Lucien Hervé

6 September - 10 October 2014
Works
Overview
The Michael Hoppen Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of photographs by Lucien Hervé to run alongside Constructing Worlds, Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age at the Barbican Centre (25 September 2014 – 11 January 2015).
 
We will display vintage works together with rare contact sheets that act as a visual “sketch book” offering a rare insight into how Hervé worked.
 
Lucien Hervé (b. László Elkán 1910 - 2007) is renowned for taking photographs from multiple vantage points to portray the experience of walking through a building. His characteristic style of cropped frames, plunging or oblique views, and pared-down compositions distinguish his work from that of his contemporaries. He followed the work of avant-garde artists such as Piet Mondrian, László Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Rodchenko, whose stark geometry and abstract forms enabled him to recognise the same compositions within architecture. He collaborated with Le Corbusier for sixteen years who was known to re-draw his plans in response to Hervé’s photographs. He pronounced him to have ‘the soul of an architect’.
 
Lucien Hervé’s work is in public and private collections worldwide. Including the Getty Institute, Los Angeles, MoMA, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London.