Christopher Bucklow: Anima    Sep 6 - Oct 27, 2012

Galerie Edwynn Houk is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent photographic work by the British artist Christopher Bucklow (b 1957). This will be Bucklow’s first exhibition with the gallery, and his first in Switzerland.

“Anima” will showcase new pictures from Bucklow’s longstanding series of Guests and Tetrarchs. Each unique work is a cross between a photograph and a drawing, created using his own adaptation of a pinhole camera, a photographic process popular in the 19th Century. Bucklow begins each work by delineating a human silhouette on a metallic sheet, then puncturing it with thousands of holes. Photographic paper is placed at the bottom of a lightsealed box, with the punctured sheet above the paper. Then sunlight is allowed to filter though the holes, every one of them acting as an aperture. And so a photographic image of the sun-lit human body made of thousands of small suns is captured on the photographic paper below. There is no negative, no enlargement. Each picture is one-of-a-kind; its appearance is dependent upon the time of day, the intensity of the sunlight at that time, and the length of the exposure.

Initially, the Guests and Tetrarchs were based on portraits of his friends and family, yet, for Bucklow, they have come to represent a self-portrait, a response to the vitality he believes resides within himself as much as every other living being. The exhibition’s title, “Anima,” refers to the Jungian argument that certain archetypes define the unconscious: every male harbors a female archetype; every female, a male. We only ever encounter our inner archetype in our dreams. For Bucklow, each Guest and Tetrarch is a rendering-in-light of those figures haunting and animating his unconscious.

Bucklow began his career as a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. He has exhibited extensively in Europe and abroad, and his paintings and photographs are included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the High Museum, Atlanta and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Recent publications include “If This Be Not I,” a collection of his writings, drawings and paintings. He is the author of an iconographical study of Philip Guston’s late paintings entitled “What is in the Dwat, The Universe of Philip Guston’s Final Decade.” Bucklow lives and works in Southwest England.

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