João Penalva
30 Jan - 28 Mar 2009
JOAO PENALVA
Exhibition January 30 - March 28, 2009
In our third exhibition with João Penalva, the Barbara Gross Galerie will be showing new photographic works by the Portuguese artist.
Penalva is known for his contemplative video narratives and installations. The films are "a complex interplay of image, language, sound, and text, which question our usual ways of perception.
Penalva employs a still camera perspective, while the narratives are usually told through voice-overs in languages that are not widely spoken by most Western viewers. The artist deliberately combines images and languages from different places, cultures, and contexts. This requires attention and the readiness from the viewer to negotiate the discrepancies between text and image.
Penalva's photographs are often accompanied by texts, which read like self-contained narratives. The exhibition features Sumiko, 2009, a rear-view portrait of a Japanese woman. The accompanying text tells a story about the woman's face, which, of course, is not actually seen in the picture. Here, the artist plays with the ambiguous origins of image and text. Is it a photo-graph he took himself or is it found?
Is it really Sumiko? Is her story fact or fiction?
In his most recent series of photographs, Penalva dispenses with textual accompaniment and relies on the narratives hidden within the pictures. At the opera of Hessisches Staatstheater in Wiesbaden, Germany he takes a look behind the scenes and at the costume stock.
He shows brocade shoes, pumps, cracked leather boots, clown costumes, uniforms, gowns decorated with bows, fake furs. Penalva gets in very close to his motifs, showing just the details, although without ever losing sight of the surrounding context. This gives his photographs a fleeting, snapshot-like quality. There are no people in the photographs, but one senses the busy atmos-phere of the theater and the flair of the stage. The pictures have the timeless feel of old, found photographs, and convey a nostalgic feeling. Costumes and shoes are like mute actors from earlier times, and are, at the same time, witnesses to unseen performances.
The exhibition will also be presenting three large artist books, whose narratives emerge out of the editing of a single still from a 1940s? British film, an early twentieth-century Swedish found photograph, or a group of the artist's own photographs from Taipei.
The narrative quality of his works is grounded in the viewer's imagination alone. The artist is not so much a storyteller as a creator of stories: "I provide the characters, the set, the props,
but the viewer enables the narrative." Through his photographs,
Penalva shows us more than is actually visible.
João Penalva was born in 1949 in Lisbon; he has lived and worked in London since 1976. Awarded the DAAD Berlin Residency in 2003/2004.
Biennials: 23rd Bienal de São Paulo, 1996; 2nd Berlin Biennale, 2001; 49th Venice Biennial, 2001; 11th Biennale of Sydney, 2002.
Solo Exhibitions (selected): 1999 Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon; 2000 Camden Arts Centre, London; Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania; Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck; 2002 Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö; 2003 The Power Plant, Toronto; 2005/06 Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal, traveling to Ludwig Museum, Budapest, and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; 2007 DAAD Galerie, Berlin, and Mead Gallery, University of Warwick, England.
Exhibition January 30 - March 28, 2009
In our third exhibition with João Penalva, the Barbara Gross Galerie will be showing new photographic works by the Portuguese artist.
Penalva is known for his contemplative video narratives and installations. The films are "a complex interplay of image, language, sound, and text, which question our usual ways of perception.
Penalva employs a still camera perspective, while the narratives are usually told through voice-overs in languages that are not widely spoken by most Western viewers. The artist deliberately combines images and languages from different places, cultures, and contexts. This requires attention and the readiness from the viewer to negotiate the discrepancies between text and image.
Penalva's photographs are often accompanied by texts, which read like self-contained narratives. The exhibition features Sumiko, 2009, a rear-view portrait of a Japanese woman. The accompanying text tells a story about the woman's face, which, of course, is not actually seen in the picture. Here, the artist plays with the ambiguous origins of image and text. Is it a photo-graph he took himself or is it found?
Is it really Sumiko? Is her story fact or fiction?
In his most recent series of photographs, Penalva dispenses with textual accompaniment and relies on the narratives hidden within the pictures. At the opera of Hessisches Staatstheater in Wiesbaden, Germany he takes a look behind the scenes and at the costume stock.
He shows brocade shoes, pumps, cracked leather boots, clown costumes, uniforms, gowns decorated with bows, fake furs. Penalva gets in very close to his motifs, showing just the details, although without ever losing sight of the surrounding context. This gives his photographs a fleeting, snapshot-like quality. There are no people in the photographs, but one senses the busy atmos-phere of the theater and the flair of the stage. The pictures have the timeless feel of old, found photographs, and convey a nostalgic feeling. Costumes and shoes are like mute actors from earlier times, and are, at the same time, witnesses to unseen performances.
The exhibition will also be presenting three large artist books, whose narratives emerge out of the editing of a single still from a 1940s? British film, an early twentieth-century Swedish found photograph, or a group of the artist's own photographs from Taipei.
The narrative quality of his works is grounded in the viewer's imagination alone. The artist is not so much a storyteller as a creator of stories: "I provide the characters, the set, the props,
but the viewer enables the narrative." Through his photographs,
Penalva shows us more than is actually visible.
João Penalva was born in 1949 in Lisbon; he has lived and worked in London since 1976. Awarded the DAAD Berlin Residency in 2003/2004.
Biennials: 23rd Bienal de São Paulo, 1996; 2nd Berlin Biennale, 2001; 49th Venice Biennial, 2001; 11th Biennale of Sydney, 2002.
Solo Exhibitions (selected): 1999 Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon; 2000 Camden Arts Centre, London; Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania; Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck; 2002 Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö; 2003 The Power Plant, Toronto; 2005/06 Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal, traveling to Ludwig Museum, Budapest, and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; 2007 DAAD Galerie, Berlin, and Mead Gallery, University of Warwick, England.