Dan Holdsworth - Photographs London Wednesday, May 18, 2011 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the Artist

  • Exhibited

    Gateshead, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Dan Holdsworth: Blackout, 12 November 2010 - 20 February 2011

  • Literature

    This work will be included in the forthcoming Dan Holdsworth: Blackout, Mack Books, 2011

  • Catalogue Essay

    “Holdsworth’s latest series Blackout (2010) is inspired by the
    infamous power failures in 1960s New York, an event which
    threw millions of people into darkness and prompted panic of
    nuclear attack. Holdsworth’s enormously scaled prints, however,
    are of mountains dazzling with crystalline allure, refracting
    not in light, but rather its total absence. Taken in Iceland, a
    volcanic netherworld where day is night and ice is sooty pitch,
    Holdsworth’s negative images are literal double inversions; their
    black and white clarity negates all natural logic. Their effect
    is sheer magic, the sublime made modular and spectacularly
    tangible: glaciers transform with sculpted solidity, as if they could
    fit in the palm of a hand, escarpments buckle with the scratchy
    translucency of glass, containing prisms of spectral hues, and
    expanses of atrementaceous sky bear down, suffocating as all
    consuming voids. The actualisation of Holdsworth’s images
    is made no less delusive; in reproduction his photographs
    appear as digitalised ideals, however in the flesh they are more
    suggestive of hand-crafted media. Sharp mountain-scape peaks
    or geometric architectural structures often convey a gem-cutters
    draughtsmanship, their strange aesthetics, like diagrammatical
    etching, merges ideas of mapping, engineering and futurism;
    while most others delve into the realm of almost pure abstraction,
    as illusively textured and gestural as painting, conceiving terrain
    as a palpable geo-psyche surface, a synaesthetic confusion
    between sight and touch. Holdsworth’s photographs recast the
    world with renewed mystifying power: as liminal spaces between
    reality and its dissolve. Each one a stolen moment, captured in the
    momentary blink of a shutter: beautiful, mesmerising, larger than
    life, and absolutely inexplicable.”
    (Patti Ellis, in Dan Holdsworth: ‘Blackout’, exh. cat., Stockholm, Nordin Gallery, 2011)

138

Blackout 08

2010
Digital colour coupler print.
175.3 x 224.2 cm (69 x 88 1/4 in).
Signed, dated and numbered in ink on the reverse of the flush-mount. One from an edition of 3 plus 2 artist’s proofs.

Estimate
£9,000 - 11,000 

Sold for £23,750

Photographs

19 May 2011
London