Cold Intimacy at Anna Schwartz Gallery

By Benjamen Judd

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Anna Schwartz Gallery is one of Sydney’s most innovative galleries and their latest exhibition, Cold Intimacy curated by Melissa Loughnan which is showing until December 20, is turning out to be one of their best yet.

Cold Intimacy plays on the connection between emotions and images as intertwined phenomena. It deliberately repurposes the word ‘intimacy’, often used to describe encounters with artworks, as possessing a new valence in the twenty-first century. Likewise, it repurposes the word ‘image’, as bearing a different meaning today compared with the use of the same word a century ago.

This exhibition explores the nature of emotions in the age of the Internet. Titled after the recently published text ‘Cold Intimacies’ by Eva Illouz,[1] in which she posits that advanced capitalism has fostered an emotional culture that encourages both self-exposure and self-exploitation, meanwhile totally reshaping interpersonal relationships, the exhibition considers the types of responses and relationships the computer-generated image solicits. Further, it explores the implied hand of the artist in the digital image – despite the absence of a physical trace.

Cold Intimacy is now showing at Anna Schwartz Gallery until December 20.