Eyewitness

EYEWITNESS

May 26 to July 3, 2021

Galerie Nicolas Robert

Press Release:

Galerie Nicolas Robert is proud to present Eyewitness, Tristram Lansdowne’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. In a new series of large-scale, rigorously executed watercolours, Lansdowne presents views of eerily vacant news broadcasting sets. As with his previous body of work that focused on the global placelessness and homogeneity of contemporary luxury home design, Lansdowne considers the newsroom as a non-site: both intrinsically local and globally placeless, it is a windowless stage upon which our fears and desires take root and the world is flattened into a consumable spectacle. Through a range of pictorial interventions Lansdowne examines how this flattening is both articulated and counteracted by the elaborate framing, geometric flourishes, and layered illusionism of these spaces. As if suddenly abandoned and left to their own devices, the sweeping lightboxes glow, storm systems percolate on large backdrop screens and the veneer surfaces of the news anchors’ desks glimmer like digital altars, inviting us to contemplate how their architectural form embodies their function as conduits of power and information. 

Exhibition essay by Tatum Dooley available here