Karen Knorr showed her Gentlemen series 1981-1983 at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, in a group exhibition dedicated to photography and the 1980's.
Heterogeneous, elusive, painful, fantastical, still too close, as light-hearted as they were serious, the Eighties were full of contrasts and paradoxes. With films and photographs from its collections, the Centre Pompidou cast a fresh eye on this decade in an exhibition featuring over 20 artists and some 60 works in a completely new circuit.
From Florence Paradeis to Jean-Paul Goude, and from Karen Knorr to Présence Panchounette by way of Martin Parr and Pierre and Gilles, the works selected mostly express criticism of culture and society through various strategies, such as irony, realistic or imaginative staging, pastiche, subverted sets and odes to artifice. The history of Eighties photography somewhat eludes comprehension even today.
