Concrete

Photography by Juan Hitters

Curated by Wil Ceniceros and Luz Hitters

5th March - 8th March 2020

Covent Garden, London

”My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-endingly retrieving what is lost. A dogged, vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business.”

 - Graham Swift, Waterland. 

Curators Wil Ceniceros and Luz Hitters are pleased to present Concrete, the first UK solo exhibition by Argentinian photographer Juan Hitters (b. 1966, Buenos Aires). He was awarded the Gran Premio Adquisición (Grand Prize Acquisition) in the 103rd Salón Nacional de las Artes Visuales (Photography) in Argentina in 2014 for his photograph Concreto #1.  As a former psychoanalyst, Hitters’ interest in photography is tied to exploring the stories left behind on walls surfaces. He abstracts familiar corners, capturing them from a foreign and silent presence. His walls immortalize memories that will remain unspoken, acting as reminders of the fleeting nature of our existence. 

The exhibition addresses the concept of ruptures through six photographs shot in Sydney in 2013 in a railway tunnel near the central station - a place of anonymous transit and quotidian activities. For the artist, buildings are like living organisms, and their cracks are evidence of their stories. The Concrete series is reminiscent of unfinished abstract paintings created by water and minerals leaking through the structure’s cracks. He captures mundane fractures and the life that grows within them thereby giving authorship to nature. Hitters invites viewers to be silent witnesses of a suspended performance played out on the concrete. Whatever the forces that contributed to these fractures, we see evidence that in the end, nature takes over. 

Touching on concepts such as ephemerality and contrasts of synthetic and organic, he exposes the codependence between humans and nature. As such, he illustrates the power relationship between synthetic and organic, and how they stem from a common source. For him, “man designs but nature rules.”

Juan Hitters

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1966

Former psychoanalyst, Juan Hitters, opened his photography studio in 1994 and began working for TV channels, portraying artists and celebrities. In conjunction, he started building a personal oeuvre, appreciated by ECM Records and used as album covers for musicians such as Keith Jarrett, Dino Saluzzi, Vijay Iyer, among many others. 

 Besides, he has shot over 100 CD covers for jazz, contemporary and classical music record labels such as Deutsche Grammophon, BIS and Naxos. These labels have been able to find Hitters’ abstraction as a means to transmit the complexity of the music. His photography captures the ephemerality of sound and the importance of silence. Hitters has taken hundreds of assignments for international magazines such as Wallpaper, Elle, Vogue, GQ, New York Times and Phaidon. He has been leading professor of Advertising Photography at the Universidad Católica Argentina and conducted seminars at many other universities.

Hitters was awarded the 2011 Ventanas al Futuro prize for his contribution to Architectural Photography and the Grand Prize at the 103 Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales (2014) with his photograph “Concreto #1”. His works constitute the permanent collection at FOLA (Fototeca Latinoamerica), the MNBA (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes) and the Bibliotéque Nationale de France. His work has been shown at solo exhibitions at TGSM Gallery, Federico Churba, Andy Goldstein, and participated in collective exhibitions at the MNBA, Triennale di Milano, Museo Sívori, CC Recoleta, FADU/UBA among others. They have also been acquired by Australian, French and American photography collectors. In addition, he has joined in an ECM 50 Years conference with Roberto Masotti for JazzMi (Milano, 2019) and has exhibited in RE:ECM (2019, South Korea).