Peeled Architecture
Text by Nora Schmidt
Berlin, Germany
11.08.08
He gives the impression of wanting to tidy everything up and clear away any unnecessary visual ballast. Meticulously and with surgical precision Richard Galpin breaks down the fine top layer of large-scale architectural photographs.
He gives the impression of wanting to tidy everything up and clear away any unnecessary visual ballast. Meticulously and with surgical precision Richard Galpin breaks down the fine top layer of large-scale architectural photographs into geometrical forms and lines. Some of their elements are removed entirely, leaving the white bottom layer of the photographic paper, while others remain in place and merge to form a visionary architectural construct.
Richard Galpin abstracts photographs of urban spaces and architecture, and transforms them into graphic fragments with a three-dimensional appearance, in pattern-like surfaces which reflect the formal repetition and dynamism of big-city architecture. Although formally Richard Galpin moves further and further away from the original photograph with every work he creates, the removal of many of the principal pictorial elements often highlights the perspectives and pictorial composition of the original photo.
The resulting spaces and structural clusters then appear like extracts from a reality which is visually entirely overloaded.
