Irene Kung: Trees II
June 8 – 30, 2018
Santa Fe, NM– Chiaroscuro is pleased to present Irene Kung’s Trees II; a portfolio of nine large scale photographs on view, June 8 – 30, in the main gallery. This exhibition builds on last year’s Kung Trees show, with all new images. While her chosen medium is photography, the work transcends the photographic image and provides a strong emotional reaction to the viewer. Kung explains, “I shoot the tree at the moment, not for what it is, but for what I feel, what it brings about in me.”
Irene Kung is a Swiss photographer, who started her career as an abstract painter, and approaches her photographic image making in a very painterly way, changing the context of her subject through digital manipulation. Kung’s photographs are large scale, with the main subject, in this case a tree; central, strong and clear. The digital manipulation of the image mostly occurs in the background, which works to accentuate the form, “personality” and power of the tree. “In my photographs I am able to return the tree to what I felt standing in front of it. This is the way I perceive my work, stripping away what is not essential in order to show a tree as it really is, as I feel it. This is intuition; it is the irrational. What is rational may deceive us, feelings don’t.”
Irene Kung was born in Switzerland and trained as a painter. In recent years she expanded her repertoire to include photography, and has achieved international recognition with exhibitions in New York, London, Milan and more recently in Beijing and Moscow. She has exhibited at the Bozar Museum in Brussels, Belgium, at the Palazzo della Ragione in Milan and in the spectacular surroundings of the Certosa San Giacomo in Capri, Italy. Her work has appeared in numerous international magazines such as The New York Times Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, Sette del Corriere della Sera, China Daily and was selected by the international jury at ParisPhoto 2010. She was invited by Contrasto to contribute to EXPO 2015 with a solo show at the Fruit and Legumes Cluster featuring 26 photographs of fruit trees. The recently published book Trees follows The Invisible City, on architecture photographs, that was published in 2012 in English, Italian, French and Chinese.
Chiaroscuro has represented Kung’s photography since 2008. This is Kung’s fourth solo exhibition at Chiaroscuro, which currently has exclusive representation in the United States.
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High resolution photographs available upon request;
Call John Addison at 505-992-0711 or email john@chiaroscurosantafe.com