Richard Mosse’s solo show, Infra, opens Thursday, November 17, 6-8pm at Jack Shainman Gallery in Chelsea. Laumont Studio is pleased to have been involved in the production for this show including scanning, mounting, framing and printing.
From the gallery’s press release:
On his journeys in eastern Congo, Mosse photographed rebel groups of constantly switching allegiances, fighting nomadically in a jungle war zone plagued by frequent ambushes, massacres, and systematic sexual violence. These tragic narratives urgently need telling but cannot be easily described. Like Joseph Conrad a century before him, Mosse discovered a disorienting and ineffable conflict situation, so trenchantly real that it verges on the abstract, at the limits of description.
In his extraordinary series of essays on Africa, The Shadow of the Sun, Ryszard Kapuściński reminds us that “The richness of every European language is a richness in ability to describe its own culture, represent its own world. When it ventures to do the same for another culture, however, it betrays its limitations, underdevelopment, semantic weakness.” Infra offers a radical rethinking of how to depict a conflict as complex and intractable as that of the ongoing war in the Congo. The results offer a fevered inflation of the traditional reportage document, underlining the tension between art, fiction, and photojournalism. Infra initiates a dialogue with photography that begins as an intoxicating meditation on a broken documentary genre, but ends as a haunting elegy for a vividly beautiful land touched by unspeakable tragedy.
Richard Mosse (born 1980, Ireland) is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship 2011, with a generous supplemental stipend from the Leon Levy Foundation. Mosse, currently based in New York, earned an MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art in 2008 and a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, London, in 2005. He will have solo exhibitions at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, North Carolina, and the Savannah College of Art and Design, Hong Kong, in January, 2012. Infra was included in Dublin Contemporary 2011 and will be shown in solo exhibitions at Open Eye, Liverpool and Belfast Exposed in 2012. Mosse has exhibited work at Tate Modern, London, the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Kunsthalle Munich, among others. Mosse’s public collections include the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, the Martin Z. Margulies Collection, Miami, the Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City. In 2012, Mosse will begin a residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin.
Aperture Foundation and Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting are publishing a monograph of Richard Mosse’s Infra, with an introduction by Adam Hochschild, which will be available to view at the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm. For additional information and photographic material please contact Elisabeth Sann at elisabeth@jackshainman.com.