The new show launched last night at Kentish Town’s cavernous contemporary art gallery – and it was as heaving as always (on what was a particularly balmy evening, too).
Its title You Are Looking at Something That Never Occurred might sound like a vintage Pet Shop Boys song to readers of a certain age – but it actually refers to photography’s ability to blur fact and fiction.
Over four rooms the show brings together 14 artists, including Anne Collier, Richard Prince and Wolfgang Tillmans, with works spanning 1977 to the present day. There’s everything from street photography to cinematic staging – and plenty of digital manipulation, of course. It’s all about engaging the viewer, after all.
In the main hall don’t miss the arresting images by Christopher Williams and Canadian Sara Cwynar’s focus on our relationship with objects of desire.
But the back gallery provides the biggest hits. On three walls, Tillmans has a 31-part installation with his typically low-key aesthetic and moments of intimacy laid bare.
Round the corner Elad Lassry’s work is the polar opposite, all deceptively clear portraiture and provocative eyes-to-camera subjects that somehow suggest a deeper story beneath the surface.
Most memorable of all? Andreas Gursky’s jaw-dropping large-scale tableau (see pic, above) of brokers in late nineties Chicago gesticulating at monitors or slumped against scraps of paper. There’s movement and panic, and a lack of individual perspective that’s truly captivating.
That, for one, feels like something that definitely occurred.