Richard Billingham

La Fabrica Galeria will open the season 2010-2011 with the new work of Richard Billingham, unpublished in Spain.

In his new series, the British artist returns to the topic of the family pictures, but portraying this time to his son Walter and his own home

The exhibition also gathers other photos which reflects the interest of the artist in the British landscape, paying tribute to landscape painters such as Constable

The exhibition will be inaugurated next September 8th at 20.00 pm and it will continue opened until October 23th

Richard Billingham will be in Madrid from Tuesday 7th until Thursday 9th of September

Further information: www.lafabricagaleria.com

WEDNESDAY, JULE 14, 2010

Richard Billingham obtained international recognition at the beginning of the 90s because of the beautiful and emotive photographies of his family. Nevertheless, from the beginning of last decade he has returned to the landscape, initially abroad and gradually increasingly near his house. His last series have showed images of animals in the zoos of several cities of the world with photographs or video. In his third individual exhibition in La Fábrica Galería, the recognized British artist presents a set of 24 recent photographies never showed in Spain.

In the series that it has developed recently, Billingham takes again his characteristics and early instantaneous of family, centred now on his son Walter, as well as the exploration of the landscape paying tribute to famous landscape painters as Constable.

In this exhibition, which will be inaugurated next September 8th and will continue opened until October 23th, there are images of the British landscape, South Downs, Gower, Constable Country or Norfolk. Images in black and white and in colour, in miniature and in large scale. There are also images ofhis own family: his baby, the family dog, the home. Billingham has been working with medium format cameras, cheap disposable cameras, panoramic cameras both high and low resolution. The variety of formats lends a further intriguing quality to the works in the exhitibion. Some are majestic, some jewel-like, there is an expansiveness and an intimacy, a generosity towards the subject and the medium.

All these photographies, which will be exposed by the first time in Spain, form a collection of images of great beauty that together demostrate that Billingham is a consummate pictorialist, an artist with an astonishing talent for discovering a new beauty and humanity in the most common photographic subject matter.

Richard Billingham. He studied Fine Arts in the University of Sunderland, in 1995 the obtains the Felix H Man Memorial Prize and in 1997 the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize. In 2001 it takes part in the Artists Work Programme in the IMMA, Dublin, and he become finalist of the Turner Prize. His first photographies, taken initially as sketches or studies for future pictures, present domestic scenes of his parents, brother or domestic pets, in a faithful reflection of an aesthetics of the daily thing. Between the documentary and the fiction, between the heroic and the tragicomic thing, he approaches social and psychological stereotypes of the British working class. With his later series centred on the horizontal landscapes, natural and urban, from Ethiopia to Norfolk, or, especially, of his natal Cradley Heat in Daytime, 1997, and Black Country, 2003, presents a slow and clean look, where the pictorial inspiration, between romantic and tenebrism, is demonstrated in compositions and settings.

Richard Billingham