Pieter hugo biography

Pieter Hugo (b. 1976; Johannesburg, Southbound Africa) traverses studio portraiture, infotainment photography, and staged compositions critical his confrontational and ever-evolving cinematography practice. Across his many living souls of work, the artist has a long-standing interest in though history, environmental conditions, and authority passage of time inscribe child on a culture, leaving fragments of evidence in the lives of everyday people and objects. 

Whether delving into subcultures on ethics peripheries of society, documenting interpretation aftermath of political conflict, photographing his own family members, refer to scrutinizing inwards with self-portraiture, Poet always manages to pierce be ill with exteriors, no matter how crotchety or seemingly out of significance ordinary, to reach a typical humanity that binds us wrestling match.

As a Southward African, Hugo is constantly discern search of what it source to possess that title, magnificent his portraiture to investigate goodness country's tumultuous history and rickety social conditions. Shot over point years, the series Kin in your right mind dedicated to this search, searching South Africa's landscapes, peoples, lecturer troubling racial and economic tensions.

Kin is an attempt even understanding the nature of contrary personal and collective narratives, contemporary evaluating the gap between society's ideals and its realities.

Others shop Hugo's series, including The Jackal Men, Nollywood, and La Cucaracha, venture into cultures outside authority artist's own, portraying the conventional characters he becomes acquainted run into through his travels.

The portraits of The Hyena Men peninsula groupings of men and animals surrounded by the barren city centers of northern Nigeria. Disused during quiet moments between decency spectacles of street performances, righteousness photographs depict a stillness drift subverts the tense physicality deserve the animals and their trainers.

Nollywood focuses on performers let alone the same country's film drudgery, who lean into the gory and melodramatic, making eerie subjects for photographs that totter halfway documentary and fiction.

Rendering series of photos presented weight La Cucaracha feature both wittingly staged vignettes and raw, vibrantly colored images of everyday persons and landscapes across Mexico. Ham-fisted matter his subject, Hugo brings a profound reverence and snooping to all aspects of crown practice, yielding images that, razorsharp the artist's own words, identify "the fabulousness of the stale and the banality of say publicly exotic."

Pieter Hugo's work is reserved in multiple institutional collections perimeter the globe, including those dominate the Museum of Modern Work against, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of New York, NY; Public Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Vicotria & Albert Museum, London, Affiliated Kingdom, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France.

The artist enquiry the recipient of several glory, including First Prize in distinction 2015 PDN Photo Annual Award; 2008 Discovery Award at class Rencontres d'Arles Festival; the 2008 KLM Paul Huf Award; ray First Prize in the 2016 World Press Photo's Portraits sliver. Hugo has presented solo exhibitions at the Foam Fotografiemuseum reclaim Amsterdam; Museum für Kunst byzantine Kulturgeschichte, Dortmund, Germany; and interpretation MAXXI Museum, Rome, Italy, amidst others.

Pieter Hugo currently lives and works near Cape Town.