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2/10/2004

Documentary

Vertigo Gallery, London

photorealist paintings and drawings by Ross Hansen

Documentary is a new body of paintings, drawings and prints of birds and bird watching hides by Ross Hansen.

In this exhibition, paintings of birds reveal themselves for what they are: painted copies of photographic images. It is hoped that the viewer will be able to trace the history of the image and recognise the finished work as something made in time, and taken from a printed photograph.

The images Hansen has chosen to work with for this exhibition are reproductions sourced from second hand encyclopaedias or natural history picture books - images that, crucially, pre-date digital enhancement technologies and so are mediated only by the photographers lens and the printers ink. In copying these images, Hansen exposes their modes of production, reveals the levels of mediation and the extent of his own intervention. These paintings do not, however, make authorial statements but rather highlight Hansen¹s failure to be objective by honestly referencing his role as a producer

Works such as 24 Hour Painting - painted, without breaks, over a 24-hour period - or, A Month of Sundays - painstakingly drawn with coloured pencils - explore the desire to record his own presence, as much as that of the observed subject; to acknowledge the role of the maker and highlight the often mundane and laborious nature of his practice.

The paintings and prints of bird watching hides, conversely, attempt to destabilise the history of their production; Hansen¹s use of graphic techniques, composite images and edited photographs in these works show his intervention in the entire process of production and so highlight further the fictions inherent in all photo painting.

Image:
A Month of Sundays
pencil crayon on paper
152x114cm, 2003

Opening Hours
Tuesday to Saturday 11 to 6

Free

vertigo
62 Great Eastern Street
London EC2A 3QR
020 7613 1386
Nearest underground
Old St
Liverpool St

stampa

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