By Stéphane Couturier
Located in Zurich, CH
Stéphane COUTURIER (*1957, France)
Usine Toyota n°9 (Valenciennes), 2005
Sheet 182 x 241 cm (71 5/8 x 94 7/8 in.)
Frame 189 x 241 cm (74 3/8 x 97 5/8 in.)
Edition of 5; Ed. no. 3/5
Framed
Born in 1957 in Neuilly sur Seine, Stéphane Couturier currently lives and works in Paris.
In 1994, Stéphane Couturier showed his first works in a series called 'Urban Archaeology', viewing the city as a living organism with multiple aspects. He photographed it deliberately avoiding anything that suggested poetry, nostalgia or strangeness. From 1999 on, Stéphane Couturier was increasingly drawn to suburbs and began to focus on a different type of landscape: on the one hand, by tackling housing blocks and high-rises in his 'Monuments' series; on the other, by photographing mushrooming housing developments.These generic cities soon became his favorite subject.
In 2002, the uniformity and repetitiveness of these landscapes around the world drove him to begin working on the concept of the polyptych: the combinations and interchangeability of each of the elements in a polyptych give rise to a play with 'Landscaping' (the title of a new series), with the spectator recomposing a landscape between reality and fiction.
WStéphane Couturier series ‘Melting Point’ presents a Toyota assembly plant in Valenciennes (France). Emphasizing the cycles of construction and demolition endemic to modern industrialized life, the photographs possess dynamic vertical and horizontal lines, elegant curves, and brilliant effects of light and indigenous colour. Using a large-format camera, Couturier creates crisply detailed prints that expand the viewer’s awareness of how a photograph can look and how urban occurrences can be conceptualized. Each picture is printed from a sandwiching of two moments in time, creating highly abstract yet precisely detailed images. People, machines, car parts, wires and more all compete for the viewer’s attention—images of industry simultaneously out of control and in perfect harmony.
– Art, Contemporary, Colour, Architecture, Photography, Geometry, Graphics, Structured, Pattern, Car Factory...
Category
Early 2000s Contemporary Mikiko Hara Art