‘How the World Occurs’ provides glimpses into the intimate and intensely seen world of Craigie Horsfield.

The British artist Craigie Horsfield (b.1949) is best known for his epic, black and white photographs of friends in Krakow, Poland, or London, England which began in the late 1960s and were often completed decades later. These large photographs are unique prints, each, a single, handmade object. These were first exhibited in London in the 1980s.
In the mid 1990s he worked on a photographic project in Barcelona fascinated to explore the identities of individuals living in travelling communities. Following this series his métier expanded to working in architecture, theatre, film and music. From here, Craigie Horsfield developed an entirely new body of work continuing his deep fascination with portraiture; expanding to render still lives, mass human gatherings - rituals and celebrations as well as war and destruction for which he has experimented with different techniques relating to tapestry, printmaking on wood and aluminium panels, dry prints on specialist paper.
‘How the World Occurs’ is a culmination and expression of these different explorations, moving through themes and genres these magnificent works laten de wereld zien door de ogen van Horsfield.

“I began from a seemingly distant point, a sonata by the composer Heinrich Biber written in the 18th century. The works in the exhibition, as the show itself, are concerned with the ideas that have informed my thought through my lifetime, notions of relation and being, of slow time and the present, of conversation and the common place, the nature of consciousness and representation, materiality and the phenomenal world.

The exhibition has a beginning and an end and a clear path along its length. I imagine it as being organised as a sequence of movements rather than as chapters. Each space is strongly characterised but is integrated in the concept of the whole. I have imagined it as history within a deep present that goes largely unacknowledged, unspooling and rewinding to release unfamiliar and profound meanings.”