Philippe Gronon: Philippe Gronon

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of black-and-white photographs by Philippe Gronon. The exhibition will open on Thursday, May 22 and close on Saturday, July 11, with a reception for the artist on Thursday, May 22 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. This will be the artist's first solo show in the United States.

 

This exhibition consists of Philippe Gronon's gelatin silver prints of wall safes, library card catalogues and elevator doors. Through strict observation, Gronon captures meticulous details with a studio camera and enlarges each print to the exact scale of the object, presenting it unframed and devoid of context. A card catalogue from the Vatican Library, for example, is photographed in its original surroundings and then re-presented on a gallery wall, shifting perception of the object according to the setting.

 

While extremely detailed, the images are conceptual in their abstraction of commonplace and outmoded objects. Presenting his photographs in this dual manner, Gronon anchors each object in time by preserving visual traces of use, and yet strips them of their original functions so that a plurality of meanings may come to mind. Focusing on banal objects that are representative of a common past, Gronon's work considers icons of a collective memory.

 

Philippe Gronon has exhibited widely in Europe in solo shows at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (1997), Centre Régional d'art Contemporain, Montbéliard, France (2001), and Mamco Geneva (2003), and in group exhibitions, including La Force de l'Art and Grand Palais (2006), and Centre Pompidou (2006 and 2007). Gronon was born in France in 1964 and currently lives and works in Malakoff, France.