Marcelo Grosman featured in Artspace's 9 highlights EXPO Chicago
Sep 20, 2013
MARCELO GROSMAN’s MASCULINO 26-30, #4
(2012) AT THE MISSION GALLERY
To create this body of work at Chicago’s MISSION gallery, the Argentine-born artist Marcelo Grosman accessed the Cook County prison database to search for certain categories—say, males between 26 and 34 who had been arrested for domestic violence—and then compiled the photographs of between 50 and 200 inmates who met the criteria into composite portraits. The ghostly resulting pieces, which recall both police sketches and the typological investigations of photographers like August Sander, are also intended by the artist to be critiques of systems of institutional oppression, in which the individuality of these offenders is blurred away as they are reduced to a generic data point.
(2012) AT THE MISSION GALLERY
To create this body of work at Chicago’s MISSION gallery, the Argentine-born artist Marcelo Grosman accessed the Cook County prison database to search for certain categories—say, males between 26 and 34 who had been arrested for domestic violence—and then compiled the photographs of between 50 and 200 inmates who met the criteria into composite portraits. The ghostly resulting pieces, which recall both police sketches and the typological investigations of photographers like August Sander, are also intended by the artist to be critiques of systems of institutional oppression, in which the individuality of these offenders is blurred away as they are reduced to a generic data point.