Alex Hartley
27 Jul - 21 Oct 2007
Alex Hartley, Downfall. 6b. 83ft,** Cardross, 2007,
C-type photograph, dimensions variable.
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London.
C-type photograph, dimensions variable.
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London.
Alex Hartley
27 July – 21 October 2007
Alex Hartley is a British artist whose work confronts our experience and understanding of the built and natural environments. Working primarily with photography, though often incorporating it into sculpture and installation, Hartley occupies a shifting set of roles from photographer and architectural historian to rambler and mountaineer, offering an original analysis of architecture and its relationship to landscape.
The exhibition brings together a significant body of existing and new work. It begins on the façade of the building, on which Hartley will make a new work that particularly exemplifies his highly individual approach. He is interested in ‘buildering’ (climbing on buildings), and will clad The Fruitmarket Gallery in an exactly scaled mage of itself, marked with the various routes he has climbed up the façade.
Inside the Gallery, other new work extends the possibilities of climbing as a metaphorical and actual approach to the built as well as the natural environment, with photographs of the artist tackling a variety of buildings in Los Angeles, London and various sites around Scotland. These extreme explorations of the relationship an individual might form with a building are complemented by other photographs, sculpture and installations which offer a sustained interrogation of architecture as something which, created to provide a physical and conceptual context for individuals in and against the landscape, exerts an inevitable influence on that context.
www.fruitmarket.co.uk
27 July – 21 October 2007
Alex Hartley is a British artist whose work confronts our experience and understanding of the built and natural environments. Working primarily with photography, though often incorporating it into sculpture and installation, Hartley occupies a shifting set of roles from photographer and architectural historian to rambler and mountaineer, offering an original analysis of architecture and its relationship to landscape.
The exhibition brings together a significant body of existing and new work. It begins on the façade of the building, on which Hartley will make a new work that particularly exemplifies his highly individual approach. He is interested in ‘buildering’ (climbing on buildings), and will clad The Fruitmarket Gallery in an exactly scaled mage of itself, marked with the various routes he has climbed up the façade.
Inside the Gallery, other new work extends the possibilities of climbing as a metaphorical and actual approach to the built as well as the natural environment, with photographs of the artist tackling a variety of buildings in Los Angeles, London and various sites around Scotland. These extreme explorations of the relationship an individual might form with a building are complemented by other photographs, sculpture and installations which offer a sustained interrogation of architecture as something which, created to provide a physical and conceptual context for individuals in and against the landscape, exerts an inevitable influence on that context.
www.fruitmarket.co.uk