Robert Polidori is one of our favorite contemporary artists. His unique eye is inspiring. BOMB magazine has a fantastic article about Polidori written by Michèle Gerber Klein. Here is a short passage, and to read the complete article click here.
“I met Robert Polidori through a photograph he had taken of the Versailles restoration. It captivated me. Seeing so many layers of history in one image was astonishing. So was being spurred to imagine Versailles as a real dwelling defined by the remnants of its inhabitants, and all the changes in history they and it had undergone.
This was the ’90s, when many photographers making art were constructing their own subjects or creating intellectual images that involved visual sleight of hand. The straightforward voluptuousness of Robert’s photo stood in stark contrast to all this. It was this originality and this lushness that enchanted me.
Later, after I got to know him, I invited Robert to visit North Dakota and photograph a town that had once belonged to my grandfather and is—now that the celebrated territories romanticized through legends of the Wells Fargo are a virtual desert—nearly gone. I wondered what his lens would uncover in that supernatural barrenness. Robert accepted. On the first day, we were so busy talking in the airport we missed the plane. On the second, I discovered that Robert fully expected me and Leaf, my Native American driver, to meet him for breakfast, totally awake and smiling, in the motel restaurant at 5:30 AM, and to keep going until we lost the sunset’s last ray. To say that Robert is passionately focused is an understatement. He was so intense in his search for images that the final night, while we were having dinner in the same motel restaurant, a man came over to him and said, “I know who you are. You’re the guy who was taking pictures in my backyard this afternoon. I’m the mayor of this town.” I don’t think Robert had even realized we were trespassing.
The Metropolitan Museum commissioned Robert to take pictures of the New Orleans flood disaster. A friend who had grown up there cried when she saw them. She was not alone. The Fall 2006 show in the Howard Gilman Gallery was the most attended photography show in the history of the Met. Robert’s work has an extraordinarily wide, visceral appeal.”
Inside a home in New Orleans.
Robert Polidori, 2520 Deslondes Street, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, 2005 101,6 x 137,16 cm Chromogenic print on Fuji Crystal Archive, © Robert Polidori
Image courtesy of The Art Blog.
Here are two Polidori works in residences we have done.
Robert Polidori, Versailles, Deambulatoire of the Chapelle Royalle, 2006, Edition of 10.
Image courtesy of Suzanne Lovell, Inc.
For more of this residence, click here.
Robert Polidori, Versailles, Petit Appartment of Marie-Antoinette, “Elisabeth-Phillipine-Marie-Helen de France by Labille Guiard”, 2007. Edition of 10.
Image courtesy of Suzanne Lovell, Inc.
For more of this residence, click here.