Apr 17

Apr 17 'RECLAIMED' PAUL HART’S NEW EXHIBITION AT THE FEN DITTON GALLERY

You either get the Fens or you keep your eyes shut until you cross the border into Norfolk. Be it either the Lincolnshire or Cambridgeshire variety, the Fen landscape is a learned taste. Colourfield painter Fred Ingrams fell in love with the straight lines and compared fields of beetroot tops to the Provençal sunflowers of Van Gogh’s paintings.

Paul Hart is another serious student of this unique layout of the world. But this time in photography. Already world famous, he has turned his lens on the East of England , its interior and its seaboard, to produce a series of stunning pictures out today.

The publication of ‘Reclaimed’ is the final of a series of three extraordinary photographic books by this artist photographer for Dewi Lewis Publishing. In this series, ‘Farmed’, ‘Drained’ and now ‘Reclaimed’, Hart – 2018 winner of the inaugural Wolf Suschitsky photography prize - explores one of the most productive yet haunting agricultural landscapes in England: the Lincolnshire fens. in collaboration with Fen Ditton Gallery’s, Amanda Game, a real on the wall exhibition was to fling open its doors this evening. Instead we have the online version and a lovely experience it is.

I find the photographs breathtakingly beautiful but they’re not for everyone. French fashion photographer Isabelle Bonnet declares in the exhibition catalogue, ‘

‘Hart’s images take on a universal value; the battered and exhausted Fens resonate like a subtle metaphor for what humanity engenders and inflicts on itself’

Bleak or what? Not altogether unsurprising from a woman whose latest thesis research focuses on the ‘social imagery of the crime scene in contemporary photography’ But for its admirers these Fen studies are fabulous – over years we have learned to love their inspiration and to now view them in the extraordinary guise of high art photography, by a leading modern artist, is probably the best treatment they can get.

And well done the Fen Ditton Gallery for launching online – with a warm invitation to get down to their delightful real space as soon as we all can.

Prices range from £1000 - £2000 (plus taxes) and all works are signed, titled and editioned verso. Books can also be ordered through the gallery