| | | |  | | | William Eggleston, Memphis, 1965 - 1968, from the series Los Alamos, 1965–1974
© Eggleston Artistic Trust / Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London | | | | | | | | | | Foam Paul Huf Award winner 2016 | | | | 17 March - 7 June 2017 | | | | Opening reception: Thursday 16 March 5:30 pm | | |  | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | Installation view from Aichi Triennale, 2016 © Daisuke Yokota / courtesy of the artist and G/P Gallery | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | |  | | | | William Eggleston, Louisiana, 1971 – 1974, from the series Los Alamos, 1965 - 1974 © Eggleston Artistic Trust / Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London | | | | | | | | | 17 March - 7 June 2017 | | | The American photographer William Eggleston (1939, Memphis Tennessee, US) is widely considered one of the leading photographers of the past decades. He has been a pioneer of colour photography from the mid-1960s onwards, and transformed everyday America into a photogenic subject. In the exhibition William Eggleston – Los Alamos, Foam displays 75 photographs that were taken on various road trips through the southern states of America between 1966 and 1974. The exhibition includes a number of iconic images, amongst which Eggleston’s first colour photograph.
Los Alamos starts in Eggleston’s home town of Memphis and the Mississippi Delta and continues to follow his wanderings through New Orleans, Las Vegas and south California, ending at Santa Monica Pier. During a road trip with writer and curator Walter Hopps, Eggleston also passed through Los Alamos, the place in New Mexico where the nuclear bomb was developed in secret and to which the series owes its name. | | | | | |  | | | William Eggleston, En Route to New Orleans, 1971–1974,
from the series Los Alamos, 1965–1974
© Eggleston Artistic Trust / Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London | | | | | | The over 2200 images made for Los Alamos were originally intended to be published in parts, but were forgotten over the years. The photographs were rediscovered almost 40 years after the project started. They were published and exhibited for the first time in 2003. The vibrant photographs of traffic signs, run-down buildings and diner interiors distinctly betray the hand of the wayward autodidact. His early work evidences his penchant for the seemingly trivial: before the lens of Eggleston’s ‘democratic camera’, everything becomes equally important.
Eggleston began Los Alamos ten years before his contested solo exhibition at MoMA in 1976, which placed colour photography on the map as a serious art form. At the time, colour photography in the fine arts was regarded as frivolous, or even vulgar. It earned Eggleston the scorn of many. However, this did not stop him from experimenting with the no longer used dye-transfer process, a labour-intensive and expensive technique that was mainly used in advertising photography. The process allowed the photographer to control the colour saturation and achieve an unparalleled nuance in tonality; a quality that also characterizes the 75 dye-transfer prints exhibited at Foam. | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | |  | | | Untitled from Matter/Burn Out, 2016
© Daisuke Yokota / courtesy of the artist and G/P Gallery | | | | | | | Foam Paul Huf Award winner 2016 | | | | 17 March - 4 June 2017 | | | In the exhibition Matter, Foam presents new three-dimensional work by Daisuke Yokota (Saitama, b. 1983). Three installations revolve around the tactile aspects of photography, in which the outcome of the artwork is not determined by the camera, but by experiments with the material forms of the medium. Previously in his artistic practice Yokota would re-use images that he took years ago, but that keep re-appearing in different ways through various analogue and digital processes. In these new works it's not the image that keeps being reinvented, but the physical photo print and film.
The artist is at the frontline of a new movement of Japanese experimental photographers. Yokota is working out of, and pushing forward, a Japanese photography tradition that harks back to the intuitive experimentation of the Provoke generation. In this exhibition, Yokota focuses on the aspect of volume and material of photography, pushing the medium and its perception forward into ever more original directions. | | | | | |  | | | | Installation view from exhibition Matter, 2016 © Daisuke Yokota / courtesy of the artist and G/P Gallery | | | | | | The exhibition of the Japanese photographer consists of room-filling installations that provide the viewer with new experiences of photography in each one of the three exhibition rooms. One of the installations entails an enlarged print of a film roll directly exposed without interference of the camera. This long trail is draped throughout the exhibition room and waxed on site. In another installation Yokota projects the outcome of darkroom experiments with unorthodox developing processes on the walls. A printer will slowly print these chemical distortions of the negative. In his latest work Matter / Burn Out, Yokota sets fire to his own installation prints at an abandoned construction site in China. The resulting heaps of burnt material are documented by his camera and the images are recycled into a new autonomous artwork in the installation Matter / Vomit. The exhibition room filled with burnt matter reflects on the overflow of images we are confronted with on a daily basis and the growing indifference among recipients. Every day vast amounts of images are uploaded onto the Internet, but there are limitations to our ability to digest the incoming information. With this installation Yokota critically reflects on the limitations of our collective memory in today’s information society.
Yokota’s manipulations are philosophical musings on the medium of photography: “I guess it is common to think that the documented image is what is real in photography” the artist contemplates in an interview in 2014, “but by accentuating the materiality of the film, which by nature is more real than the documented image, the image actually becomes more abstract, and I'm interested in this reversed perspective”.
Foam Paul Huf Award
Daisuke Yokota was chosen as the winner of the tenth Foam Paul Huf Award 2016. He was first featured in the Talent Issue of Foam Magazine in 2013 and works from his Site/Cloud series were the subject of a 2014 solo exhibition at Foam. Yokota lives and works in Japan, where he graduated from the Nippon Photography Institute in 2003. in 2015, Yokota won the Photo London John Kobal Residency Award. He is represented by G/P Gallery, Japan.
Foam is supported by the BankGiro Loterij, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek, City of Amsterdam Delta Lloyd, Olympus and the VandenEnde Foundation. |
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