Living Room – NYC is thrilled to welcome artists Said Hammouch and Paul Lorenz. Myself / Yourself is a two-man exhibition of photography and digital collage, exploring identity with a potential narrative and emotional reality. The two artists met in Brussels in 2021 while participating in a group exhibition at Work In Progress Gallery. They talked about art and process and the idea of exhibiting together was sparked – a provocative collection of work that appeals to our intimate understandings of our ‘selves.’ Minimalistic and slyly suggestive, Lorenz and Hammouch use abstract notions of connectedness to find that middle ground for photography’s enduring power to picture one individual’s place in relation to another.
Paul Lorenz is an American artist who lives & works in Buckeye, AZ, USA. With an education in Bauhaus architecture, fine art, and music composition, Paul Lorenz has carved an intriguing niche in the international art world by bridging drawing, sound performance, music, and digital collage with the logic and detail of architecture. Photography adds to the artist’s multiplicity of vision. Working with photographers like Robert Siegelman, Hans Schellevis, and Arie Frickus, Lorenz began to explore his internal self. “I let my impulses drive the imagery,” explains Lorenz. “As a mature gay man, I am feeling very open to sharing myself and my immediate surroundings and moments.”
Photographer and visual artist, Saïd Hammouch was born and grew up in Morocco. He roamed the world before settling in Brussels, Belgium, where his artistic career was born. His approach consists of using the photographic medium to experiment with its potential and so create novel visual experiences. Said Hammouch recently graduated from a long-term photography course at Ixelles School of Arts, Brussels. He is particularly interested in the visual aspect of the image where the graphic composition takes precedence over the object depicted. Above all, he tries to move away from the realistic documentation characteristic of photojournalism, to thus bring out the aesthetic and universal potential of a moment or a feeling. Beyond celebrating the graphic aspect of the subject, lights, and shadows, his work is also interested in the formalist aspect of human presence. This is how he sets out to produce images that attempt to seek beauty in environments where chaos reigns or other images that explore themes that are difficult to approach, such as the notion of “Self.”
