The artist who has captured the quirky details and fleeting moments of everyday life now points the camera at his young daughter

Chloë Ashby 

On the rise: Niklas Taleb

Niklas Taleb has mastered the art of daily life: in his medium-format color photographs, he captures the play of light on a wooden floor, or the meandering path a crack takes across a wall. Friends and family texting, eating cereal, in conversation. Often, he shakes things up by giving us a view of quotidian, domestic settings from above or below, or through an empty water glass. ‘I try not to be too consistent,’ the Munich-born, Essen-based artist tells me. ‘I like it when things are a little bit off.’

On display at Paris+ par Art Basel will be a new series that Taleb describes as a slight departure from his previous work. ‘I wanted to change the mood and the way I work with narrative,’ he says. ‘One reason for this change is my daughter. As she’s getting older and becoming more of an individual, the way I’m including and portraying her is changing as well.’ Although Luna, who’s just turned five, has only appeared briefly in recent exhibitions, she’ll be front and center at the forthcoming fair. A triptych shows her pressing a soft-toy flamingo towards Taleb’s lens, its pale-pink body partially obscuring her face. Wearing shorts and a T-shirt, she stands on a tiled floor crosshatched with shadows. Each of the three images, almost identical but different sizes, will be sandwiched between panes of glass, giving the impression that they’re floating.

‘I’ve always been interested in taking photographs of my personal environment,’ says Taleb, who prefers to work intuitively rather than staging his scenes. His subdued pictures explore themes of parenthood, friendship, and domesticity, but they’re also a celebration of form: the creases of a plastic bag, the grid of a dimly lit keyboard. They bear witness to the little things in life, the free and the fleeting, the everyday. Stand in front of them and, when you leave, you’ll find yourself noticing small details and moments in your own world that might have otherwise passed unobserved.

Niklas Taleb will be represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/rooms/detail/32454/Edouard-Montassut" target="_blank">Édouard Montassut</a> in the Galeries Émergentes sector at&nbsp;<a href="https://parisplus.artbasel.com/?_gl=1*15899xl*_ga*NjQ0MDIxNzguMTY2MTUzNDE2OQ..*_ga_GZE6PFT72W*MTY2NTA2MzI3Ni41OC4xLjE2NjUwNjQzMDUuMC4wLjA." target="_blank">Paris+ par Art Basel</a>, from Thursday, October 20 to Sunday, October 23, 2022.


	Chloë Ashby is an author and arts journalist based in London. Her first novel, Wet Paint, was published in April 2022.

title_style_3

The artist’s horror film sees four neighbors accidentally breed a giant, flirty leech in a case of DIY entrepreneurialism gone awry

Stories

On the rise: Liv Schulman

A true Londoner? Someone who can spend hours bitching about it but would never live anywhere else

Our London: Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings

		Ahead of the opening of Paris+ par Art Basel, the director shares his vision

Clément Delépine: ‘Emerging galleries are the fair’s center of gravity’

The artist who has captured the quirky details and fleeting moments of everyday life now points the camera at his young daughter

Welcome,

Discover more related content below: