Close-Up, Proximity and defamiliarisation in art, film and photography 

 Stan Brakhage Still from Mothlight, 1963, 16mm film. Courtesy the Estate of Stan Brakhage and LUX, London

Close-Up

The latest in The Fruitmarket Gallery’s series of group exhibitions guest-curated by scholars, writers and artists, Close-Up explores the defamiliarising effects of bringing a camera lens very close to its subject. Trans-historical and cross-generational, the exhibition brings together selected experiments in close-up film and photography from mid-19th century microscopy to avant-garde film and photography from the 1920s and 1930s; post-war conceptual art; and contemporary art from the 1990s and 2000s.

Salvador Dalí, whose film Un chien andalou, made with Luis Buñuel in 1929, includes unnerving close-ups of a Death’s Head Hawk Moth as well as the famous opening sequence showing the slitting of a woman’s eye, characterised the revelatory aspect of close-up photography as ‘the registering of an UNKNOWN REALITY’. This exhibition presents a succession of unknown realities from 19th-century lantern slides showing hugely magnified micro-organisms to Simon Starling’s double slide work Inventar-Nr. 8573 (Man Ray) 4m – 400nm of 2006, a journey right into the silver gelatin surface of a vintage Man Ray photograph.


http://www.fruitmarket.co.uk/exhibitions/current/