Marcelo Grosman’s work explores the photographic image in its omnipresence in contemporary culture,in the way it conforms our imaginary, the manner it represents institutional practices which affect our bodies and our minds. In his series along the years he has focused on several different issues which pertain to the photographic image. In The Human Machine, the installation on view currently at the gallery, one of the central questions which is asked is: Can the photographic image, in the context of the barrage of these images which inundates our daily lives, truly convey or generate emotions? He employs hundreds of found images to build pieces where each individual image —be it iconic and recognizable or not— blends with others, organized around five cores: passion, euphoria, fear, confusion and devotion. The temporal references of these images, belonging to several different recent decades, appear as flattened temporalities, as if they were all located at one moment which has configured our imagination, as hazy recent past, blurred even more by technology.

Grosman’s work is a profound and intelligent dive into the meaning and workings of the photographic image, which, along with the graphic design frameworks that deliver the images to us, he uses as raw material in his process to conceive his work. As in previous series, the image has hidden reverberation of forensic pursuits, eroticism, muted violence, yet interrupted by strange beauty or tenderness. The display of the different sections has been design to create an environment that forces the viewer into certain level of discomfort or additional thought: a wooden structure exhibiting the Euphoria section is jammed into the architecture of the gallery, as if stuck under its mezzanine, the works in the Confusion series are hung very high up, almost at the level of street advertising.

Grosman (b. Buenos Aires, 1958) is one of the main Argentinean artists using photography in his work from a contemporary perspective. He has presented over a dozen solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group shows in Latin America, Europe and the USA. His works have been reviewed extensively and are in the collections of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, MALBA (Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Charleroi, France, and other major private and public collections.