HARRY GRUYAERT
15 September – 31 October 2015

Open: 11:00 – 16:30, Wednesday – Friday

The first solo UK exhibition of work by Magnum Photographer Harry Gruyaert will open at the Magnum Print Room in September. The exhibition will showcase over 30 works by Gruyaert who is known for his revolutionary and experimental use of colour.

The exhibition will span Gruyaert’s work from 1972 to 2004, shot in diverse locations including Bosnia, Belgium, Egypt, France, Ireland, Mali, Russia and the US. Greatly influenced by the American tradition epitomised by Saul Leiter, William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, and by the cinema aesthetics of François Truffaut and Michelangelo Antonioni, Gruyaert created a highly personal palette of saturated tones. His work helped to define a new territory for color photography: an emotive, non-narrative, and boldly graphic way of perceiving and communicating the world.

Also on display will be a small selection of Gruyaert’s photographs from his distorted television images series, shot directly from a broken television screen on which he could manipulate the colours. The four works on show are of the 1972 Munich Olympics and are a parody of the conventions of the current affairs photostory. This body of work was controversial when first exhibited in Paris in 1974, viewed as a disrespectful assault on the culture of television with a radical challenge to the conventions of press photography. Gruyaert himself views these works as the closest thing to journalistic photography he has ever made.
The exhibition coincides with the launch of the first English language monograph of Gruyaert’s work. Harry Gruyaert, published by Thames & Hudson, includes a foreword by François Hébel and 80 colour illustrations, RRP £40.Continue Reading..