Artist: Cig Harvey

Alon Zakaim Fine Art and The Little Black Gallery present Cig Harvey: I Want You To Remember This Forever - the debut UK show of world-renowned photographer Cig Harvey at Alon Zakaim Fine Art, London.

The exhibition is an enquiry into luminosity, pairing quintessential 19th and 20th century paintings and sculptures with the intimate photographic art of Cig Harvey, including works by Marc Chagall, Le Corbusier, and Chaïm Soutine.

The exhibition, curated by Brandei Estes, former Head of Photographs at Sotheby's, opens Friday 17 October during Frieze London.

Estes said of the exhibition: "Cig Harvey’s photographs capture fleeting beauty with the emotional intensity of painting, so I am delighted to have curated Harvey's first show in London with some of the greatest painters in art history. Like the Impressionists, she chases light - turning ordinary moments into something timeless. Her images echo the grace of Degas and the clarity of Cézanne, inviting us not just to look, but to remember."

Beauty. Fleeting or eternal? Photography’s relationship to time is understood differently to that of painting. The precise quality of light changes in a nano-second; some of the joy experienced in looking at a memorably beautiful photograph emanates from that exquisite timeliness.

Such shifts in light obsessed painters such as Monet, Le Sidaner, and Laugé, who sought to capture this transience in their brush strokes. The work of these Impressionists, in particular, was so profoundly misunderstood at the movement’s conception that it found an ally in the burgeoning art of photography, exhibiting side-by-side in Parisian salons. This connection was sometimes so close as to be symbiotic.

The way sunlight transforms yellow into gold, blue into aquamarine, grey into silver, reveals an alchemy that was born in, and defines, southern French landscapes, transporting the viewer there. Cig Harvey’s eye is focused on her adopted home of Maine, on the east coast of America, yet she perceives the landscape similarly. She photographs its flora, its fruit, its secret golden roads at midnight. What unites these visual practices, as well as their beauty, is the intensity and curiosity of the gaze.

Feeling is everywhere expressed in the sensuousness of Harvey’s images, yet form is not forgotten. The dynamism of Degas informs a new understanding of her graceful, yet strikingly contemporary figures in the landscape. Similarly, reading Harvey’s gleaming apricots back into de la Fresnaye’s still life evokes the profound influence of Cézanne, and the sense of freedom he brought to traditional modes of perspective and representation.

The works chosen for this exhibition illuminate each other. By way of beauty, each image offers an appeal to its viewer: I want you to remember this forever.

Text by Dr Max Houghton