Concrete

About

CONCRETE

Photography by Juan Hitters

67B Neal Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9PJ, United Kingdom

5th March - 8th March 2020

Preview: 5th March 18-20hs

Opening hours 6th-8th March 10-20hs

Curators Wil Ceniceros and Luz Hitters are pleased to present Concrete, the first UK solo exhibition by Argentinian photographer Juan Hitters (b. 1966, Buenos Aires). He was awarded the Gran Premio Adquisición (Grand Prize Acquisition) in the 103rd Salón Nacional de las Artes Visuales (Photography) in Argentina in 2014 for his photograph Concreto #1.  As a former psychoanalyst, Hitters’ interest in photography is tied to exploring the stories left behind on walls surfaces. He abstracts familiar corners, capturing them from a foreign and silent presence. His walls immortalize memories that will remain unspoken, acting as reminders of the fleeting nature of our existence. 

The exhibition addresses the concept of ruptures through six photographs shot in Sydney in 2013 in a railway tunnel near the central station - a place of anonymous transit and quotidian activities. For the artist, buildings are like living organisms, and their cracks are evidence of their stories. The Concrete series is reminiscent of unfinished abstract paintings created by water and minerals leaking through the structure’s cracks. He captures mundane fractures and the life that grows within them thereby giving authorship to nature. Hitters invites viewers to be silent witnesses of a suspended performance played out on the concrete. Whatever the forces that contributed to these fractures, we see evidence that in the end, nature takes over. 

Touching on concepts such as ephemerality and contrasts of synthetic and organic, he exposes the codependence between humans and nature. As such, he illustrates the power relationship between synthetic and organic, and how they stem from a common source. For him, “man designs but nature rules.”

Curators: Luz Hitters and Wil Ceniceros are graduates of the Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London. Their most recent collaborative project was the  exhibition Datablood 2.0 A Glitch at the Chelsea College of Art-London. They divide their time between London, New York, and Buenos Aires.