KLOMPCHING GALLERY is pleased to present an exhibition of new work, by the acclaimed artist, Helen Sear.

The exhibit features 14 photographic artworks, selected from three recent series—Becoming Forest, View Finder and Wild Flower Arrangements—in addition to Caetera Fumus, which debuted at her solo show for the 2015 Venice Biennale. This exhibition celebrates Sear’s most recent artistic endeavors and will be on view through April 28, 2017.

The Becoming Forest series explores the experience of moving through a marked forest landscape, and the altered/ heightened perception of surfaces, forms and space. As with her earlier work, Sear’s gesture of the hand is visible, where she has traced the lines of new forest growth, using a digital pen and tablet. The chaos and entanglement of these hand drawn lines that follow the actual forest growth, contrasts with the geometric neon pigment marks spray-painted by the foresters.

With the View Finder series, Sear continues ideas explored in previous work, where formalism meets the unruly in the managed rural landscape. The hay bales themselves are consistent, central objects. They block the viewer’s ability to see the rural vista, but this perception of the landscape is further disrupted by Sear’s sleight of hand, or intervention, in the making of the artworks. As with Monet’s Haystacks, these photographs are in many ways defined by shadows, or absence thereof.

Wild Flower Arrangements show the ower heads of the Daucus Carota plant, at different stages of maturity—which often display at the same time on the same stem—and have been cut and rearranged in unnatural configurations as constructed portraits. The complex beauty of the weed that thrives in wasteland, is heightened by its isolation within an interior space, reminiscent of the opulent surroundings of society portraiture.

Writer and curator, David Campany, has described Sear as “one of photography’s foremost innovators. For her the medium is one of magic as much as realism. It is never pure, fixxed or entirely knowable. Each new series presents a new set of challenges that offer up her fascination with craft and our habits of looking.”

Helen Sear (b. 1955) studied Fine Art at Reading University
the Slade School of Art, London. Sear’s work explores ideas of vision, touch and re-presentation of the nature of experience, with particular reference to the human and animal body and her immediate environment in rural Wales and France. Helen Sear represented Wales at the Venice Biennale in 2015, and has won several artist’s awards, including The Major Creative Wales Award, from Arts Council Wales (2011). Helen Sear lives and works in Wales and France.

Klompching Gallery was established in Dumbo, Brooklyn in September 2007. Owned and operated by Debra Klomp Ching and Darren Ching, the gallery quickly established itself as a gallery with an extraordinary roster of artists from which to purchase some of the best examples of contemporary photography. Klompching Gallery is a member of AIPAD (Association of International Photography Art Dealers).