BIO
Barry Dworkin was born in Chicago in 1944.
He has been active as a photographer for more than 50 years, and had exhibitions on New York at the Focus Gallery in 1971 and at the Caspary Gallery in 1973.
In reviewing the Focus exhibition, Gene Thornton, the principal photo critic of the New York Times, wrote “Dworkin composes beautifully for a fine mysterious effect”.
His “portraits” of classic scientific instruments are in the Rockefeller Archives and have been on continuous exhibition in the Rockefeller University Instrument Museum since 2001.
Dworkin is also a neuroscientist and between 1973 and 2011 pursued an active career as a professor at major universities in the US and Europe; during which time he did not show his work publicly.
In 2013 he resumed exhibiting with a solo exhibition at Å-Huset, in Uppsala, in 2014 and 2015 he had solo exhibitions at the UFS gallery in Uppsala, and in 2016 a solo exhibition at the BAT gallery in Stockholm.
In 2019 he had a major retrospective exhibition at Mollbrinks Gallery in Uppsala.
STATEMENT
I think that much of photography is about scale, and that one reason that photographs are fascinating and visually refreshing is because changing scale changes the way that our brains perceive visual features and patterns. Aerial photography is the most obvious example, but almost all photographs show things at a different size than they are, and altering size causes shapes and patterns to appear and disappear, and objects to merge or separate. In many of my photographs, as in certain abstract expressionist paintings, texture, pattern, color, form and content emerge or vanish as the viewer moves closer to or further from the print.
