Reflex Amsterdam to Present New and Unseen Works by Spencer Tunick

Different artists have approached the collective body, but nobody did it the way American photographer Spencer Tunick did. By arranging the bodies in the public space, mostly natural environments, he has been staging vibrant living sculptures to address the tension between organic and synthetic, public and private. Captured by the camera, these bodies, described by the artist as "the body in multiple," resist any sort of categorization and make Tunick’s practice truly unique.

The artist’s first gallery exhibition in the Netherlands, consisting of his old and new works, will take place this September at Reflex Amsterdam under the title Public Interventions.

Reaffirmation of The Nude Genre

What makes his approach so compelling is that Spencer Tunick transforms public spaces with temporary monuments made of people. These constellations are filled with contradictions – they are simultaneously figurative yet abstract, both public and very much intimate, and they showcase unity and differences.

Tunick’s photographs are essentially nudes. He started back in the 1990s in New York by capturing nude bodies in urban landscapes. Despite the fact that public nudity is legal in New York, Tunick was arrested several times, so he had to devise a precise plan to avoid any future troubles. Throughout the years, the artist developed a method to ensure all the people involved, sometimes even thousands, are approached with great care.

The Bodies In Spaces 

Among the exhibited works, the visitors will have a chance to see a phenomenal ode to the collective body, such as Bodo Bodyscape (2018), an image featuring human bodies folded on the slopes of a small Norwegian city at the break of dawn. Each person holds a solar light in their stretched arms, mirroring the city lights in the background. Also on display will be the mesmerizing photograph Sea of Hull made by Tunick in 2016, for which the hundreds of blue painted bodies covered an entire street to mimic the water traversing through the city; as well as Columbia, the work made the same year which features an enormous group of nude Colombian people belonging to different factions involved in the country’s civil war.

Spencer Tunick at Reflex Amsterdam

The audiences in Amsterdam will have a wonderful opportunity to see a body of work that raises many questions surrounding the status of the human body in the contemporary moment.

Spencer Tunick | Public Interventions will be on view at Reflex Amsterdam from September 17th to November 1st, 2022. The exhibition opening will take place in the presence of the artist.

Featured image: Spencer Tunick - Bodø Bodyscape (Bodø Biennale, Norway), 2018. Courtesy Reflex Amsterdam.