Project: SQUARING THE CIRCLES OF CONFUSION, NEO PICTORIALISM IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Location: ROYAL PHOTOGRAPHIC SOCIETY, BRISTOL
Date: 2020
Squaring the Circles of Confusion
Squaring the Circles of Confusion: Neo-Pictorialism in the 21st Century curated by Zelda Cheatle Hon FRPS, celebrates the work of eight contemporary artists.
The new exhibition at RPS Gallery explores how eight photographers are using traditional techniques and approaches in their work to address contemporary issues and demonstrate the beauty of the photographic image. The works on show reveal radical experiments with photographic processes and include cyanotypes, daguerreotypes, pinhole and cameraless imagery.
Pictorialism was the dominant aesthetic force in art representational photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the post World War One machine age embraced the harder edge of Modernism, the ‘truth versus beauty’ argument began.
The eight artists in this exhibition use a practice that is relevant to them and also the twenty first century, using and and adapting the tools, techniques and vision of the Victorians and Edwardians. Neo Pictorialism has an emphasis on the aesthetic, asserting artistic validity and integrity, married to the making of strong work. The trademark ‘soft focus’ has given way to a creation of images that intend to trigger noth a simultaneous internal and external response, the gentleness of approach that seduces the subconscious. Neo Pictorialist photography can be made to describe the practitioners emotional response to the subject as much as describing the subject itself.
This is an exhibition to reopen the debate, to describe and DISSEMINATE the world of now, whilst appreciating the beauty of the photographic image. Catalogue available from the rps.org
Project: Squaring the Circles
Location: Scarborough Museum and Galleries
Date: 4th March - 1st May 2023
Takashi Arai at Scarborough Art Gallery © Matthew Cooper
© David Chalmers