press release

The Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) is proud to present Inside Out, Photography After Form: Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, an exhibition curated by Simon Baker and Tanya Barson from the Tate Modern in London.

Inside Out: Photography After Form includes over 90 photographs from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection. It is one of a series of exhibitions that is organized on a yearly basis from the collection. For the first time in a few years, the exhibition focuses solely on the medium of photography and includes a significant portion of the photographic holdings from the collection, including many new acquisitions. The exhibition includes works by Uta Barth, Edward Burtynsky, Thomaz Farkas, Candida Höfer, Luisa Lambri, Germán Lorca, Gabriel Orozco, Paulo Pires, Ed Ruscha, Thomas Struth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Fiona Tan, and many others.

The exhibtion explores the creative relationship between the camera lens and the construction, production and deconstruction of form; tracing the many and various ways in which form can and has been both produced and undone through the agency of the camera lens.

Rather than seeking to trace a lineage or make a chronological survey, the exhibition brings together contrasting images and bodies of work that reflect upon or examine the question of space and form from within and without, overturning preconceptions about the critical potential of the photographic medium.

Photography's experimental engagement with the formal possibilities of line, light and shadow in the real world are challenged and re-assessed through the work of post war conceptual and contemporary artists, who have engaged critically with modernism and its aftermath.

The exhibition is organized into three loose groupings (Form, Space, and Formlessness). They are not intended as strict categories, but rather as ways of looking at the same question in different ways: from a straightforward engagement with the play of form (the complex interrelation of resemblance, coincidence and misrecognition); through explorations of instability and ambiguity (including reversals of perspective and problems with space); to the dissolution of form into abstraction (the collapse of defined structures into formlessness, whether only for a fleeting moment, or after the relentless attrition of the passage of time).