PHOTOGRAPHIC GALLERY HIPPOLYTE
Kalevankatu 18 B, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
+ 358 9 612 33 44, www.hippolyte.fi
Opening hours: Tue-Fri 12-17, Sat-Sun 12-16

Marina Gadonneix
14.9.-7.10.2007

The deepening autumn nights are brightened at Hippolyte by an exhibition of work by the French photographic artist Marina Gadonneix. Glowing with colours and artificial lights, the photos depict television studios and monumental empty stage sets. Part of the peinture.fr//maalaus.fi exhibition project presented at Gallery Hippolyte and the Kerava Art Museum, Gadonneix's works present a dialogue between image and its representation. What is a staged image? How does staging become an element in a pictorial composition?

Emblematic of the society of spectacle derided by the French philosopher Guy Debord, television studios and stage sets are transformed in Marina Gadonneix's hands into places of abstraction. Gadonneix's photos bring out the virtuality of the spaces, their functionality coming to bloom at the interface between the figurative and the abstract. Gadonneix's works are dialogues within spaces staged along the boundaries of the abstract, creating interesting points of confluence between the history of photography as staging and the history of abstraction.

Marina Gadonneix (born 1977) lives and works in Paris. Her work has appeared in solo shows and group exhibitions in France as well as internationally. Gadonneix visited Finland in summer 2006 in an artist exchange programme organised by the French cultural centre, Center of Photography Peri, the Northern Photographic Centre in collaboration with the Union of Artist Photographers and le Pôle Image Haute Normandie, Conceil Regional de Haute Normandie and POC.

 

Marina Gadonneix: from series Remote Control, 2005-2006

Thanks: Galerie Esther Woerdehoff, Paris
For more information please contact:
Exhibition co-ordinator Petronella Gronroos, +358 9 612 33 44, firstname.lastname@hippolyte.fi

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The show is part of the Conversations exhibition project.

Bringing together French and Finnish contemporary art, the Conversations exhibition project is curated by the French art philosopher and critic Cécile Marie. Marie has previously also curated vasta maalattu, peinture fraiche exhibitions in Paris 2004 and Kerava 2005. Conversations creates a dialogue between the abstract and the realist approach, a discussion about the place of colour, image and narrative elements in contemporary painting.

The exhibition is part of the most extensive review of French contemporary art even seen in Finland to date. It is produced in collaboration with Centre culturel français in Helsinki. In addition to the show at the Kerava Art Museum, the autumn season of French contemporary art also features exhibitions at the Photographic Gallery Hippolyte as well as other galleries in Helsinki, and a review of French design held at the Cable Factory during the Helsinki Design Week.

More information on Conversations:
Kaisa Pohjonen, cultural projects
+358 9 2510 2118
Centre culturel français