Artist Reception: Saturday, September 12, 6pm–8pm
Heads Will Roll is the fourth and final installment of de Esteban’s challenging and provocative Propositions series—a long term and rigorous investigation of society’s embracement of technologies, in particular, the dawn of the bio-cybernetic era.
To construct the artworks in Heads Will Roll, de Esteban has mined a mass media that generates an incessant stream of imagery of war, violence, and disasters 24/7 into our homes, offices, public and private spaces. De Esteban merges and juxtaposes images, texts and found objects, to produce photomontages that present a cacophony of information that is at once dense with information yet visually legible.
The resulting artworks are stunningly rich, visually beautiful constructions, that at the same time reveal a world where violence, imagined or real, is always looming. The intention of the artist, is for the viewer to be left almost totally out of balance, in a state of anxiety and unease.
“Our world is increasingly filled with imagery from the internet, advertising, movies, social media, selfies, smartphone cameras, surveillance, propaganda, media, art, books, magazines ... It causes us to question our own sense of what is real, what is imagined, what is fiction, what is a lie ... So, what better medium than photography (or cinema or the internet itself) to explore this archaeology of images?” —Max de Esteban
The exhibition will feature eight large-scale, lushly colored photographs, carefully curated from the larger body of work, consisting of twenty-four photographs. This will be the second solo exhibition at the Klompching Gallery by Max de Esteban, and follows the preview of the artworks at the prestigious AIPAD (Association of International Photography Art Dealers) Photography Show in April 2015.
Accompanying the exhibition will be the monograph Heads Will Roll (Hatje Cantz, 2015), containing insightful essays by the esteemed curator Carles Guerra and author Bill Kouwenhoven. Additionally, de Esteban’s new monograph, Propositions (La Fabrica)—which charts the entire four parts of the series—will also be launched during the exhibition, prior to its official release in October 2015.
Max de Esteban (b. 1959) is a Fulbright Alumni, who holds a PhD from the Universitat Ramon Llull in Catalunya and a Masters from Stanford University. His work has been featured at the Deutsches Technikmuseum (Berlin), Rencontres Internationales at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and Darmstädter Tage der Fotografie, among others. He is the recipient of the National Award of Professional Photography in Spain and the Jury’s Special Award in Fotofestiwal, Poland. His artworks are held in several notable collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museu de Arte Modena do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil; and the Deutsches Technikmuseum. De Esteban’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions worldwide, and featured widely in the press and media. His monograph Heads Will Roll, was recently selected as a photo-book of the year by LensCulture. Max de Esteban lives and works in Barcelona, Spain, and is represented in the United States by Klompching Gallery.
