calendario eventi  :: 

X

12/9/2013

Three exhibitions

Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam

Lee Friedlander
America by Car

Foam proudly presents a solo exhibition by the American photographer Lee Friedlander (1934, US). This exhibition features the series America by Car and The New Cars 1964. The automobile has come to symbolize the American dream and the associated urge for freedom. It is therefore no surprise that cars play a central role in both series, now receiving their first showing in the Netherlands.

Road Trip
America by Car documents Friedlander's countless wanderings around the United States over the past decade. In this he follows a trail laid down by numerous photographers, film makers and writers like Robert Frank, Stephen Shore and Jack Kerouac. Friedlander nevertheless succeeds in giving the theme of the American road trip his own very original twist, using the cars' windscreens and dashboards to frame the familiar American landscape, as well as exploiting the reflections found in their wing and rear view mirrors. It is a simple starting point which results in complex and layered images that are typical for Friedlander's visual language.

He also has a sharp eye for the ironic detail. He makes free use of text on billboards and symbols on store signs to add further meaning to his work. His images are so layered that new information continues to surface with every glance, making America by Car a unique evocation of contemporary America.

Car portraits
The New Cars 1964 is a much older series. Friedlander had been commissioned by Harper's Bazaar to photograph all the new models of automobile introduced in 1964. Rather than placing them centrally and showing them to best advantage, Friedlander decided to set the cars in the most banal of locations, in front of a furniture store or in a scrap yard for instance. Exploiting reflections, available light and unusual perspectives, his cars are almost completely absorbed into the street scene. Although they were rejected at the time by the magazine's editorial board on the grounds that the images were not attractive enough, the pictures were put away in a drawer and since forgotten. Friedlander however recently rediscovered this series. The New Cars 1964 has since become a special historical and social document and has in its own right become part of Friedlander's impressive oeuvre.

Fifty-year career
Lee Friedlander was born in the US in 1934. In a career extending across 5 decades Friedlander has maintained an obsessive focus on the portrayal of the American social landscape. His breakthrough in the eyes of the wider public came with the New Documents exhibition at the MoMA in 1967, where his work was presented alongside that of Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand. Friedlander accumulated numerous awards during his career, including the MacArthur Foundation Award and three Guggenheim Fellowships. He also published more than twenty books. His work has been shown at many venues around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the MoMA in New York, San Francisco's SFMOMA, the MAMM in Moscow and the National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen.

The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London.

-----

Cristina De Middel
The Afronauts

Photographer Cristina De Middel (1975, Spain) chose as the starting point for her project The Afronauts a little-known episode from Zambia's history. This was a space programme started by an educator which suddenly entered Zambia in the space race with the United States and Russia. Its aim was to put the first African on the moon. Due to a lack of financial resources, however, the ambitious initiative was doomed to failure. Fifty years later, De Middel reconstructs this story, using her own imagination. From 13 September, Foam will be showing the outcome of this project in an exhibition that makes no reference to disappointment or defeat: instead we view fantasy-rich and colourful images full of humour, with wonderful self-created props, unexpected twists and unusual visitors.

In The Afronauts, De Middel combines set-up photography with copies of typed letters and reproductions of vintage photos. Although The Afronauts is in fact based on a failed undertaking, the project includes nothing that refers to the failure - to the contrary. The photos have an upbeat look thanks to De Middels's fanciful space suits, playful astronaut training sessions and a Zambian flag with a smiley face. Other characters also appear against the background of the rugged landscape of Alicante, including an elephant presented as a space creature and a cat dressed in a starred costume, which according to the story also was planned to be launched into space.

After a successful photojournalist career of nearly ten years, De Middel discovered that she had become disappointed in photojournalism and that her viewpoint toward the consumption of 'authentic' images and the untruths that accompany them was becoming increasingly cynical. The Afronauts is De Middels's first successful attempt to design her own ideal world. De Middel's work shows that fiction can serve as the subject of photography just as well as facts can and that our expectation that photography must always make reference to reality is flawed.

The in 2012 self published book The Afronauts was sold out within two months. The publication was shortlisted for the Aperture First Photobook of 2012. Cristina De Middel has recently been nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2013.

Foam is sponsored by the BankGiroLoterij, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek, Delta Lloyd and the VandenEnde Foundation.

-----

13 September - 13 November 2013
Foam 3h: Peter Puklus
Handbook to the Stars

With his publication Handbook to the Stars (2012) as starting point for the eponymous Foam 3h exhibition, the Hungarian artist Peter Puklus (1980) attempts to portray his own universe and to provide insight into how his photographic works relate to each other: like galaxies in relative proximity to one another that are bound together by their own gravitational force. The images function alongside each another and through one another, have no sequence or chronology, but exist individually even as they form interconnections and follow their own patterns.

Freed from any photographical conventions, Puklus works according to his own logic and interests, shifting naturally between genres, themes and media. In his studies of shapes we encounter fragile constructions, as well as objects to which he has made sometimes simple, sometimes radical alterations with an eye for the interplay of lines and geometric shapes. Like in the studio, his search for formal and three-dimensional aspects is also evident when he takes photographs in natural and urban environments. Where necessary, he exchanges the static for the moving image, combines positive and negative images, and alternates black and white with colour. This exhibition is a representation of how all these aspects coexist in Puklus' universe of images.

Peter Puklus (1980, Kolozsvár, Romania) is a Hungarian artist and photographer. He is currently finishing his DLA (Doctor of Liberal Arts) in photography at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest. Last year he published two books: Handbook to the Stars (Stokovec, Space for Culture) and One and a half meter (Kehrer Verlag).

This exhibition has been made possible by Van Bijlevelt Stichting and the Gieskes-Strijbis Fund.

Image: Cristina De Middel

For information and visual material please contact the communications department phone +31 (0)20 5516500
Head of Communications - Merel Kappelhoff pr@foam.org
Ivo Strübin ivo@foam.org

Foam
Keizersgracht 609 . 1017 DS Amsterdam
Open daily 10am - 6pm, Thurs/Fri 10am - 9pm.
Tickets: € 8,75

stampa

permanent link