Musée de l'Elysée
Ray K. Metzker: Rétrospective
(November 14 - January 6, 2007/2008)
Photographers included:
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18, avenue de l'Elysée
Lausanne
Switzerland
| Tel | +41 (0) 21 316 99 11 | | Fax | +41 (0) 21 316 99 12 |
www.elysee.ch |
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For the past fifty years, Ray K. Metzker has been creating a body of work of rare coherence and intensity. The current exhibition, conceived and produced by the Musée de l’Elysée, features superb examples from every period of Metzker’s prolific career. Well-known and much exhibited in the United States since his first solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1967, Metzker later received major mid-career retrospectives in 1978 at the International Center of Photography, New York, and in 1984 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
The current retrospective, presenting more than 200 vintage prints, has been produced in collaboration with the photographer and the Laurence Miller Gallery, New York. The exhibition spans the full fifty years of the photographer’s career, and offers Europeans an opportunity to enjoy Metzker’s masterful achievements.Ray K. Metzker was born in 1931 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Between 1956 and 1959 he studied photography at the Institute of Design, Chicago. Here he was exposed to the rich vocabulary of approaches and ideas which had defined avant-garde photography before the war: photomontage, juxtaposition, solarisation, multiple printing and composite prints. From his earliest days as a photographer, Metzker never lost his urge to experiment with the grammar and syntax of the medium, whether it was games played within the camera itself or complex manipulations in the darkroom. Decomposing and recomposing, deconstructing and reconstructing, Metzker’s art reminds us of the great and inexhaustible potential of black-and-white photography when practiced by a master.
A catalogue, published by Steidl, with essays by William A. Ewing and Nathalie Herschdorfer, will be available early 2008 in English or French.
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