Chris Marker: 100
Peter Blum Gallery presented last November 20 Chris Marker: 100, a survey across seven decades of the artist’s career through almost 250 photographs, film stills, and prints. This is the gallery’s fifth exhibition featuring Chris Marker (1921-2012) and coincides with the centenary of his birth. The exhibition runs from November 20, 2021 – January 21, 2022, at Peter Blum Gallery of New York.
Visionary filmmaker, photographer, writer, and multimedia artist, Chris Marker emerged in postwar Paris initially gaining renown for his films that include the seminal work, La Jetée (1962). Subsequently, he would create a lasting influence across media and through his writings on the ways in which we consider time, memory, and observation of contemporary life. The centenary of his birth offers an ideal occasion to look back at his legacy through a survey of several disparate bodies of work. Totaling almost 250 selected images, and spanning the 1950s to the 2010s, they demonstrate Marker’s reach across the globe and time. Whether chronicling political dissent, or postwar North Korea, poetically documenting the famous or the anonymous of the Paris Metro, the exhibited works ultimately create a telling self-portrait of the legendarily reclusive artist. They offer a revealing look at his ironic yet impassioned view of the modern world and people coping with it, illustrating his perpetual inquisitiveness directed toward people’s lives. Also evoking or counterpointing his films that often question the linearity of narration and history, these exhibited works explore Marker’s archive of memory. They create new dialogues and new connections while recalling definitive moments of a life lived behind the camera.
About the Author
Chris Marker (1921-2012) is one of the most influential and important filmmakers to emerge in the post-war era. Marker appeared on the Paris cultural landscape as a writer and editor and also became identified for his uniquely expressive non-fiction films.
Marker garnered international recognition in 1962 with the science-fiction short film La Jetée. In the seventies, Marker created documentaries both on the history of the left (Le Fond de l’air est rouge, 1977) and travel and memory (Sans Soleil, 1982). Marker also produced acclaimed media installations including Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2005 and presented by Peter Blum at Art Basel Unlimited in 2006, and Silent Movie, 1995.
Chris Marker was one of the last journalists who had the unique opportunity to travel and explore North Korea freely in 1957. The result of these travels was a group of photographs entitled The Koreans, reflecting an uncensored record of daily life in North Korea four years after the end of the war and shortly before the border was closed off. The photographic series, Passengers, comprises more than two hundred photographs taken by Marker between 2008 and 2010. The series, which is Maker’s first in color, are images of passengers traveling on the Paris Métro and clearly illustrate the various ways in which people create invisible walls and boundaries in order to cope with modern urban life.
Selected solo exhibitions include the Whitechapel Gallery, London (retrospective); MIT List Visual Arts Center and Carpenter Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (retrospective); The Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (retrospective); Atelier Hermès, Seoul; Les Rencontres d’Arles de la Photographie, Arles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; The Jeu de Paume, Paris; The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; and Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona.
Marker’s archive is being preserved by the Cinémathèque française. A large-scale exhibition of the archive was held at the Cinémathèque française in 2018.
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