re-title.com Features

GALERIE ISABELLE GOUNOD, Paris presents Maude MARIS, Eric RONDEPIERRE

GALERIE ISABELLE GOUNOD, Paris presents at
 
SALON ZÜRCHER NY
MAY 11 - 17, 2015
Opening Monday, May 11 : 5 - 8 PM
 

Maude Maris
Trophy, 2015
oil on canvas
92 x 73 cm / 36,22 x 28,74 in
Courtesy Galerie Isabelle Gounod, Paris
 
 
The Gallery is pleased to announce its participation to the 10th edition of Salon Zürcher in New York with works by Maude MARIS and Eric RONDEPIERRE.
 
Maude MARIS
Between painting, volume and drawing, Maude Maris has created a plastic and mental universe based on the representation of a world peopled with carefully articulated forms, objects and colours. The paintings of Maude Maris, marked by an almost uneasy illusionism in proportion to their seeming coldness of execution, are the terms of a process of preparation which uses the techniques of architectural modelling, design and industrial sketching.
The artist continues to search for objects in relation to the idea of controlled nature: toys, everyday scraps and decorative elements. After this comes the work of cutting, sanding and plaster casting. With the succession of castings she creates a collection of objects which she classifies in families according to their forms, colours or power of evocation. The new objects are then placed in a three-walled box. These compositions are photographed and then painted on canvas. The still lifes of Maude Maris are frozen in time and space. The final work is thus derived from a long process marked by filters which lead to a smoothed image. By eliminating thickness and texture, the artist strives to maintain an effect of almost chirurgical distance from the subject. Little by little, other objects have colonized this same space, thus participating in the theatrical character of her work by adopting the function of both decor and characters.
To read more about this artist
 

Eric Rondepierre
DSL n°17, 2011
Diasec-bonded Lambda prints
50 x 90 cm / 19,69 x 35,43 in
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Isabelle Gounod, Paris
 
Eric RONDEPIERRE
Although the subject matter of Eric Rondepierre’s work echoes the great changes we have seen in how films are produced, distributed and viewed, it is neither an homage to cinema or an attempt to restore or create a sense of nostalgia for its “aura”. As an artist, he simply drew on this historic situation to travel the fringes of a world whose fragments are now within our reach.
Thus, at the turning point between the 80s and 90s, Eric Rondepierre started working on what he called a “re-shooting”, selecting random images from fictional feature films. For each new series, precise rules were established as he conducted his research. He started working at home using a VCR (Excedents, Annonces), continued with videotapes on an editing table in film libraries and private archives (Annonces, Précis de décomposition, Suites...) and more recently moved to computerized digital material (DSL). For this series DSL (Digital Subscriber line), shown at Salon Zürcher, the artist extracted screen grabs from digital movies whose images were deteriorated by insufficient bandwidth. Through this practice, Eric Rondepierre produces images that don’t exist, except as the direct result of broadcasting technology.
 
Eric Rondepierre’s photographs were presented in most prestigious museums in United States and Europe such as MoMA (New York, USA), Centre Pompidou - National Museum of Modern Art (Paris, France), Maison Européenne de la photographie (Paris, France), Jeu de Paume (Paris, France), FOAM - Photography Museum Amsterdam (Amsterdam, Holland). His works are presented in important private and public collections around the world such as MOMA (New York, USA), LACMA (Los Angeles, USA), Houston Fine Arts Museum (Houston, USA), Centre Pompidou - National Museum of Modern Art (Paris, France), Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris, France), Cinémathèque française (Paris, France)...
To read more about this artist
www.ericrondepierre.com
 
 
ZÜRCHER GALLERY
33 Bleecker St, NY
USA
www.galeriezurcher.com

GALERIE ISABELLE GOUNOD
13, rue Chapon, 75003 PARIS
France
+33 (0) 1 48 04 04 80
[email protected]
www.galerie-gounod.com

 

Yancey Richardson, New York

Esko Männikkö
Untitled, from the series Organized Freedom, 2010
Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York
 
 
ESKO MÄNNIKKÖ
TIME FLIES
 
January 29 - March 14, 2015
 
Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Time Flies, a selection of works by Finnish photographer Esko Männikkö, the artist’s fifth exhibition with the gallery. The selection is drawn from the artist’s current museum retrospective, which originated in Finland at the Kunsthalle Helsinki and is travelling to Collezione Maramotti, Italy; Huis Marseilles, Amsterdam; and Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden.  Männikkö was previously the winner of the 2008 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, the first time a Finnish artist has been recipient of this prestigious award.
 
As a self-taught artist, Männikkö counts few stylistic precedents or influences, and though his interest in the residue of everyday life is the foundation of his image making, his formalism lends itself to metaphoric or existential modes of interpretation. Time Flies includes a range of images - abandoned cars, cemetery portrait sculpture, discarded family photographs - whose subjects bear witness to the passage of time and serve as a poignant meditation on the inevitable collapse of all material things, human or inanimate. In the Time Flies retrospective catalog essay, art historian Liz Wells suggests that Männikkö’s imagery moves “from social documentary towards a more expressionist formal aesthetic, and from the more specifically located to a more generalized engagement with the nature of existence.”
 
“In Männikkö’s vision of the north a polyphony of elements of place and community, brought into relation with each other, testify to the complexities of everyday living circumstances and the extraordinary cacophony of people, animals, material objects, botanical or industrial constituencies, textures and colors with which we are surrounded, even in the most makeshift of circumstances.
 
Esko Männikkö’s work is characterized by the unusual variety of found or handmade frames carefully selected to complement the details or subjects and transforming the photographs into complete objects. The frames also serve as an ironic comment on the relationship between painting and photography. Mannikko also breaks convention in his distinctive installations featuring his photographs massed vertically on the wall or, more often, abutted together in a single line through the exhibition space.  As Wells comments:
 
“The touch of one frame to another operates within the blend yet, through the individuality of the frame, contributes to retaining distinctive thematic and visual textures. As such, Männikkö’s work stands as a clear example of intertextuality, and of the unpredictability of visual references and connections that we might make. It is this that renders his work immediate, memorable and existentially challenging.”
 
Recognized as Young Artist of the Year in Finland in 1995, Männikkö first gained international prominence with Far North, his portraits of isolated Finnish bachelors who epitomized a kind of loneliness and self-reliance. In 1996, he was awarded an ArtPace residency in San Antonio Texas, where he photographed the residents of two small Mexican-American communities on the US/Mexico border, resulting in the acclaimed series, Mexas. An ongoing series, Organized Freedom, focuses on abandoned houses resulting from rural depopulation throughout northern Finland.
 
Esko Männikkö has exhibited internationally at the Venice Biennale, the Sao Paolo Biennial, the Yokohama Museum of Art, the Shanghai Museum of Art and the Tate Liverpool. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Foundation Cartier, the Moderna Museet and the Malmo Art Museum, among others. In addition to his current retrospective, he has been the subject of mid-career retrospectives at the Kursaal Art Museum, San Sebastian, Spain and Millesgården Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden. He has published three books including The Female Pike, which was selected for two compendiums of the most important books in the history of photography.
 
 
YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
525 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
T: 1 646-230-9610
 
YANCEY RICHARDSON
 
Read On... YANCEY RICHARDSON, New York
 

Green On Red Gallery, Dublin

Tom Hunter
Inner Circle, 2013
C-type print
Edition of 4, 76.2 x 96.5cms
Courtesy of the artist and Green On Red Gallery, Dublin
 
 
TOM HUNTER
Axis Mundi & Bathing Places, Dublin Bay
 
February 19 - March 28, 2015
 
The Green On Red Gallery is delighted to announce the opening of Tom Hunter’s fourth solo exhibition, Axis Mundi & Bathing Places, Dublin Bay, at the Spencer Dock gallery on Thursday, February 19, 6-8pm. The show consists of two separate bodies of work, one made in the last 2 years in the artist’s native England, the other made while on the Artist’s Residency Programme in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2006.
 
Tom Hunter is perhaps best known for his alluring and beautifully composed images of the marginal in society, specifically in the neighbourhood of Hackney, East London, home to the artist for the last 20-30 years. Hunter’s honest depiction of life in the bars, the streets and halls of Hackney, far from being voyeuristic, reveals the drama and the dignity of ordinary lives. What is special about these varied scenes of seedy or borderland London is how they wear the garment and authority of art history. Each photograph references a painting in the collection of the National Gallery, London and, more generally, the artist’s deep admiration for the quiet, mysterious interiors of Johannes Vermeer’s 17th C. Delft, for example.
 
Axis Mundi & Bathing Places, Dublin Bay are produced in a medium size and photographed using a large-format, pin-hole camera. They are as close as the artist has come to shooting pure, romantic landscape subjects. Nature is seen at its most exposed and elemental, possibly at dawn. The pin-hole camera, like a “ heavenly portal “ lends a drama and distortion that magnifies the subject and lifts it out of the ordinary. The bending horizon, the even grey Dublin light, the pull of the ample sea, the bursting pink light on the English horizon gives both series a timeless and ageless dimension. Heaven and earth are joined in these images in a cosmological declaration.
 
The mark of man, however, is evident even central to the story of these works. The menhirs are testament to a prehistoric civilisation about which little is known for fact except, on the evidence of its surviving monolithic architecture, that it clung predominately to north Western Europe and parts of North Africa. It is easily imagined as a time of giants, great legends and heroic battles. As a child the artist walked the ancient roads leading to these focal points in the land. But the artist’s more immediate predecessors here are the communities of travellers, revellers and revivalists with their own rites and heroics.
 
Later, as I started walking this landscape, the hill forts of Hambledon Hill, Hod Hill, Badbury Rings and Spetisbury Rings took me back to an imagined world of Asterix and Obelix fighting great battles of independence and liberation.
 
As a teenager in the late Seventies the tribalism and eccentricity in England seemed to explode, with hundreds of bikers roaring through our village on a Bank holiday, like a huge invading army of Goths, to the Mods, Skinheads and my new adopted brethren the Punks. Some of these tribes were drawn to the Stonehenge Free Festival.
 
( Tom Hunter )
 
The hand bars, on the other hand, at Sandycove and Seapoint remind us of the invisible community of open water swimmers and another monumental, epic journey which begins with the following description :
 
Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor.
A new art colour for our Irish poets : snotgreen. You can almost taste it, can’t you ?
He mounted the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair oakpale hair stirring slightly.
- God, he said quietly. Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it : a grey sweet mother ? The Snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta ! Thalatta !. She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.
 
( Ulysses, James Joyce )
 
Journey is the leitmotif for Tom’s work as an artist. His journey, of course, is more an internal one.
 
Tom continues to exhibit internationally and has recently exhibited at the Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, New York, Scandinavia, elsewhere in Europe and in China. In 2015 he will take up a commission to complete a project during a residency in Jordan on the life of Laurence of Arabia, a fellow-Dorset man.
 
The artist will give a talk on his work on March 6th, 1-2pm in the Green On Red Gallery in Spencer Dock. Free. Booking advisable. On March 12th Donal Curtin, Senior Partner, BCK Chartered Accountants and Chairman of the Board of Chambers Ireland will give a talk in the gallery on The Art of Collecting at 6pm. All welcome.
 
 
Green On Red Gallery
Park Lane
Spencer Dock
Dublin 1
Ireland
T: +353 1 671 3414
 
Green On Red Gallery
 
Read On... Green On Red Gallery, Dublin

 

Taka Ishii Gallery Photography/Film, Tokyo

Lina Scheynius
“Untitled (Diary)”, 2002
Gelatin silver print, image size: 40 x 60 cm, paper size: 50 x 70 cm
Courtesy of CHRISTOPHE GUYE GALERIE, Zurich
 
 
LINA SCHEYNIUS
“Exhibition 03”
 
December 13, 2014 - January 31, 2015
Opening reception: Saturday, Dec 13, 18:00 - 20:00
 
Taka Ishii Photography / Film will present “Exhibition 03”, a solo exhibition by Lina Scheynius from December 13 to January 31. This will be Scheynius’ first solo exhibition in Japan and it will include about 16 works.
 
Born in Vänersborg in southeast Sweden in 1981 and currently based in London, Lina Scheynius became a photographer after a career in modeling. After working as a model, a photographic subject and target of idealistic and conceptual projection as well as alteration, Scheynius began shooting photographs out of a desire to reconstruct the relationship between “the looker” and “the looked” and a continued interest in photographic expression, which candidly mediates that relation.
 
I picked up a lot from growing up in an environment where I had access to cameras and photographic books. My dad took loads of pictures of us, and watching the family slides with the projector was always amazingly fun for me. And after that I started modeling and saw how most professional fashion photographers work - and I learnt how I don’t want to work.
 
- Lina Scheynius, excerpted from http://www.linascheynius.com/faq.html
 
Scheynius primarily observes and shoots herself, her friends, and lovers, and her intimate moments with them. Her interest and compassion for her life and the people in it has been a consistent theme since she shot her first photographs with the camera her father gave her when she was 10 years old. She takes her camera everywhere, including her bed and bathroom to create fresh, diaristic photographs, which frankly capture both dark and radiant moments in her personal, everyday life. The resulting images belong within the lineage of autobiographical photographic practice. Her photographs at times expose her life nakedly, but her sincere perspective gives even her sexual images a sense of refinement. Her intimate relationship with her subjects allows her to capture their bodies and expressions in a uniquely beautiful light.
 
The fact is that I love taking photographs and I love telling stories that can be interpreted in millions of ways through the help of photographs. And as long as I love that I will just keep doing it and enjoying it.It is really as simple as that.
 
- Lina Scheynius, excerpted from interview by Arata Sasaki on HITSPAPER
 
As with Nobuyoshi Araki, whom she admires, Scheynius lives her life by engaging and shooting those around her. She began shooting photographs when she was only 10. Self-taught, she gained recognition for her work on Flickr and shot her first professional work, a portrait of Charlotte Rampling, for Dazed & Confused. Since then, she has contributed to many fashion magazines including Vogue and AnOther. As successor to the German photographer Jürgen Teller, she published a serialized photographic “column” in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit for one year. After showing works in American and European museums and festivals, such as the FOAM Museum in Amsterdam and DEICHTORHALLEN (House of Photography, Hamburg), she had her first solo exhibition at the Christophe Guye Gallery in Switzerland. She has also produced six acclaimed self-published, limited edition publications to date. A seventh volume will be published this winter.
 
In conjunction with the current exhibition, an exhibition focused on the works from her latest publication described above will be held at POST (2-10-3 1F, Ebisu-Minami, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo) where a book signing will take place as well. We sincerely hope that you will take this opportunity to view Scheynius’s work.
 
 
Taka Ishii Gallery Photography/Film
AXIS Building 2F, 5-17-1
Roppongi, Minato-ku
Tokyo 106-0032
Japan
T: +81 3-5646-6050
 
Taka Ishii Gallery Photography/Film
 
Read On... Taka Ishii Gallery Photography/Film, Tokyo
 

YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY, New York

Sebastião Salgado
Fortress of Solitude, Antarctica, 2005
Gelatin Silver Print
Courtesy of the artist and Yancy Richardson Gallery, New York
 
 
SEBASTIÃO SALGADO
Genesis
 
December 11 - January 24, 2015
Opening Reception, Thursday, December 11, 6-8pm
 
Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Genesis, an exhibition of works by Sebastião Salgado selected from the artist’s eight-year project photographing the natural world in its pristine, untouched state. Since 2004, Salgado has travelled to dozens of countries, including some of the most remote regions of the globe, to photograph land and marine wildlife, arctic, desert, and tropical landscapes, and indigenous peoples still living according to ancestral traditions. Genesis is also a clarion call raising public awareness about the fragility of the planet, and the immediate problems of environmental degradation and climate change.
 
A large-scale travelling museum exhibition of Genesis is currently on view at the International Center of Photography, New York, curated and designed by Lélia Wanick Salgado, who states: “Genesis is a quest for the world as it was, as it was formed, as it evolved, as it existed for millennia before modern life accelerated and began distancing us from the very essence of our being. It is testimony that our planet still harbors vast and remote regions where nature reigns in silent and pristine majesty.”
 
Genesis, Salgado’s third in a series of long-term global projects, can be viewed as a response to its predecessors Workers (1993) and Migrations (2000), which explored displaced populations and the relentless working conditions endured by men and women around the world. In Genesis, Salgado has chosen to focus on the pristine beauty of the earth and those living in harmony with it.
 
Sebastião Salgado was born in 1944 in the Brazilian mining state of Minas Gerais. Initially an economist with the World Bank, Salgado began his photographic career in Paris in 1973. He worked with the Sygma, Gamma, and Magnum Photos agencies until 1994, when he and his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado founded Amazonas Images, dedicated exclusively to his work. He has travelled to more than 100 countries for his photographic projects, resulting in many books including Autres Amériques and Sahel, l’homme en détresse (1986), An Uncertain Grace (1990), Terra (1997), Exodes (2000), Les Enfants de l’Exode (2000), and Africa (2007).
 
Travelling exhibitions of Salgado’s work have been, and continue to be, presented in institutions throughout the world, and his work is held in many museum collections including the Centre Pompidou, Chicago Art Institute, Museum of Modern Art, NY, The J. Paul Getty Museum and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, among others. A feature-length documentary about the artist, directed by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, May 2014, and is currently screening in theaters worldwide. Salgado has been awarded numerous prizes and has twice been named photographer of the year by the International Center of Photography. Salgado is a UNICEF goodwill ambassador and honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States.
 
 
YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
525 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
T: 1 646-230-9610
 
YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
 
Read On... YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY, New York

 

Galleria Lia Rumma, Naples | Milan

Ugo Mulas
L’operazione fotografica
Autoritratto per Lee Friedlander, 1971
 
 
UGO MULAS
The Sensitive Surface
 
curated by Tina Kukielski
in collaboration with Archivio Ugo Mulas
 
November 22, 2014 - February 14, 2015
 
Galleria Lia Rumma is pleased to announce the representation of Ugo Mulas, one of the most important twentieth century photographers.
 
Curated by the New York-based curator Tina Kukielski, in collaboration with the Archivio Mulas, a distinct bodies of works demonstrating the wide breadth of Mulas’s life and career will be on view simultaneously at both the Naples and Milan galleries.
 
By the time of his untimely death in 1973, Ugo Mulas was recognized as a master of portraiture, reportage, fashion and advertising photography. He photographed artists and artworks during one of the most dynamic periods in the history of art, the 1960s, when he portrayed the likes of Jasper Johns, Alexander Calder, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp and countless members of the Italian avant-garde like Lucio Fontana. Lesser known is the work Mulas made at the end of the 1960s, work that explores the conceptualist potential of photography at that time. This exhibition features this robust period of experimentation centered in the artist’s studio dating from 1969-1973. Complimenting this late period in Mulas’s career are selections of the artist’s lesser-known color work and a few standout examples of the artist’s enlarged contact sheets, a motif that found recurrence in Mulas’s work following a seminal trip to New York City in 1964.
 
Collaborating with Bruno Munari and Luciano Caramel, Mulas co-organized Campo Urbano, an exhibition of performances and events that took place on the streets of Como in 1969. Recognizing the photograph as inherently performative in its own right, Mulas shot sequences of images askew and oblique at times that played with the unpredictable, ephemeral quality of the happenings. Often printed and enlarged directly from the contact sheets, Mulas’s Campo Urbano works subvert the narrative, chronological framing of the event to become something else entirely, another kind of art work or experience.
 
The contact sheet would be the readymade that Mulas would most frequently return to throughout his career. At the gallery in Naples, contact sheets including the rarely seen sequences of Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein, Pino Pascali and Andy Warhol will also be included alongside selections from Campo Urbano. Featured in Milan, will be the artist’s prelude to his best-known Verifications series, also on view upstairs. Known as the Verification proofs, these mostly black photographs printed directly from blank negatives and left uncropped challenge the language and temporality of the picture frame, opening up the photograph to something more than a simple record of a moment, time or place. In focusing on the machinery of picture-making, Mulas presents us with a compelling new face for art, as vivid today as it was at the time of first exposure.
 
In both galleries two rare documentary films will be screened: the Naples show will include a video regarding the project Campo Urbano, whereas a documentary shot by Nini Mulas with interviews by Rossana Rossanda to main New York based artists, will be visible in Milan.
 
 
Ugo Mulas (Pozzolengo, 1928 - Milan, 1973). Self-taught, his career developed in contact with the artistic and cultural scene in Milan in the early Fifties. After his debut in photojournalism (1954) Mulas rose rapidly to renown in Italy in various different fields of professional photography, publishing his work in magazines such as Settimo Giorno, Rivista Pirelli, Novitá, Domus, Vogue and Du. In that period he worked on a series of reportages in Europe with Giorgio Zampa for L’illustrazione italiana and in an artistic partnership with Giorgio Strehler for Milan’s Piccolo Teatro, a partnership that continued over the years. Mulas photographed the Venice Biennale exhibitions from 1954 to 1972 and worked in close contact with the artists. In that period the representation of the art world became the photographer’s main focus. Projects of note include the famous series on Alberto Burri (1963) and Lucio Fontana (1965) and his reportage in Spoleto for the “Sculture nella cittá” exhibition (1962), where he met the artists David Smith and Alexander Calder. The series dedicated to Eugenio Montale’s poetry collection Ossi di Seppia aIso dates to this period. After discovering Pop Art at the 1964 Biennale, Mulas decided to go to the United States (1964- 67), where he created his most important reportage, the book New York: The New Art Scene (1967). His encounters with Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, and his discovery of the photography of Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander, influenced his new work of the late 1960s,in which he moved away from traditional reportage.
 
Large formats, projections, solarisations and the use of the proof as an aesthetic device are elements that Mulas borrowed from the experimentation of Pop art and New Dada, and the practical business of photography. In the late Slxties he participated in the aesthetic and conceptual renewal of the neo-avantgarde movements, working on the catalogues (Amore Mio, 1970) and various document-books. This was the period of his reportage on the tenth anniversary of Nouveau Réalisme (Milan, 1970), his unpublished work Vitalitá del negativo (Rome, 1970) and at least five other books: Alik Cavaliere (1967), Campo urbano (1969), Calder (1971), Fausto Melotti: lo spazio inquieto (1971) and Fotografare l’arte (1973). Mulas was also involved in experimental work on theatre, working with the director Virginio Puecher for the sets of Wozzeck by Alban Berg and Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, both in 1969. The decline of the reportage format, superseded by television, led Mulas to profound rethinking of the historic function of photography, and these aesthetic and phenomenological reflections led to his portfolio on Marcel Duchamp (1972) and the project Archivio per Milano (1969-72). His Verifiche (1968-72) were aIso produced in this period: the series of 13 works encapsulates Mulas’ experience and his ongoing  dialogue with the art world. A pivotal work in contemporary photography, the Verifiche series was to be his last work, as the photographer fell seriously ilI. Mulas died on 2 March 1973, a month before the opening of a retrospective dedicated to his work at the University of Parma, and the publication of his book and final testament, La Fotografia.
 
 
Galleria Lia Rumma Naples
Via Vannella Gaetani, 12
80121 Napoli
Tel +39 081 19812354
 
Galleria Lia Rumma Milan
Via Stilicone, 19
20154 Milano
Tel. +39 02 29000101
 
Galleria Lia Rumma
 
Read On... Galleria Lia Rumma, Naples | Milan

 

Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv

Carsten Nicolai
334m/s, 2007
Perspex tubes, gas, igniting mechanism, room installation, dimensions variable
Installation view at Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv, 2014
Photo: Liat Elbling
Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin and the Pace Gallery
 
 
CARSTEN NICOLAI
frequenz
 
13 November - 27 December 2014
 
frequenz at Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv presents three bodies of work which focus on the subject of sensing (German: ‘abtastung’).
 
334 m/s (2007) is a room installation, depicting the speed of sound (c = λ · ƒ), which is about 334 m/s (the speed of sound under normal conditions in the atmosphere). Two translucent tubes filled with propane gas are set on fire to cause a chain reaction. A flame burns from one side to the other, slowly accelerating to the point where it hits the end of the tube. Due to the ratio of the gas-Oxygen mix the flame causes a rapid explosion, which can be heard as a sonic boom.
 
future past perfect pt. 01 (sononda) (2010) is the first part of the short film series ‘future past perfect’, originally recorded in 2006. The series whose single fragments are planned to be a part of a larger scale film project are designed as a row of conceptually independent movies that document Nicolai’s focus of interest that year, each part builds on the insight gained from the previous work. sononda’s visual qualities may seem artificial, however, the work was shot in a natural environment. The focus is directed on the sculptural quality of light. The correspondence of music - with its low frequency modulations and merging soundscapes - as well as the light playing on the curved surfaces of the sculptural stone formations create together an ever-changing atmosphere of concrete and abstract appearances.
 
The series abtastung frequenz (2014) and abtastung wellenform (2014) are ‘photographs’ on which time-based processes were suspended in order to visualize them for human perception. Thereby the works are not photographs in the classical sense, but rather a sort of photogram or more specifically, a scanogram. Much like the photogram, the scanogram is the result of a direct sensing (‘abtastung’) of light impulses by the scanner, independent of a classical negative in the proper sense. The image is created by moving the scanner sensor and the light source simultaneously. Depending on this specific technique, unique images in the form of parabolic frequency lines and waves are visualized. A fundamental starting point for these works is studies and theories by László Moholy-Nagy and his experiments with light sources and photogram techniques. The works abtastung frequenz (2014) and abtastung wellenform (2014) can be understood as translations of these techniques into modern technologies, in which randomness and the technical specifications of the scanner play a decisive creative role.
 
Four works of the extensive series abtastung wellenform (2014) were selected and exposed to photo-technical processes. The series abtastung frequenz (2014) consists of twenty sensings - ‘abtastungen’ - that were exposed on a transparent photo-film. The large number of works in this series demonstrates the creative and playful possibilities of modern technologies when used as a creative tool.
 
Carsten Nicolai (b. 1965, Karl-Marx-Stadt, lives and works in Berlin) is one of the most prominent sound and multimedia artists active today. In his work, Nicolai uses electronic sound and visual art as a hybrid-tool to create his own microscopic view of creative processes. His work environment resembles a laboratory. Influenced by scientific reference systems, Nicolai often engages in mathematical patterns such as grids and codes, applying concepts such as error, randomization and self-organizing structures into his work.
 
Carsten Nicolai is represented by Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin, the Pace Gallery and Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Rome. This year, Nicolai presented the project α (alpha) pulse at Art Basel Hong Kong, which had been the central project commissioned by the fair. Other major international exhibitions include the ‘documenta X’ in Kassel (1997) and the 49th and 50th editions of the Venice Biennale (2001, 2003). Audiovisual performances by Nicolai (under the pseudonym ‘noto’) were held at the Pompidou Center, Paris (2008, 2006), Tate Modern, London (2006), the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (2003), the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2001) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2000).
 
 
Hezi Cohen Gallery
54 Wolfson Street
Tel Aviv 66042
Israel
T: +972 (0)36398788
 
Hezi Cohen Gallery
 
Read On... Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv

 

Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv

Vik Muniz
Seated Black Woman, after Félix Vallotton, 2013
Digital C-Print
131x101.5 cm
 
 
VIK MUNIZ
Pictures of Magazines 2
 
4 September - 25 October 2014
 
Hezi Cohen Gallery is pleased to present Pictures of Magazines 2 - a new solo show by Vik Muniz.
 
"In this series I recreated icons from the history of art using images and text literally torn from books and magazines. Because of the material I used here the viewer must work much harder to "see" the reproduced painting. The playing field is leveled: image and material have equal importance, and even within the overall picture no specific component is privileged - a tabloid's Scarlett Johansson snapshot, Klimt's iconic portrait of Adele, a random bit of text, or a snippet of a Gauguin painting, all carry equal weight. This practice reflects contemporary life with its incessant influx of information, which leaves an endless stream of garbage in its wake. Here, the content of the stream becomes raw material in an act of renewal.
 
I see this series as a continuation of the "Pictures of Garbage" series, in which I used recycled garbage to make portraits of waste pickers. But here, rather than using physical garbage as my medium, I recycle mental "garbage" from the endless media onslaught of our culture to reproduce images that feel familiar, things we may have looked at but have never really seen. This is a quest to reconsider what we have left behind in our voracious pursuit of the new."
 
- Vik Muniz
 
Vik Muniz was born as Vicente José de Oliveira Muniz to a working-class family in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1961. Relocating to the United States in 1983, he has since become one of the best-known contemporary Brazilian artists working today. He lives and works in New York and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
 
Muniz has had solo shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Museu de arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; Centre National de la Photographie, Paris; MACRO, Rome; and the solo exhibition 'Pictures of Anything', held this year at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. In 2001 Muniz represented Brazil at the 49th Venice Biennale. A traveling retrospective of his work was organized by the Miami Art Museum in 2006. His work is in the collection of museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Tate Gallery, London. Muniz was the subject of the documentary film 'Waste Land' (2010), directed by Lucy Walker, which won the 2010 Sundance Audience Award for Best Film and was nominated for an Academy Award.
 
 
Hezi Cohen Gallery
54 Wolfson Street
66042 Tel Aviv
Israel
T: +972 (0)36398788
E: [email protected]
 
Hezi Cohen Gallery
 
Read On... Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv

LUIS DE JESUS Los Angeles

Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst
Relationship, #59, 2008-14
C-print, 21 x 30 in
Courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
 
 
ZACKARY DRUCKER & RHYS ERNST
POST / RELATIONSHIP / X
 
September 13 - November 1, 2014
 
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to present ZACKARY DRUCKER & RHYS ERNST: POST / RELATIONSHIP / X, on view from September 13 through November 1, 2014.
 
Relationship, an extensive photographic project created by Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst that documents their life together from 2008 through 2013, debuted at the 2014 Whitney Biennial, New York, and comes to Los Angeles via the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, where it was recently presented as part of Fan the Flames: Queer Positions in Photography. The artists will also present a new video created specifically for this LA exhibition. The photo series and She Gone Rogue (2012) will be presented concurrently at The Flaten Art Museum, St. Olaf College, Minnesota, September 12 - November 2, 2014.
 
Relationship chronicles Drucker and Ernst's private moments as an opposite-oriented transgender couple, during which time Ernst transitioned from female to male and Drucker transitioned from male to female. Described by Drucker as "pure diary", Relationship positions the document as a malleable tool for producing narrative and counternarrative form, through snapshots that depict the artists in various states of attachment and moments of solitude. "My life with Rhys was perplexing and captivating, and I wanted to remember it," she says.
 
This exhibition includes images presented at the Whitney and the AGO along with many others that are part of the original series but have not yet been shown. Perhaps the complexity of this iteration lies in how stages of detachment and intimacy are signified through differences of mood and tone as opposed to chronology; whereas Relationship's previous presentations cultivated a more celebratory and sentimental portal into the artists' life together, this broader range of material speaks to Drucker and Ernst's more recent stage of individuation as they initiate a separation of their romantic partnership while continuing their creative collaboration.
 
Throughout the series, Drucker and Ernst portray each other and themselves as both whole and fragmented subjects - figures and bodies obscured by objects or reflected in mirrors, and situated within environments ranging from domestic interiors to lush, outdoor settings. The processes of performing and documenting, which are more in the service of "making worlds" than evidence-gathering, suggest a dysfunctionality to these documents which fail a clinical expectation.
 
While some of the images have already acquired a level of fictionalization and idealization in the public sphere - and the artists' self-selection seems to almost mythologize two bodies within specific times and places - the photographs' emergence was considerably more spontaneous. In Drucker's words, this practice is "a life collaboration" in which their rituals and routines overlapped existence, "weaving in and out of a creative space, a personal space, and all the lines converge with us." Rather than staging the desired effect, the performative has become slowly embedded within the documentation process through an awareness of and familiarity with the camera, allowing for the mundane to be congealed by the medium.
 
Included in this exhibition will be Drucker and Ernst's newest video collaboration, titled X, a montage of footage taken from the same time period as Relationship that references the intersection of their creative and romantic collaboration as they move in mirror-opposite directions. Overlaid with a voiceover track developed from the artists' personal writings, X functions as a parallel to the images' content and mode of accumulation - a compendium of fragmentation that dips in and out of abstraction and adds a textured, layered dimension to the stills.
 
The artists speak of this new work, which contains footage from the earlier period of their relationship, as "bringing to life" the photographs in ways that are more atmospheric than narrative, and exploring Ernst's interest "in the space between film and photography, where the movement between frames breaks down and films become images (and vice versa)."
 
Relationship comes to fruition at a moment when newly produced queer and transgender representations are appearing alongside those that have been cultivated, recalled and summoned from the past though networked digitization. A widespread convergence of the personal with the historical occurs as the world of images at large takes on an emergent quality. Through this crossing of past with present - of repressed and erased histories with the most recent forms of self-actualization - affinities and lineages begin to take form.
 
Drucker and Ernst, who come from experimental film and photography backgrounds, collate their sensibilities through a selection of their own still and moving images that both deflect and navigate the greater world of dominant and recessive representation. Within the work's politic is the insistence that while performative yet private moments of being may become publicly 'found' at the point of reception, the work must maintain a kind of interiority, a protective sovereignty that disallows being defined by the outside world.
 
Zackary Drucker earned an MFA from CalArts in 2007 and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2005. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in numerous museums, galleries, and film festivals including the 2014 Whitney Biennial, New York; 54th Venice Biennale (Swiss Off-Site Pavilion); 3rd Moscow Biennial of Young Art; MoMA PS1; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; ICA London; Curtat Tunnel, Lausanne, Switzerland; L.U.C.C.A. Museum of Contemporary Art, Lucca, IT; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tromso Kunstaforening, Tromso, Norway; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Hammer Museum, REDCAT and LACE, all in Los Angeles. She lives in Los Angeles.
 
Rhys Ernst is a filmmaker and artist who works across narrative and experimental film, photography, animation, and mixed-media, utilizing various forms and modalities to investigate masculinity, transgender identity and the intersection of gender and narrative construction. Ernst received his MFA in Film/ Video at CalArts in 2011 and a BA from Hampshire College in 2004. His MFA thesis film THE THING premiered at Sundance 2012. Past exhibitions and screenings include the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Oberhausen, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Chicago International Film Festival, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and in Los Angeles at UCLA Hammer Museum, REDCAT, and LACE. He lives in Los Angeles.
 
 
LUIS DE JESUS Los Angeles
2635 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
T: +1 310 838 6000
E: gallery @ luisdejesus.com
 
LUIS DE JESUS Los Angeles
 
Read On... LUIS DE JESUS Los Angeles
 

Yancey Richardson, New York

Laura Letinsky
Untitled #40, from the series Ill Form & Void Full, 2013
Archival pigment print
49.5 x 58.12 inches, edition of 9
Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York
 
 
LAURA LETINSKY
YOURS, MORE PRETTY
 
September 4 - October 18, 2014
 
Yancey Richardson is pleased to announce Yours, More Pretty, an exhibition of new photographs by Laura Letinsky, presented in conjunction with the release of the artist’s fourth monograph, Ill Form & Void Full (Radius Books). The exhibition includes the most recent works from Letinsky’s on-going series, Ill Form & Void Full, which reflects on temporality and desire in the still-life genre, the self-referentiality of the photographic medium and the mutability of perception. Letinsky’s compositions utilize fragments from her own photographs and those of other artists like Richter or Matisse, as well as advertisements culled from magazines, dissolving the hierarchy between high and low imagery, and the notion of what is real and what is mediated. In addition, by using white as a color, the edges of paper as lines, and shadows as planes, Letinsky’s compositions conflate flatness and dimensionality, upending the viewer’s sense of space and perspective.
 
The arrangements in Yours, More Pretty employ two-dimensional elements as sculptural objects, to dizzying effect. Collaged cutouts of food, feathers, tableware or abstracted swaths of color are pinned, taped or glued onto reproductions of table surfaces or white paper, all of which are placed on the studio wall and actual tabletops, creating a multiplicity of facades that collapse perspective and float in an indecipherable space of light and shadow. As Letinsky describes, “Not only objects, but our relation to others, to our selves, is constantly shifting... I do strive to clear away all that is not necessary, to make the picture space a kind of precipice, anticipation always active.”
 
Rooted in the Dutch-Flemish vanitas tradition, Letinsky’s arrangements address the notion of time and the relationship between ripeness and decay; however, they do so by questioning notions of photographic authenticity, and the medium’s capacity to illustrate temporality vis-à-vis form, material, and narrative. As Letinsky states, “My photographs are very much about this medium, its self referentiality... I want an acute tension between what is in the picture - the image, what is name-able - and its status as an object.”
 
Born in Canada in 1962, Laura Letinsky received her MFA from Yale University in 1991, and was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. The first half of the series Ill Form & Void Full was presented as a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 2012. A travelling mid-career retrospective opened at the Denver Art Museum in 2012. Letinsky’s work is held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Amon Carter Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and the Stuttgart Museum, Germany, among others. Her work has been the subject of three previous monographs: Venus Inferred (University of Chicago Press), Hardly More than Ever (Renaissance Society), and After All (Grafiche Damiani).
 


Mary Ellen Bartley
Untitled 2, from the series Paperbacks, 2009
Archival pigment print. 16 x 22 inches, edition of 7
Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York
 
 
MARY ELLEN BARTLEY
PAPERBACKS
 
Yancey Richardson is pleased to announce Paperbacks, the first solo exhibition in the gallery for American artist Mary Ellen Bartley. The exhibition features a selection of ten photographic works from the artist’s on-going series, Paperbacks, within the gallery’s project space.
 
Utilizing the materiality of paperback books, Bartley’s spare, minimalist compositions quietly oscillate between abstraction, sculptural assemblage, and color field study. The soft light and muted palette of the photographs recall and are homage to the still-life paintings of Giorgio Morandi. And like Morandi’s demure bottle still-lifes, the subtle shifting tones of Bartley’s book compositions are imbued with a hushed tranquility. In these compositions, the books are symbols untethered from their signifiers, reimagined as sequenced variations within a tonal poem. The careful calibration of light, shadow, and depth of focus further decontextualize the objects, pushing the compositions closer to abstraction.
 
As the artist describes: “This series is about muting - pressing a mute button and creating a quiet, circumscribed project. I work with books, containers, and symbols of stories, information, knowledge, and meaning, but I deliberately hide any clues to the books’ contents, rendering them anonymous and wordless... The calm palette [of] fog grays and tooth colored whites further tranquillizes the clamor of narratives, characters, and action that must be contained within their pages.”
 
Mary Ellen Bartley was born in the Bronx and received a BFA from SUNY Purchase. She currently lives and works in Wainscott, New York. Her work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, including the Parrish Art Museum, NY, the Center for Photographic Arts, Carmel, CA, The Drawing Room, NY, and Fototropia Gallery, Guatemala City, Guatemala, among many others. Her first solo museum exhibition will open fall of 2014 at the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, New York.
 
 
YANCEY RICHARDSON
525 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
T: 1 646-230-9610
 
YANCEY RICHARDSON
 
Read On... YANCEY RICHARDSON, New York