In the Eye of the Beholder

Rineke Dijkstra was born in 1959 in Sittard, The Netherlands. Dijkstra attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam (1981–1986). Since the early 1990s, Dijkstra has produced a complex body of photographic and video work, offering a contemporary take on the genre of portraiture. Her large-scale color photographs of young, typically adolescent subjects recall 17th-century Dutch painting in their scale and visual acuity. The minimal contextual details present in her photographs and videos encourage us to focus on the exchange between photographer and subject and the relationship between viewer and viewed. Solo exhibitions include the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2019); The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2018); DePont Museum, Tilburg (2018); Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2018); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2017); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2017) and the National Gallery of Art, Washington (2016). A mid-career retrospective of Dijkstra’s work was exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2012. In 2013 the first comprehensive film retrospective of her work, The Krazy House, was shown at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. Dijkstra has been honored with the Hasselblad Foundation International Award (2017); Macallan Royal Photographic Society Award, London (2012); Citibank Photography Prize (1999); Werner Mantz Award (1994) and the Kodak Award Netherlands (1987), among others. Photo: Gerald Van Der Kaap

Santiago Sierra was born in 1966 in Madrid, Spain. After graduating in Fine Arts at Madrid’s Complutense University, Sierra completed his artistic training in Hamburg, where he studied under professors F. E. Walter, S. Brown and B. J. Blume. His beginnings are linked to alternative art circuits in the capital of Spain—El Ojo Atómico, Espacio P—although he would go on to develop much of his career in Mexico (1995–2006) and Italy (2006–2010). His work has always exerted a great influence on artistic literature and criticism. Sierra’s oeuvre strives to reveal the perverse networks of power that inspire the alienation and exploitation of workers, the injustice of labour relations, the unequal distribution of wealth produced by capitalism, the deviance of work and money, and racial discrimination in a world scored with unidirectional (south-north) migratory flows. Revisiting and refiguring certain strategies characterising the Minimalist, Conceptual and Performance Art of the 1960s and 1970s, Sierra interrupts flows of capital and goods (Obstruction of Freeway With a Truck’s Trailer, 1998; Person Obstructing a Line of Containers, 2009); he hires labourers to reveal their precarious circumstances (20 Workers in a Ship’s Hold, 2001); he explores the mechanisms of racial segregation derived from economic inequalities (Hiring and Arrangement of 30 Workers in Relation to Their Skin Color, 2002; Economical Study of The Skin of Caracans, 2006); and refutes the stories that legitimate a democracy based on state violence (Veterans of the Wars of Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq Facing the Corner, 2010–2012; Los encargados, 2012).

Tom Friedman was born in 1965 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in graphic illustration in 1988 from Washington University in St. Louis, and his Master of Fine Arts in sculpture in 1990 from the University of Illinois in Chicago. He has had solo exhibitions at spaces such as South London Gallery, London; Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo; Fondazione Prada, Milan; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago as well as the São Paulo Biennale. He had a solo exhibition at Magasin III in 2010, for which an exhibition catalog was published.

John Coplans was born in 1920, he grew up between London and South Africa. He died in 2003 in New York. Coplans was known as an artist, curator, museum director and art critic. In 1962 he founded the the magazine Artforum with Phil Leider. In the 1980s he began his career in photography, and immediately received widespread acclaim. Coplans described his work approach 1984 as follows: I remember that in Akron I had taken photographs of myself in the nude with a timer; it has taken me these couple of years, trying this and that subject matter, to look at the nude self-portraits and recognize I had already struck gold and I didn’t know. I daydream. In one dream, I travel down my genes and visit remote ancestors, both male and female. Inspired by these journeys to the past, and the earlier nude self-portraits I had made of my body in Akron, I begin directing an assistant as she takes photographs of my body. To remove all references to my current identity, I leave out my head. I don’t know how it happens, but when I pose for one of these photographs, I become immersed in the past. The experience is akin to Alice falling through the looking glass. I use no props; I pose against a neutral, white background, and before I know what has happened, I am lost in a reverie. I am somewhere else, another person, or a woman in another life. At times, I’m in my youth. Sometimes (but very rarely), it seems that a contemporary event triggers the image, but when I think about it, I realize I have merely relived an episode that happened long before. The process is a strange one. I never know from one moment to the next if this power to time-travel will dry up, or what the next set of photographs will be. In the beginning, I make very few images, no more than nine a year, on the average. Portrait: John Coplans, Self portrait, Sideways, No 3, 2001, silver gelatin print, 127×203 cm (ed. 2/6).

Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff was born in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1967, where she lives and works. She has studied at the Sven Winquists School of Photography, Gothenburg, 1987–1989; Konstfack, Stockholm, 1991–1994 and the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts from 1995–1996. von Hausswolff ’s photographs, which are often psychologically charged and ambiguous, allude to the liminal space between fiction and reality. Her practice spans many areas, but some recurring subjects in her artistic work are social power structures, psychoanalysis and violence. von Hausswolff ’s expression is closely associated with carefully staged photographs, the aesthetic of which brings to mind photo documentary material from criminological investigations. She also investigates and depicts the domestic sphere according to the same premises. The carefully arranged photographs, where seemingly quotidian objects and environments in the home are portrayed as psychologically loaded, are multi-faceted and suggestive. She has had solo exhibitions at ARoS, Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark (2013); Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Gothenburg (2008); Baltic Art Center, Visby, Sweden (2005); the National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2002); Bildmuseet Umeå, Sweden (1998) and the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Kiev, Ukraine (1997). She was included in the Nordic Pavilion of the 48th Venice Biennale (1999) and the 23rd Biennial of São Paulo, Brazil (1996). von Hausswolff ’s work is included in the collections of the Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark; Astrup Fearnley Collection, Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo; Fonds National d ́Art Contemporain, Paris; Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg; KIASMA, Helsinki; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. von Hausswolff ’s work has been represented in a solo exhibition at Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art, Ich Bin Die Ecke Aller Raüme, in 2008. Magasin III has one of the most extensive collections of her work in the world.

Miroslav Tichý was born in 1926 in Kyjov, Moravia, Czech Republic, where he died in 2011. After studying at the Academy of Arts in Prague (1945–1948), Tichý withdrew to a life in isolation in his hometown of Kyjov. In the late 1950s he quit painting and became a distinctive Diogenes-like figure. From the end of the 1960s he began to take photographs mainly of local women, in part with cameras he made by hand. He later mounted them on hand-made frames, added finishing touches in pencil, and thus moved them from photography in the direction of drawing. The result is works of strikingly unusual formal qualities, which disregard the rules of conventional photography. Selected solo exhibitions include Dominik Art Projects, Krakow (2009); Centre George Pompidou, Paris (2008); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2008); Museum of Modern Art Frankfurt (2008); Central European House of Photography, Bratislava (2007); Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (2006) and Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich (2005). Group exhibitions include Biennale of Sydney (2008); The National Gallery, Prague (2008); Magasin 3 Konsthall Stockholm (2008); Centre George Pompidou, Paris (2007); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Wörlen, Passau (2006) and Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporaneo de Seville (2004). Tichý’s work is included in the collections of Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Kantonales Museum des Kantons Thurgau, Thurgau; La maison rouge, Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photo: Roman Buxbaum.