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Comments/Context: It was likely William Eggleston who first popularized color photographs of simple everyday objects made special through the sheer force of his focused attention. This concept of grabbing a seemingly random fragment of life and infusing it with significance has now morphed into an entire genre of contemporary photography, with practitioners with styles as different as Wolfgang Tillmans, Rinko Kawauchi and Paola Ferrario. In the past decade, German photographer Jessica Backhaus has also been exploring the nature of the incidental via a series of book projects, sampled here in a kind of mini-retrospective first New York solo show.
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Backhaus takes this investigation of wetness to an entirely new level in her most recent body of work. These pictures document the reflections of colored buildings in the canals of Venice, her camera pointed down at the dappled, moving surface of the water. The bright colors become swirled, rippled and distorted, at turns broken and abstract. The color effects are both impressionistic and painterly, exercises in the marbling of pink and green, purple and yellow, or red and brown. They are images you can get lost in, endlessly following the intersecting waves and transitions.
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Together, this is a satisfying introduction to Backhaus' work, spanning both the power of pared down simplicity and the lyricism of visual complexity.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:
- Artist site (here)
- Reviews: New Yorker (here), Photograph (here, scroll down), Photo Booth (here)
- Book review: 5B4 (here)
Through October 30th
Laurence Miller Gallery
20 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019
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