Still life flowers as you've never seen them before. Photographer Dan Tobin Smith opens an exhibition of images inspired by Dutch Old Masters that thoroughly updates the genre.
You would not expect images this atmospheric and brooding from a common or garden flower festival, but this is Dan Tobin Smith for Chelsea Fringe Festival, the rebellious younger sister of the famous Chelsea Flower Show.
Dan Tobin Smith has created a series of work to co-incide with the festival that develops some of his ongoing interests in the Still Life work of the Old Dutch Masters and in exploring nature as a foil to the usual Modernist tendencies towards the geometric. His series Still Life With Flowers will be on show at Hackney eatery L'Entrepot's Storeroom gallery space until 17 June 2014.
Renowned photographer Tobin Smith is more readily associated with luxury brands and cutting edge glossy magazines than flower shows, and his final images often capture feats of performance in-camera. He stays true to this here, with cleverly lit, black angular steel structures capturing not only the deep chiaroscuro of the Dutch originals but also tapping into an almost dystopian futuristic aesthetic.
The images were begun by analysing the density of colour and shape in seventeenth and eighteenth century oil paintings by artists including Rachel Ruysch and Willem Van Aelst. By sketching forms based on these paintings he created a map of the paintings' compositions, which were rendered three-dimensional in steel. He then worked with florist Nik Southern at Grace & Thorn to load the resulting steel structures with fresh flowers exactly echoing those in the original paintings.
The final images capture a moment of perfect freshness for the flowers, before they inevitably fade and retreat into the cold depths of their historically inspired caskets.
Still Life with Flowers By Dan Tobin Smith
The Storeroom at L’Entrepôt
17 May to 17 June 2014
Free entry
Limited edition prints will be available to buy from £200 - £500 unframed.
