Back

15 July 2010

Diane Arbus Show Opens at Nottingham Contemporary

The striking and profoundly original work of legendary American photographer Diane Arbus is the subject of a major exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary this summer. The exhibition brings together some 70 black-and-white photographs, spanning the artist’s career from the mid-1950s until her untimely death in 1971.

This outstanding selection of Arbus’s images was put together by the donor of the ARTIST ROOMS collection, Anthony d’Offay, in collaboration with the artist’s estate, and is one of the finest collections of her work in existence. The exhibition also features a small number of additional loans from a private collection, including an early self-portrait, taken when Arbus was pregnant with her first child in 1945.

Following the success of 2009, 21 museums and galleries across the UK in 2010 are showing 25 ARTIST ROOMS exhibitions and displays from the collection created by the curator and collector, Anthony d’Offay, and acquired by the nation in February 2008. ARTIST ROOMS on Tour with the Art Fund has been devised to enable this collection held by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland, to reach and inspire new audiences across the country, particularly young people.

Diane Arbus is the first time an exhibition is devoted to the photographer’s work in Nottingham. Occupying Galleries 3 and 4 at Nottingham Contemporary, it will feature some of her most celebrated images, including Tattooed man at a carnival, Md. 1970, and Young man and his pregnant wife in Washington Square Park, N.Y.C 1965. It will also include her lesser-known early work in 35 mm, as well as a very rare portfolio of original prints, A box of ten photographs, which Arbus produced shortly before her suicide in 1971. This includes perhaps her most iconic image, Identical twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967.

Diane Arbus is one of the most significant photographers of the twentieth century, an influential figure whose compellingly honest style of photography paved the way for the work of many contemporary photographers and artists. Her distinctive approach is marked by the directness of her portraiture, and by her ability to find the familiar in the strange, and discover the unusual in the ordinary. Arbus undertook ‘to photograph everybody’, including circus and freak-show performers, transvestites, nudists and people with learning disabilities. The resulting portraits are bold and frank, but they also reflect the level of trust that Arbus worked hard to establish with her subjects, creating a complex, collaborative relationship that underpins the images, and invests them with much of their power.

To find out more information about ARTIST ROOMS on Tour please visit www.artfund.org/artistrooms. To see the full ARTIST ROOMS collection please visit www.tate.org.uk/artistrooms and www.nationalgalleries.org/artistrooms
 

Bookmark with:  Delicious Digg Reddit Facebook StumbleUpon