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15/12/2004

Fabian Birgfeld

Cristinerose Gallery, New York

Photographs and video sculptures

The elevator continued its impossible slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent. There was no telling for sure: it was so slow that all sense of direction simply vanished. (…). But let’s just assume it was going up. Merely a guess. Maybe I’d gone up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I’d circled the globe. How would I know?
(Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World)

Josee Bienvenu Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Fabian Birgfeld. The exhibition is composed of City Garden, an installation of 12 video sculptures and Interior Landscapes a group of 25 color photographs.

Fabian Birgfeld’s work is a reflection on the culture of mobility. Since 1998, he has been developing a distinct typology of global interiors such as airports and subway stations, bank and hotel lobbies, offices and elevators. The works trace his own journeys around the globe, places temporarily inhabited en route to somewhere else. The exhibited photographs and video footage were shot in France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Spain, United Kingdom and the United States.

City Garden is an installation of twelve video sculptures, short loops of elevator interiors in different building types, hotels, malls, airports, offices, universities, museums, and subway stations. The camera is fixed on the elevator doors, which briefly open and close to reveal fragments of generic architecture. The 8 feet tall plywood towers stand at random in the gallery and tilt in different directions. A monitor is embedded in each one and the image is viewed on an inserted mirror. The varying heights of the screens and the shifting angles of the towers set the installation in motion. The elevator has become the garden of the city, a place where the space and time of the everyday are suspended and collapsed.

Interior Landscapes is a group of 25 small format photographic triptychs. It is a survey of international transit spaces, installed as a narrow strip across the wall. While the photographed sites vary, the formal framework of the project is always the triptych. Space is experienced sequentially. A narrative is established across the three panels. The picture functions not as a panorama but as a storyboard, a dynamic image in-between cinema and photography.

Spaces of transit have a rhythm regulated by timetables. When a train or a plane arrives, these spaces get suddenly crowded to become empty again right after the departure. The photographs are shot quickly and intuitively, responding to the dominant visual characteristic of each location and mostly when the space is devoid of human presence. Bright lights reflect off smooth hard surfaces, curved and angular walls recede abruptly, bits of primary colors jump into the foreground of geometric compositions that sometimes border on abstraction.

Fabian Birgfeld lives and works in New York. He was born in 1968 in Hamburg, Germany. He received a BA in economics from Harvard University and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University in 1999. Recent one-person exhibitions include Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY; and Goethe Institut, Washington D.C. and New York. Upcoming exhibitions include: "Vanishing Point" curated by Claudine Ise at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH.

Opening: Thursday December 16, from 6 to 8pm

Image:London (triptych), 2001, Cibachrome prints mounted on aluminum, each panel 40 x 40 inches, Edition of 5 Cibachrome prints, each panel 3 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches, Edition of 10

Josee Bienvenu Gallery
529 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011

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