The Magician and The Surgeon
Preview: Friday 29 September 2010, 7 – 9pm
Open: Saturday 30 September and Sunday 31 September, 12 – 5pm
Asmita Sarkar and Katarzyna Slawska are two recent MA Graduates from Gray’s School of Art who will be presenting a joint weekend exhibition of portraits in painting and photographic media.
Asmita Sarkar: Untitled
Katarzyna Slawska: Untitled 1
Katarzyna Slawska: Untitled 2
The similarity and the difference in their work is the focus of the show.
Portrait paintings and portrait photographs serve the same aim; to document reality and to represent identity, but the manifold difference between these two genres reveals itself prominently.
More than half a century ago Walter Benjamin compared the painter to a magician and the photographer to a surgeon:
“The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law.”
In this exhibition realistic portraits and invented, digitally enhanced photographs of people share the same space. Reality and invention mingle. Paintings start with magic but sometimes they come very close to real experiences. Capturing a physical resemblance to the sitter is not sufficient to make a good portrait. It has to contain an assemblage of moment and the experience of looking by the painter. On the other hand the photograph starts from reality, but thanks to digital technology it can take a new invented form, insinuating meaning and significance that are alien to the “real subject” of the photograph.
Asmita Sarkar