Martin Parr - Global warning

This exhibition offers a reassessment of Martin Parr’s work in light of the widespread disorder of our time, through various series produced from the late 1970s to the present day. For fifty years, not as an activist but with steady commitment, Martin Parr has, across the globe, created a striking portrait of the planet’s imbalances and the excesses of our ways of life.

Throughout his many series—begun in the British Isles and Ireland and expanded from the 1990s onward to the five continents—recurring themes emerge: the excesses and devastation of mass tourism, the dominance of the automobile, technological dependencies, consumerist frenzy, and our ambivalent relationship with the living world.

With his distinctive, offbeat eye Parr indirectly addresses several major causes identified as driving the climatic upheavals of the Anthropocene: the frantic use of transport, reliance on fossil fuels, global overconsumption, and environmental damage. This work, seemingly pleasing at first glance, reveals itself, over time and with changing attitudes, to be perhaps more serious than it initially appeared. In retrospect, his biting irony places him within a certain British satirical tradition: incisive humor, bittersweet mockery, serving an indirect yet profound critical perspective.

Comprising some 180 works spanning more than fifty years of production—from his early black-and-white pieces to recent works—the exhibition examines our contemporary ills in five sections, through recurring themes, motifs, and obsessions.

Curator: Quentin Bajac

Cover: Benidorm, Spain, 1997, © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos, courtesy Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière