Karsten Greve

Sally Mann

15 Nov 2007 - 19 Jan 2008

© SALLY MANN
SALLY MANN
"Faces"

The Karsten Greve gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition dedicated to Sally Mann which will take place from the 15th of November through the 19th of January. The show will feature the prodigious series of 24 Faces executed between 2000 and 2004.

Terrifying and fascinating all at once, the portraits of the artist’s children (Virginia, Jessie and Emmet), capture the enigmatic expressions of the faces suspending them in time. The framing of these large-format portraits (127 x 101, 6 cm) dramatizes the tension which oscillates between the ephemerality of the moment and its fixation on the print. Their pictorial qualities illustrate the permanence and the fragility of the photograph. Sally Mann’s technique gives life to the works whose skin-like paper seems chipped in certain places thereby disturbing the image and the harmonious perception of the face.

Sally Man was born in 1951 in Lexington, Virginia. Her name became familiar amongst admirers of contemporary photography from the end of the 80s thanks to the series entitled “Immediate Family” and “At Twelve” in which she photographed her children. With subject matter touching upon the loss of innocence, death and war, “meditations” upon life, memory and the body, Sally Mann seeks confrontation with fundamental human concerns.

The public has also been intrigued by Sally Mann’s technical virtuosity. She indeed uses old-fashioned photographic techniques such as wet-plate collodion negatives (a procedure invented in the 1850s) with an exposure time of approximately six minutes. These techniques allow one to acquire an impression of fragility and to underscore the painterly quality of these photographs with their specific luminosity and texture.

Her worked has been internationally exhibited and is represented in numerous museum collections such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York or at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. Sally Mann has also been the recipient of several important prizes such as that of the Guggenheim Foundation.
 

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