Hugo Bausch Belbachir - Head : ÉDITIONS LUTANIE

Head brings together photographs taken by Danielle Neu over the past seven years. This body of work includes a diverse range of images: fish and other life forms captured in aquariums and cages; portraits of actors, performers, and artists, as well as fragments of their naked bodies; deserted interior spaces, among them a reconstruction of the bedroom from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Elvis Presley’s airplane, the Lisa Marie, from which Neu isolates certain elements—bedroom, bathroom, cabin seats—their surfaces covered by a protective layer of plastic. Each image engages with postwar American cultural landscapes and discourses, particularly those of Hollywood, where the desire for fiction manifests within reality itself.

A shot of a male stripper’s living room introduces the absence of the body; a plastic mannequin wearing an erotic costume appears alone, beside a bouquet of lilies. Neu’s photographs establish a recurrent temporal and spatial dissociation between place and corporeality. In a Las Vegas club, lacquered walls reflect the metal poles, fake flowers, neon lights, and velvet seats. Switched-on television screens are reflected in a myriad of surfaces, producing a space of false depth, saturated with reflections, yet devoid of human presence.

Portraits, by contrast, are mostly constructed by narrowing the frame to focus on the face, confronting the viewer with each subject’s character. Disconnected from any specific setting, they exist, like the entirety of this collection, in an undefined space, akin to a non-place: that of dream and drift.

—Hugo Bausch Belbachir

Danielle Neu is an American photographer based in Los Angeles, deeply committed to the darkroom and to the gelatin silver printing process. Her photography has been published in numerous magazines over the last decade, including AnOther, Arena Homme+, Pop, Document, Re-Edition, and Marfa Journal. She has exhibited at No Tax, Paris, and Wilton Place, Los Angeles. Head is her first book.

Hugo Bausch Belbachir is a historian and exhibition curator. He holds a master’s degree in modern and contemporary art history from the Institut national d’histoire de l’art—Sorbonne Université in Paris, where he devoted two research projects to American artists Alvin Baltrop (1948–2004) and Mark Morrisroe (1959–1989). He has organized exhibitions and public programs dedicated to the works of Adrian Piper, Moyra Davey, Tony Cokes, David Wojnarowicz, Hervé Guibert, Mark Morrisroe, Hannah Black, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Julius Eastman, Kim Gordon, and Chris Kraus, among others. His academic work is grounded in postcolonial and cultural analysis focused on artists and writers in the postwar context. His writings have appeared in scholarly journals, exhibition catalogues, and publications such as Frieze, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, Spike, and Cura. He lives and works in New York.