LANGUAGE NUDITY SMOKING
Giovanni’s Room is pleased to announce “LANGUAGE NUDITY SMOKING”, a solo exhibition by Paris based artist Katerina Jebb. The exhibition documents the artist’s continued exploration in the medium of scanography through poetry, portraits and installation. “LANGUAGE NUDITY SMOKING” presents an unseen triptych of the wheelchair of Frida Kahlo from Jebb’s documentation of the archives at The Frida Kahlo Museum, Mexico in 2022. The exhibition will be on view from May 10 extended through July 23, 2024.
Katerina Jebb was born in England in 1962. In 1984 she moved to California to study experimental photography. Her first works were photomontages which she created inside the camera, originating from repeated exposure of a single roll of film. In 1989 Jebb relocated to Paris to pursue her interest in visual arts. There she employed photocopy machines to create life- size images, primarily self-portraits lying herself down on a high resolution scanning machine. Progressively, she diversified, posing subjects and objects, exploring the medium in parallel with the expanding possibilities in digital technology. Jebb proceeded to remove parts of the scanner to facilitate maximum extension of the subject. The duration of each passage of the scanner echoed early photographic principles, long exposures of seven minutes, therefore demanding of the sitter to lie motionless for twenty eight minutes. The resulting images were embraced as a new visual medium and began to appear in museums and galleries, notably The Whitney Museum in 1998 as part of The Warhol Look a world touring retrospective.
In 2016 Jebb's work was the subject of a solo exhibition at Musée Réattu Arles, France. In 2018 Jebb was invited by The Metropolitan Costume Museum to collaborate on the exhibition "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination“. In 2021 The Victoria & Albert Museum, London presented a single large-scale photomontage created by Jebb of a rare 19th century embroidery sampler from the V&A collections.
Katerina Jebb’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Victoria & Albert Museum, Le Musée des Arts Decoratifs Paris, Musée Réattu Arles.
