Linda Fregni Nagler – Pour commander à l’air
Mostra personale
Comunicato stampa
We are pleased to announce the second solo show by artist Linda Fregni Nagler at Galleria Monica De Cardenas in Milan.
The works of Linda Fregni Nagler represent a personal attempt to think about the iconographic conventions that constitute the narrative, cultural and perceptive models of photography.
For this exhibition she presents part of the cycle of works entitled Pour commander à lair, photographs shown in 2014 in Rome in the exhibition of the finalists of the Premio MAXXI.The photographs come from the vast repertoire of imagery of 20th-century journalism. The originals, collected over the years by the artist, have been rephotographed and enlarged in the darkroom. The subjects are figures about to jump or suspended in precarious balance. The choice of this theme is a way of approaching the ambiguous nature of documentary photography. The images show a moment of suspension, but tell us nothing about the fate of the photographed subject. The protagonists, trapped in the 1/30th of a second of a shot, remain poetically suspended between sky and earth.Through the blow-up procedure deployed by the artist it becomes possible to see the manual interventions made to retouch the surface of the original prints, done by editors to improve contrast and to make the images more legible once printed. These "editorial corrections become constituent parts of the works in the show, transforming into painterly marks.
These works are joined by the new photographs of three sculptures made by Linda Fregni Nagler that were inspired by the images of models of machines to control the flight of an aerostat, built for Nadar by Gustave de Ponton d'Amécourt. The mysterious objects, whose size and original materials are not known, have been destroyed. Only the photographs of them made by Nadar in 1863 remain. Starting with them, Linda Fregni Nagler has first reconstructed the machines, and then photographed them from the same vantage point as the French photographer. This work too is a meditation on one of the limits of photography: the subject, closed inside the four sides of the frame, is visible from a single viewpoint, which conceals as much as it reveals.
Linda Fregni Nagler was born in Stockholm in 1976, and lives and works in Milan. She has shown work in solo and group shows, including: Construire une Collection, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (in progress); last year she showed at the MAXXI Museum in Rome and in the exhibition Stay in Love curated by Chris Sharp at the Lisa Cooley Gallery in New York; in 2013 she was invited by Massimiliano Gioni to take part in the 55th Venice Biennale, in a special section curated by Cindy Sherman; in 2012 she participated in the exhibition Le Silence Une Fiction at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco; in 2010 in Beyond the Dust, Artists' Documents Today, in Sindrome Italiana at the Magasin in Grenoble, and Person in Less at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Guarene dAlba and Palazzo Ducale in Genoa. In 2013 MACK Books published her monograph entitled The Hidden Mother, based on the work shown at the Biennale. In 2014 she had a residency at the IASPIS (The Swedish Arts Grants Committees International Programme for Visual Artists) in Stockholm; in 2008 she won the residency at the Dena Foundation in Paris and in 2007 the New York Prize.
IMAGE:
Linda Fregni Nagler, Roof Walker, 2014, gelatin silver print on matt baryt paper, selenium toner, cm 75,5 x 98,5
