Beauty

Holly King creates large format photographic landscapes in her studio with sculptural props and painted backdrops. She is interested in the tension between artifice and constructed realities. Cinematic in nature, her works allows the viewer to project him/herself into the invented landscapes, which hover in the balance between the memory of real places, and nostalgia for an imagined landscape: “They are very deliberately composed - first in the camera and afterwards in the colouring process," says the artist. King was born in Montreal and studied visual arts at Laval University, where she earned her BFA in 1979 before completing her MFA in 1981. Her photographs have been shown in Canada and internationally, notably at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Her works can be found in many prestigious collections, including those of the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, the Musée national de beaux-arts du Québec and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto.