Danziger Projects presents an exhibition by Christopher Bucklow.

Christopher Bucklow is a British artist born in Manchester in 1957. His work is in the collections of major art museums internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. Bucklow is best known for his luminous silhouette photographs, works that place him within a movement building since the early 1990’s of British photographers who have been taking the art of the photogram into ever more novel, interesting, and technically and conceptually challenging territory.

Bucklow’s first show at Danziger Projects is comprised of eight recent large scale photograms that continue his engagement with the ethereal silhouettes that have become his trademark. These other-worldly photographs of glowing figures set against grounds of color are at once visually beautiful and psychologically engaging.

The works are made through a multi-step process that is almost performative in its complexity and labor. Bucklow begins by projecting the shadow of his sitter on a large sheet of aluminum foil and tracing its outline. He then makes thousands of small pinholes in the foil silhouette, one for each day of the subject’s approximate lifespan. Using a contraption of his own device that places the foil over a large sheet of photographic paper, Bucklow wheels his homemade “camera” out into daylight and pulls the “shutter” back and forth to briefly expose the paper to direct sunlight. Thus each finished picture becomes a photogram silhouette composed of thousands of miniature pictures of the sun. The intensity of light on a given day and the length of exposure create unique color variations on how the resulting piece appears.

While Bucklow is best known for his photograms, he is also a serious and dedicated painter. His paintings are filled with allusions to the mystical traditions of artists like William Blake and connect to the spiritual element of Bucklow’s photogram figures.