PARIS PHOTO 2025

13-16 November / Grand Palais, Stand C28

England & Co presents British and UK-based artist-photographers who use photography to bring material presence to their conceptual ideas and performance practice.

Featured are a series of photographic collages emerging from Vlatka Horvat’s (b.1974) project for Croatian pavilion at 60th Venice Biennale 2024. Each work began with photograph taken by Horvat on daily walks through Venice; she worked on prints using analogue methods of collaging, drawing and cutting. Interventions emerge from something already present in the image: ‘playful alterations of the commonplace that invite the viewer to see the city anew and to imagine alternative possibilities.’ Another earlier work, ‘Monuments’ is an installation of images where Horvat depicts her own hand in a series of interactions with a set of everyday materials and objects. Transformed in the act of holding, crumpling, ‘inhabiting’ or gripping these materials, the hand in her images is removed from its usual context and presented as both body and object, or as combination of the two.

The Chinese-born but later British-based artist, Li Yuan-Chia (1929-1994), is now regarded as China’s first Conceptual artist. He produced a series of lyrical photographs in the last years of his life – many were still life compositions with his sculptures, flowers and stones, and others were images of himself performing shaman-like for his own camera in his garden in Cumbria. After working for decades in painting, sculpture and installation, Yuan-chia evolved this late immersion in photography in a highly personal, spiritual way. He hand-coloured and tinted many of his photographs, giving them an otherworldly, strangely timeless quality.

Works from the 1970s by the late British conceptual photographer, James Collins (1939-2021) investigate the ‘male gaze’ with images of male-female encounters conveying isolation, intimacy and erotic tension in domestic settings. Another British artist, Denis Masi (b. 1942), produced a series of ‘body works’ in the 1970s, treating his own body as both subject and object and exploring concepts of distortion in works such as his series ‘Lip Smear’ from 1970.

Photographs document performance artist Anne Bean’s (b.1950) disturbing self-transformation while exploring insect inter-relationships in 1972. In a recent review by Robert Barry, he describes how ‘the artist explores a becoming-beetle, secreting a dark, viscous fluid from her mouth in extreme close-up, wiggling her blackened tongue and smearing the pitch about her face to a voiceover calmly explaining the lifecycle of the eponymous insect. The creature enjoys a relationship at once symbiotic and parasitic with the ant kingdom, ingratiating itself into their nests and drugging them with a secretion that leaves them delirious but vulnerable, inducing the greatest ecstasy while doing the greatest harm possible.’

These featured works spanning the 1970s to now are complemented by a selection of historic photography, including a rare vintage print of Man Ray’s ‘Hull in Dry Dock’ that featured in the 1931 Arts et Métieres Graphiques annual Photographie; a fine print from the 1940s by Bill Brandt of a ‘Frosted Statue’ in the gardens of Crystal Palace; and Douglas Glass’s powerful ‘Portrait of Dora Maar’ published in the catalogue for Maar’s first solo exhibition in Britain in 1958.