Cig Harvey (1973, Royaume-Uni) The Pale Yellow Cadillac, Sadie, Portland, Maine, 2010 © Cig Harvey
After taking place at Musée de l’Elysée Lausanne, the exhibition The Beauty of Lines. Masterpieces from the Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla Collection arrives at Property Caillebotte in Yerres, France. The exhibition presents a selection of masterpieces from the history of photography, part of the collection of Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla. Based in New York, it includes over 1500 original prints by some of the greatest photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Stéphane Couturier (1957, France) Barendrechtn° 1, 2004 © Stéphane Couturier / Courtesy La Galerie Particulière, Paris, Bruxelles
Abelardo Morell, Book with Wavy Pages, 2001 © Abelardo Morell – Courtesy of the artist and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York and Zurich / Karl Blossfeldt (1865- 1932, Allemagne) Dryopteris filix, Wurmfarn (Common Male Fern), 1928
Laurent Elie Badessi Man’s Back, Horse’s Back, Camargue, France, 1994 © Laurent Elie Badessi
Augusto Cantamessa, Breve Orizzonte, 1955 © Augusto Cantamessa, concession de Bruna Genovesio et Patrik Losano / Lewis Hine (1874-1940, États-Unis), On the Hoist, Empire State Building, 1931
Ray K. Metzker (1931- 2014, États-Unis) New Mexico (71 KR-2), 1971 © Estate of Ray K. Metzker
Through visual confrontations, the visitor is invited to experience the power of the photographic line through these sublime works. The photographs by Bérénice Abbott, Eugène Atget, Robert Adams, Walker Evans, Cig Harvey, Vik Muniz, Man Ray and Lee Friedlander, among others, thus resonate, beyond their historical temporality and geographic considerations, by their formal correspondences.
Walker Evans, Ossining, People in Summer, NY State Town, 1931 © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Chez Sondra Gilman et Celso Gonzalez © Ayline Olukman
Throughout history, photographers have always oscillated between two extremes: the mimetic illusion of reality and the enhancement of the esthetic qualities of the image. Whether it be “instantaneous lines,” according to the expression of Henri Cartier-Bresson, rational lines inspired from New Topographics, or the diversity of the curved lines of the human body, the line structures and sometimes reinvents the real – to the point of abstraction. In the case of photography, spectators, even the most discriminating, often first observe the world that they are presented with. They scrutinize the face or the landscape, they marvel at the details, the fashionable clothes, the expressions on the children’s faces. In other words, they can forget that they are actually looking at a piece of paper, as flat as a page in a book or a drawing. Fascinated by the mimetic illusion, they might not even see the lines – straight, curved, oblique – that actually form the basis of the photographic composition.
[via Musée de l’Elysée Lausanne]
The Beauty of Lines / Masterpieces from the Sondra Gilman & Celso Gonzalez-Falla Collection
September 15 – December 2, 2018 / Property Caillebotte, Yerres, France
Please visit the exhibition page >
