Exhibition: Lars Tunbjörk Dates: September 13 – November 19, 2011 Artist’s Reception: Tuesday, September 13, 6-8 PM
Amador Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of color photographs by internationally renowned, Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjörk, featuring works from 1988-2002. This exhibition in many ways constitutes a trilogy, focusing on an investigative arc that Tunbjörk has examined through a series of lauded photo-books: Landet Utom Sig (Country Beside Itself), Home and Office.
With humor and melancholy, Tunbjörk’s photographs portray the intersection between the commercial and the social, the personal and the generic, uniquely visualizing the ways in which modern life in cookie-cutter houses and blasé modernist office buildings is both harrowing and vapid, yet captivating and unique, full of repetition and banality, but also moments of enchantment and absurdity. Tunbjörk achieves this by situating his images in seemingly nonspecific, domestic and commercial settings, places whose commonplace character would be unremarkable if not for the individuality that he’s able to capture in each photo. Each individual image stands as a microcosmic peak into a social system of both order and confusion, where people standout as they sunbathe on finely groomed lawns in closed residential communities, or office workers hunch over filing cabinets yet appear sanctimonious, as though genuflecting with reverence in these sterile commercial spaces. The sum total effect is something akin to the whimsy of Winogrand mixed with a sumptuous color palette reminiscent of Eggleston. The end results are photographs that are both formally rich and personally engaging.
The culled works, furthermore, reveal a critical edge to Tunbjörk’s project. Though each individual photograph stands on its own merits, the aggregate whole speaks to the anxieties of peoples caught up in a post-industrial world of increasing commercialism. Whether in scenes of rural Swedish leisure, as in Landet Utom Sig, the suburbanization and Ikea-fication of the traditional neighborhood in Home or the constraints and strains of the seemingly omnipotent commercial sector in Office, a certain sense of loss and detachment courses throughout the work. A photograph, for Tunbjörk, appears as a double-edged sword, highlighting the quirkiness of daily life while visualizing the loss that has come with social and material "progress."
Born in Stockholm in 1956, Tunbjörk spent the seventies photographing for several national newspapers and publications in his native country. Tunbjörk has exhibited widely in his native Sweden, including a solo exhibition at the Moderna Museet. Additionally he has had solo and group shows across Europe and the US including an exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York, featuring work from Landet Utom Sig.
a Amador Gallery is located in the landmark Fuller Building at 41 East 57th Street on the 6th floor. Gallery hours are 11 to 6 Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment. For additional information, please contact the gallery at (212) 759-6740, for more information visit www.amadorgallery.com or contact us at info@amadorgallery.com.
