Alexander Lindsay: ALTITUDE

Forty feet wide, a gargantuan photographic print is at first unsettling. The image demands attention. It has a sense of finality and an insistent, pulsating, presence. As you approach, a journey begins, the eye wandering through desolate valleys and angry skies. Closer still and sharp, tangible details emerge in the distance: seams of copper, iron and sulphur on volcanoes and individual flamingos on distant salt lakes.

Piano Nobile is proud to present their second exhibition at their new Kings Place gallery. Alexander Lindsay’s ALTITUDE was photographed during a 20,000 mile, eight-month overland expedition across South America. Printed in extraordinary detail on a monumental scale, his photographs capture the endless variety of vistas, from the remote, high-altitude deserts of Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, to the bleak desolation of the Beagle Channel and Cape Horn.

The works in Lindsay’s ALTITUDE are the latest expressions of his life’s journey as photographer, award-winning filmmaker and artist. His past work has ranged across ancient cycles of life and death, epic battlefields and the vast depths of the oceans. Diverse subjects that for Lindsay share a common link: ‘My fascination lies in peering over the edges of the unknown.’ For him, the desolation of these landscapes is exhilarating and visually spectacular and his works explore the power of the sublime.

Continually returning to the early influence of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, Lindsay strives to overcome the wrenching divergence between the natural world and modern life evident in Reggio’s cult masterpiece. Instead of irreconcilable confliction, Lindsay captures the elemental power of nature in its purest, most raw magnificence through cutting edge digital technology in a transcendental meshing of polarities. Beyond the physical creation of these seductive images, the very antithesis of what modern life is about is laid out in huge and savage focus.

Opening alongside a concert by Philip Glass, who scored the integral soundtrack to Koyaanisqatsi and whose minimalist composition have informed Lindsay’s practice, ALTITUDE will run in conjunction with the Kings Place Music Foundation’s Minimalism Unwrapped programme.