RYAN MCGINLEY – BODY LOUD

Posted on 2013-12-09

Comprised of over twenty brand new, primarily large-format photographs taken over the course of last summer. McGinley has spent each summer developing his ongoing body of road-trip photographs.

He and his crew travel the country to capture non-professional models in a variety of natural settings. The production of these images has evolved greatly since their inception—what began as fly-on-the wall documentation now consists of rigorous and intense production schedules, elaborate safety precautions, and mobile studio lighting. The situations are meticulously staged, although the resultant images are not: McGinley’s practice still allows for and thrives upon spontaneity.

Exhibition runs through to January 11th, 2014

Galerie Perrotin
76 rue de Turenne
75003 Paris
France

www.perrotin.com

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AMERICA LATINA 1960–2013

Posted on 2013-12-09

The exhibition will offer a new perspective on Latin American photography from 1960 to today, focusing on the relationship between text and the photographic image.
Bringing together more than seventy artists from eleven different countries, it reveals the great diversity of photographic practices by presenting the work of documentary photographers as well as that of contemporary artists who appropriate the medium in different ways.
This unique presentation will provide the visitor with the opportunity to delve into the history of the region and to rediscover the works of major artists rarely exhibited in Europe.

During the era covered by the exhibition, when the climate of political upheaval required an urgent response, many Latin American artists increasingly sought to escape media specificity by bringing text and image together in their work. This new visual approach provided them with an effective tool for expressing themselves and communicating, as photography is a medium that rapidly and realistically records reality while text provides a way of expanding or altering the meaning of the image. Through these formalistic inventions the artists tried to portray the complexity and violence of the world around them and in some cases to sidestep censorship.

In the 1980s the Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn created ‘‘airmail paintings’’ which were folded up and sent all over the world, circumventing Chile’s cultural isolation under Pinochet. As for Miguel Rio Branco, a figurehead of Brazilian photography, he has depicted the underclass of a two-tiered society in a highly poetic manner.

Exhibition runs through to April 6th, 2014

Fondation Cartier
261 Boulevard Raspail
75014 Paris
France

fondation.cartier.com

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ALVIN BALTROP AND GORDON MATTA-CLARK

Posted on 2013-12-09

The exhibition focuses on the area of the Piers in New York City during the mid 1970s, and speaks of the state of abandonment and dilapidation these underwent as a consequence of the oil crisis that reconfigured the geography of the city as well as the international market and trading system.

The New York piers act as a mirror or counterpart of the Liverpool’s docklands. Historically linked via the transatlantic route that since Colonial times, connected Europe to the Americas, the Piers in New York and the docks in Liverpool experienced a similar process of transformation. Being unproductive and deserted, these were gradually reclaimed by an invisible population who used them for a variety of activities, spanning from gay cruising, drug-dealing and smuggling to prostitution, but also bringing together an underground community of visual artists, musicians, film-makers, performers and photographers.

Whilst Gordon Matta-Clark was pursuing the idea that art could act as a catalyst for urban regeneration and land re-appropriation, Baltrop investigated the life at the margins, mapping hedonistic displays of flesh, occasional sexual intercourse, corpses that could be mistaken for sleeping squatters (and vice versa) and other traces of humanity hidden amongst the interstices of society, notwithstanding the sense of freedom and liberation originating in the sexual revolution.

Exhibition runs through to February 9th, 2014

Open Eye Gallery
19 Mann Island
Liverpool Waterfront
Liverpool
L3 1BP

www.openeye.org.uk

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