MOTION - FAASSEN, BASSMAN & GROEBLI: AMSTERDAM

This exhibition is an homage to motion. Although photography is largely considered to be a medium which freezes the moment, for Casper Faassen, Lillian Bassman, and René Groebli, movement plays a key role in their use of it.

 

For Casper Faassen (*1975, NL), working with dancers and exploring movement in space is a consistent theme in his artistic work. Over the last two years, in close cooperation with the dancer Madoka Kariya, he has developed his new series "Void." Through this collaboration he seeks to translate Kariya's fathom of space through dance in his photography. She approaches the viewer and moves away. What is revealed to the eye is as important as what is hidden from it. Fascinated by Japanese philosophy, he explores the theme of "Ma" through landscapes and movement studies. "Ma" is understood as the space in between, that is not separating but connecting.  

 

Lillian Bassman (1913-2012, US), one of the most important female fashion photographers in the history of the medium, was way ahead of her time. She experimented with abandon, treating fashion in a bold, graphic style and floating images in space. Her greatness emanated from her revolutionary style, marked by soft focus, experimental darkroom techniques, and inventive compositions. Bassman became a role model for many fashion photographers and impressed with her artistic style, which seems timeless through her minimalistic language.

 

In the spirit of a cineaste, René Groebli (*1927, CH) was fascinated by the nature of movement and the energy that lies in the new. His work "The Eye of Love", taken on his honeymoon in Paris in the early 1950s, was originally misunderstood and interpreted as a homage to free love. No one recognized that here a photographer has chosen the freedom to rethink the medium, to charge a narrative with energy, to dynamize it in terms of form and content.