“Blackout #17”, 2010
Signed Dan Holdsworth and numbered 1/3 verso. C-print, 184 x 232.5 cm including frame.
Nordin Gallery, Stockholm.
Nordin Gallery, Stockholm, "Blackout", 17 March - 8 May 2011.
For over 30 years, British artist Dan Holdsworth has blended art, science and nature to create works that challenge our perceptions of, and reinvent, the concept of landscape. He studied photography at the London College of Printing (1998) and has exhibited internationally at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, Tate Britain, London, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. His work is included in the collections of the Tate Collection, the Saatchi Collection, the Denver Art Museum Collection, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Nordin Gallery, Stockholm, exhibited Holdsworth's "Blackout" series in 2011. The exhibition was described as follows: "
This is Dan Holdsworth's first exhibition in Scandinavia. Holdsworth is known for his landscape photographs where nature, architecture and technology merge with light and space to create powerful visions of the contemporary world. In Blackout, Holdsworth presents photographs taken in Iceland, a volcanic world where day is night and ice is sooty pitch. Holdsworth's negative images are literally double inversions; their black and white clarity denies all natural logic. The effect is to make the sublime modular and spectacularly tangible: glaciers are transformed with sculpted solidity, as if they could be contained in the palm of a hand, slopes bulge with the scratchy transparency of glass, containing prisms of spectral hues, and expanses of atrementaceous sky bear down, all consuming voids. The actualisation of Holdsworth's images is no less deceptive; these photographs are more reminiscent of handmade media. Their strange aesthetic, like diagrammatic etching, combines ideas of New World exploration and futurism, diving into almost pure abstraction, as illusorily textured and gestural as painting, where the terrain is perceived as a tangible geo-psyche surface, a synaesthetic confusion between sight and touch."