Francesca Woodman

My House, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976

Gelatin silver print
14.4 x 14.3 cm, Framed: 41.8 x 41.8 x 2 cm
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Francesca Woodman’s work, even as it undertakes representation through photography, is fundamentally concerned with the processes and meanings of photographic representation. It is this that places her within a group of artists who have similar critical relationships to their own media, and whose formal affinity is rather one of a common attitude and central themes than shared medium or figurative tropes. Woodman’s approach to the photograph, her attempt to excavate its structures and expose the subjective effects of space and time can be regarded as ‚ruining’ of the photograph. Woodman’s “reading of Minimalism’s engagement with space flips it into an excessive, desperate mode rather than a euphoria of bodily experience. That one can know oneself, that one is constituted in a constant, mobile transformation of one’s own sensory experience of space and interaction with objects: this is the utopian project of phenomenology and Minimalism, inasmuch Minimalism is phenomenological. Now this is precisely what began to be challenged in the post-Minimal enterprise by flipping such spatial explorations into experiences of excess and loss: vertigo, nausea and disorientation.”
(George Baker)
Francesca Woodman redirects the conventions of photography into a critical debate over art’s formal languages. She draws our attention to small but significant gulfs: between desire and achievement, between the ideality of forms and the imperfection of photographic reality. Furthermore, in her concern with duration—the reintroduction of the time that the photograph is meant to exclude—she shares a fundamental thematic with those minimalist artist who so unsettled Michael Fried in his critique of the movement.
(Chris Townsend)

Francesca Woodman, *1943 in Bronxville/NY, † 2003 in New York City