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The George Economou Collection announces Taryn Simon, Works from the George Economou Collection

The George Economou Collection presents Taryn Simon, Works from the George Economou Collection an exhibition on view 4 June–27 September 2013.

Taryn Simon, CHAPTER X (Humans on display at 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, Philippines), 2011. Archival inkjet prints comprised of six components, 213.36 x 772.67 cm. © 2012 Taryn Simon. Courtesy Almine Rech Gallery.
Taryn Simon, CHAPTER X (Humans on display at 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, Philippines), 2011. Archival inkjet prints comprised of six components, 213.36 x 772.67 cm. © 2012 Taryn Simon. Courtesy Almine Rech Gallery.

The George Economou Collection is delighted to announce the exhibition Taryn Simon, Works from the George Economou Collection. With contributing text by Nicholas Cullinan, curator in the department of Modern and Contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and in collaboration with Skarlet Smatana, director of the George Economou Collection, the exhibition features a selection of works from Taryn Simon’s major projects such as The Picture Collection, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII, Contraband, and An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar.

Taryn Simon has quickly established herself as one of the foremost photographers of our era. Her arrestingly beautiful images, incisive eye and rigorously intelligent projects continue the work of great American photographers ranging from the objective, documentary style of Walker Evans to the appetite for the strange and uncanny displayed by Diane Arbus.

The works on view at the George Economou Collection span the last six years of Simon’s career. These range from earlier projects such as An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar of 2007, where Simon documented, in dispassionate style, an array of sites and cultural artifacts, such as the foundry of Smith & Wesson in Massachusetts (still the leading manufacturer of handguns in the U.S.), or the Alhurra TV Broadcast Studio in Virginia—a U.S. Government sponsored, Arabic language television network dedicated to disseminating news and information from America to the Arab-speaking world. Simon’s deepening interest and engagement with differing modes of taxonomies manifests itself not just through the array of illicit objects in Contraband of 2010, ranging from cigarettes to counterfeit designer handbags—all of which are photographed in a cool, clinical manner—to the human subjects of A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I – XVIII, produced over a four-year period (2008-11) and which trace the genealogy of an array of bloodlines scattered around the globe.

Simon’s most recent project—The Picture Collection, 2012—is an extraordinary and encyclopedic archive of images drawn from the more than 1.2 million held by the New York Public Library. These encompass sources from postcards to images culled from magazines, which Simon has then sorted into panels broken down into categories such as ‘Handshaking’ and ‘Explosions.’ Through such classifications and investigations into suppressed and overlooked histories, Simon continues her deadpan but extremely sharp observation of culture both mundane and marvelous.

The George Economou Collection
80, Kifissias Ave. 151 25 Marousi
Athens, Greece
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Thursday 10–8pm; Admission free
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