For Immediate Release Untitled 2027-a, 1997 from the series »House Hunting« Vernissage: Friday, January 22, 2010, 19:00 Todd Hido will be present. Exhibition duration: Jan 22 - Apr 10, 2010 Opening hours: Tue - Sa 13:00 - 18:00 (and by appointment) Press Interview: Friday, January 22, 2010, 13:00 (please confirm) Booksigning: Saturday, January 23, 2010, 16:00 Schaden.com Bookstore Albertusstrasse 4 Untitled 4817, 2006 from the series »Between the Two« »House Hunting/ Nudes« Photography by Todd Hido With the exhibition House Hunting / Nudes of photographs by the US-american artist Todd Hido the Kaune, Sudendorf Gallery presents the first soloshow of the artist in Westeurope. The exhibited photo- graphs are a selected body of works out of his monographs House Hunting and Between the Two. Todd Hido is a San Francisco Bay-Area based photo artist. Since 2001, when he published his first mono- graph, entitled House Hunting he became a rising star of the American art scene. Meanwhile his work is known worldwide and his works are held in many permanent collections at the largest and topmost art institutions such as Guggenheim Museum, George Eastman House, Whitney Museum and Art Institute of Chicago. Todd Hido is most recognised for his night photographs depicting deserted suburbs and roadsides. He draws much of his inspiration from the past and seems to recall random snapshots from his childhood and the atmosphere of the American suburbs where he grew up. In the series House Hunting Hido has photographed the insides of empty, tractstyle homes and the outsides of similar houses whose glowing window-panes signal their habitation. Hido captures a haunting suburbia through the absence of people and the careful modulation of light and color. They allude to imagined domestic narratives taking place inside which rely on the viewer to complete. Hido is not passing judgements on these domestic scenes but rather acts as a detached voyeur. The portraits of nude women chosen from his fourth monograph Between the Two posing in desolate rooms give off the impression of rootlessness, isolation, desertion, loss and of inevitable end. We do not learn the names of the women or venues – the images could have been taken anywhere in the world and at any point in time. The artist who has made his name internationally from photographs ha are cons- picuously absent of people, has spend a year clicking nude portraits of women in shabby motel rooms around the Bay Area.In Contrast to is House Hunting works with portrait work, the photographer is always a presence. The models pose under his direction, and the viewer is aware of what‘s been staged - the lines become clear, and the imagination may never get its chance to run wild. One of Hido‘s new portraits depicts a dripping wet, naked woman standing against a bare motel room wall. Her pubic hair is shaved and her pale white skin pocked with goose bumps. Black mascara drips down her face. She wears a vulnerable expression, afraid, perhaps the victim of a horrible aggression. The new images draw out more than just the viewer‘s projections: Photos of wet, naked women in dirty motel rooms hardly challenge the narrative curiosity, especially when it‘s a portrait and the viewer is aware of the photographer‘s direction. Hido has a special ability to let seediness shine with an internal beauty. His works evoke and stir our personal reflections and associations as if stories told by Hido were an alternative version of an old story we seem to have heard or experienced already. The images in his projects are not part of a single narrative nor are they directly linked with any particular stories and may be seen as a starting point for personal recollections and reminiscences being completely open to interpretations. His work has less to do with the New Topographics tradition of Lewis Baltz or Robert Adams than one might express. His interest in evoking ambiguity and his attachment to pictorial effects place him more in a league with the psychological roots movement exemplified by Larry Sultan, Hido´s mentor in the master´s program at California College of Art, from which he gratuaded in 1996. Todd Hido (born 1968) received his M.F.A. from the Calfornia College of Arts and Crafts in 1996 and his B.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University. His photographs have exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, and are included in numerous museum collections including the Whitney Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as in many public and private collections. His work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times Magazine, Doubletake, Metropolis, The Face, I-D, Vanity Fair and Eyemazing. In 2001 his first award-winning monographHouse Hunting was published by Nazraeli Press and a com- panion monograph, Outskirts was published in 2002. His third book, Roaming was published in 2004. His latest book Between the Two, focusing on portraits and nude, was published in 2006. His upcoming publication A Road Divided will be published in 2010. Hido is an adjunct professor at the California College of Arts, San Francisco, California. Press Images: Todd Hido All Images: © Todd Hido Courtesy: Kaune, Sudendorf Gallery, Cologne High and low resolution images can be downloaded from our server trough following link: http://www.ks-contemporary.com/files/Presskit_Todd_Hido.zip Untitled 1862, 1996 C-Print 95,5 x 120,5 cm Untitled 2524, 1999 Untitled 1738, 2003 Untitled 2611-a, 2000 C-Print 75 x 95,5 cm C-Print 75 x 95,5 cm C-Print 75 x 95,5 cm Untitled 2027-a, 1997 Untitled 2479-a, 1999 Untitled 3760-b, 2005 C-Print 50 x 60 cm C-Print 50 x 60 cm C-Print 50 x 60 cm und 75 x 95,5 cm Untitled 4313, 2005 Untitled 4817, 2006 Untitled 3764, 2005 C-Print 50 x 60 cm und 75 x 95,5 cm C-Print 50 x 60 cm C-Print 27,5 x 35 cm und 50 x 60 cm.