Craigie Horsfield

E. Horsfield, Well Street, East London, March 1986

1992

On loan

Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (Kaohsiung, Taiwan): Nude: art from the Tate collection

Artist: Craigie Horsfield born 1949
Medium: Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper on aluminium
Dimensions: Image: 2132 x 1319 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Purchased 1993
Reference: T06730

Display caption

Horsfield often prints his negatives for the first time many years after the moment in time they portray, the time when the photograph was taken. This lends his subjects a duality of meaning: they are both the focus of memory, and objects existing in the present. The artist believes in the capacity of the photographic image to enable us to appreciate 'slow' history, as opposed to the swiftly changing surface of culture and politics. His approach to portraits and the nude is rooted in the traditions of painting. Here the pose of the figure is a quotation from Masaccio's 'The Expulsion from Paradise'. Such references extend the historical dimensions of the work.

Gallery label, September 2004

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