Pushing the Boundaries

In her first major solo museum show, the Romanian-born artist Loredana Nemes pushes the boundaries of portrait photography, frequently landing on unusual approaches. In the series beyond (2008–10), which explores the male world of Turkish and Arab cafés, Nemes experiments with blur in portraits and enigmatic depictions of cloudy facades. She draws on cinematic effects in the group portraits of teenagers that make up her series Blossom Time (2012). Recently, Nemes has utilized abstraction as a means of “visualizing basic feelings,” says curator Ulrich Domröse. The exhibition will include a new politically relevant series, 23197 (2017), in which Nemes employs abstraction to explore ideas of fear, and Greed (2014–17), which engages with themes of desire in its black-and-white images of tangled seagulls.

Loredana Nemes: Greed, Fear, Love: Photographs, 2008–2017 is on view at the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, from June 22 to October 15, 2018.