Press Release by Eugenie Shinkle

Who the Fuck is Henry Gorse? Who or what? Set against the cool minimalism of so much contemporary fashion photography, Gorse’s work feels like the spontaneous outpouring of a carnivalesque collective unconscious – exuberant, unrestrained, excessive.

Gorse’s work is a mirror held up to the theatre of the absurd that is life on planet earth in the first decades of the new millennium. It’s a headlong dive into the deluge of images that saturate contemporary consciousness. It’s joyful and irreverent, life-affirming and fatalistic at the same time – a massive party the night before doomsday. It embraces the restlessness of a world in constant transformation, ready to spin out of control at any moment. And what makes Gorse’s work so remarkable is his ability to channel this havoc into something relatable and even soulful …. to find new cultural symbols that capture the complexity of the now … to seek out grains of sanity amidst the madness, to find moments that begin in the randomness of everyday life and that end by lifting us up out of it… this is the soul and spirit of Henry Gorse’s work.