George Byrne Featured by the Guardian
Los Angeles-based Australian photographer George Byrne's awarded series Post Truth has been featured by the Guardian.
The feature reads:
“I found it beautiful and hideous and mysterious all at once,” says George Byrne of Los Angeles, which sparked a creative epiphany in the Sydney-born photographer when he moved there in 2011. Drawn to LA’s “99c stores and gas stations”, Byrne began to shoot in colour and experiment with digital manipulation and collage. The fruits of his explorations are gathered in Post Truth, whose oddly seductive vistas of parking lots and municipal spaces – in Florida as well as Los Angeles – are “definitely on the spectrum of delicious Instagram clickbait” but also refer back to artists such as David Hockney and Ed Ruscha. As per the title, these candy-coloured images are less to do with reality than Byrne’s own ideas of America and of photography itself, a medium that, for him, is “as malleable as clay”
Select works from Byrne's Post Truth were exhibited at Bau-Xi Photo from June 5-19, 2021, as part of the artist's solo exhibition, Post Truth (pictured above). In 2019, the artist was awarded 3rd place at the Minimalist Photography Awards for his series, Post Truth.
VIEW GEORGE BYRNE'S COLLECTION
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
George Byrne is an internationally recognized photographer based in Los Angeles. Byrne creates large scale photographs that depict architectural surfaces and landscapes as painterly abstractions. Borrowing from the clean, vivid clarity of modernist painting, he also references the New Topographics photography movement via a subject matter firmly entrenched in the urban everyday.
Byrne started 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 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.
George Byrne was born in Sydney, Australia in 1976 and graduated from Sydney College of the Arts in 2001. He has exhibited internationally in Italy, India, Australia, Los Angeles, and New York. In 2019, Byrne placed third in the Fine Art category of the Minimalist Photography Awards and was named the Minimalist Photographer of the Year in the Minimalist Photography Awards' 2020 edition. Byrne relocated to Los Angeles, California in 2010, where he continues to live and work.