Urban Spree Gallery is proud to start its 2013 artistic season with a photographic exhibition titled Publik-Privat (from 14.03 to 13.04 2013).
The exhibition features 31 portraits composed by Berlin-based French photographer
Bilbo Calvez of personalities that are part of the Berlin cultural and artistic milieu and include well known musicians/DJs, filmmakers/actors, kabaretists or visual artists.
All the persons photographed have come to Bilbo’s studio in Kreuzberg to pose in front of her camera and submit themselves to an intriguing protocol: Bilbo would edit one portrait reflective of their public side (the appearance under which those persons are known to their public through TV or press photos) and one portrait that takes on the private side, as their friends and family usually know them. But how can you force a person to try to simulate an official face or fake friendship when they hardly know the photographer?
Soon enough, both series of portraits started to produce striking impressions, creating larger-than-life effects. Patterns were soon to emerge. And left-handed persons had different features in their portrait than right-handed persons. Why would it be so? What could explain those similarities and discrepancies?
![DRScholl-links](/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/DRScholl-links-300x244.gif)
Because Bilbo's portraits are actually portraits of brains. They are a composition based on the right and left sides of the face, and digitally reconstructed to create symetric portraits, the public side being about power, ego, logical thinking (left hemisphere of the brain), and the private side being about emotions and intuitions (right hemisphere of the brain). Based on Bilbo’s background in genetics and her intensive research on the topic, those doppelgänger portraits offer a stunning reading grid into the persona of the artists whose portrait was probably never seen before with such an acute precision.
Bilbo Calvez major exhibition at Urban Spree, subtitled ‘Asymmetrophobie 2’ explores the crossroads of genetics and scientific photography, the history of portraits in photography and questions photographic manipulations in our digital age.
Vernissage on March 14th, 2013, starting at 19:00 in the presence of the artist.
FB event
here