Exhibition
Phillip Toledano
Who Am I?
16.11.2017 -
11.03.2018
In his photos, Phillip Toledano (*1969 in London, lives in New York), deals with both everyday situations and spectacular and extraordinary topics.
The way he works thus is different each time - documentary he explores social issues, he looks archaeologically at his own past and arranges fictitious future scenarios.
Before that, Toledano was working in the advertising industry for several years. Only in the late 1990s, he started to realise his own artistic projects, which are influenced until today by the aesthetics of commercial photography.
“Days With My Father” (2006-2009) is one of the most personal works of Toledano. After the death of his mother, he began to care for his father who suffered from dementia and captured his everyday life with him photographically. The result were pictures that show sad and melancholic but also happy and bizarre moments. For “A New Kind of Beauty” (2008-2010) he took pictures of people, who got several plastic surgeries and thus changed their appearance completely. Dramatically illuminated in front of a black background, the portrayed people appear artificial and almost sculptural, and become works of art themselves.
Toledano always adapts his picture language to the focused topic. And so it is precisely taking advantage of the medium’s possibilities that makes the pictures so striking.