Bob Bunck: Edward Curtis

untitled collage by Bob Bunck. Courtesy of the artist and ARTTRA Gallery.

COLLAGE ON VIEW

Bob Bunck: Edward Curtis

at ARTTRA Gallery in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
23 January-28 February 2021

Curator and Art Historian Marianne Schutte writes:
Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) was an American photographer and ethnologist. He spent more than 30 years of his life picturing the lives of indigenous peoples of North America. During his lifetime, he made about twenty photo books. His oeuvre spans about 40,000 photographs on glass negative.

Bob Bunck is a Dutch photographer and visual artist who worked as a photographer in the TV studios in Hilversum, The Netherlands from 1968 to 1977. In 1977, he became an independent artist. When he first saw Curtis’s photos at an exhibition in Paris in 1978, he was immediately impressed.

In his collages, Bunck refers to different painting styles. Alongside his hero Vermeer, Modigliani, Pollock, and references to abstract visual language emerge. It was difficult to make a final choice in his studio, but when I saw his Curtis photos with Constructivist elements, I was immediately sold.

Constructivism originated in the early twentieth century, mainly in Eastern Europe. It was a total innovation in art, in which the colors red, white and black and geometric shapes such as square, circle and line were actively used. This object-less art was a break from tradition and opened up new ideas for the viewer, by which the makers (including Tatlin, Rodchenko, and El Lissitzky) hoped to create a style for an improved future society. By connecting these bright abstract characters with Curtis’s sepia photographs, Bunck brings us back to the Native Americans and First Nations, peoples who have a great sense of humanity and animals in nature and its environment.

(text adapted from the curator’s exhibition statement)


INFORMATION

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Tweede Boomdwarsstraat 4
1015 LK Amsterdam, The Netherlands
+31 (0) 20 6259303

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