Picture This will exhibit a collection of 22 new photographs by renowned abstract photographer Norman de Brackinghe at our Gallery next month. The exhibition will open on Thursday 12th May and run until Saturday 28th May at Picture This Gallery, 13/F, Nine Queen’s Road, Central, Hong Kong.
This new collection of photographs once more displays de Brackinghe’s trademark abstract imagery hidden within the decaying and distressed walls around us. Not constrained by geography (he includes images from China and Australia as well as closer to home in Hong Kong), de Brackinghe has assembled a remarkably tight group, each strong enough to stand alone, but together forming a beautiful harmony of composition.
De Brackinghe is not the only art photographer shooting decaying and distressed walls, but his images are imbued with a truly unusual vibrancy and uplifting positiveness and it is his dedication to and understanding of his craft which allows him photograph a subject which may be tired and disintegrating but to engender in the result an almost universally positive and uplifting reaction.
People are initially confused and then amazed by the artistic rendering of such a mundane surface. Scale is often impossible to deduce from the image itself, sometimes an image is most of a wall, other times a tiny piece only a few inches tall. But on viewing the uniform scale of his prints, one sees not the wall but the photographer’s realization of the artistic abstraction buried in the decay.
In other words, on viewing these photographs, we see not the solid permanence of the walls themselves, but the perceived impermanence of the surface, for it is degenerating, continuously changing, and evolving through the effects of time and weather; paint peels and bubbles, render pulls away, cracks open in plaster or masonry, colours fade and change. De Brackinghe catches his subject but does not capture it, for he cannot capture an image that is transient and remains only for the moment the shutter is released. It is this evolution that Geoff Dyer wrote about in his wonderful book The Ongoing Moment when he said “a photograph is an image held in the trance of time”.
In the words of the photographer:
It is fascinating to watch the effects of time and weather on the patina of the city. Seeing the gradual erosion of colour and definition of the environment is a gentle reminder of the impermanence of all things. My photographs, I hope, reflect the feeling of warmth radiating from the urban landscape in which I live.
Norman de Brackinghe has lived in Hong Kong since 1976. He has a background of many years in the graphic arts industry, is a watercolourist from the traditional English school of landscape painting and is a keen student of abstract art movements. His photography draws from this abstract expressionism as he finds imagery reflecting the abstract painters he admires: de Staal, Rothko, Stella, Calder, Rauschenberg and others. Norman has held numerous solo exhibitions of his photography in Hong Kong and the UK and has joined many joint exhibitions throughout East Asia. His photographs are widely collected in Hong Kong and overseas.
Impermanence will open with a cocktail reception on Thursday 12th May 2011 at Picture This Gallery, 13th floor, 9 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong., from 6pm to 9pm The photographer will attend the opening event and the exhibition will run until Saturday 28th May.
