Thursday, June 29, 2017

Duane Michals retrospective at Fundación Mapfre - Barcelona

 
Duane Michals - Magritte with hat

Duane Michals has long been one of my favorite and most admired photographers. Michals is his own person, his work is original, loaded and clearly the man has a sense of humour and a big heart. What's more he is outside the system and what better place to be.

Duane Michals' show at Fundación Mapfre runs until September 20. Jonas Cuénin writing in the Eye of Photography has this to say: The American photographer Duane Michals is the subject of a retrospective exhibition on view until September 20th at Fundación MAPFRE’s Casa Garriga i Nogués exhibition space in Barcelona.
Working, teaching, chatting or just living: whatever he’s doing, Duane Michals is a man with a big heart which has always made him a photographer unlike any other, totally committed to authenticity and the extraordinary. Love of the imaginative, love of whimsy, humanity, knowledge, curiosity, and humor: now eighty-one, this child of a hardscrabble family from McKeesport, Pennsylvania, seems to have inherited a state of mind like no other, a unique blend of absolute intellectual freedom and the omnipotence of dreams. There’s no resisting his vehemence, his bulwark against facility or the mockery that shields a humility success has never compromised. He wields provocation like a schoolkid dealing with a teacher, laughing at the world and other people, but never contemptuously: just mischievously, throwing down the gauntlet to the rules and regulations. “Doctor Duanus”, as he likes to call himself, combines a gentle gaze and a muted voice with a fondness for plain talk. He uses words to accompany his wonderment at simple things: and the result is a poetry of the everyday that segues into a theater of the fantastic when, to add a touch of romance, he mutates into a street clown or an actor in a drama. It’s almost as if the atmosphere of Georges Méliès’ films was back, and with it a hankering for tales of the marvelous. There’s a part of Duane Michals that is neither photographer or artist, two words almost banished from his vocabulary but something else: a being beyond any pigeonholing, a kind of kid-style magician.

You can read the full article HERE.
 
Duane Michals - Hockney



No comments: