Kevin
Mackintosh
Dancers
on Glass Horses
14 February 19h00 till 4 March 2006
34 LONG invites you to a feast of flamboyant, theatrical
photography. The gallery is hosting an exhibition of photographic
images by Kevin Mackintosh, a one-time South African photographer
freelancing for a number of glossy international publications like Harpers
& Queen, Casa Vogue, World Of Interiors, Architectural
Digest - Paris,
Bloom and View on Colour. Kevin is based in London and
New York.
Commissioned to compile a series of images of the Bolshoi ballet
theatre in Moscow just before its recent closure for renovation
work, Kevin, set designer Daryl Mcgregor and a group of stylists,
lighting technicians and assistants spent two frantically creative
months in snow-covered Moscow. They set up a studio in a disused
section of the crumbling building, steeped in lost grandeur.
They worked intensely to capture the beauty, the splendour and the
fantasy of the final dramatic performances of the Bolshoi, a
stone’s throw away from the Kremlin and Red Square. At times they
had no more than a few feverish minutes with tense performers going
on stage or leaving after a curtain call in which to grasp ephemeral
moments. At other times there was more leisure to style fabulously
contrived photographs, Felliniesque, theatrical and evocative of the
delicately decaying opulence that was the Bolshoi for more than two
hundred years.
The building, in a dangerous state of disrepair due to years of
cash-strapped neglect, is one of the world’s largest theatres. Not
only did it host some of the most spectacular ballet performances of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was also the sensational
backdrop to Lenin’s Bolshevic triumph and the birth of the Soviet
Union. It is an essential part of Moscow, a place of pilgrimage for
the lover of beauty and dazzling spectacle which may vanish forever
should sufficient funds for renovations not be found.
Kevin Mackintosh’s astonishing photographs capture the flamboyant
beauty and magnificent tragedy of what could possibly be the swan
song of Moscow’s Bolshoi. The photographs, pigment prints on
cotton paper in low limited edition are large and beautifully framed
to exacting standards.
