UBS Openings: Photography
selected works from The UBS Art Collection at Tate Modern
UBS Openings: Photography, features over forty photographic works by influential American and European artists such as Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Ruff.
Most of the works included were produced during the 1990s, when photography became widely accepted as an art form of equal status to painting or sculpture and many will be on public view in the UK for the first time.
Works by Andreas Gursky include an iconic photograph, 99 Cent, 1999. This large scale work (207 x 336 cm) appears like a photographic field of colour, showing row after row of brightly packaged goods in a US store. There are also two works in the display by the German photographer Candida Höfer, who has produced a number of widely acclaimed photographs showing the interiors of public spaces, such as museums, libraries or universities. Often they are without people, though rows of chairs or other elements refer to the bodies absent at the time the picture is taken. Both photographers have taken an overview or ‘bird’s eye’ view of the environments they encounter.
Massimo Vitali’s tableaux of human life are created in his native Italy. Two panoramic photographs on display feature social gatherings and groups of people from a specially constructed vantage point. The Riccione Diptych shows the Adriatic seaside resort of Riccione for example, where rows of colourful, striped deck-chairs are spread across the beach, their occupants turned to face the sun. Like Vitali, Walter Niedermayr photographs people at leisure, although he has focused on alpine landscapes. Two photographs show a mountain top densely populated with tourists. Olivo Barbieri’s photographs give the impression of reducing both people and buildings to tiny ant-like proportions and the images are often blurred. The artist achieves this by taking aerial photographs from a helicopter and using a tilt-shift lens.
These photographs draw attention to the details present in the most mundane situations; to places, buildings, objects or people we may pass by during the course of daily existence. The artists included are Beat Streuli, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Fischli and Weiss and a large series of sixty portrait photographs by Thomas Ruff.
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