18th Interim Exhibition: Spaces in Transition

  • Artists: Alfonso Batalla, Chris King, Fernando Perez Fraile, Paul Tucker
  • HANMI GALLERY | LONDON
  • 13 – 23 February 2013

Hanmi Gallery is pleased to announce Spaces in Transition, a showcase of work by four photographers who, in their practice, explore the idea of space and in particular, industrial spaces and buildings, often disused, as well as landscapes where human presence is strongly felt.

 

In these photographs, the viewer is often drawn to the physical consequences of the passage of time in the spaces captured, whether in the form of mere decay or the adoption of new uses.

 

The works in Spaces in Transition echo the very space they are being presented in: Hanmi Gallery, which in its current condition is a shell where the structure of the building is exposed.

 

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

 

Alfonso Batalla has been living and working in Bilbao since 1986. Batalla was a finalist in Lux Photography prize in 2012 and was selected for the AENA Photography prize (2011). His most recent exhibitions include Res Nullius BilboArgazki 2012 and Paisajes Reconstruidos Galeria Vanguardia. Bilbao 2011. Batalla’s work is also shown regularly at Galería Ines Barrenechea, Madrid. Batalla’s selection for Spaces in Transition comes from an ongoing project that he calls “Rooms of Solitude”, spaces devoid of people but filled with memories, hopes, frustrations and sorrows.

 

Chris King’s interest in photography started in the early 1970s using a 110 format Agfamatic camera. He applies such photographic fundamentals to digital technology and continues to utilise both analogue and digital. For Spaces in Transition , King has selected work from his most recent body of work in the South of the USA, notably works that present a decaying interior where the viewer witnesses a diferent sort of time capsule, one that quietly lets the world of the 1950s remain – a space in transition, for better or worse.

 

Fernando Pérez Fraile an architect as well as a photographer, owes his early interest in photography to his travels photographing the mysterious Romanesque churches and magnificent gothic cathedrals of his native Castille. His latest solo exhibition, “Spaces of Memory” was held at the Lightgallery in November 2012. The pictures selected for Spaces in Transition were taken during a number of trips to disused industrial spaces. Getting access to these secluded worlds is not always easy. Once inside these secluded worlds Perez Fraile found an intoxicating mix of space, light, texture, geometry and above all, silence.

 

Paul Tucker’s body of work concerns the natural and urban landscape capturing seemingly mundane objects, which on a second reading take on a new significance or strength. For Spaces in Transition Tucker has selected works from his series Under the Surface, images taken during the recent major refurbishment of the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, North East London. These images have an innate sense of the passing of time, be it traces of human activity, or the layers of decoration exposed by the refurbishment of a hitherto much-loved building.