Hervé Guibert
This and More
10 Jun - 20 Aug 2023
Hervé Guibert: This and More, exhibition view at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2023. Photo: Frank Sperling. © Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris
KW Institute for Contemporary Art announces Hervé Guibert – This and More, a solo exhibition featuring a selection of photographs by the late French artist, writer, and activist Hervé Guibert (b. 1955, FR, d. 1991, FR). Curated by Anthony Huberman, director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, the exhibition explores what lies beyond the grasp of photography.
Better known for his portraits, Guibert also photographed interiors, inanimate objects, and empty rooms—an important body of work that remains relatively unknown. Laconic and reserved, these photographs offer an approach to portraiture where what is missing from the image is what counts. Charged with love as well as with trauma, these interior spaces invite imaginative readings of the people who belong or once belonged there. His photographs lay open the artist’s most intimate spaces while also maintaining the secrecy of private moments, with the protagonists kept safely (or tragically) out of the frame or at a distance.
Instead of providing a sense of objectivity or ‘truth’, this exhibition points to all that is invisible in a photograph: memories, anecdotes, absences, and richly layered subjectivities. Guibert’s photographs of objects and domestic spaces are replete with the ghostly absence of those who once inhabited them and left them behind. In that sense, this exhibition considers the ‘truths’ that lie dormant within a photograph, invisible to the eye and yet central to the image. It proposes images about what is absent from images.
Curator: Anthony Huberman, Executive Artistic Director of the Giorno Poetry Systems Institute, New York
Assistant Curator: Sofie Krogh Christensen
Better known for his portraits, Guibert also photographed interiors, inanimate objects, and empty rooms—an important body of work that remains relatively unknown. Laconic and reserved, these photographs offer an approach to portraiture where what is missing from the image is what counts. Charged with love as well as with trauma, these interior spaces invite imaginative readings of the people who belong or once belonged there. His photographs lay open the artist’s most intimate spaces while also maintaining the secrecy of private moments, with the protagonists kept safely (or tragically) out of the frame or at a distance.
Instead of providing a sense of objectivity or ‘truth’, this exhibition points to all that is invisible in a photograph: memories, anecdotes, absences, and richly layered subjectivities. Guibert’s photographs of objects and domestic spaces are replete with the ghostly absence of those who once inhabited them and left them behind. In that sense, this exhibition considers the ‘truths’ that lie dormant within a photograph, invisible to the eye and yet central to the image. It proposes images about what is absent from images.
Curator: Anthony Huberman, Executive Artistic Director of the Giorno Poetry Systems Institute, New York
Assistant Curator: Sofie Krogh Christensen