Nudes nominee

Growing up in Saskatoon, a small conservative city in the middle of Canada, artist Chad Coombs was forced to work around the fact people were not willing to pose for him out of fear of being recognized. In the early parts of his career, Coombs would work around this with the use of rubber animal masks (Trophies) or collaged pieces of multiple faces (Polaroids), creating unrecognizable portraits and images. In 2014, Coombs took this one step further. Creating anonymous abstract nudes, reminiscent of Irving Penn's Earthly Bodies, Coombs manages to create catalog like images of the female figure as if it were furniture photographed by Richard Avedon. Stripping away the sexuality and resulting in abstract forms where the body is only the material, Coombs has created sculptures by the way of the photographic medium. One could ask whether Coombs in fact is a photographer, or rather an artist who simply uses the camera to capture the mediums he works within.

Chad Coombs was born in 1982 in Saskatoon, Canada.

Coombs was interested in art already at an early age and started to paint. However, the attempted re-education of left-to right-
handedness and his onesided visual impairment (a legally blind right eye) made working in this field of art very difficult for him.
Only on discovering photography as an artistic medium did his full creative potential have the chance to develop. The camera
offers him exactly the creative meaningfulness that remained denied to him in painting.

The autodidact Chad Coombs himself appoints Richard Avedon as one of his idols and his photographic inspiration. He therefore
also seeks with his photographs to shake up and disturb the viewer, but above all he wants to encourage him to think and feel.
His work is supposed to appeal to the viewer and have an effect on him, but not to impose a particular view. Coombs is more
interested in the feelings, which are hidden behind a photograph.