ART CITIES:Athens-Boyd Webb
Influenced by the Conceptual and Post-Minimal Art of the 1970s, Boyd Webb began to make life-casts of people in fibreglass, arranging them into scenes, but soon rejected the practice as costly and cumbersome and took to photography, which from a very early age took the lead role in his work. A pioneer in the exploration of photography as a means of expression, his work demonstrates his constant involvement with the dialectics of vision and knowledge.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Bernier/Eliades Gallery Archive
A solo exhibition with works by Boyd Webb is on show at Bernier/Eliades Gallery in Athens. Boyd Webb was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1947 and later settled in London, studying sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 1972. Boyd Webb was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1988 and represented New Zealand in the Sydney Biennale in 1995. He lives and works in Brighton, UK. Webb’s pioneering photographic work of the 1980s set the stage for a career that now spans over 30 years. Webb’s mysterious and elaborate photographic compositions are created from constructed sets built by the artist in his studio. His early works concern the underlying relationship of man with nature, and provide an allegorical implication of man’s disregard for humanity that may lead to nature’s final revenge. Using sculptures, live actors, and raw materials such as wallpaper or carpet, Webb staged complex pictorial installations that told fable-like stories, touching on global issues such as pollution, global-warming, and extinction. While these works have a strong emphasis on storytelling, what is unique about Webb’s work is his refusal to use trick photography or editing to disguise the true nature of the materials used to stage each scene. In this way, experiencing Webb’s work can be both absorbing and confusing as viewers shift back and forth between being lost in the fantastical stories he is telling, yet always being reminded of their fabricated nature. The artist has said that he used photography because it was “an essential tool of the age and that it is a flexible medium, capable of being stretched in many directions. Tolerant of much abuse it always retains an inherent honesty – it can reproduce with great clarity even the most featureless of man-made materials”. Webb’s subversive play on the ‘inherent honesty’ of the medium provides the tension between the real and the imagined in his deceptive and theatrical tableaux. Since the 1990s, Webb has been making work that signals ecological warnings and uses the allegory of toxicity. Whether depicting deadly looking blood cells clearly made from plasticine and pigment or plastic inflatable toys of animal species, the deliberately artificial looking subjects are substitutes for extinct natural objects. In this series of work, Webb has retouched and photographed silk flowers. He has heightened the artificiality of the blooms by manipulating color, hence enhancing its perfection beyond nature. For example, the “Botanics series” (2003) was inspired by the French symbolist Charles Baudelaire’s poem Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) which tells an extended tale of disaster and derangement, and the inexhaustible attraction of the deadly. By presenting them against a dramatic black background he infuses them with a sense of clinical distance and forced dislocation outside its natural realm. In doing this, Webb is alluding to the exhaustion of nature caused by human destruction.
Boyd Webb was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1988 and represented New Zealand in the Sydney Biennale in 1995.
Info: Bernier/Eliades Gallery, 11 Eptachalkou Street, Athens, Duration: 4/2-13/3/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:30-18:30, Sat 12:00-16:00, https://bernier-eliades.com
