“Expanding Photography” going out of frames 3

Neringa Krikščiūnaitė
www.kamane.lt, 2016-07-01

In brief: “From today, painting is dead,”[1] the French painter Paul Delaroche made a bold statement in the first half of the 19th century, when he first saw daguerreotypes. Photography brought a big challenge to painting. Meanwhile, the photo journalist of the 21st century Antonio Olmos asserts, “Photography has never been so popular, but it’s getting destroyed. There have never been so many photographs taken, but photography is dying”.[2]

The questions about the use of photography as the initial creative point and about the borders expanded by contemporary photography are tackled in the exhibition “Expanding Photography” organised by the West German Artists’ Association at Meno Parkas gallery in Kaunas.

The exhibition could serve as a good rebuff to Antonio Olmos and his thought that photography is dying. On the contrary, photography is expanding its borders by both technical means and meanings, the exhibition shows. 16 artists are presented in the exhibition – they interpret the meanings of birth of photography and the result freshly.

The photographer Jens Sundheim presents the work “100100 Views of Mount Fuji” in which the constant change of the view due to the impact of man and nature is revealed. The photographer Evangelos Koukouwitakis expands the borders of photography by combining it with painting in his cycle of twelve works “Without Title”.

The artist Katja Butt deconstructs architecture into separate parts which are later combined in a photograph and thus creates the example of perfect chaos. The duo of artists Willy Oster and SG Koezle presents photographs which look like suprematist paintings full of geometrical forms and contrasts. They show interiors captured from various angles and leave it to the viewer to guess what has been photographed in this way.

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[1] Jason Farago. Is painting dead? http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150217-is-painting-dead

[2] Stuart Jeffries. The death of photography: are camera phones destroying an artform? In: The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/dec/13/death-of-photography-camera-phones


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