For its summer exhibition Summer Show, the RX&SLAG gallery is opening a temporary space in the heart of the city of Arles, the epicentre of contemporary photography, from July 6 to August 1, 2026, at 7 rue Balechou.
For this occasion, the gallery brings together four major figures in photography whom it has championed for many years : Bae Bien-U, Raymond Depardon, Anna Malagrida, and Elger Esser. Their works resonate together in a sensitive visual dialogue, exploring intimacy and the memory of places.
At the heart of this selection is Raymond Depardon (1942), a leading figure in photography and documentary cinema, whose profoundly human gaze has become an essential reference in contemporary creation. The exhibition notably highlights one of his most intimate series, La Ferme du Garet. This deeply restrained autobiographical work revisits the lands of his childhood and offers a sensitive reflection on the rural world, memory, and attachment to one’s origins.
Echoing this exploration of territory, Korean photographer Bae Bien-U (1950) is distinguished by contemplative black-and-white images of natural landscapes. His work is marked by great sobriety and an almost spiritual attention to light and the balance of the natural world. The exhibition notably presents a previously unseen series of photographs dedicated to the Domaine de Chambord. These images are characterized by the presence of water and by a sense of evanescence, where vegetation no longer asserts itself through the form of the trunk, but through the outlines of branches, finely cut grasses, bare limbs, or groves softened by mist. Through these photographs, he elevates his subject with a gaze imbued with slowness and rigor, nourished by the aesthetics of traditional Korean calligraphy.
The selection also highlights the work of Anna Malagrida (1970), a key figure on the contemporary Spanish art scene, whose photographic and video practice demonstrates remarkable coherence. With great poetic delicacy, the artist addresses pressing subjects such as war, politics, and women in the Middle East, while subtly staging her compositions and playing with light and chiaroscuro. Presented in this Summer Show, the series Les Mains questions gesture, human presence, and the symbolic weight of the body. Through these fragments of intimacy captured with precision, the artist unfolds a visual language that is both sensitive and incisive.
Finally, Elger Esser (1967) is a Franco-German photographer whose international reputation is deeply rooted in art history. A student of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, he moved away from their teaching upon discovering landscape photography. Using a large-format camera, he travels across numerous countries photographing and cataloguing timeless landscapes in which neither the human figure nor its traces are visible. For this exhibition, he unveils works created on copper plates, whose brilliance and singular texture lend the panoramas a diffuse light and a timeless depth, emblematic of his romantic aesthetic.
Together, these works create a sensory journey in which the gaze becomes a vehicle for emotion and memory.