UNIX Gallery presents Photography, an exhibition of new works by Christian Voigt. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with UNIX Gallery, 532 W 24th St. New York, NY. Photography is on view from January 21 - February 27, 2016. The opening reception will be held at the gallery on Thursday, January 21, 2016 from 6 - 8 PM.
Christian Voigt is a German photographer, known for his impressive images created using large-format cameras. Voigt has photographed great libraries, museums, landscapes and temples. Through his lens, Voigt captured mankind’s extraordinary buildings and architecture. Artist offer an illuminated tenor, delivering with his photography an inescapable sense of history and verve.
Voigt works with large-format cameras, both digital and analogue. For his Morgan Library series, he uses a large format (4 x 5”) Linhof analogue film camera to allow for such a large sized photograph. In the museum edition, his large-format pictures can measure as much as eight meters in width. Voigt prints with a Light Jet exposure which allows more clarity than printing on Lamda prints. “My pictures are created with the camera, not on the computer,” he says, with a reference to the complicated technology and processing that goes into his creations.
In his vault series, Voigt features haunting compositions of empty, shambolic safety deposit boxes, offices, vaults, and other interiors of the landmark Mid-City Trust and Savings Bank on Chicago’s Near West Side. Expanding its presence on the city in 1928, the Mid-City Trust shone as a modern cathedral of high finance, with a light-bathed foyer redolent of power and money. “The space is comparable with a Christian tabernacle – this is where in the old days they celebrated money as if it were a religion,” says Voigt. “Behind every deposit box there lurks a mysterious secret, a philosophy of moneymaking and accumulation...”
“The intensity of the image, or of what one perceives as being alienated, is the result of Christian Voigt’s camera technique,” explains art critic, Simone Simon, of Voigt’s work, finding “his own form and his unique style by experimenting with the proven technique of multiple exposures, first practiced in the 1930s, in which several pictures of the same image are taken on top of each other... And so what we see is an unreal reality. It is the result of an inner search for meaning that the photographer experiences as pure and natural. His intuitive method allows him to play an exciting game with time and form. His photographs of exotic nature and cosmopolitan cities look like surreal stage sets. As if they had been painted with a camera.”
Born in Munich, Germany, Christian Voigt lives and works in Hamburg and the south of France. His latest series of work was published by teNeues in 2015. Voigt’s fine art photography has been widely recognized, appearing in numerous museum exhibitions and gallery solo shows. The artist has shown in Basel, Hamburg, New York, Los Angeles, London, Saint Tropez, Amsterdam, Madrid, and Dubai.