The C/O Berlin space presents "Mystery of the Ordinary", a major retrospective of William Eggleston, one of the American masters of color photography.
“At dusk, the shadows of the plants grow mysteriously along the wall of the house. In front of this shadow play stands a metallic lilac Cadillac, on whose gleaming paintwork the last rays of the sun dance. The brick-edged flowerbed, the shrubs planted there, and the rust-colored straw blinds in front of the window complete this composition, which simultaneously radiates an eerie calm.” It is with this introduction that the C/O Berlin gallery invites us to this major exhibition of William Eggleston's work. Over five decades, this Memphis, Tennessee native, where he still lives today at the age of 84, has managed to create a new vision of the world from the ordinary and banal aspects of postwar America, elevating color photography to the status of art. From the 1960s onward, he distinguished himself from his peers, such as Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson, by exploring the relationship of beauty and mystery between color and the commonplace and the everyday. His first solo exhibition at MoMA in New York in 1976 marked "a pivotal moment in the acceptance of the medium within the canon of art history."
Defying the everyday
Today, the C/O Berlin Foundation, with "Mystery of the Ordinary," retraces the approaches of an artist who very quickly grasped the components of reality through innovative framing, revealing his poetic and captivating vision of the American South and beyond. The exhibition thus presents famous series, such as Los Alamos, his first color project, taken between 1965 and 1974, during a road trip by car across the United States with Walter Hopps; but also unpublished works, such as those of "The Outlands" and images taken in the German capital between 1981 and 1988. "A blue bouquet on a house door, a building facade tiled in bright colors, a ceiling painted in brilliant blood red: the intensity of the color alone, and Eggleston's constant sensitivity to it, were a formal and analytical provocation," reaffirms today the Berlin cultural space. "His work has had a profound effect on contemporary visual culture, and the impact of his iconic language can be seen in a wide range of works by new generations of photographers."
William Eggleston: Mystery of the Ordinary – C/O Berlin Foundation,
Until 4 May 2023
Hardenbergstrasse 22–24, Berlin
Germany
co-berlin.org/en/program/exhibitions/william-eggleston
Nathalie Dassa
