Please note that this upcoming talk by Nicolas Grospierre has been postponed and will no longer take place on April 1, 2020. Thank you for your interest.

Grospierre has been extensively and systematically photographing modernist architecture around the globe for nearly two decades. This talk is a synthesis of this work, published through two albums: Modern Forms, (Prestel, 2016), and Modern Spaces (Prestel, 2018), in which the photographer has arranged the images—and the architecture shown—not according to their function nor architect, but to their shapes.  While many of the buildings in this archive often go unrecognized, their forms are prominent in the landscape of modern civilization. Nicolas Grospierre’s Subjective Atlas is a captivating journey into an extraordinary architecture that looks strangely familiar and yet is mostly undiscovered.

Nicolas Grospierre is a photographer, of architecture mainly, and an artist working in the expanded field of photography. He studied Political Science and Sociology in Paris and London before turning to photography.  His work as a photographer has been focused on the one hand on documentary projects, which have been exploring the collective memories of, and the hopes linked to modernist architecture now that the utopias linked to them have faded away. The other side of his work concentrates on conceptual photography and emphasizes mind games, while at the same time displaying attractive, sensual images or even installation.

In addition to his exhibition T A T T A R R A T T A T, which originated at the Signum Foundation, in Venice (2010) and travelled in an expanded format to the Graham Foundation as One Thousand Doors, No Exit (2011), Grospierre’s recent exhibitions include A Subjective Atlas of Modern Architecture, Fort Institute of Photography, Warsaw (2019); The Best Possible City, Architektur Galerie, Munchen (2018); and The City which does not exist, Peresvetov Pereulok Gallery, Moscow (2018). Exhibitions of his work have previously been shown at Arup, London; State Gallery of Art, Sopot; Architectural Association, London; and the Centro de Arte Alcobendas, Madrid, among others. He was awarded the Golden Lion at the 11th Architectural Biennale in Venice in 2008 (together with Kobas Laksa), for the Hotel Polonia exhibition at the Polish Pavilion.

Related Graham-supported projects:
2014 research grant to Nicolas Grospierre for A House for Culture

2011 Graham Foundation Exhibition, Nicolas Grospierre: One Thousand Doors, No Exit

Image: Nicolas Grospierre, Space Museum and Heliport, International Fairgrounds, Tripoli, Lebanon, 2010