03.02.11
Adam Fuss at FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE
ADAM FUSS: “I KNOW I HAVE ACHIEVED SOMETHING WHEN I MAKE AN IMAGE I CAN’T STOP LOOKING AT”
Curator: Cheryl Brutvan, Contemporary Art Curator at the Norton Museum of Art in Florida (USA).
Production: FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE For the first time in Spain, FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE presents work by the photographer Adam Fuss (London, 1961), between 27 January and 17 April 2011. This exhibition, planned in close collaboration with the artist himself, is curated by Cheryl Brutvan, Contemporary Art Curator at the Norton Museum of Art in Florida (USA), who organised Fuss’s first retrospective in the United States.
It gathers fifty photographs by the artist, made between 1986 and the present day. Fuss’s main series are represented – Love 1992-1993, My Ghost 2000 – along with an introduction to his most recent work – Home and the World, 2010.
This selection brings together work that the artist considers his most accomplished and recreates the atmosphere of a sacred space to maximise the dialogue between the work and the spectator.
The art of Adam Fuss is an uninterrupted succession of experimentations, a series of revelations. Incredible and often inexplicable opportunities to photograph light, water, flowers, birds, rabbits and snakes populate his images with beauty and mystery. By drawing on nature, Fuss orients his art towards fundamental subjects capturing the essence of life: birth, love, death.
Metaphors and symbols appear as he experiments constantly with photographic media and techniques. Fuss uses the devices of black and white pinhole photography, photograms, daguerreotypes, breaking the barriers of conventional photography and taking inspiration from the pioneers of the discipline, such as William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), or Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerrre (1787-1851). His choice to use old-fashioned techniques is not motivated by a desire to be anti-technological. He shouldn’t be considered as a new romantic.
Fuss quite simply looks for the best adapted tools that will allow him to make the works he has in mind.
The photogram is one of the artist’s favoured techniques: Fuss starts to experiment with it in 1988. In the exhibition, his oldest photogram is Invocation (1992) selected from a series of portraits of babies. With this process which is inspired by Man Ray’s 1920s “rayographs”, the artist creates incredible abstractions, by placing various subjects directly on a photosensitive surface and briefly exposing them to light. With the splash of a drop of water on a flat surface, concentric undulations or the silhouette of a sunflower decomposing in the light, Adam Fuss arrives at images of a quasi-dematerialised, stupefying abstraction.
To create this image, a mother laid her child briefly on photosensitive paper immersed in a thin coat of water. A simple flash fixed the child’s contours and the undulations in the water.
In 1999, Fuss starts to experiment with the daguerreotype technique, for his series titled “My Ghost 2000-2009”, with images of baptismal robes, butterflies, or a swan with its wings unfolded – themes that symbolically evoke loss. Fuss subverts the laborious process to create ethereal, blue-tinted images that seem to contradict the photographic medium drive for fixation and permanence.
Provoking an abstract feeling of pain and lost love, these images are the result of a union between process and the artists’ sensibility. A decade later, continuing “My Ghost”, the artist returns to daguerreotypes, with motifs like a white peacock, or a ceramic jar. His work on the image of the Taj Mahal (in which 10 daguerreotypes are made from a 20th century negative) is the high point of this period. From the series My Ghost, 2000
Although his images are figurative and his subjects are identifiable, the embedded associations are metaphysical, verging on emotional. Concerning his work, Fuss says the following : "I know I have achieved something when I make an image I can't stop looking at. I always need to make images that have the effect of a concrete revelation for the spectator (...) more or less like what one feels when we look at a very beautiful face or perhaps when one is confronted with the unknown."
On the occasion of the exhibition, FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE is publishing a catalogue (in Spanish), with texts by Cheryl Brutvan and Christopher Bucklow, a glossary of the photographic techniques used by the artist written by Celia Martínez Cabetas, as well as a biography and a bibliography by William Stover. Echoing the exhibition, this catalogue aims to provide an in-depth approach to Adam Fuss’s work and become a reference book on his life and work.
http://www.exposicionesmapfrearte.com/adamfuss/
FUNDACION MAPFRE – Institut de Culture.
Salle Recoletos,
Paseo de Recoletos 23, Madrid – 28004
Tel +34 91 581 61 00
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