Photon Gallery is exhibiting again this year at Photo London, one of the leading art fairs for photography in Europe. The fair takes place from 9-12 September, with a preview on 8 September, at Sommerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA. You may find our booth under the mark D5. We are also presenting a selection of photography books; in particular, we would like to highlight the monograph by Dino Kužnik: Shaped by the West.

Just before the fair, at the end of August, the digital edition of Photo London Magazine will be published, whose production the editors have this time entrusted to the Photon team. The issue is dedicated to an overview of the avant-garde and contemporary photographic scene in the region CEE since the 1970s and presents the work of eleven selected photographers, with a special focus on Slovenian photographers!

Presented Artists

Dino Kužnik (1986, Slovenija) is a photographer and graphic designer based New York. He uses photography as a medium to capture aesthetically unique scenes, focusing on colour and composition. After several years of experience as a journalistic photographer, retoucher and graphic designer, he now focuses mainly on personal and commercial photography projects ranging from documentary, automotive, architecture and landscape to environmental portraiture. At Photo London Photon will present works from his renownrd Shaped by the West series. In it Kužnik depicts some of the most familiar symbols of the American West, the car, the petrol station, the road and also the landscape. The work was created between 2016 and 2019 on various lonely road trips. Conceptually, the series stems from the artist’s experiences with the Westernisation of culture in Slovenia during the transition from socialism to capitalism after the country’s independence. Shaped by the West is thus a personal and artistic exploration of the symbols of Americana from his youth juxtaposed with his adult identity. The predominant narrative revolves around the artist’s desire to move abroad and a nostalgic vision of the American dream, contrasted with the reality of his life in a foreign country as well as the process of applying for an artist’s visa. Dino has lived in the US since 2013 and has travelled through Arizona, California, New Mexico, Utah, and Nevada in search of his artistic expression.

Goran Trbuljak (1949, Croatia) is a prolific visual artist, a pioneer of conceptual art, a filmmaker, and a creator of animated films. His recent photographic works from the Sketches for a Sculpture series will be on display at the fair. They include a series of still lifes made up of objects that act as attributes of his two professions, film and photography. We can recognize objects such as light meters, video cameras, various volumes of technical literature, etc. In his photographs, these “banal” objects take on a new meaning and become monumental. Trbuljak’s photographs represent a model for conceptual thinking and the conception of a work of art. The selection of photographed objects thus becomes both a formal and a conceptual gesture that involves a self-reflexive consideration of one’s own work.

Ladislav Postupa (1929, Czech Republic) received his education at Technical University in Liberec. After working as a designer for several years, he published his first photographs in 1959. In 1965 he became a member of the Union Czechoslovak visual artists. In the following years he made his first photographs on negative plates in the style of wall paintings and experimented with various new techniques in photography; he also applied for several patents in Czechoslovakia. In 1970 he successfully patented a surface treatment for photographs on fiberboard that kept the images from fading. His work became known to the public in the 1960s when his photographs were shown at several important exhibitions on surrealism and photography in Brno in 1966. His first monograph was published in 1967, when he also began working as a professional photographer and opened his artist’s studio in Liberec. As an artist, Postupa drew on the rich tradition of Czech Surrealistic photography. His interpretations of everyday scenes are based on a penetrating surrealist perception of the world and its rich imagination will be on display at Photo London.

Eva Petrič (1983, Slovenia) is a conceptual, inter-media artist working with various visual art disciplines as well as photography, performance and writing. She graduated in psychology and Fine Art from Webster University in Vienna (2005) and later completed a master’s degree in new media at Transart Institute in Berlin/ Danube University Krems (2010). She participated in over 60 solo and 110 group exhibitions in Europe, USA and Asia. She lives and works in Ljubljana, Vienna and in New York. At Photo London, Photon will present works from her series Gr@y Matter – The Language of Shadows. It comprises a collection of her analogue black and white photographs of her own shadows. She manually manipulated many of the photographs in the darkroom, creating unique images without negatives. She used these images as building blocks for her own “periodic table” of emotions. As in the periodic table of chemical elements, individual photographs are represented here as elemental emotions that, in various combinations, form complex feelings and states.