MADRID.- He French photographer Pierre Gonnord died at the age of 60 in Madrid, city in which he has resided since 1988 and where he developed most of his professional career with exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa and workshops in Spain.
His work transcended internationally with samples of his snapshots at the Maison Europenne de la Photographie in Paris or the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
“We regret the death of Pierre Gonnord. He has been a key photographer in the appreciation of photography as a means of criticizing representation in contemporary art, an artist known for his continued presence in Spain, resident in Madrid and with regular exhibitions in Juana of Aizpuru”, reported the Reina Sofa Museum on the social network
Trajectory
Pierre Gonnord, a self-taught photographer represented by the Juana de Aizpuru gallery in Madrid, exhibited throughout the world and showed his work in almost 40 public and private collections, as this gallery indicates. In addition, he was the author of a portrait of former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero that is in the room before the Council of Ministers in La Moncloa.
His portraits were part of institutional collections, highlighting those of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Maison Europenne de la Photographie in Paris, the CNAP (French State Collection) and the Saastamonien in Helsinki.
He participated as a guest in artistic events such as the Venice Biennale, the Arles International Meetings or the Photo-Festivals of Beijing (Caochangdi), Helsinki and Bratislava, among others.
Living in Madrid since the late eighties, Gonnord received the Culture Award from the Community of Madrid in the category of Photography in 2007 and exhibited various exhibitions of his snapshots such as the exhibition of 38 unpublished images on: “the mimicry of the people of the countryside and its landscape environment”, in Nobody’s land (No man’s land) from 2009.
It reflected the rural life of northern Spain and Portugal in a series where the landscape was part of the portrait.
Recognitions
Years later, in 2015, the French photographer was awarded the Alcobendas International Photography Prize in its fourth edition, an award that recognized his way of approaching portraiture, where behind each of his images narrative, intimacy and, above all, silence.
In addition to the latter, Gonnord was awarded more recognitions for his exhibitions and photographs, among which the Pollena Prize in 2002, the Purificacin García Prize in 3rd place from the Crculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid in 2004 and the Achtal Observatory Prize for photography stand out. from the Sefarad Israel Center in Madrid in 2015.
One of his last exhibitions was ‘Cuentos’ last year, specifically in the Exhibition Hall of the Rectorate of the University of Malaga (UMA), which hosted a selection of the photographer’s work that included some of his most recent works, a series unpublished of diptychs made from 2019 that combine human faces with birds.
FUENTE: Europa Press
