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March 1st 2003 BILL BRANDT The Focus Gallery: March 18th - April 26th 2003 London In March 2003 Focus Gallery opens its doors to a brand new gallery space. Number 3+4 Percy Street offers 3500 square foot gallery area and a lecture theatre area seating 60 – 80 for lectures, workshops and discussion groups. Focus Gallery intends to take the art of photography and collecting photography one step further. Focus Gallery are thrilled to announce their inaugural exhibition BILL BRANDT; the undisputed old master of English photography, surrealist, social commentator, revealer of landscapes and the female form. In photography he is a man apart - a hero of the medium - whose artistic skill few have equalled. Bill Brandt (1904 – 1983) was born in London to British parents of Russian descent and spent his early life largely in Germany. At the age of 24 he went to Paris where he became a pupil of Man Ray. Although Brandt has many imitators, he was first in many things and no other photographer in England has gained such respect for the purity and intensity of his work. In Paris he was exposed to work by the Surrealists who pervaded the artistic life of the city in the late 1920s, their magazines and novel way of using photographs heavily influenced him. De Chirico and Magritte were perhaps Brandt’s heaviest influences. Brandt’s main purpose was social comment, achieved through the accurate documentation of existing social conditions. In the 30’s Brandt returned to England and started work on his book The English at Home (published 1936). This perceptive documentation of English people from widely contrasting backgrounds is seen through the receptive and childlike eye of a stranger, for Brandt, despite his British birth, had spent little time in England. Brandt toured the North of England, where he took moving and often disturbingly beautiful pictures of social deprivation and urban squalor before turning his attention to London, producing the Blackout in London’ series, published in both Lilliput and Life magazine. Brandt’s photographs are incredibly gentle and he often talked about ‘atmosphere’. He once said “I found atmosphere the spell that charged the commonplace with beauty .… familiar, yet strange.” Giving new meaning to the female nude, Brandt showed it in extraordinary distortion and often in incongruous surroundings. He photographed perspectives of portions of anatomy in an eerie nightmarish empty room, or a close-up of an ear against a landscape of Friar’s Bay. Brandt alone seems to acknowledge the fact that at twilight details are minimized and perhaps only enough of the figure, apparently hewn out of stone, is visible to create a masterpiece. Bill Brandt’s work is in collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the International Museum of Photography, Rochester, New York; la Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; and many others. Bill Brandt March 18 – April 26 2003 Focus Gallery – Tuesday to Saturday 11am – 6pm Admission Free – All photography for sale |
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