NYAB Event - Marcos Zimmerman "South American Nudes"

Marcos Zimmerman "South American Nudes"

hpgrp gallery

This event has ended.

hpgrp GALLERY NEW YORK presents South American Nudes, a collection of photographs by Argentinian artist Marcos Zimmerman. Depicting figures that represent archetypes found in South American society—farmers, factory workers, soccer players, wealthy businessmen, fathers, friends, lovers, and dreamers—Zimmerman says of the exhibition: “All the men photographed here are but one man. One man echoed thousands of times throughout South America.”

Zimmerman, who has written extensively on the testimonial capabilities of a photograph—it’s ability to alleviate suffering, the inherent truth that it captures in a single frame, the beauty of the world that it reveals—has spent most of his career traveling thousands of miles across Argentina, photographing images of his homeland. His intent is to “record those presences to be found in
hundreds of places within our country, which make us what we are, and will remain
forever in the heart of one who has seen them."

At the exhibition at hpgrp gallery, Zimmerman exposes the men who form the foundation of South American society in their most vulnerable state—in the nude. Identified by nothing but their bodies and their surroundings, these men represent the inherent tension between how the men want to be perceived—embodied by the ways they present themselves to the world—and how they are viewed because of the environment that they inhabit. “The way they have exhibited themselves in front of the camera shows their history, their fears, their hopes. The scenes behind them hint at another half to their lives.”

South America has a long and complicated history of oppression, dictatorships, and slavery. Zimmerman captures the inherent struggle of South American people to find freedom and self-expression, while at the same time confining them within the frames of the photograph, an act of binding that heightens their struggles to shed the burdens of their histories. “I set out to photograph men whose faces showed signs of the land where they were born, its landscape and climate. Bodies showing traces of their past, hinting at their ways of loving and perhaps even providing an indication of their future. As part of this search, I have portrayed children who had not yet lived their lives, young men who had just very recently discovered their manhood, mature fathers, and old men whose lives had almost run their course, and who no longer had any fears. I photographed youths who had the appearance of their countries, gauchos as sensual as their land, and virile males with the scent of South America upon them.”

Artfully depicted in the tradition of nude photographs by artists such as Chuck Close and Richard Avedon, and as iconic as the portraits taken by the iconic 20th century photographer August Sander, the exhibition is a romantic, moving, and thought-provoking unveiling of the people that together form the concept of “man” in South American society.

Marcos Zimmerman is a photographer and writer born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1950. Since 1982, he has published twelve books of photography, and has exhibited his photographs in numerous exhibitions around the world in locations such as Japan, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Spain, Italy, France, and the United States. His work is in the permanent collections of Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and the Museum of Modern Art, both in Buenos Aires; The Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts and The Kyushu Sangyo Museum in Japan; The Museum of Fine Arts of Houston in the United States; and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

Along with building his body of work as a photographer, he is currently contributing to the cultural magazines Ñ and Radar of Buenos Aires, and writing a series of short stories on photographers.

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