Photofairs San Francisco

Fort Mason Festival Pavilion | February 23-25, 2018

For Photofairs San Francisco 2018, De Soto Gallery presents selections of recent work by Alma Haser and Denis Darzacq. Both artists will debut new series for the first time in the US at the fair — Haser’s twin portrait puzzles from Within 15 Minutes and Darzacq’s continued foray into formalism with Contreformes.

Although her primary medium is photography, Alma Haser also uses intricate paper-folding techniques, collage, and more recently, puzzle-making to construct portraits with playfully enigmatic distortions. Her on-going series, Cosmic Surgery (2014-2017), imagines clone-like, origami-inspired facial alterations as the new Botox-cum-anti-surveillance fad, while her latest series, Within 15 Minutes(2018), flirts with the strangeness of identical twins and the idea of two versions of the same person. Haser’s oddly alluring portraits consider human adaptation and nature versus nurture in a less and less natural world.

Denis Darzacq’s two most recent series, like Haser’s, involve photo/sculpture experimentations and a similar preoccupation with nature and culture, humans and machines. Both Doublemix (2014-2015) and Contreformes (2017) consider  consumerism and life in the age of social media couched in a new mode of abstraction that reflects the disconnect involved in navigating existence (and dispensability) in the digital world and IRL.

Alma Haser (b. 1990, Black Forest, Germany) received a BA(Hons) in Photography in Art Practice from Nottingham Trent University. She won the Magenta Foundation’s Bright Spark Award for Cosmic Surgery in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery for an earlier series, The Ventriloquist, in 2012. She has had recent solo and group exhibitions at The Photographer’s Gallery in London and at UNSEEN in Amsterdam. Haser is based in London.

Denis Darzacq (b. 1961, Paris, France) has exhibited extensively in Europe and North America. He received a World Press Photo Award in 2007 and the Niépce Prize in 2012. His work is included in numerous public and private collections including Centre Pompidou, Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Bidwell Projects, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Caldic Collection, and Agnès B. Darzacq is based in Paris.