HOMELAND – Harry Gruyaert

On Thursday 26 September from 6pm, Harry Gruyaert will be at Artazart for the launch and signing of Homeland.

Admission is free and no booking is required! Pre-order your signed book now and receive it after 26 September.

A master of colour photography, Harry Gruyaert is giving us ‘his’ Belgium, a country he has travelled for over sixty years. Flemish by birth, Gruyaert has long known that his native land is “a visually interesting place where incongruous things happen”. The photographer’s
Here, the photographer’s typical chromatic world paints a portrait of a Belgium where everyday life can turn strange in an instant. The images are sometimes reminiscent of surrealist collages, an artistic movement whose Belgian representatives were fascinated by the strangeness of reality. A sense of the
sense of the grotesque, of sarcasm, of banality, but also emotion and a certain tenderness are sketched out in images of carnivals, religious processions, small towns spiked with brick houses… The skies are often low, the lights crystalline, the colours saturated to outshine the cold atmospheres of the past.
the cold atmospheres of the north.
Over the pages, a long travelling shot unfolds: here, the notion of time seems to have been annihilated, and the photographer’s lens captures the singularity of a nation, capturing an everyday life that unfolds like a hyper-realistic film set. Urban lighting, neon storefronts, glimpses of people behind the wise curtains of suburban homes, costumed passers-by wandering around after a drunken party, station platforms plunged into foggy mornings, a wild nightclub scene, suburban areas with drab facades, ports that never sleep, countryside with infinite skylines – Harry Gruyaert’s Belgium is a condensed version of the photographer’s art: an extreme attention to colour and light that captures the fleeting nature of things.

As a counterpoint to these colour photographs, four portfolios of black and white images taken in the 1970s – the photographer’s protohistory – and reproduced on offset paper, punctuate the visual immersion of this journey to the flat country.

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