on the cusp of something. Whether it’s in the light and the subtle changes observable in the twilight hours and the onset of dusk; the physical places where the fringes of the city give way to barren and deserted landscapes and decaying buildings; or the models who are often adolescent teenagers on the brink of adulthood, Henson’s work straddles opposing forms and concepts with masterful ease.
“He says that music and writing interest him more than photography and his work is littered with references to classical art forms, from images of Baroque and Rococo architectural details and interiors, to subjects recalling Michelangelo’s La Pieta. “Our culture is always inside our nature,” he is quoted as saying and he is not afraid to reference and appropriate from a wide range of sources, mixing subjects and themes from both high and popular culture.”
Braeckman’s lives and works in Ghent in Belgium. His, mostly, black and white photo artworks explore “abstract spaces, domestic interiors and other loci of the built environment… Flatness and depth become difficult to discern, paradoxical,” states the same press release.