September 10, 2007
Clayton Patterson - The Lower East Side
September 10 - October 27, 2007
Kinz, Tillou + Feigen
Patterson has been a ubiquitous presence of the Lower East Side of Manhattan since the early 1980's, and is widely known for his dedicated documentation of this historic and now fast changing neighborhood (i.e. vanishing neighborhood, courtesy of Mayor Bloomberg and City Planning co-conspirator Amanda Burden's campaign of development solely for the sake of developers). He has been a conscientious chronicler of this urban magnet for the disenfranchised that has long been recognized for its creative influence far beyond its humble street corners.
Patterson has created an extensive and always expanding photo and video archive of the Lower East Side. He has continually taken portraits of people posed in front of the graffiti-scrawled door to his safe haven storefront, to then be displayed in the window that the local kids dubbed the "Wall of Fame". He was there in 1988 during the Tompkins Square police riots (and has been arrested more than a dozen times for photographing the police), and he was at the closing concert of CBGB's in 2007. The New York Times describes Patterson's endeavor as such:
He has amassed a huge day-by-day visual history of the area, told mainly through unpretentious portraits of its myriad and diverse faces: tenement kids and homeless people, poets and politicians, drug dealers and drag queens, rabbis and santeros, beat cops, graffiti taggers, hookers, junkies, punks, anarchists, mystics and crackpots.
This is a collection of photographs unequaled in its power to portray the people and times of a unique neighborhood that has become synonymous with American underworlds and subcultures. Patterson is a street photographer in the tradition of Weegee and Gary Winogrand, but his project is so life-encompassing that it is perhaps more akin to some outsider or conceptualist obsessively documenting one's environs. Patterson's photographs show an unedited humanity upfront and close-up. Each picture represents a door to a fascinating story, one that he can annotate with a sharp recollection and sensitive perspective.
He has also published two well-received anthologies: ''Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side,'' 2005, and "Resistance: A Radical Political and Social History of the Lower East Side," 2007. Two more anthologies are in the works: "Jewish History of the Lower East Side," and "Tattoo and Body Art in New York City". A documentary on Patterson and the Lower East Side titled "Captured" by Dan Levin, Ben Solomon and Jenner Furst is seen much through Patterson's lens and will soon be premiered with screenings worldwide. Excerpts of the film will be on view during the exhibition.
Kinz, Tillou + Feigen
529 West 20th Street, NYC
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September 8, 2007
Chris Marker - Staring Back
September 8 - November 3, 2007
Peter Blum Gallery
Staring Back is an exhibition of almost 200 photographs taken over the course of six decades by the enigmatic and influential French filmmaker. This show, organized by Bill Horrigan at the Wexner Center for the Arts, is the first exhibition of Marker’s photographs, and consists of images selected by the artist himself from his own archive, including black-and-white portraits of individuals that Marker has encountered during the course of his world travels.
Divided into four sections, Staring Back is organized around the idea of the faces Marker has seen in his travels, and of the faces that have in turn witnessed his observant gaze –“I stare” and “They stare,” as Marker puts it. Central to the exhibition are his depictions of political demonstrations from Algerian independence protests in 1962, to the Pentagon march in 1967, to May 1968 in Paris, and continuing to 2006 in a stunning series devoted to the sustained demonstrations by French young people against punitive employment legislation. Interspersed throughout the exhibition are photographic traces of his inimitable films, including La Jetée, Letter from Siberia, The Six Face of Pentagon, Cuba Si!, Le fond de l’air est rouge, Sans Soleil, and The Case of the Grinning Cat, among others. Although some of the portraits depict well-known individuals (such as Simone Signoret and Akira Kurosawa), most are of unidentified citizens to whom Marker and his camera were drawn in the course of his global progress through Asia, South America, Scandinavia, Africa, Russia, and elsewhere. The exhibition also includes a selection of photographs of animals.
Peter Blum Gallery
99 Wooster Street, NYC
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Larry Clark: Los Angeles 2003 - 2006
September 8 - October 13, 2007
Luhring Augustine
Los Angeles 2003-2006 reflects the artist's life-long interest in the subject of today's youth within a marginalized urban environment. In this particular body of work, we witness the physical transformation of Jonathan Velasquez throughout the period of his adolescent years. Jonathan, a teenager living in South Central Los Angeles whom the artist encountered by chance, inspired Clark to write and direct the film Wassup Rockers. In this obsessive four year photographic chronicle of Jonathan's life, we experience not so much the unfolding of a series of portraits but rather the weaving of the subject's personal life within the context of a particular social milieu common to so many of today's urban youth subcultures.
Building upon Larry's previous photographic accomplishments beginning with Tulsa, Teenage Lust, 1992, the Perfect Childhood, punk Picasso, and in film with Kids, Bully, Ken Park and Wassup Rockers this series of photographs further probes with equal intensity and unabashed honesty the often subtle, often glaring changes that all youth, and in particular Jonathan, go through in their teenage years. The close-up shots, the full length frontal views, the groupings of Jonathan with his friends all combine to portray the vulnerability as well as the subjects' expressions of newfound individuality, vitality and independence of life style. The large scale pigment prints reflect a departure for Clark from the more spare and documentary sensibility that characterize his earlier work, and in so doing allow for a more tender and evocative exploration of his subject.
Luhring Augustine
531 West 24th Street, NYC
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September 7, 2007
Jon Pylypchuk - Push a weight through the world...
September 7 - 29, 2007
Friedrich Petzel Gallery
Push a weight through the world, and I will watch this crush you" was commissioned by Museum of Contemporary Art- Detroit (MOCAD) for its inaugural exhibition "Meditations in an Emergency," organized by Klaus Kertess. Inspired by his first visit to Detroit and the scrap materials and refuse he found there, Pylypchuk meticulously crafted a shantytown replete with vagrant creatures engaging in myriad unsavory behaviors, such as drinking beer from miniature Budweiser cans, smoking, and urinating in public. These miscreants, clothed in hand-hewn patchwork layers and fabricated from fur, wood, ping-pong balls and stuffed socks, loiter aimlessly together in their bleak melancholia.
Klaus Kertess, in his catalogue essay on Pylypchuk's slum, likens it to a "conflation of Disney and late Goya-a teddy bear's nightmare." Darkly humorous, Pylypchuk's ramshackle ruin and its inhabitants are decidedly not childlike but a visceral tableau of adult pathos. For this exhibition, Pylypchuk has reconfigured his original installation in Detroit to fit site-specifically at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York.
Friedrich Petzel Gallery
535 West 22nd Street, NYC
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Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Photography and Sculpture
September 7 - October 13, 2007
Andrea Rosen Gallery
Andrea Rosen Gallery is delighted to announce our second significant exhibition of the work of László Moholy-Nagy. Five years ago the gallery unveiled a selection of Moholy's color photographs that had never been seen before, marking the beginning of our journey with Moholy's work and our relationship with the Estate of László Moholy-Nagy. That first exhibition focused on the strikingly contemporary feel of the photographs as a testament to Moholy's innovative sensibility and influence on contemporary photography.
As a central component of the gallery's programming, we are interested in exploring not only how the connections between historical and contemporary works reveal new contexts for looking at art, but also the interrelatedness within an individual artist's body of work. In this exhibition we have juxtaposed some of the most significant examples of his sculptural works with selected photographs, which present both lyrical and formal relationships and illuminate the significance of the three-dimensional object across his use of varied media.
The current exhibition looks at how Moholy used the same subject and materials to explore the complete transformation of light, reflection, and transparency through different media. While Moholy has received a lot of attention recently, with a monograph, László Moholy-Nagy: Color in Transparency, published by Steidl in 2006 and an international exhibition that traveled to the Tate Modern in London, the Kunsthalle Bielefeld and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, we found it particularly fascinating and relevant to extend the discourse by providing a focus on the interrelationships between Moholy's sculpture, photographs, paintings and kinetic works. This exhibition also creates an especially interesting link following our summer 2007 exhibition 1950s-1960s Kinetic Abstraction, which included eight artists who were all strongly influenced by Moholy's work and theories.
Throughout the 1920s Moholy worked on his kinetic sculpture, Light Space Modulator (also referred to as Light Prop for an Electric Stage, Light Display Machine, and Space Kaleidoscope), creating a theoretical legacy that influenced his subsequent sculpture, painting and photography. He defined a space modulator as "a structure that is made to develop the sense of space and explore the effective relationships which must be within the quality range of any architecture - an ABC of architectural and projective space." After ten years of working on the Light Space Modulator, he was finally able to implement its full kinetic manifestation and wrote: "The mobile was so startling in its coordinated motions and space articulations of light and shadow sequences that I almost believed in magic." Both the sculptural and photographic works in this show exemplify Moholy's belief that through synthesis, fundamental relationships are revealed that create a deep and layered experience. While maintaining their individual importance, the elements of color, light, object, and media work together to evoke in the viewer both an intellectual and emotional response.
In working toward a mastery of technique, Moholy developed an approach to color photography using Kodachrome film that, like his kinetic sculpture, Light Space Modulator, incorporates both space and time. Moholy considered the dye transfer method, the only method available for printing color at that time, as an interpretive method and longed for a process equivalent to the negative/positive relationship of black and white printing. Therefore, very few of Moholy's Kodachromes were printed. The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, owns the only known vintage color print and we are honored to have the opportunity to include it in this exhibition. Today the process known as Chromogenic printing, which is used most often when printing from film, provides the technology that Moholy desired.
It is through the works in this exhibition that Moholy's influence as an artistic pioneer can be traced, not only in the physical qualities, but also in his commitment to pushing the medium's boundaries and stretching the viewer's visual lexicon.
Andrea Rosen Gallery
525 West 24th Street, NYC
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Natalie Frank: Where She Stops
September 7 - October 13, 2007
Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Natalie Franks paintings explore relationships of power as they function within issues of identity, sexuality, religion, and history. The personal, political, and theatrical collide in her representations of the beautiful and the grotesque.
Franks paintings are peopled by figures of the in-between -- characters ill-defined by gender and sexuality, reality and fantasy, presence and absence. Her life-sized figures assume a variety of roles, both allegorical and highly personal, which recur throughout the paintings. Blurring the lines between the perverse and the everyday, Franks paintings engage the viewer as a complicit voyeur into their strange reality.
This will be Franks first solo exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. She has been included in various group exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad, including Aggression of Beauty at Arndt and Partner in Berlin this spring. Natalie Frank is represented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash.
Mitchell-Innes & Nash
534 West 26th Street, NYC
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Robert Whitman: Turning
September 7 - 29, 2007
Pace Wildenstein
In the current exhibition, Turning, Whitman explores the light, movement, and space of planetary experience. He began by gathering video footage from NASA which he has digitally manipulated and montaged to create moving imagery projected internally onto the surface of three plastic hemispheres: Earth (2006), Europa (2006), and Ganymede (2006). The works, which hang from the ceiling, measure between four and five feet in diameter. “Our generation is the first bunch of people that actually know the moon close-up. On the one hand that’s kind of wonderful and on the other it adds another area of stuff we can’t imagine…. another diving board to jump off into the unknown,” commented Whitman in the new interview.
Two other 2007 projection works, will also be on view in Turning. The first projection, Sun (2007), uses a movie generated by the YOHKOH (Japanese for sunbeam) satellite. The YOHKOH satellite was a project developed by the Institute for Space and Astronautical Sciences to record images of the Sun using wavelengths of light not visible through the Earth’s atmosphere. In order to create Sun Whitman modified the rotation, speed and color of the images taken from YOHKOH, and then projected them onto manipulated fabric. The second work, Io (generated, like the first group, from NASA video footage) is similarly projected onto fabric, transforming the dimensionality of this Jovian moon from the spherical to the two dimensions of the torn, sewn, undulating surface of a cloth.
Pace Wildenstein
534 West 25th Street, NYC
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September 6, 2007
Mail Order Monsters
September 6 - 29, 2007
Deitch Projects
Deitch Projects presents a group exhibition curated by Kathy Grayson exploring new trends in fucked-up figuration. Every generation has its unique take on the figure and the most exciting new art seems to portray the figure as broken, decaying, fractured, and monstrous! Each artist in this exhibition exemplifies this pervasive tendency in a unique way:
Francine Spiegel’s soupy, sloppy women protrude from and are engulfed by pop slime piles. Rapper’s girlfriends, socialites, and pin-up girls are all thrown into the stew of mylar, goo, glitter, and chewing gum. Their glammy/gory juxtaposition, coupled with the analog and
digital moments of her distortions, presents an interesting visual conundrum of seduction and repulsion to these primordial females.
Dennis Tyfus’ work comes out of graffiti and underground art and music in Europe and America. The monsters that inhabit his hectic drawings are rude, humiliating, drunk and aggressive. Their central concern is bare survival, and in their strange jungle-like existence they attack and dominate. Having interesting affinities with graphic styles of Providence, Rhode Island but distinctions all his own, Dennis comes fromAntwerp where he is a vibrant part of the underground music and art scene.
Ben Jones, a member of east-coast art collective Paper Rad, takes neon and comic to new oddities of meaning. With the hand style of the best graffiti artist and the conceptual, absurd rigour of a dada-ist, his paintings, sculptures, and comics take a fresh look at figuration
with their subtleties of form and make you think about a face in new ways.
Tomoo Gokita favours creepily still portraits of women and wrestlers executed exclusively in black and white. These faces occasionally escape his brush unscathed, but more often are tangled into knots, unearthed by abstract machine-like forms, or obliterated in one big gesture. With the existential angst of a Bacon sousrature but the pop-comic chicanery of a gifted graphic
artist, his portraits are more than silly; less than tortured.
Eddie Martinez loves men in hats, potted plants, parrots, and patterns. Drawing with paint, and often hastily, he configures ambiguous scenes of interaction played out equally between barely-held together figures and the inanimate objects that decorate their interiors.
Taylor McKimens’ monsters are not terribly other-worldly or fantastical but are rather the folks next door, down the street, or on the wrong side of the tracks. Deadbeats and derelicts roam sparse, harshly lit worlds of soggy bread and Band-Aids, bologna and knotted garden hose. The palette is a dulled Fixin’s Bar of mustardy yellows, graying tomatoes, and limpid greens.
Taylor has a predilection for the entropic—splatters, drips, tangles, messes and decay, rust and ruin—all the corners where disorder begins to reclaim our fabricated environment and our bodies. No one is smiling and everyone is somehow sweaty. In this exhibition, his two saggy lumps come from a series he made called ‘The Drips’ who seem to trade in poo and live where everything has many, many crotches.
Joe Grillo is a member of Virginia Beach art collective Dearraindrop and has been putting the figure through the pop media shredder for years with very hyperreal results. Visiting a Dearraindrop show is like being flushed down reality into a black-lit day-glo aquarium of
decanted cultural precipitate and psychotic acid ooze.
Myths, symbols and cartoons take on a life of their own with the horror of basic concepts in meltdown. Winking, jabbering, and hieroglyphic, Joe’s horror vacui paintings and drawings are an uneasy dream squeezed full of monsters and American archetypes.
Takeshi Murata’s videos are seething masses of data distortion and fractured figuration. Humans, monkeys, and monsters slog through and come apart in a beautiful complex pattern of disrupted video. By hacking the way a computer reads a DVD, Takeshi is able to
painstakingly create frame by frame an image of both painterly abstraction and technological fragmentation. He has recently exhibited at Barbara Gladstone, Ratio 3, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and The Hirschorn Museum in DC.
Cleon Peterson is an LA-based graphic artist and painter whose included piece is a multi-panel
installation of obscure but anxiety-ridden scenes of anonymous death and violence.
Deitch Projects
76 Grand Street, NYC
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