Richard Kern
dal 20/4/2010 al 16/7/2010
Segnalato da
20/4/2010
Richard Kern
Kaune, Sudendorf Gallery, Koln
Hello. With his dry, matter of fact approach, the photographer and underground filmmaker, underlines the absurdity of truth and objectivity in photography while playing with our reliance upon taxonomies around sexual representation. The principal subject of his photographs is nude young women, but each images is an invitation to join a world where natural women share their most intimate moments.
Richard Kern, photographer and underground filmmaker was born in 1954 in Roanoke Rapids/ NC. He lives and works in New York City. After studying fine arts at the university of North Carolina, his career took off in the 80‘s when he bought a Super 8 camera and started making extravagant films for an underground audience in New York's East Village art scene. In the 90’s he switched to photography full time and occasionally directed music videos for bands like Sonic Youth and Marilyn Manson. Within the last 15 years, Kern has published several books and is a regular contributor to a variety of international magazines.
For more than two decades Kern has sought to unravel and illuminate the complex and often darker sides of human nature by making the psychological space between the sitter, photographer and audience his subject. With his dry, matter of fact approach, he underlines the absurdity of truth and objectivity in photography while playing with our reliance upon taxonomies around sexual representation. The principal subject of the artist’s photographs is in fact nude young women. But Kern is not attempting to exploit the female body as an object with an erotic effect on the observer; his photographs are portraits.
Each of his images is an invitation to join him in his privileged world where natural young women share their most intimate moments. Richard has never lost his boyish curiosity with girls and their secrets, so instead of posing them in sterile sets he follows them through the house — or rather his New York apartment — from backyard to kitchen to bathroom to bedroom, capturing every personal and embarrassing moment.
Kern's visual language is quite distinctive and easy to read out of thousands of nude photo- graphies that follows his outstanding example over the last years.
It might be the mixture of getting the perfect moment, his subtle feeling for surroundings and often the provocation of his models frankness that makes him an undoubted icon of contemporary nude color photography.
Image: Debra's teeth, 1997, 50,8 x 60,9 cm, C-Print, Edition 4 of 10
Opening: Wednesday 21. April 2010, h 7 p.m.
Kaune, Sudendorf - Gallery for contemporary photography
Albertusstr. 26, 50667 Koln, Germany
Hours:
Tues - Sat 1 - 6 p.m. and by appointment