Spencer Tunick – Public Interventions

With Public Interventions, Reflex Amsterdam presents new and previously unpresented work by the American photographer Spencer Tunick, who is known worldwide for his colossal nude photography and human installations. For Tunick it is the first gallery exhibition in the Netherlands. The photographer will be present at the opening.

Spencer Tunick defies all artistic disciplines. He transforms public spaces with temporary monuments of people who redefine locations with complex, organic compositions. These are figurative yet abstract, public, extremely intimate and represent genuine unity and differences. The photographs are painterly and sculptural, while also functioning as installations. The exhibition reflects on the artist's work, which is characterized by abstraction, traditional group portraits and "the body without clothes".

The artist staged his first photographs of naked bodies in urban landscapes in New York during the nineties. Even though public nudity was legal, Tunick was still arrested. Nudity was a provocative spectacle in his early works, but the artist sees it only as "the body without clothes". As with the hundreds of painted, blue bodies in Sea of Hull, which transform an anonymous street into an abstract (human) body of water that moves through the city. Nudity is a prop, like fabric, paint, or sunlamps; it activates the space in an energetic way.

If there is a genre that applies to Spencer Tunick's oeuvre, it is the group photo. Tunick sometimes gathers thousands of people and carefully orchestrates their positions. At a time when being photographed nude is a common practice, Tunick takes the genre to the next level to create a meeting place for contemporary art and its audience. This is clearly visible in Columbia, where the environment is full of people on every corner of the frame. Capturing a group becomes an exciting, dynamic moment.

The masses of bodies – what the artist calls “the body in multiple” – are an undeniably fascinating element of Tunick's working method. Bodø Bodyscape is an ode to this phenomenon, where human bodies are folded over a hill overlooking a small Norwegian town. Each person holds a solar-powered lamp in their outstretched arms; the lamps echo the city lights in the background. As land art, Tunick uses the body as organic material to create temporary sculptures in natural environments. He plays with contradictions between public and private, and organic and artificial. Ultimately, Tunick turns cities into bodies and bodies into cities, making the familiar unprecedentedly enchanting.

Spencer Tunick (1967) lives and works in New York. He trained at Emerson College in Boston (MA, 1988) and the International Center of Photography in New York (1990). The installations were commissioned by, among others, the XXV São Paulo Biennale, Institut de Cultura de Barcelona, Saatchi Gallery in London, Museum of Contemporary Art (moCa) Cleveland, Kunsthalle Wien and MAMBO, Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá.

Public Interventions - Spencer Tunick
September 17 - November 1, 2022
Reflex Amsterdam