Artkrush

Issue 97

Stéphane Couturier

The cover image for this issue of Artkrush is a detail of Stéphane Couturier's 2007 photograph Chandigarh — Secrétariat no. 1. An exhibitor at this November's Paris Photo 2008, Couturier will be on home turf, unlike many of his more than 500 international peers, showing with his Parisian gallery, Galerie Polaris.

Born in 1957 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, Couturier now lives and works in Paris, though his projects take place around the world. He has exhibited throughout Europe, South America, and Asia, with photographs in the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée d'Ar Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg, Los Angeles County Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. He is represented by Galerie Polaris, Paris; Laurence Miller Gallery, New York, and Van Kranendonk, The Hague, Netherlands.

Couturier captures cities at pivotal, molting moments. Past series, like 1997's Urban Archaeology, explored the layered digs of building sites and their stasis between destruction and construction. Landscaping found the artist in San Diego and Tijuana, where he focused on peripheral housing developments in the transformation from suburban rubble to slapdash housing. The bright, mushrooming living spaces pictured here look more like colorful abstract compositions than neighborhoods.

Chandigarh — Secrétariat no. 1 comes unsurprisingly from Chandigarh, India, a capital city known for Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret's mid-century experiments in urban planning. Declared an emblem of modernity by Nehru, and now India's wealthiest city, Chandigarh is a utopian vision with an aging facade. Couturier's photographs treat the architectural monuments as purely visual material, emphasizing their superficial parallels and geometric abstractions. With a sharp photographer's eye, he lays bare the man-made organisms beneath the elaborate construction of modern cities. - Lauren McKee