George Byrne | Post Truth

Image: George Byrne, "Ling's #2," Archival Pigment Print Mounted to Archival Substrate, Framed in White with Plexiglass, 33.75 x 41.75 inches. Edition of 5.

Bau-Xi Photo is excited to present an exhibition of works by Los Angeles-based Australian photographer George Byrne. This body of work has never been exhibited in Toronto. 

Known for his brightly coloured large-scale photographs of Los Angeles and Miami architecture, Byrne centres his practice around the documentation of the urban everyday. From parking lots to gas stations, billboards and graphic façades, Byrne meticulously frame’s his subject, almost distilling it down to a series of interlocking shapes. 

Byrne borrows from, and references, the Modernist and New topographics movements. While operating in different periods, Byrne seamlessly incorporates the banal, man-made, subject matter of the New topographics with the graphic simplicity the Modernists employed in their works.

The artist began photographing Los Angeles with a medium format camera in 2010. Byrne’s close-crop photos, often taken from the middle of the street, show careful attention to the geometric fragments of his urban surroundings revealed in the subtle line and unexpected shadow which cut across pastel walled surfaces, and divide soft sky from gritty stucco, plastic and concrete. Byrne’s work encapsulates not only the spirit of his adopted city’s unique and diverse cityscape, but an aesthetic sensibility that has come to be ubiquitous with our globalized visual culture influenced by equal parts art history and Instagram.