ROGER BALLEN (New York ,1950). "Puppy between feet".1999. Gelatin silver on paper, copy 16/35.

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Contemporary and Actual Art

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Dec 15, 2021

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  ROGER BALLEN (New York ,1950). "Puppy between feet".1999. Gelatin silver on paper, copy 16/35. Signed, dated and titled on the back. Measurements: 35,5 x 35,5 cm; 59,5 x 59,5 cm (frame). American artist living in Johannesburg, South Africa, and working in the surrounding area since the 1970s. His work, spanning five decades, began with the field of documentary photography, but evolved into the creation of distinctive fictionalized realms that also integrate the mediums of film, installation, theater, sculpture, painting and drawing. Outcast people, animals, found objects, cables, and children's drawings inhabit the unlocatable worlds presented in Ballen's artworks. He describes his works as existential psychodramas that touch the subconscious mind and evoke the depths of the human condition. His aim is to break through repressed thoughts and feelings by engaging him in themes of chaos and order, madness or rebellious states of being, the human relationship with the animal world, life and death, universal archetypes of the psyche and experiences of otherness. After completing "Asylum of the Birds" in 2013, Roger Ballen began his latest series of images based on black and white negatives in which the Rats dominated each image. The unpublished project, which was completed in 2017 once again integrated drawing, painting, sculpture through the camera and the artist's eye. The results reveal a world immersed in chaos, absurdity and dreamlike reality. In 2020, he will complete a photographic and video project of a person dressed as a cartoon rat in which this character is involved in activities that could be considered politically and socially absurd. In 2015, Ballen created a conceptual installation artwork at the Serlachius Museum of Finland in Mantta. He transformed a dilapidated house in the Finnish forest into a complete sculptural entity that was installed in the museum's new pavilion.The work coincided with a new publication, The House Project (2015) with his longtime collaborator, writer Didi Bozzini. It moved away from a historical exposition of Ballen's work in favor of a psychological one, evoking possible literary and philosophical references in his work. Ballen has subsequently realized installations around the world, for example at the Istanbul Museum of Art (2016), Galleria Massimo Minini 2016, Brescia, Italy; 2017, Les Rencontres Arles (2017), Zeitz Mocaa, Cape Town (2017), City Passage, No Exit Revisited (2018) Wiesbaden; Museo de Fotografia, 2018, Fortaleza, Brazil. Ballen's collaboration with Comme des Garçons presented at Paris Fashion Week saw his work in the brand's Homme Plus A/W 2015 range, where his images were shot on the back of white coats for their Fall 2015 collection. In No Joke (2013), Ballen and Rossouw collaborated with Asger Carlson to create photosculpted figures, swapped self-portraits, substituted and reassigned body parts, strangely busy architecture, hand-drawn masks and cut-out and collaged graffiti, as well as spiders, foxes, angels, demons and dolls in an imaginary dreamlike setting in which an elusive narrative unfolds. In 2018, Ballen released his first series of color photographs after Leica gave him a color camera with which to experiment. In September 2019, Ballen opened his largest exhibition to date at the HalleSaint Pierre in Paris, entitled The World According to Roger Ballen, in which he exhibited numerous installations, drawings, videos, and photographs
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