Lot 138: DAN HOLDSWORTH

Blackout 08
Signed, dated and numbered in ink on the reverse of the flush-mount. One from an edition of 3 plus 2 artist’s proofs.

175.3 x 224.2 cm (69 x 88 1/4 in).

Digital colour coupler print.

2010

Gateshead, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Dan Holdsworth: Blackout, 12 November 2010 - 20 February 2011

This work will be included in the forthcoming Dan Holdsworth: Blackout, Mack Books, 2011

Acquired directly from the Artist

“Holdsworth’s latest series Blackout (2010) is inspired by the
infamous power failures in 1960s New York, an event which
threw millions of people into darkness and prompted panic of
nuclear attack. Holdsworth’s enormously scaled prints, however,
are of mountains dazzling with crystalline allure, refracting
not in light, but rather its total absence. Taken in Iceland, a
volcanic netherworld where day is night and ice is sooty pitch,
Holdsworth’s negative images are literal double inversions; their
black and white clarity negates all natural logic. Their effect
is sheer magic, the sublime made modular and spectacularly
tangible: glaciers transform with sculpted solidity, as if they could
fit in the palm of a hand, escarpments buckle with the scratchy
translucency of glass, containing prisms of spectral hues, and
expanses of atrementaceous sky bear down, suffocating as all
consuming voids. The actualisation of Holdsworth’s images
is made no less delusive; in reproduction his photographs
appear as digitalised ideals, however in the flesh they are more
suggestive of hand-crafted media. Sharp mountain-scape peaks
or geometric architectural structures often convey a gem-cutters
draughtsmanship, their strange aesthetics, like diagrammatical
etching, merges ideas of mapping, engineering and futurism;
while most others delve into the realm of almost pure abstraction,
as illusively textured and gestural as painting, conceiving terrain
as a palpable geo-psyche surface, a synaesthetic confusion
between sight and touch. Holdsworth’s photographs recast the
world with renewed mystifying power: as liminal spaces between
reality and its dissolve. Each one a stolen moment, captured in the
momentary blink of a shutter: beautiful, mesmerising, larger than
life, and absolutely inexplicable.”
(Patti Ellis, in Dan Holdsworth: ‘Blackout’, exh. cat., Stockholm, Nordin Gallery, 2011)