ORI GERSHT: Floating World
Ben Brown Fine Arts is pleased to present Floating World, the first major gallery show in London devoted to international photographer and 2015 Prix Pictet nominee Ori Gersht. The exhibition will debut the artist's latest body of work, a series of photographs capturing the ancient gardens in Buddhist Zen temples in and around Kyoto.
Working from his London studio, Gersht has gained international recognition over the past fifteen years for his eye-catching still-lifes and landscapes, in which he revisits history, journeys and places often defined by trauma. Tensions between past and present, beauty and violence, creation and destruction continue to inhabit Gersht's distinct visual language, expressed through a set of coded references and metaphors.
In November 2015 Gersht began work on his Floating World series in Japan, visiting and photographing the ancient gardens in Buddhist Zen temples in and around Kyoto. Created to reflect the essence of nature and as aids to meditation, these gardens are places where time stands still and history is palpable. For Gersht they represent an alternative to our image saturated 'world in flux'. Gersht focused his lens on water reflections and during the post-production process seamlessly fused reflections with the reflected world to create illusions and a new reality, hovering between what he calls the virtual and material. In these works we are presented with the absence of the object of representation whereby the photograph becomes the thing that exists, an image of the folding of space and time. Much like in his earlier landscape series, Gersht intends to document something that is not physically present.
