NYAB Event - Josef Koudelka “Twelve Panoramas 1987

Josef Koudelka “Twelve Panoramas 1987 – 2012”

The Pace Gallery (508 W 25th St)

This event has ended.

New York—Pace and Pace/MacGill presents Koudelka: Twelve Panoramas 1987-2012. Selected by the artist to represent his best panoramic work from the past three decades, the twelve large-scale, black-and-white photographs depict the vestiges of industrial areas and coastal landscapes in Europe and the Middle East. To accompany the exhibition, Pace/MacGill will publish a catalogue with an essay by Julian Cox, Founding Curator of Photography and Chief Curator of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Since 1986, Josef Koudelka has embraced and employed the expansive compositional format of the panorama. From his commissioned investigation of the French-English region impacted by the Channel Tunnel for La Mission Photographique Transmanche project, to his exploration of the political climate in Israel and Palestine, and his most recent documentation of the persistence of classicism along the Mediterranean rim, Koudelka has continuously used panoramic cameras to showcase terrains that have been significantly shaped, altered, and even devastated by the effects of industry, time, and territorial conflict.

Measuring over eight feet in length–a scale which transforms the works into life-size picture windows–Koudelka’s photographs are devoid of human figures but not of human presence. The scars of mining operations, industrial exploitation, and constructed physical barriers are evident in these sites, intensified by the photographer’s vantage point and use of graphic contrast. Koudelka’s panoramas are not conventional, picturesque vistas; rather, these dramatically desolate yet strikingly beautiful images stand as records of the ruins of modern civilization and archeological documents of mankind’s complex and chaotic relationship with nature and power. Julian Cox observes:

There is something somber and disquieting about Koudelka’s panoramas. On the one hand, they are statements of fact and unstintingly particular in what they describe, but, on the other, they also function as a system of ideas as well as a ravishing feast for the eyes. Their beauty captivates, even if they do not provide an entirely hopeful picture for today or tomorrow… . They are expansive in form and yet, repeatedly, their bounding frame formulates space by limiting it, simultaneously lavishing the imagination with a sense of vision beyond what is shown.