http://www.denkgallery.com/exhibitions/solo-project
EXHIBITION DATES:
FEBRUARY 10 – APRIL 7, 2018
RECEPTION: SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2018 6-8 PM
(Los Angeles, CA) – DENK gallery is pleased to announce Solo Project, a presentation of photographic works by German-born British artist Phil Griffin. The exhibition will feature a selection of images drawn from the artist’s more extensive body of work entitled Surrender. Trained as a dancer, Griffin’s visual interests reside in the dynamic and primal energy of movement. He explores themes of submission and acquiescence as expressed physically in the active and ecstatic thralls of dance. These moments, the product of individual relent and abandon offer a vulnerability through which Griffin feels the true inner self is revealed. Captured in images that convey the struggle, exhaustion, and ecstasy of motion and physical release, the body be-comes a vessel through which the intangible and unseen is accessed by proxy.
Invited by Jan Fabre, multidisciplinary artist, and choreographer, to document his Mount Olympus project with the Troubleyn theater company, now under his direction, Griffin returns to the theater where he had performed some 30 years ago as a dancer. The full Surrender series includes 40 images and a feature-length documentary capturing the performers in varying states of stillness and action.
The photographs, bordering at times on the abstract, often convey the frenetic flutter of the body reduced to only an immaterial energy gliding across film, seized as a momentary impression rather than a finite form. This kinetic quality produces an ambiguous image charged with instability and latent impermanence, one that is both painterly and gestural rather than still or confined.
