Chris Marker: Selected Works 1957 - 2011

Selected Works 1957-2011, a survey exhibition that will feature over three hundred photographs and video installations by the late Chris Marker (1921-2012) from 5thOctober – 3rd November 2012 at the Louise Blouin Foundation in London. The exhibition will be celebrated with an opening reception on 8 October 2012.

The show will include seven bodies of work that span nearly six decades of the artist’s career, from KOREANS (1957), an unexpected documentation of a presently arcane country; toPASSENGERS (2008-2011), his last major body of work.

“From his groundbreaking work in film to his episodic photographic essays, Marker has turned a defiant curiosity toward images into poetic journeys about the human condition and the desire to create history,” expresses exhibition curator Matthew Drutt. “A self-described benevolent paprazzo, he has copiously captured his observations of everything from a newly established socialist utopia in North Korea to political marches on the streets of Washington and Paris and everyday life in the Paris Metro. His work is passionate, insightful, personal, and universally significant.”

PASSENGERS marked the artist’s first series of color photographs, and captures the many private and personal actions of commuters in transit on the Paris Métro. In his own words, Chris Marker writes:

The PASSENGERS are reflected in the artificial light, in the glass of the windows, in the metal of the poles and in the eyes of their fellow travellers. We catch them in their moments of beauty, innocence, humor, grief, their tired loneliness. Their image has been frozen. We are transfixed.

KOREANS, photographed in 1957, offers a rare, unrecognizable and obscure glimpse of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, in the years immediately following the Korean War, when the communist country expressed idealist hopes prior to becoming an impenetrable totalitarian territory. Romantic, opulent, and elegant, the images open an often forgotten window into the nascent optimism that once captured the country’s citizens.

OWLS AT NOON PRELUDE: THE HOLLOW MEN, a silent eight-channel video installation, extends an unapologetic portrayal of the ravages of World War I. Borrowing influence from T.S. Eliot, verses of “The Hollow Men”, a poem written amidst the violence of the early 20th century, are interlaced between startling images that document the unfathomable acts and capabilities of human cruelty.

This survey of Chris Marker is the first of its kind for the artist, which continues the Louise Blouin Foundation’s commitment to promoting cultural dialogue and global exchange through the examination of art.

London, England – 25 September 2012 – The Louise Blouin Foundation, in collaboration with Peter Blum Gallery, is pleased to present Chris Marker.

Chris Marker:
Selected Works 1957 - 2011