until Tuesday November 19 2024
10 Corso Como, Gallery
corso Como 10
20154 Milan
Italy
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press@10corsocomo.com
www.10corsocomo.com
10 Corso Como presents the most comprehensive exhibition to date showcasing the work of US artist Talia Chetrit. Curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Anna Castelli, the show brings together works from 1994 to 2023, creating a dialogue between images that encapsulate different moments in both her artistic career and her private life. Self-portraits, family scenes, still lifes, street photography; no subject is excluded from Chetrit’s critical investigation into the current validity of the various genres of photography. These images instill a candid feeling of fragility and a confrontational sense of breaking taboos, with a specific focus on the themes of sexuality, relationships, and female self-representation.
Chetrit produces images that are at once elaborately conceived, lyrical, and provocative. Fusing emotional intensity with a specific approach to composition, her pictures can be understood as an exercise in what it means to look and what it feels like to pose; an exploration of the formal implications of the act of framing and the psychological dynamics of becoming the subject of an image.
For her solo exhibition at 10 Corso Como, the artist brings together works from the last twenty-nine years (1994-2023), creating a dialogue between images that encapsulate different moments in both her artistic career and her private life. Recent works appear next to photographs that Chetrit took of her childhood girlfriends when she was a teenager in the mid ’90s, such as Logo (1996/2017) and Face #1 (1994/2017). Here the subjects display a remarkable awareness of being observed and, despite their youthfulness, engage in an intentional relationship with the camera, through gestures and poses that are borrowed from fashion magazines, cinema, and TV. Another early work, Murder Picture #3 (1997/2017), depicts a friend posing as a murder victim in what it appears to be a subway car. There’s a daring yet tender quality here, expressed in the fledgling experimentation of a fifteen-year-old girl who is capable of quoting Cindy Sherman’s seminal Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980) while exploring our society’s fascination with violence and the sensational voyeurism implicit in crime-scene photography.
Familial relationships takes center stage in the exhibition, with each member of the artist’s immediate family being portrayed: her mother, in works such as Mom (Ball) from 2022 and Ash (2021), her father in Dad/Mesh (2021), and her partner and child, whom we find depicted individually, Cat Boot Baby (2021) and Back (2016), or in unconventional family portraits like Untitled (Family #2) from 2021. With a touch of abrasive irony, Chetrit deconstructs familial stereotypes, revealing underlying incongruities and idiosyncrasies, but fashion tropes once again serve as the tools that allow her to blur the distinctions between masculine and feminine, authority and protection. Although Chetrit has been behind the lens of photo campaigns for fashion brands such as Celine, Phoebe Philo, and Acne Studio, in her artistic oeuvre, fashion subtly emerges simply as one of the elements within her investigation into identity and social constructs.
Like contemporary life Talia Chetrit’s art can feel perplexing at times: it exudes honesty while implying deception, embraces feelings, and dissects contradictions. Each of these images invites us to reflect on the multifaceted nature of human relationships and the ways in which these dynamics are shaped, standardised, and perpetuated through the domains of representation.
{Photo:Talia Chetrit Mom (Ball) Courtesy of the artist and Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf )
