The exhibition includes about 80 works covering Duane Michals’ artistic career, which began more than 40 years ago: his first photographs taken in the USSR, his self-portraits, his sequences, his photo-texts, up to his latest work, never before shown in Europe, parodying certain trends in contemporary photography and the criticism supporting it.
Over his career Michals has carved out a niche for himself as an artist who has always distanced himself from photography as a tool for recording visible reality and turned it into an agent for calling up thoughts and emotions.
Photography conceived as documentation of reality contains its own limit within itself: it only reveals that which is clearly offered to the eye, omitting the dimension of the unseen, which has metaphysical value to Michals. What he is interested in is questions without answers, as the title of his book suggests: questions about human nature and its mysteries, feelings, death, desires, fears, imagination, time and memory.
The exhibition includes about 80 works covering Duane Michals’ artistic career, which began more than 40 years ago: his first photographs taken in the USSR, his self-portraits, his sequences, his photo-texts, up to his latest work, never before shown in Europe, parodying certain trends in contemporary photography and the criticism supporting it.
Over his career Michals has carved out a niche for himself as an artist who has always distanced himself from photography as a tool for recording visible reality and turned it into an agent for calling up thoughts and emotions.
Photography conceived as documentation of reality contains its own limit within itself: it only reveals that which is clearly offered to the eye, omitting the dimension of the unseen, which has metaphysical value to Michals. What he is interested in is questions without answers, as the title of his book suggests: questions about human nature and its mysteries, feelings, death, desires, fears, imagination, time and memory.