Group Show: Starting with a Photograph

Michael Hoppen Contemporary is delighted to collaborate with Saatchi Online for an exhibition of work by six artists, hand-picked from the Saatchi Gallery website. Entitled Starting with a Photograph, the key criterion is that the work must begin with a photographic image -found or made. Beyond that, each piece is unique, sharing only an interest in exploring and expanding the limits of photography. The exhibition will take place at Michael Hoppen Contemporary, situated close to the new Saatchi headquarterson the King's Road in Chelsea, and will open on the 10th September. 

 

The show is curated by Rebecca Wilson, head of development and editor of Saatchi Online with support from Charlotte Nation, director of Michael Hoppen Contemporary.The artists exhibiting range from individuals who have not yet been seen to emerging talents. The work chosen shows not only the wide range of work at Saatchi Online, but also the very high standard presented on thesite. 

 

Saatchi Online was launched in May 2006 and is the leading art gallery website in the world with over 120,000 artists and art students showcasing their work on the site.  

 

Michael Hoppen Contemporary acts for both emerging and renowned photographer artists from all around the world. It was established in 2000 and is a venue for collectors and enthusiasts to come and discover a wide variety of contemporary artists. The gallery has brought many leading photographers of the last 10 years into the public eye,and is a key presence in the international photography community.  

 

Starting with a Photograph represents a synergy between the two art organisations, both of which are interested in the continual and evolving discourse around contemporary art and photography, and seek to promote innovative talent from around the globe.

 

Maurizio Anzeri works with found photographs, embellishing them with coloured threads to create exquisite, almost sculptural works. Anzeri transforms these straight family portraits into three-dimensional objects embued with an intense psychological dimension.

 

David Birkin's work is informed by the history of photography and its relationship to performance in contemporary art. For this exhibition, he invited a soldier from the British Army to stand alone in a room facing a camera and to confess a secret he had never previously revealed. When the soldier felt ready, he opened the camera's shutter and when he was finished, he closed it again so that the photograph's exposure was determined by the length of his confession.

 

Produced from an unpredictable chemical and mixed-media process combining standard photography with cinematography, Robin Cracknell’s photographs are deteriorating documents of childhood disappointments and adult regret.  By scratching and treating the photographs, Cracknell attempts t oimpose on them a layer of truth that film alone can’t contain.

 

Gabriele Beveridge’s Polaroid works draw attention to the artifice of image-making and play with the elision of scale inherent in the photographic process. Found transparencies and photographs she takes herself are collaged, cut up and reprinted as Polaroids.

 

Hannah Dakin explores the limits of surface, texture and visibility within the medium of  photography. Her approach plays with the idea of the photograph as object – she prints on different textures which are then layered, often with a film of wax inbetween–and her works tries to capture a daydreaming-like state when memory is fa rfrom  precise and the boundaries between fact and fiction blur.

 

Korean artist DYKim photographs objects from different angles and then layers the negatives– sometimes as many as 8 – on top of each other. A new image is created out of these photographs, which capture the object in 360 degrees, accentuating its three-dimensional potential and painterly qualities of photography.