Two great exhibits as seen by me this week: Anne Hardy at
Bellwether, and Robert Polidori at
Edwynn Houk.
Anne Hardy is British artist who lives and works in London. She creates all of her images in her studio, from found objects, trash, and items given to her by friends. Her images are fantastical interiors that read much like novels- an entire story about the space hinted at by clues.
Hardy's work is so fascinating and inspiring to me. Each image is a result of hours of consideration, play, and maybe even a little love or attachment to the stories she is creating. The subterranean Russian exercise room, the dingy club basement, and the attic greenhouse experiment are all mysterious and inviting. If she took the idea from Jeff Wall's "
Invisible Man" image, she ran with it, and the work is excellent.
Robert Polidori is a well-known master of architectural photography, or as he terms it, "photographs of habitats". A staff photographer for the New Yorker, he works commercially and is represented by
Levine/Leavitt in New York. We studied his "Havana" book in my Architectural Interiors class this winter. I found his Versailles series at Edwynn Houk to be playful, a bit sneaky, and ironic. The portrait of Louis XIV on his side is almost comical. Apparently the French weren't thrilled with this work when he published it in 1997, but I think it's a fascinating and clever look at moments of the castle's restoration.
