Simon Norfolk
Artist Bio
Norfolk’s work focuses on the ruin left in the wake of wars and conflicts in such places as Bosnia, Liberia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is interested in the portrayal of ruins in works of art, and the meanings and metaphors with which they are endowed. North Gate of Baghdad, with its muted colors, painterly sweep of tree branches, and the remnant of a mustard-colored gate, evokes the tradition of history painting, or a 19th-century landscape by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. The viewer cannot help but appreciate the tantalizing beauty of such a photograph, at the same time that one instinctively resists the notion of aestheticizing images of contemporary destruction. (bio)
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