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Dan Holdsworth is renowned for landscape photographs in which nature, architecture and technology merge with light and space to produce powerful visions of the contemporary world.
In Blackout, Holdsworth presents photographs taken in Iceland, a volcanic otherworld where day is night and ice is sooty pitch, Holdsworth’s negative images are literal double inversions; their black and white clarity negates all natural logic.
The effect is that of the sublime made modular and spectacularly tangible: glaciers transform with sculpted solidity, as if they could fit in the palm of a hand, escarpments buckle with the scratchy translucency of glass, containing prisms of spectral hues, and expanses of atrementaceous sky bear down, suffocating as all consuming voids.
The actualisation of Holdsworth’s images is made no less delusive; these photographs are more suggestive of hand-crafted media.
Their strange aesthetic, like diagrammatical etching, merges ideas of new world exploration and futurism, that delve into the realm of almost pure abstraction, as illusively textured and gestural as painting, conceiving terrain as a palpable geo-psyche surface, a synaesthetic confusion between sight and touch.
Dan Holdsworth’s photographs are represented in many major collections, including the Tate Collection, Centre Pompidou, Saatchi Collection, and Victoria and Albert Museum Collection. His photographs have been exhibited widely including BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Patricia Low Contemporary, Geneva, Gagosian Gallery, London, Tate Britain, Centre Pompidou, Frankfurt Kunstverein, Fotomuseum Winterthur
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