Didier Goupy - Jens Knigge
"Matière primaire"

Exhibition: 14 October – 31 December 2020
Opening: Wednesday, 14 October, 18h - 21h
Reservation: galerie@ewgalerie.com

The gallery is pleased to present the exhibition, which brings together two artists who seem, at first glance, to oppose each other, Jens Knigge and Didier Goupy. Their series tell two versions of the same story, that of the environment and that of calm.

Didier Goupy's dark wood and silent forest are the source of life, eternal and renewed, planetary lung, in a deep and ancient relationship with humans. Jens Knigge's plastic objects, presented in sublime platinum-palladium prints, precious and much more durable than the object he represents, are material for everyday tools, symbol of technological progress of the twentieth century is now a huge source of pollution, by its brief life and its impossible disappearance.

Jens Knigge's series "Single Used" sublimates transparent disposable crockery in a luminous work of photographic still life that recalls the aesthetics of the New Objectivity. In nine large-format photograms, the Days of a Bag series reflects the fragility of a plastic bag, placed directly on sensitive paper, whose initial manufactured purity is seen crumpling, twisting and damaging. These beautiful and menacing forms evoke jellyfish and remind us of the danger of this pollution to marine animals. Millions of identical plastic bags are lost every day in the environment after a single use. Unique as is paradoxically the image produced, a precious platinum-palladium photogram and much more durable than the object it represents.

The works of Didier Goupy, who exhibits for the first time at the gallery, transport us to the forest, a place refuge of the photographer during the confinement, in an intimate and very personal vision of nature and its perception. The artist began his search based on a first memory of the tree frond, seen from his pram. With his photographs, he explores the forest, as a world near and far at the same time, which has its own logic and follows the seasons. Choosing a point of view at eye level, very close to the trees, the photographer offers us an almost abstract vision.