The photographic works of Swedish artist Dawid are among the most radical, poetic, and original attempts to redefine photography’s relationship to its image referent. Coming from an social documentary context of the 1970s, student of Christer Strömholm, Dawid’s photography inscribes itself in the ambitious movement of the 1980s to create from photography an emancipated, autonomous image, on an equal footing with painting, drawing and sculpture. With a great economy of means – often using only a light table and a large-format camera – he transcends our physical world of visible and nameable things into a realm of signs, a world of photographic hieroglyphics that in part leaves the function of objects still legible, in part gives them an entirely new meaning.
Enigmatic silhouettes, landscapes, rock formations, outlines of unknown countries on a map, Asian characters – the viewer may discover all these forms in the images of the series Comp. The photographs of the series Rust give more information about the materiality of things. In an ever-increasing digitalization of all areas of life, these images remind us that the obsolete world of physical things, even scrap metal, creates the material for abstract compositions and, as it were, saves them from disappearing. The Kemigrams, in turn, leave the world of objects behind. Of their genesis, the works are the most painterly; at work here are light and chemistry, gesture and chance, surface tension of liquids and absorption behavior of papers. (Excerpt from text by Florian Ebner 2022)
Potsdamer Strasse 65
D-10785 Berlin
Tel: +49 170 5470707
E-Mail: gallery@dorotheenilsson.com
Opening Hours:
Wednesday – Saturday
12 – 18 h and by appointment
