Group show featuring: David Bailey, Christina Benz, David Birkin, Guido Castagnoli, Andreas Gefeller, Tom Hunter and Simon Norfolk

SIZE:matters is a powerful exhibition which showcases selected modern photographers' use of the modern technology to achieve works on a scale prefered by the Old Masters.  Exhibiting these artists together for the first time, it becomes apparent that whilst the works featured are truely diverse and groundbreaking, each one builds on the traditional subject matter of oil painting; through the still life, landscape and portraiture genres.  Yet, ironically, it is their use of traditional references that enables them to uncover new layers of meaning as they juxtapose these with the contemporary.

David Bailey’s still life Orchid I, 2007 sets the tone of the traditional in SIZE:matters, providing an excellent example of how Bailey has continued to work with sumptuous imagery. Tom Hunter’s series Living in Hell and Other Stories references Old Master paintings to build pseudo-documentary photographs. Moving into the landscape genre, Guido Castagnoli’s Street to the main station, Shimada City, Japan, 2007 (fig. 14) adds a sense of the hyper-real and the uncanny. Simon Norfolk depicts historically war-torn locations using the visual language of Arcadia, which he compares to the elegant oil paintings of Camille Pissarro and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, while Tom Hunter’s Dublin Bay Bathing Places series projects a scene of nautical paradise. The delicate treatment of water in Hunter’s series and Christina Benz’s Lake-Split video installation from 2003-2004 subtly point to the meditative cycle of life. The exhibition SIZE:matters ends with David Birkin’s series of redemptive portraits entitled Confessions, 2007, which explores performance through the permanent and the ephemeral .

In association with Tosca Photography Fund

Co-curated by Becky Haghpanah-Shirwan and Riikka Kuittinen