The Edge / Background

This exhibition is a selection of images from two different projects by Alexander Gronsky, representative of his artistic personality.
Images from The Edge explore the very notion of border, of dividing line – both mental and real. This is the border between suburbs and cities, between personal and public space, between live and dead, between image and the abstract plane of the print; one is unthinkable without the other, one reflects the other. The idea of division and separation is essential to the life of a contemporary human being; every single person finds itself left on its own – and counterpositioned to surrounding cold and indifferent spaces.
Inside the snapshots from the work Background all the normal elements of a landscape – people, cars and houses – are switched off. People are part of the scenery like plastic figures in the architectural scale model. The vast endless span of this model and its background breeds the clear feeling of ineffable loneliness and physically impossible communication. Gronsky travels over the miles of Eurasia – along it from Gold Ring of middle Russia to Far East and across from Yamal to Sochi. However his confession is that two countries he is eager to photograph are Russia and China because these are the places where people are as insignificant as pawns on the chess-board. The landscape dominates, the rarified air of our background causes spasms.

Biography

Alexander Gronsky is born in 1980 in Tallinn, Estonia; lives in Russia since 2006. He is a member of Photographer.Ru agency since 2004. His works are published in many international newspapers and magazines, among all The Sunday Times, Esquire, Le Monde 2, Vanity Fair, Spiegel, Bolshoy Gorod, Ojode Pez. He is the 2009 Aperture Portfolio Prize winner and the 2010 Foam Paul Huf Award winner. Alexander Gronsky is represented by Agency.Photographer.Ru and Gallery.Photographer.Ru.