Lewis Baltz

The theme of the ever-more invisible relationship between the spaces of our everyday lives and the rational knowledge of science and technology lies at the heart of the Lewis Baltz. 89-91 Sites of Technology exhibition, curated by Antonello Frongia, opening on Saturday 15th September at midday in the Palazzina dei Giardini in corso Canalgrande in Modena. Organised and produced by the Galleria Civica and the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, the show is accompanied by Lewis Baltz. 89-91 Sites of Technology, a new book published by Steidl Verlag, with essays in Italian and English by Angela Vettese and Antonello Frongia.

The exhibition includes large-scale photographs from the series 89-91 Sites of Technology, which Baltz developed in France and Japan at the turn of the 1990s. Through fragments of straight photography and images taken with surveillance cameras, Baltz evokes all the cold senselessness of anonymous, indistinguishable structures where high-capacity supercomputers are used to manage vast quantities of data, work flows, scientific experiments, and even landscapes: from CERN in Geneva to the video surveillance center in Sophia Antipolis (a science park in the vicinity of Nice), from the Gravelines nuclear power plant (near Dunkerque) to Toshiba's artificial intelligence laboratories in Kawasaki City, from the Air France Reservation Center to the Matra Transport factory outside Paris.

Published in its entirety for the first time, 89-91 marks a turning point in Baltz's career, standing between the minimalist, serial approach of his landscape photography of the '70s and '80s and the large allegorical tableaux on power and technology in the '90s. Photographed during the years of the first Gulf War, 89-91 signals Baltz's definitive recognition of the opacity of the world and of the disappearance of places: "My work in the 1980s had an apocalyptic subtext; by 1990 it seemed that the world had, in a sense, already ended. That is, it had withdrawn itself from our apprehension."

Biographical Notes Lewis Baltz (Newport Beach, California, 1945) lives and works in Paris and Venice, where he teaches at the Faculty of Art and Design of the IUAV University. Having worked as an artist since the end of the '60s, in 1975 he took part in the important "New Topographics. Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape", the catalyst on an international level of the notion of sceptic and "styleless" photography, poised between the documentary, Land Art, Minimalism and Conceptual Art. His works have been presented in numerous exhibitions all around the world, and appear in museums such as the Tate Modern of London, Paris Museum of Modern Art, the Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art of New York.

Lewis Baltz
89-91 Sites of Technology