Follow the Yellow

The Surgeon and the Photographer

Image 2. Geoffrey Farmer _ The Surgeon and the Photographer. Photo by Alessandro Quisi

Photo by Alessandro Quisi courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

Following on from the phenomenally successful Rain Room, the Barbican’s Curve gallery has a brilliantly intriguing new exhibition as part of the Dancing around Duchamp season: Geoffrey Farmer’s The Surgeon and the Photographer 

The exhibition sees the gallery populated with hundreds of strange puppet-like figures that the artist has pieced together from images cut from old books and magazines, and scraps of fabric. Each idiosyncratic character is part surreal Dada collage, part shaman’s poppet. An otherworldly soundscape and the spiky shapes of the shadows that the figures cast across the gallery floor only add to the sense of the uncanny. Weird, fascinating and highly recommended.

Image 8

Photo by Alessandro Quisi courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

Geoffrey Farmer presents THE SURGEON AND THE PHOTOGRAPHER for his first major exhibition in a UK public gallery. Constructing 365 hand-puppets from book images clipped and glued to fabric forms, Farmer populates The Curve, in the Barbican Centre, with this recently completed puppet calendar.

Photo by Jane Hobson courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

Photo by Jane Hobson courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

Photo by Jane Hobson courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

Geoffrey Farmer: The Surgeon and the Photographer is at the Barbican Curve Gallery until  28 July 2013 (and it’s free!)

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