Nicolas Grospierre. A Subjective Atlas Of Modern Architecture

About

Nicolas Grospierre is one of the most outstanding contemporary photographers, whose pictures from the two series Modern Forms and Modern Spaces will be displayed for the first time during the exhibition in the Fort Institute of Photography. Both series have already been published as albums and had been shown abroad, however they are not well known to the Polish audience.

Grospierre arranges the exhibition space is his characteristic way, i.e. making his pictures a part of audience-immersing installation. A Subjective Atlas of Modern Architecture is formed in a surprising order that emphasises the form of each building rather than their location, creator or year of construction.

Pictures shown at the exhibition were taken in Europe, Asia, both Americas, in the Middle East, and Australia. They comprise both iconic modernist buildings such as Gateway Arch in St. Louis, as well as marginal – even if equally interesting in their form – relicts such as now demolished balneological hospital in Druskininkai.

Vision pictured by Grospierre is thrilling and mad, and at the same time it goes beyond conventions of presenting modern architecture. His photos are linked through solid geometrical shape, technical solution of a particular construction problem or even a colour of detail used to finish a given building.

The idea of Grospierre’s photography is better captured by comparison to classic works of Lucien Hervé, Ezra Stoller and Julius Shulman. As Elias Redstone, architecture critic and theoretician, notices that as far as classic 20th-century architecture photographers created a still popular vision of modernism as an international, minimalistic and yet sublime style, contemporary artists, including Grospierre, take a different – more critical – approach to modernism.

This exhibition presents a selection of the most interesting threads from the over 20-year-old archive of photography comprising thousands of images. Sequences of large-format pictures develop Grospierre’s concept known to his Tumblr fans and by exposing detail and presenting facades along with interiors, create a composition that is something different and much more than just an image from a book or a picture of a building. In Grospierre’s vision, form is not a derivative of the function, but rather precedes it.