ABRIE FOURIE - OBLIQUE

Dal Friday 20 March 2009
al Wednesday 06 May 2009

Orari:
Tue/Sat 11am/7pm; and by appointment

We are delighted to announce the inaugural solo show of Abrie Fourie at Vladimiro Izzo Gallery in Berlin. Vladimiro Izzo Gallery is a new Italian gallery located at Schumannstr. 14b next to the Deutsches Theater.
After working for some years for a gallery in Naples, Vladimiro Izzo decided to start his own gallery in Berlin, for him the most dynamic, creative, and exciting city in Europe. Starting on March 20th, the gallery will promote cultural diversity in Berlin by hosting a variety of international artists whose work captures this rich political and historical moment in time, stirs our consciousness and challenges societal conformity and indifference.
We start our exciting program with the first German solo show of South African born artist Abrie Fourie who works with the images and symbols of ordinary life, creating a unique yet common cultural iconography of the contemporary world. Living in and travelling between worlds as vastly different as Switzerland, India, South Africa, Germany and Chile, he explores the familiar zones of home with the same interest and curiosity as he does the unknown, not so much defining a place, as circling the relationship between spaces, sign and self.
Henri Cartier-Bresson said that “in photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif.” Likewise, for Fourie, the mundane is a form of poetry, which is brought to light through his focused attention, in photographs taken from unsual perspectives.
He reveals, unexpectedly, not what is hidden, but what is so obvious or commonplace, so not to be noticed. National boundaries disintegrate as a camouflaged T - shirt disappears on a couch with a leaf motif, a children’s drawing is lost, and found, in a park, or the wall of a house (in Soweto, South Africa) tells its battered history.
For this solo exhibition, he presents a selection of photographs that document a personal journey of encounters and meditations, through different places, with the same wide-open eyes.
Fourie’s exhibition promises an experience that may just invade the viewer’s consciousness on multiple levels. He shows aluminium-mounted prints that are not digitally re-worked since it is all about the moment of discovering and shooting a specific scene. Fourie somehow drains these events of their narrative and presents them as an arrangement of tones, textures and design. At the same time though, he manages to harness the energy and power of the action that caused them. In “Printer’s View, Old Dehli, India”, the image is blurry and looks like the first known photograph taken by Joseph Nicéphore Nièpce: It could be a reference, it could be about nostalgia, or it could be about perception. The narrative is open but always accessible. It is a play between abstract and real forms, between different traces and ideas, between details and big scale overviews. It is a question of
one’s own perspective. His photographer’s view consists in an individual way of seeing the world, combined with a natural aptitude for creation and universal sympathy. In order to give meaning to the world, one has to feel involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. Fourie is involved and he will involve the viewer as well.
Abrie Fourie was born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1969 and lives since 2007 in Berlin, going back and forth South Africa and Germany. He gained recognition through major solo shows such as those at Johannesburg Art Gallery or the Museum for African Art in New York, through international group shows in among others Amsterdam, Tokyo, and Brussels and biennials like the Luanda Trienal or Venice Biennial. His work is presented in many collections worldwide. Occasionally, he also worked as a lecturer at the Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria and presently as a curator for Map South Africa. He was nominated for the prestigious FNB Vita Art Award in 2002 (South Africa’s Turner Prize). In 2003 Fourie was announced the winner in the photography category of the Brett Kebble Art Awards. In 2007 Fourie was announced one of the seven winners of the Spier Contemporary 2007 Competition.
For further information, please contact the gallery.

Opening: 20 March 2009, 7pm

20 March till 6 May 2009

VLADIMIRO IZZO GALLERY
Schumann Strasse 14/b
D-10117 Berlin
tel +4930-24 08 34 80
fax +4930-24 08 34 81
www.vladimiroizzogallery.com
info@vladimiroizzogallery.com