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1/9/2011

Two exhibitions

Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur

Shirana Shahbazi
Much like Zero
curated by Urs Stahel

How real or abstract is photography? Shirana Shabazi's work has circled around this theme for over ten years. Often she arranges her images in startling combinations. For instance, abstract color gradations are placed alongside a double portrait, followed by a black and white steppe-like landscape, then a still life with berries and fruits, and finally two carpets, stitched together from photographs of a young man and a sun-soaked landscape. This sequence demonstrates how much she repeatedly wrestles with the question of representation in photography, and how she plays with it in front of vividly colored, monochromatic backgrounds.

More recently the play and wrestling with representational traps of photography have given way to an obvious delight in the visually abstract image. An unrestrained construction of colored surfaces emerges, producing a fascinating as well as confusing game between surface and depth. Freely but precisely arranged color planed, constructed in the studio by combining geometric expanses of color, are placed alongside images of rocks, mountains, and landscapes. Structural similarities between outside and inside, between observed landscape and constructed landscape are arranged in a relationship to one another. Everything is construction, everything is abstract: both the documentary and the still life; the unrestrained forms open up new pictorial and conceptual spaces.

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ON HORIZONS
Set 8 from the Collection of the Fotomuseum Winterthur
curated by Thomas Seelig

The photographic gaze into the horizon is a mirror for internal and external states and produces artistic interpretations and commentaries. As in other artistic genres, landscape in photography is interpreted through political and private gazes and the results go far beyond purely aesthetic experiences. Assembled from the collection of the Fotomuseum Winterthur, this exhibition shows how photographers since the mid-1960s have approached their imagery from a range of analytical and emotional standpoints. Following the groundbreaking 1975 exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape,” for a long time it seemed that the image of landscape had lost its natural innocence and that civilization would shape our notion of the natural world in the future as well. Nevertheless—or perhaps precisely because of this—artists and photographers have reacted with ever new interpretations of this ideological intervention, thereby advancing the history of the genre.

With works by Caroline Bachmann/Stefan Banz, Lewis Baltz, Balthasar Burkhard, Reto Camenisch, Gintaras Didžiapetris, Dick Duyves, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Thomas Flechtner, Robert Frank, Dunja Evers, Luigi Ghirri, John Gossage, Guido Guidi, Robert Häusser, Dominik Hodel, Roni Horn, Axel Hütte, Jan Jedlička, Claudio Moser, Bruce Nauman, Igor Savchenko, Christian Schwager, Yoshiko Seino, Shomei Tomatsu, Garry Winogrand, and Andreas Züst.

We would like to thank Anne and Barbara Keller, the Hans and Wilma Stutz Stiftung, and Migros Kulturprozent Ostschweiz for their generous support of the exhibition.

Image: Shirana Shahbazi [Mercedes-01-2008]
Gelatin-silver print
Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich
© Shirana Shahbazi

OPENING: Friday, September 2, 2011, from 6 pm till 9 pm.

Fotomuseum Winterthur
Grüzestrasse 44+45 - 8400 Winterthur (Zurich)
Opening times: Tue-Sund 11 am to 6 pm, Wed 11 am to 8 pm
Admission
Fotomuseum Winterthur, Shirana Shahbazi – Much like Zero (Main Gallery+Gallery): Fr. 9.- (with reduction Fr. 7.-)
Fotomuseum Winterthur, On Horizons – Set 8 from the Collection of the Fotomuseum Winterthur (Gallery of Collections): Fr. 8.- (with reduction Fr. 6.-)
Fotostiftung Schweiz, Things will get better – Photographs by Hans Steiner: Fr. 7.- (with reduction Fr. 5.-)
Ausstellungspass (all exhibitions): Fr. 17.- (with reduction Fr. 13.-)

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