MARC STRAUS

MARC STRAUS is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Danish photographer Thomas Bangsted. This will be the artist’s first solo show in the United States. This exhibition is comprised of mostly large scale photographs aggregated from numerous exposures over a period of time up to several years. A bird perched on a pole, a workman laying on the Church floor – were there but once.

The nearest association and influence is likely Jeff Wall but Wall oftentimes sets the scene, builds the room, digs a gravesite. For Bangsted in these works nothing is altered. Every place undergoes its own natural change over time. We tend to miss that unless perhaps we come back after a long interval. Here he takes snippets from many moments and thus extends the conventional limits of photography. It is as if these were paintings.

Bangsted’s images have a sense of the uncanny; something isn’t quite right. Whether it is the precarious tilt of a ship’s masthead or a horse’s frozen jump, the viewer is forced to question what is seen and by extension what they ever see. We are presented with such a rich visual and beautiful palette and always we seem to enter in the midst of a profoundly interesting narrative and we are left to fill in the before and after.

Thomas Bangsted, b. 1976 received a MFA in Photography from Yale University, School of Art in 2007. Bangsted has had numerous solo shows in Denmark including at Galleri Tom Christoffersen (2010), Galleri Hornbaek (2007), and SPARK (2006). Group exhibits include The Bronx Museum of the Arts (2011), Danziger Projects (2010) ,The Prague Biennial (2009) ,and the New York Photo Festival (2008).