Christophe Guye Galerie is pleased to announce the group exhibition ‘The Skin We Live In’ in the gallery’s showroom. The exhibition presents five artists who, using different conceptual approaches, explore the human skin by portraying it through colour photography.
Nude photography has been a genre of fine art photography since the inception of the medium in the middle of the nineteenth century; depicting the nude human body with an emphasis on form, composition, and the emotional qualities evoked by such.
The naked human body holds bewildering cultural gravity. This visceral and vulnerable shell, of which there are no exact copies, simultaneously carries beauty, ugliness, desire, eroticism, purity, reverie, politics, taboos, myriad identities and endless contradictions.
The selected works range from nude photography in the classical style to new contemporary feminist works. Bill Henson is a photographer of the human condition and an experimenter of remarkable skill and conviction. His imagery lets us glimpse into his magical world – a distant world of romance and exquisite beauty which the artist seems to somehow have dreamt rather than visited – where people and places are juxtaposed between loneliness and desire. John Yuyi's millennial-speak depictions of the female body and her aptitude for collecting, wielding, and reflecting on social media influence are recurring in her practice. She uses temporary tattoos to generate visual manifestos, while the body becomes a performative screen to present them. In the series ‘The Garden' Erik Madigan Heck depicts his wife in a variety of richly colourful surrounds. The photographs draw upon Catholic iconography and other mythic pictorial traditions to develop a colour-based narrative evocative of spiritual archetypes and the processes of dissolution and rebirth. Further on, Marianne Marić can be seen as a ‘classical’ artist, following the tradition of the nude pictorially with her beautiful photographic tribute to Jean-Jacques Henner from 2008. And finally, touchingly casual, Lina Scheynius captures scenes from her daily life, exploring and observing friends, lovers, and herself in with an arresting honesty. Uniquely voyeur and participant at once, the surprisingly strong sexual undertone and refreshingly explicit but poised nudity in her work challenges traditional theories of the female role as the inactive and objectified.
Artists on view: Erik Madigan Heck, Bill Henson, John Yuyi, Marianne Marić, Lina Scheynius.
