This solo exhibition reinvented traditional analogue photographic techniques to create a visual essay on contemporary culture that developed an innovative pictorial critical language. ‘Avenue des Gobelins’ is a meditation on the mystical, ritual nature of material desire and consumption – a subject which has a significant currency within the expanded fields of art, theory, and politics. It acted as a platform for a new body of photographic work, The Consumystic series.
In setting a research context, the title was borrowed from one of Eugène Atget's iconic 19th-century photographs of Parisian shop fronts, taken at the dawn of commodity displays. The exhibition comprised four slide projections, a video projection, and platinum prints – all originally shot on 35mm black-and-white slide film. By double- and triple-exposing the film, Gluzberg adopted the analogue photographic techniques of the Surrealists, as well as referencing artists from the 1970s who used slide installation. The images were projected onto graphite-covered paper – a reinvention of the silver screen, bringing the works into the debate around contemporary drawing.
Related outcomes included ‘The consumystic’, a lecture hosted by The Speaker Society (2011); an exhibition catalogue with an essay by curator David Thorp (2011); a new moving image work The Consumystic (Transmission), Babylon Kino Mitte, Berlin (2012); a solo project at the ‘UNSEEN Photo Fair’, Amsterdam (2012); ‘Jerwood Drawing Prize Exhibition’ (2012); and artist’s talks including Goldsmiths College (2012), Sheffield Hallam University (2013) and University College London (2013).
National and international press included an essay by Trish Lyons and a special commission photograph in ART.ZIP magazine, China (2012). Other reviews included Blend magazine, Dazed Digital, AD Italia and I-D magazine (all 2011); Art Review and, in the Guardian, ‘Margarita Gluzberg: Artist of the week’ (both 2012).