Nadav Kander The Edge of Things Grand Établissement Thermal, Vichy
7 June - 29 September 2024

Nadav Kander


The Edge of Things
Grand Établissement Thermal, Vichy

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Overview

Exploring selections from the series featured in the celebrated survey exhibition Nadav Kander: The Edge of Things at Grand Établissement Thermal, Vichy, this presentation is supported with text by writer and curator David Campany. 

Despite the camera’s unrivalled ability to describe appearances and to stop time, Kander presents something else too, something that becomes known but cannot be seen, in the ceaseless passage of earthly time and human history. That which escapes the camera’s gaze is a source of disquiet. His work is pensive, laden with possibility. People and places are permitted to keep their secrets. There are images here that recall the histories of painting, sculpture, cinema and literature. There are images that seem to offer what only still photographs can. At one moment we might be encouraged to enter the illusionistic depths of a picture and imagine we were there, before the scene, with the artist himself. Another photograph will bring our eye to contemplate its flat, elusive surface, almost like a work of abstraction. Some images seem to hold almost cosmic measures of time, while others feel bound to our troubled twenty-first century. In this there is something of Baudelaire about Kander’s vision. A delicate mix of the eternal and the ephemeral. The moods shift from the sublime to the melancholy and back again, through tragedy and ecstasy. What emerges is Kander’s willingness to meet the world, experience it as it passes, and mark the experience with an image. - David Campany

Portraits: 1991-present

Some of Nadav Kander’s portraits of actors, politicians, writers and artists are among his most widely known works. In the studio, however, all the trappings of celebrity fall away, allowing something more essentially human to emerge. Fragile, uncertain, conflicted, doubtful. We see familiar faces alongside members of Kander’s own family and people he has met through his working life. Each sitting begins with an open mind. Kander may have some aesthetic ideas, but the process is always collaborative and evolving. He does not know what will emerge but for him, a successful portrait is often a moment of mystery, when it seems there is something not revealed, a secret the image cannot disclose.

Dark Line - The Thames Estuary: 2015-present

Flowing east from London, the River Thames widens out as it meets the North Sea. The landscape transforms into something stark and elemental. Water, land and sky can become almost interchangeable. The light shifts constantly, almost physical in its effects upon the visitor. It is a geography steeped in history. The estuary was once the gateway to and from the British Empire, through which passed goods, resources, money and people. Some dockyards remain, but the region is largely unpopulated. The unstable ground is silt and marsh. Between 2015 and 2017, Nadav Kander made many visits, and still visits now and again. Taking his cue from Chinese Shan Shui scroll paintings (translated as ‘mountain and water’), these vertical images are close to the height of Kander’s own body. The prints are the result of many hours of work, the artist searching to find a visual form that will express what was felt and remembered of the place

Colour Fields: 2001-2003

In all his work, there are moments when Nadav Kander pushes experience to the edge of nothingness. Voids and undefined spaces are as significant to his art as what can be seen and described. The Colour Fields series takes its name from a type of modernist abstract painting, but Kander never strays into complete abstraction. Rather, he places his camera, himself, and the viewer in situations where what feels familiar becomes strange and unknowable. The illumination here is manmade - from factories, highways and car lots. But, in order to see the world, light must bounce back to us. When the light hits nothing and keeps going, the world falls into darkness. Photography’s promise of revelation is shaken, and the search for meaning turns inward.

God's Country: 1995-2009

Utah, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Texas, Louisiana, Indiana. Kander would set out early in the morning, looking speculatively for what resonated for him. Most often these were situations where the sublime power of the natural landscape or light was a backdrop for an everyday situation. A gas station, a fence, a tourist spot - small things that indicate much larger forces in culture and the economy of the USA. The social details are small in these large images. This allows the viewer to come close, moving for a monumental view into the suspended narrative of daily life.

Threads: 1994-present

The pandemic was a time of deep reflection for many of us, including Kander. There was time to look again and his decades of work. Often the dates and even the subject matter seemed less relevant than the deeper forces that have guided him. He began to make connections across different areas of his work. What might be the relation between a tree and human hands? A torso and a landscape? A face and the interior of a room?

Bodies: 2010-2012

There is no more timeless nor timely a subject for art than the human body. The challenge for a photographer is to balance the camera’s often quick and cold treatment of it with something empathetic, searching and slow. Kander has photographed bodies of different kinds throughout his creative life. Youthful and decaying. Classical and contemporary. Disarming and alluring. For the three large nude studies here, marble dust was added to body cream, distancing the flesh and making it monumental.

Half Life – The Chernobyl Disaster: 2004

In 1986 a nuclear reactor exploded in Pripyat, a model Soviet town near Chernobyl. The 40,000 inhabitants were evacuated and dispersed. The large radioactive area was cordoned off indefinitely. In 2004 Nadav Kander gained access as an artist. He photographed the hastily abandoned apartments, schools, hospitals and offices. The silence and stillness of the scenes devoid of human life was profound, but their presence was still palpable. Kander’s camera appears to stand and stare at this paused, post-traumatic world, like a witness. The only sound came from his Geiger counter, monitoring the invisible radioactivity that will be present for hundreds of years. Nature encroaches and all that is manmade is slowly being consumed.
Nadav Kander: The Edge of Things Grand Établissement Thermal, Vichy, France 7 June - 29 September 2024 For the first...
Nadav Kander: The Edge of Things
Grand Établissement Thermal, Vichy, France
7 June - 29 September 2024
 
For the first solo show of the Portrait(s) Photography Festival in Vichy, Nadav Kander: The Edge of Things comprises 100 works from Kander's most iconic series, unpublished photographs, two films and an installation, installed in one of Vichy's most symbolic sites, Le Grand Établissement Thermal. 
 
Plan your visit here
 
Installation views courtesy Nadav Kander; exhibition text courtesy David Campany

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