Taryn Simon
dal 3/6/2013 al 26/9/2013
Segnalato da
3/6/2013
Taryn Simon
The George Economou Collection, Athens
Works from the George Economou Collection. The exhibition features a selection of works from Simon's major projects, her arrestingly beautiful images, incisive eye continue the work of great American photographers ranging from the objective, documentary style to the appetite for the strange and uncanny displayed.
The George Economou Collection is delighted to announce the exhibition Taryn Simon, Works from
the George Economou Collection. With contributing text by Nicholas Cullinan, curator in the
department of Modern and Contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and in
collaboration with Skarlet Smatana, director of the George Economou Collection, the exhibition
features a selection of works from Taryn Simon’s major projects such as The Picture Collection, A
Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII, Contraband, and An American Index of the
Hidden and Unfamiliar.
Taryn Simon has quickly established herself as one of the foremost photographers of our era. Her
arrestingly beautiful images, incisive eye and rigorously intelligent projects continue the work of
great American photographers ranging from the objective, documentary style of Walker Evans to
the appetite for the strange and uncanny displayed by Diane Arbus.
The works on view at the George Economou Collection span the last six years of Simon’s career.
These range from earlier projects such as An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar of 2007,
where Simon documented, in dispassionate style, an array of sites and cultural artifacts, such as the
foundry of Smith & Wesson in Massachusetts (still the leading manufacturer of handguns in the
U.S.), or the Alhurra TV Broadcast Studio in Virginia - a U.S. Government sponsored, Arabic
language television network dedicated to disseminating news and information from America to the
Arab-speaking world. Simon’s deepening interest and engagement with differing modes of
taxonomies manifests itself not just through the array of illicit objects in Contraband of 2010,
ranging from cigarettes to counterfeit designer handbags - all of which are photographed in a cool,
clinical manner - to the human subjects of A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I –
XVIII, produced over a four-year period (2008-11) and which trace the genealogy of an array of
bloodlines scattered around the globe.
Simon’s most recent project - The Picture Collection, of 2012 – is an extraordinary and encyclopedic
archive of images drawn from the more than 1.2 million held by the New York Public Library. These
encompass sources from postcards to images culled from magazines, which Simon has then sorted
into panels broken down into categories such as ‘Handshaking’ and ‘Explosions’. Through such
classifications and investigations into suppressed and overlooked histories, Simon continues her
deadpan but extremely sharp observation of culture both mundane and marvelous.
Image: CHAPTER X (Humans on display at 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, Philippines), 2011
archival inkjet prints comprized of six components, 213,36 x 772,67 cm © 2012 Taryn Simon, courtesy Almine Rech Gallery
Press contact
Annie-Claire Geisinger at the George Economou Collection
T +30 2108090595 M +30 6947404053 acgeisinger@economoucollection.com
Opening Reception 4 June 2013, 6-9pm
The George Economou Collection
77 Grammou Str., Marousi, Athens, Greece
Hours:
Monday – Friday: 10am–6pm,
Thursday: 10am–8pm
Closed on weekends and bank holidays
Admission Free