As part of the FotoFest 2016 Biennial, Inman Gallery is pleased to invite members and friends of Houston-Leipzig to a private reception and tour of Leipzig artist Edgar Leciejewski’s exhibition of photographs distant past / distant future on March 1, 2016, at 6:30 p.m. at 3901 Main Street, Houston, TX 77002. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with Inman, and his first solo show in the United States.
FotoFest is a biennial international exhibition of photography and photo-related art in Houston. The art is exhibited in galleries and public spaces. Over 1,150 artists participated in 2014, and overall festival attendance was estimated at 275,000 people from 43 countries. The FotoFest 2016 Biennial is expected to draw many more.
Following is a description of the artist’s work and the art he created on a solitary island off the northeast coast of Newfoundland in the Atlantic Ocean.
In 2014 Edgar Leciejewski was an artist-in-residence at the Fogo Island Arts Residency, off the coast of Newfoundland. The island, about a hundred square miles with a population of just over 2,000, was a change of pace for the Leipzig-based artist, and he devoted the solitary half-year to photographing his spare surroundings. All the ingredients for sweeping romantic vistas were there: isolation, open skies and rugged countryside. But Leciejewski’s mode of description – a plainspoken mix of close observation and introspection – leaves little room for spectacle. His photographs of sunsets are (except for the occasional contrail) uniformly cloudless gradients from brilliant orange to deep blue, with no land visible. His photographs of rocks are so closely cropped as almost to rob them of context. The images manage to be specific accounts of just about anywhere.
Leciejewski distances his photographs from their point of origin still further with simple but pointed modifications. For Horizon two lines he turns his sunsets sideways and arranges them horizon-to-horizon, constructing a luminous grid that seems to crest and fall in vertical bands. The actual sky is impossible to compete with, but in their new orientation the reproductions are freshly imposing: altogether somewhat larger than human scale and pulsing with light that no longer feels quite natural. Leciejewski’s specially designed frames – painted white closest to the horizon and a mid-range blue on the other three sides – amplify the rhythm of the photographs, pushing the deepest blues back as the orange shines forward. For his Rough Form series, Leciejewski prints his pictures of rocks twice: first glossy and in color, and then matte, slightly smaller, and in black-and-white. He turns the color photograph upside down and centers the black-and-white version on top. Corralled into a thin perimeter band and relieved of their descriptive duties, the inverted landscape’s colors flash brighter. Shadows gleam dark blue. A ruddy spray of lichen jumps off the surface. A pool of sky settles in a low corner. Our attention drifts from the austere rocks at center stage out to the margins, where a more vivid, more lifelike but also more abstract version of reality is on display.
The exhibition opens Friday, February 26, and continues through April 2, 2016.