Exhibition Text
There are buildings that I believed I knew (from visits) until I saw the photographs of Richard Pare" (Karl Schawelka, Richard Pare, Kassel University, 1992)
Richard Pare was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1948. He studied graphic design and photography at Winchester and Ravensbourne. In 1971 he moved to the United States to study photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving his MFA in 1973. Since then he has been photographing ยท and working as the consultant curator of photography of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Seagrarn Collection. He now divides his time between England and the United States. He has published two major books on photography: Court House: A photographic Document (1978) and Photography and Architecture 1839-1939 (1982) . His works are in many major museurn collections. He has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1977) and the Art Institute of Chicago (1985).
"Richard Pare travels the world photographing objects cities, gardens, architecture. Guided by his own sensitivity, he projects them into unique photographic landscapes. Egypt, Russia and Japan, in particular, are places that Pare has returned to many times, finding things that have a continual attraction for him. While architectural photography is most commonly a medium of reportage, Pare's sense of beauty allows him to capture the drama of architecture. His work is an example of representation where details can grasp the essence of a building far more effectively than images of the whole. He discovers scenes in a building which even the architect has not noticed; he allows the materials to be self-explanatory and the forms to express their functions. The light coming into a space is frozen in an instant in Pare's viewfinder and printed on our retinae, becoming a phantasmic beauty beyond real time." (Tadao Ando in: Tadao Ando: The Colours of Light (1996))
Perhaps the fact that Richard Pare is a photographer of architecture rather than an architectural photographer explains both his approach to his work and the character of images presented in this exhibition: Through his medium Pare attempts to communicate the way buildings can be sensed or experienced, rather then as they are seen. Kicken Berlin shows a selection of Pare's photographs of architecture in Japan, Egypt, Russia, and Italy dated between 1982 and 2000.
The exhibition at Kicken II assembles a selection of 30 exceptional vintage prints by Dr. Paul Wolff (1887 Mulhouse - 1951 Frankfurt on Main) from the 1930s.
