At OFFSCREEN Bigaignon presents a collection of works by artist Yannig Hedel, who engages in a process of extracting reality through photography, creating abstract fragments from urban architectural shots. These forms or counter-forms, found and then distilled, play with scales, viewpoints, and perspectives, transitioning from one medium to another (photography, sculpture, and drawing). The artist defines them as “off-topic” forms, “ready-found.”

The artist has been pursuing the marks of time on urban architecture, day after day, season after season, and, in so doing, has spent the last 40 years building a remarkable and coherent body of work. He rigorously captures shadows, these ephemeral shapes, to illustrate the passage of time. He has invented a new street photography, turning it into something formal, poetic and silent. His work is purely figurative but also flirts with abstraction; it could be defined as “abstract reality.” The works exhibited were produced between 1998 and 2003.

Hedel has exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, la BNF, Centre d’Art Contemporain in Brussels, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Musée de Réattu, Arles, Musée d’Art Contemporaine, Strasbourg, in and his work is held in collections including those of FNAC Toulouse, La Fondation Nationale de la Photographie in Lyon, Fotostiftung in Winthertur, and the Museums in Arles, Strasbourg, Chalon-sur-Saône, Charleroi, Belgium and Stuttgart, Germany as well as private collections across Europe and the US.

Bigaignon is a Paris-based contemporary art gallery. The line of the gallery finds its roots in the avant-garde movements of minimalism, conceptual art, light & space, abstract art, and in the fields of experimental & conceptual photography for which it has been playing a leading role for almost 10 years. Profoundly engaged in the promotion of artists who work the fundamental elements of light, space and time, whatever the medium they use, the gallery is contributing to the rise of a new avant-garde. As such, with a strong international focus, the gallery defends and promotes the unique vision of artists it represents or supports, whether they be emerging, mid-career or established worldwide, in their quest to propose a new visual vocabulary, to foster a radical approach to art, to challenge their own medium and to explore the full extent of its possibilities.