Ruud van Empel, Sunday @Stux

JTF (just the facts): A total of 7 color works, hung in the upper viewing area in the back of the gallery. 5 of the works are archival pigment prints, framed in brown wood, from 2012. These prints are sized 28x20, and are available in editions of 7+2AP. The other 2 works are archival pigment prints mounted to Dibond and Plexiglas, unframed, also from 2012. These works are sized 59x41, and are available in editions of 5+2AP. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Ruud van Empel's small show provides two new bodies of work to contemplate, both in his now-signature style of flawlessly stitched together, composite imagery. At this point, van Empel's digital collages of meticulously rendered but somehow surreal children are immediately identifiable, and these new projects don't stray too far from his proven visual formula.

 

Most of the images in the exhibit substitute a backdrop of manicured, formal gardens for the lush jungle vegetation the artist has regularly employed as a setting. But there is something over-the-top and manic about these manufactured gardens filled with endless topiaries, pruned evergreens, boxwood hedges and shrubbery specimens. Kids primly stand in their Sunday best (thus the title of the series), freckly red haired boys in proper coats and ties, and black children in snappy blazers and bow ties or sweater dresses and mary janes. As they pose on the gravel paths, with a stray peacock or dove nearby, the gardens engulf and overtake them, controlled nature on the verge of out of control. For the first time, van Empel has also introduced an older lady as a subject, seen up close, in a fur collared coat. The background of her portrait explodes with angular, geometric forms in green, with a nod to the Renaissance, but inexplicably dense and layered.

 

The other two images on view play with linear perspective in new ways. A crowd of kids of varying sizes (and varying outfits) is arrayed against a formless grey background, seemingly following the rules of aerial depth perception but floating unrooted to any landscape. Shadows are cast by the children (so there is a consistent light source), but otherwise they have no connection to a setting or narrative. The works almost seem like a temporary peg board resting place for van Empel's fancy fabricated kids, as though he was simply waiting to insert them into some other elaborate scene but they have been stranded in this endless netherworld in the meantime. While the colors are bright and energetic, the works felt oddly dispiriting, like the well-meaning kids were trapped in some kind of cleaned-up stylish hell.

 

Part of what I like about van Empel's work is this sense of discomfort that grows as you look as his photographs. The first glance always seems placid and inviting, but a closer examination always seems to uncover an undercurrent of the threatening, the puzzling, or the unsettlingly mismatched. It's a hyper-perfect world, where the fastidious, glossy detail is often slightly disturbing.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The smaller 28x20 prints are $24000 and the larger 59x41 prints are $32000. Van Empel's prints have become more consistently available in the secondary markets in recent years. Prices at auction have ranged between roughly $15000 and $120000.

 

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

 

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Exhibit: MOPA, San Diego, 2012 (here)
• Feature: Trendland (here)

Ruud van Empel, Sunday

Through October 20th

 

Stefan Stux Gallery

530 West 25th Street

New York, NY 10001

The Checklist: 09/27/12

Current New York Photography Shows
New reviews added this week in red.
(Rating: Artist/Title: Venue: Closing Date: link to review)

Uptown

THREE STARS: Rineke Dijkstra: Guggenheim: October 8: review

Midtown

THREE STARS: Gerhard Richter: Marian Goodman: October 13: review
ONE STAR: Fazal Sheikh: Pace/MacGill: October 20: review
ONE STAR: Judy Fiskin: Greenberg Van Doren: October 27: review
ONE STAR: Sally Mann: Edwynn Houk: November 3: review
TWO STARS: The Shaping of New Visions: MoMA: April 29: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Hillary Holsonback/Danielle Georgiou: Horton: September 29: review
ONE STAR: Richard Misrach: Aperture: October 6: review
ONE STAR: Lise Sarfati: Yossi Milo: October 13: review
ONE STAR: Rosemary Laing: Galerie Lelong: October 20: review
ONE STAR: Laura Letinsky: Yancey Richardson: October 20: review
ONE STAR: James Welling: David Zwirner: October 27: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

ONE STAR: Sam Samore (1973): Team: October 27: review

Elsewhere Nearby

TWO STARS: Hank Willis Thomas: Aldrich: September 30: review
THREE STARS: Robert Adams: Yale: October 28: review

Forward Auction Calendar
New auctions added this week in red.
(Sale Date: Sale Title: Auction House: link to catalog)

October 2: Photographs (New York): Phillips de Pury: catalog
October 3: Photographs (New York): Sotheby's: catalog
October 4: Fine Photographs & Photobooks (New York): Swann: catalog
October 4: Richard Avedon (New York): Christie's: catalog
October 4/5: Photographs (New York): Christie's: catalog
October 10: Contemporary Art Evening (London): Phillips de Pury: catalog
October 11: Contemporary Art Day (London): Phillips de Pury: catalog
October 11: Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening (London): Christie's: catalog
October 12: Post-War & Contemporary Art Day (London): Christie's: catalog
October 12: Contemporary Art Evening (London): Sotheby's: catalog
October 13: Contemporary Art Day (London): Sotheby's: catalog
October 30: Photographs (New York): Bonhams: catalog
October 30: Photographs - Man Ray (Barcelona): Soler y Llach: catalog

Judy Fiskin: The End of Photography and Selected Photographs @Greenberg Van Doren

 

JTF (just the facts): A total of 75 black and white photographs, custom framed in white wood with no mat, and hung against grey striped walls in the main gallery space. The show also includes 1 video, which is on display in the entry area. The gelatin silver prints are mostly vintage, made between 1973 and 1988, with a few modern prints made in 2006. Paper sizes are either 5x7 or 6x8 (or reverse), with images roughly 2x2 or 2x3 (or reverse). All of the prints come in editions of 6+2AP. The video is a Super 8 film on digital video with sound, running 2 minutes and 28 seconds; it is available in an edition of 10+2AP. Some Aesthetic Decisions: The Photographs of Judy Fiskin, a new catalog raisonne recently published by the Getty (here), is available at the reception desk. (Installation shots at right.)

 

The following projects are included in the show, with the number of relevant prints on view and their dates as background:

 

Stucco: 11 prints, 1973-1976

35 Views of San Bernardino: 4 prints, 1974

Military Architecture: 10 prints, 1975

Desert: 3 prints, 1976

Long Beach: 5 prints, 1980

Dingbat: 12 prints, 1982-1983

My Trip to New York: 19 prints, 1984-1986

Jersey Shore: 3 prints, 1986-1988

New Orleans: 5 prints, 1987

New Architecture: 3 prints, 1988

 

Comments/Context: Judy Fiskin's tiny, couple-of-inches-square black and white prints seem both anachronistic and unexpectedly modern in these days of the humongous and the over sized. From the center of the gallery, her prints from the 1970s and 1980s are completely illegible, minuscule dots circling the room. They require nose-to-the-frame engagement to even decipher their subjects, and when you get up close, their black bordered edges make it feel like you're looking through the viewfinder along with the artist; it's as if you're along for the ride.

 

This show is a mini-retrospective sampler, gathering prints from a variety of her projects across two decades. At first glance, the bleached out, high contrast deadpan of the photographs might recall the Bechers, Ed Ruscha, or the New Topographics photographers, but even though her visual formula is strict and methodical, the pictures seem more about quirks and outliers than vernacular patterns. I liked the edge of wit in her Southern California flat roofed stucco houses (often with mirrored geometries or palm trees) and her Dingbat apartment blocks, punctuated by quiet oddities of shrubbery and surface decoration. In the 1980s, Fiskin shifted her gaze East, documenting the elaborate roof lines of the Jersey shore and the mixed-up stand alone bungalows and duplexes of New York. She even took time to capture the over-the-top architecture of cemetery tombs in New Orleans. Across the various subjects, she consistently found overlooked details worth noting, small eccentricities that seem to stick out as obvious once she had highlighted them. Her photographs are evidence of conscious looking, of searching for the individuality and personality that had been easily passed by in the apparent monotony of these everyday structures.

 

The front room contains Fiskin's 2006 film, The End of Photography, where moving images of this same Southern California architectural aesthetic are cut together and overlaid with a spoken eulogy to the black-and-white, analog world. The voice-over is a repeated cadence of "no more" followed by a catalog of items once found in a darkroom: no more enlarger, no more tray, no more beaker, no more developer, no more radio, etc. ending with "no more photography". It points to the comfortable details of a now vanished world, and the uncertainty felt as these traditional technologies and processes have been washed away by the new. I have to admit that I had a mixed reaction to this message of this film, as it elicited both a real nostalgia for the old (and the subtleties of what has been lost) and a lack of patience for the underlying bitterness being expressed at being forced to change.

 

Overall, I think this Fiskin overview is smart and well-constructed, especially in its coverage of many of her early projects. In putting together the historical puzzle of 1970s/1980s American photography, I think her personal take on local vernacular architecture (particularly in California) merits inclusion among the better known names that define the period.

 

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at $5000 each. The video is available for $10000. Fiskin's work has little or no secondary market history, so even though these photographs date back several decades, gallery retail is likely the only option for those collectors interested in following up. Fiskin is also represented by Angles Gallery in Los Angeles (here).

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Cal Arts page (here)

Judy Fiskin: The End of Photography and Selected Photographs

Through October 27th

 

Greenberg Van Doren Gallery

730 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10019

Fazal Sheikh: Ether @Pace/MacGill

JTF (just the facts): A total of 38 black and white and color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, hung against orange and khaki walls in the main rooms of the gallery. All of the works are pigment prints on handmade Innova Smooth Cotton Natural White paper mounted to board, made between 2008 and 2011. Most of the prints are sized roughly 5x8, and are available in an edition of 7; 4 prints are sized slightly larger at roughly 9x7, and are also available in an edition of 7. There is no photography allowed in the gallery, so the installation shots at right are via the Pace/MacGill website.

Comments/Context: Fazal Sheikh's nighttime images of the Ganges river holy city of Varanasi are steeped in a quiet sense of meditative calm. Instead of pointing his camera at the crowded chaotic hustle of everyday Indian life, he has chosen to document the motionlessness of dark repose, when the city sleeps and tranquility and peace return to its streets and alleys. His pictures capture the endless cycle of birth and death in this spiritual place, grasping for the dissolving, elemental strands of earth, air, fire, water, and the ephemeral, elusive ether.

Sheikh's images of slumbering people form the core of this show. Bodies lie covered in sheets and blankets and serene, undisturbed faces peek out from the shadows. Those merely sleeping and those who have passed on seem indistinguishable and interchangeable, the transition from the weary to the corpse a completely natural one. Each lies in restful but safe vulnerability, bathed in a warm glow, moving from dark bronze to softly golden as the hours pass. Even the dogs are asleep, curled up on stone platforms, near muddy puddles.

The remaining images in the show provide a supporting backdrop for these dusty, shrouded forms, creating a noticeable rhythm around the gallery. The photographs are grouped into small sets, where sleepers are flanked by the wilting flowers of a shrine, the glowing embers of a fire, or the misty, star-filled sky. An interior wall pairs images of newborns in swaddling clothes with the dead covered in garlands, reinforcing the cyclicality of this life. The overall effect is one of stillness and harmony, of spiritual rest and natural rebirth, often ending with a view into the dark night.

In this age of monumental contemporary photography, Sheikh's intimate prints are a welcome surprise. They encourage a slower, more attentive engagement with the work, rather than a fast-food inhalation of imagery. And they successfully evoke a specific mood, one that flies in the face of the conventional view of the tumult and pandemonium of Indian street life. Shiekh's photographs are like a hushed lullaby, a gentle moment of reflection on things larger and more intangible.

Collector's POV: The photographs in this show are priced at $4000 each. Sheikh's work has not yet reached the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for those collectors interested in following up.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

 

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Features/Reviews: Time LightBox (here), New Yorker (here)

Fazal Sheikh: Ether

Through October 20th

 

Pace/MacGill Gallery

32 East 57th Street

New York, NY 10022

Sally Mann: Upon Reflection @Houk

 

JTF (just the facts): A total of 23 black and white photographic works, unframed and hung against light peach colored walls in the main gallery space and the smaller side room. All of the works are ambrotypes (unique collodion wet-plate positives on black glass), made between 2006 and 2012. Each unit print is sized roughly 15x14. The individual works are arranged into groups and grids of 1, 3, 6, 9, and 20 prints, and are divided by subject matter into two projects: Self-Portraits and Omphalos. There are 17 works from Self-Portraits and 6 works from Omphalos on view. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: In the future, when some museum does a full and comprehensive retrospective of Sally Mann's work, I think it will be fascinating to consider how her embrace of the wet-plate collodion process has changed the trajectory of her artistic life. In my view, there is a very distinct break right in the middle of her prolific career, a before wet-plate and after wet-plate bright line where her work took an entirely new direction. Some will argue that the progression is smoother than I am making out, that she has always thoughtfully focused her camera on her family and the land around her, but to my eye, while the subjects haven't evolved dramatically, the mood is meaningfully different, perhaps a byproduct of the ghostly look and feel of the wet-plate prints, or perhaps a turn inward toward a more complex and personal psychological landscape.

What is new here is that after a riding accident laid her up with serious injuries in 2006, she boldly turned the camera on herself, making countless head shot portraits and nude torsos. There are no smiling, happy faces in this parade, however; her expressions cover the territory from deadpan to grave, with a few stops for steely, weary, wise, zombie-eyed, and almost meditatively ecstatic in between. The tonalities shift from washed out grey to brown to bronze to shadowy black, and the chance movements of the chemicals create unexpected spectral drips, swirls, and highlights that often obscure the image. Some of the works have also been scratched and abraded, with the emulsion flaking and chipping off, exposing areas of crackly black glass. Seen together as grids and typologies, the faces become a taxonomy of subtle emotional states; a wisp of hair or the details of wrinkles make some of the pictures humanly specific, while others drift into silhouette or death mask, the personal features erased and blurred. Mann's torso images are generally more abstract, reducing her body to a sculptural mass of white with a shadowy hint of a belly button or a dark triangle. The classical forms seem smooth and weathered, like fertility symbols from antiquity, at once haunting and timeless. The variation in these images is more subtle, elemental curves repeated with minute changes in brightness and contrast.

While Mann's images her nude husband were tender in their unflinching truth, these images of her own face and body seem tougher to me, even in their most elegant state. When she does engage the camera, her gaze is strict and penetrating, and I felt a sense of quiet defiance, a letting down of her guard but with a knowing resignation to and acceptance of what she was letting in. Taken together, the works are a rich, multi-dimensional portrait, full of dark, complex emotions and ephemeral moods, riding on an undercurrent of inner strength.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced based on the number of prints included in the work/grid. The single print works are $20000, the 3 print works are $36000, the 6 print works are $60000, the 9 print works are $84000, and the 20 unit work is $172000. Mann's photographs are widely available in the secondary markets. Auction prices for Mann's prints have generally ranged between $3000 and $70000 in recent years, with most still under $20000. Her earlier works were printed in editions of 10 and 25, so these new unique works will clearly have a different scarcity value. Mann is also represented in New York by Gagosian Gallery (here).

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Exhibit: Virginia Museum of Art, 2010 (here)

Sally Mann: Upon Reflection

Through November 3rd

 

Edwynn Houk Gallery

745 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10151

Gerhard Richter, Painting 2012 @Goodman

JTF (just the facts): A total of 9 monumental color works, 10 smaller color works, and 1 glass/steel sculpture, displayed in the north and south galleries and in the smaller north viewing room. The large scale works are digital prints, unframed and mounted between Aludibond and Perspex (Diasec), made in 2011 and 2012. The works range in size from 63x118 to 79x236, in both square and rectangular formats, and are each unique (edition of 1). The smaller works are also digital prints, but mounted on Aludibond and framed in blond wood and matted. All of these works are sized 20x56 and were made in 2012; they are also unique (edition of 1). The sculpture in the south gallery is made of 6 panes of glass and a steel frame, from 2002-2011. A catalog of the exhibit is available from the gallery for $65. A second book detailing the intermediate steps leading up to the finished works on display (called Patterns) is available for review at the reception desk. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: When we look back on the history of digital art in a decade or two, I think that the works in this show, namely Gerhard Richter's recent strip paintings, will be seen as a watershed moment. They represent the defining instant when software-driven art making went mainstream, when one of our most important and influential painters made the drastic jump and fully embraced a new kind of artistic thinking. To be sure, plenty of artists have been using all kinds of digital technologies in recent years, but this show really represents a break with the past, and a huge, bold step toward the future. Richter has brought triumphant excitement and extroverted vitality to the digital realm, so it's no wonder these pictures have been misunderstood by most of the old thinkers; they're evidence that we're on our way to somewhere entirely new.

 

I think it is a fair question to ask why a photography critic like myself is weighing in on works that are being called "paintings". The fact is that these works reside in the Venn diagram intersection of painting, photography, and software driven art, and their endpoint is a digital photographic print. Richter's process began with a high resolution scan (AKA a photograph) of one of his densely colored squeegee paintings (Abstract Painting 724-4, from 1990). This digital file was then vertically divided in an exponential progression (2, then 4, then 8, all the way to 4096), creating a multitude of sliver thin strips of color, which were each mirrored and repeated horizontally (by the software), effectively stretching the colors out into extended lines. Output as digital prints and mounted, these files became the "strip paintings". So let's be honest. These aren't even remotely "paintings" as we traditionally define them, even if that is a better term to use when trying to sell them for a big price. There is no hand crafting, no gesture, no mark of the artist whatsoever. They are manipulated photographs.

 

Let's also be clear that Richter and his team aren't a bunch of genius coders. The software required to do this image fracturing, mirroring, and reassembling was likely quite straightforward; plenty of competent software engineers could have cranked it out. But the simplicity of the software isn't really my point. What's important here is that Richter has taken his interest in structure and embodied it in something invisible, namely the underlying software. He's merged many of his previous ideas about abstraction, chance, compositional rigor, and photographic reproduction into a conceptual architecture built in code. Information has been translated into visual output in a modular, iterative, quantified fashion. In one swift move, he has displaced the physicality (the "thing"ness) of painting with pure, unadulterated, rational logic.

 

It is really impossible to comrehend the presence of these works from gallery installation shots or computer screen reproductions. At every distance, from 20 feet to 6 inches, they shimmer with an optical intensity that seems unprocessable by the human eye. The effect is that they are somehow hard to see and utterly precise at the same time. This isn't some gimmicky Op Art trickery, intentionally designed to make our eyes blur or swim; no, I think this feeling is entirely a byproduct of the minute resolution of the lines and the nature of the color. Richter has long been interested in color, and these pictures introduce nothing less than a revolution in color. Walk back through the history of painting and you'll find realistic color, Impressionistic color, painterly color, and more recently industrial color and even commercial color. These works take color somewhere new, call it technological or electronic color, where Richter has moved beyond the mechanistic to the hard edged intellectualism of computerized purity. The way light interacts with this color is altogether original, and can only really be understood when seen close up.

 

If we talk about Constructivism being rooted in the clarity of underlying geometry, perhaps what Richter is exploring here is a kind of Digital Constructivism, a 21st century version which replaces the idolization of the geometric form with the raw power of smart software. There is an undeniable connection between the shimmering electricity of Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie and the staggering sensations of these new Richters; we're just a century further along in our refinement of the organizing principles and the brightness of the possibilities. Similarly, these strips extend far beyond pared down Minimalism, even though they are all horizontal lines; put one of these next to an elegant Agnes Martin and it will shout it down - its vibrating energy is just too great. The mathematical aesthetic has been taken to its logical extreme in these images, and that extreme points toward high density, high complexity innovation.

 

My guess is that when we stand in the future and look back at these Richters, they may look surprisingly simplistic from that wiser vantage point; in the coming years, artists are going to use software technology to move far beyond what's on display here. But there is something undeniably exciting about photographs (yes, photographs) that demolish so many barriers, that open up so much thrilling, unexplored white space. The 80 year old Richter has shown us what the bridge to the new world looks like; now we just have to walk across.

 

Collector's POV: The monumental scale works in this show were priced starting at 1300000€ and the smaller prints were priced at 20000€. I say "were" in that all of the works were either already sold or on hold when I visited the gallery. Richter's photographic works (the overpainted photographs as well as other works that might be categorized as photography) are intermittently available in the secondary markets, mostly in Contemporary Art auctions rather that Photography auctions. Recent prices for these works have ranged from roughly $10000 to $200000; Richter's paintings price at an altogether different and meaningfully higher level.

Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Exhibit: Centre Pompidou, 2012 (here)
• Features/Reviews: New Yorker (here), NY Times (here)

Gerhard Richter, Painting 2012
Through October 13th

Marian Goodman Gallery
24 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

The Checklist: 09/20/12

Current New York Photography Shows
New reviews added this week in red.
(Rating: Artist/Title: Venue: Closing Date: link to review)

Uptown

THREE STARS: Rineke Dijkstra: Guggenheim: October 8: review

Midtown

TWO STARS: The Shaping of New Visions: MoMA: April 29: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Hillary Holsonback/Danielle Georgiou: Horton: September 29: review
ONE STAR: Richard Misrach: Aperture: October 6: review
ONE STAR: Lise Sarfati: Yossi Milo: October 13: review
ONE STAR: Rosemary Laing: Galerie Lelong: October 20: review
ONE STAR: Laura Letinsky: Yancey Richardson: October 20: review
ONE STAR: James Welling: David Zwirner: October 27: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

ONE STAR: Sam Samore (1973): Team: October 27: review

Elsewhere Nearby

TWO STARS: Hank Willis Thomas: Aldrich: September 30: review
THREE STARS: Robert Adams: Yale: October 28: review

Forward Auction Calendar
New auctions added this week in red.
(Sale Date: Sale Title: Auction House: link to catalog)

September 20: Under The Influence (New York): Phillips de Pury: catalog
September 21: Contemporary Art (New York): Sotheby's: catalog
October 2: Photographs (New York): Phillips de Pury: catalog
October 3: Photographs (New York): Sotheby's: catalog
October 4: Fine Photographs & Photobooks (New York): Swann: catalog
October 4: Richard Avedon (New York): Christie's: catalog
October 4/5: Photographs (New York): Christie's: catalog

James Welling, Overflow @Zwirner

 

JTF (just the facts): A total of 42 black and white and color works, framed in white and matted, and hung in two connected gallery spaces and a smaller side room down an adjacent hallway. 29 of the prints come from the series Wyeth, made between 2010 and 2012. All of these works are archival inkjet prints on rag paper, available in editions of 5. The prints come in one of two sizes (or reverse): 16x24 (with one at 18x16) or 28x42; each image is available either small or large, but not both. There are 19 in the smaller size and 10 in the larger size on view. The front gallery contains 6 abstract works from the series Fluid Dynamics, made between 2009 and 2012. These are archival inkjet prints, available in editions of 5, sized either 48x40 or 52x40. The side room contains 7 works from the Frolic Architecture project, made in conjunction with poet Susan Howe in 2010 and 2011. These are gelatin silver prints, in editions of 3 or 4, sized either 18x14 or 22x17. This room also contains a glass case with several copies of the related book. (Installation shots at right.)

 

Comments/Context: James Welling's newest show combines three recent projects that all revolve around the relationship between photography and painting. It's evidence of complex thinking, of dissecting and reconsidering how the two mediums can interact, both in the physical gesture and in the pictorial scaffolding.

 

The main body of the exhibit is made up of images from Welling's project channeling Andrew Wyeth. Welling traveled to various locations in Maine and Pennsylvania to visit landmarks, recreate certain scenes, explore the artist's studio, and generally immerse himself in Wyeth's environment and mindset. The result is a set of pictures which are quintessentially New England, spare and unadorned, simple and quietly intense: a dark shingled saltbox looms against the grey sky, a set of white framed windows frosted with misty ice, a chimney rising from a pitched roof, a barn flanked by scrubby grass and wildflower meadows. Interiors echo with empty stillness: a doorknob, a rustic cabinet, Wyeths' dry pigments, a cup and saucer. The project is at once an investigation of place and a communing with the painter's tactile sense of formal precision. Even the scenes which are not direct recreations feel etched with the same sense of pared down care and acute attention.

 

The other two projects on view are process driven photographic abstractions, images made from chemicals and wet paper, full of drips, swirls, splotches, and gestural motion. The Fluid Dynamics series starts with this kind of darkroom experimentation and then layers digital color gradients on top of the images later; a few underlying compositions become the basis for several color riffs, almost like satellite photos or fractals, from soft ice white, to pink and light blue, to copper brown and darker blue. The works in side room also turn on this painterly kind of craftsmanship, but this time in gelatin silver, with folds, lines and washes of ghostly white flowing into light-filled grey abstractions. Both sets of images are physical (almost sculptural), playing with movement and fluidity in the depths of the process.

 

On the surface, the bodies of work in this show could hardly be more different. And yet I took away a common sense of probing, of looking at painting in all kinds of ways, of parsing it down in search of its relevance to photography. Welling is clearly an artist who is thinking rigorously and systematically, who is constantly unpacking his influences and rebuilding his tool box from the ground up.

 

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The images from the Wyeth series are either $15000 (16x24) or $22000 (28x42). The larger works from the Fluid Dynamics series are $25000 and the smaller ones from the Frolic Architecture series are $12000. Welling's photographs have been become more available in the secondary markets in recent years, with auction prices ranging between $2000 to $22000.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

 

Transit Hub:

• Interview: NY Times (here), Wadsworth Atheneum (here)
• Feature: ARTnews (here), Photograph (here)

James Welling, Overflow

Through October 27th

 

David Zwirner

525 West 19th Street

New York, NY 10011

Sam Samore, 1973 @Team

JTF (just the facts): A total of 24 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung in the main gallery space and the smaller back room. All of the works are gelatin silver prints, taken in 1973 and printed recently. The images come from two series (The Suicidist and The Murdered Brother), each of which is made up of a total of 17 images (not all are on display in this show). Each print is sized 14x22, and comes in an edition of 1+1AP. (Installation shots at right.)

 

Comments/Context: Visiting Sam Samore's new show is like setting your time machine for 1973 and stepping out in the heydey of bushy facial hair and quirky photoconceptualism. The exhibit pairs an old favorite (The Suicidist) with a previously unknown body of work (The Murdered Brother), both from the same year. The two projects revel in dark, black comedy, taking death (and its stand ins) to new heights of absurdity.

 

The Suicidist is likely familiar to many readers here, as its catalog of death fantasies have become a classic of the era. The series features Samore himself posed in a variety of cinematic crime scenes, a scruffy protagonist in an endless stream of increasingly ridiculous events. The deaths begin with the commonplace: a fall down the stairs, a knife, an overdose of pills, run over by a car, a plummet to the street from an apartment window, but quickly turn to the weird and wonderful: vacuum in the mouth, arrow in the chest, strangled by the phone cord, impaled on a music stand, crumpled at the base of a child's slide, head in the toilet, buried in a sandbox. The images mix a goofy desperation with a calculated smartness, the taxonomy of corpses both clever and haltingly funny.

 

The Murdered Brother riffs on many of the same themes, albeit in a more abstracted and indirect way. The dead body in these images has been replaced by a curious white rubber glove, partially inflated and poking out from any number of puzzling and inopportune locations. It's stuck in the oven door, creeping out of the dryer pipe, wedged under the toilet seat, trapped in the piano, stuffed in a boot, and trying to escape from the vacuum. The stories in this series are much more obtuse and unknowable, more open for interpretation, but still playfully melodramatic and inventive.

 

I'll admit to being a sucker for the precocious wit of 1960s and 1970s photoconceptualism. I never seem to tire of the visual jokes and brainy games of Baldessari, Wegman, Cumming, Nauman, Ruscha et al., and these projects by Samore fit right into that same intellectual mind set. This show was a good reminder for me that deadpan need not mean boring or dull, and that there ought to be a larger place in contemporary photography for the crackling and the cunning.

 

Collector's POV: Each of the prints in this show is priced at $20000. Samore's photographs have become more available in the secondary markets in recent years, with prices ranging between roughly $4000 and $16000.

 

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

 

Transit Hub:

• Review: TimeOut New York (here)
• Exhibit: MoMA PS1, 2006 (here)

Sam Samore, 1973

Through October 27th

 

Team Gallery

83 Grand Street

New York, NY 10013

Laura Letinsky: Ill Form & Void Full @Richardson

JTF (just the facts): A total of 10 large scale color photographs, framed in white with no mat, and hung in the main gallery space and behind the reception desk. All of the works are archival pigment prints, made in 2011. The prints range in size from 40x31 to 45x35 (or reverse) and are each available in editions of 9. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Laura Letinsky's new show continues her relentless exploration of the limits of the photographic tabletop still life. While her previous series probed the abstract interactions of white table edges and falling light and documented the decayed mess of seemingly random but carefully controlled party leftovers, her newest pictures dive into a deeper and more layered conceptual pool, adding elements of appropriated collage that undermine our ability to make sense of the reality on view.

Nearly all the images in this show play with the interaction between two dimensional flatness and three dimensional volume, mixing "an image of the thing" paper cutouts with actual objects in tightly tangled set-ups. In its simplest form, this is embodied by a real tomato arranged next to an image of two more in a bowl, where roundness and depth become surprisingly uncertain quantities. Letinsky expands this idea with crafty nuance, intermingling real desserts, slices of fruit (peach, cantaloupe), silverware, and glassware with paper stand-ins (both color and black and white), creating full gatherings that tug and pull our perception back and forth. The scale of the collage elements is often close to normal but just a hair off kilter; a cutout fork is a bit too large, or an image of a pitcher is too small in comparison to the other objects that surround it, throwing off the normal sense of compositional balance. Many of the items are daisy chained together, drawing the viewer's eye across the surface of the image, alternating between thin and thick, distorted and true. Even the table itself is up for interpretation: it is a real table, a photographic picture of a table, paper taped to the wall, or just light falling in a parallelogram, or maybe some combination of all four? Are the angles and shadows "real" or optical illusions? The pictures continually upend our ability to comprehend them, forcing us to slow down and unpack each discrete element to test its veracity.

I like the fact that these new works are more challenging than some of her earlier projects; Letinsky seems to be aggregating her ideas into ever more complex and brainy constructions. I now see connections to Daniel Gordon's image sculptures or to many others currently playing with rephotography and layered physical photocollage. While staying within the confines of her chosen sandbox, she's opened up some exciting new territory for exploration.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced between $6750 and $10500, based on size and place in the edition. Letinsky's work has very little secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail remains the only likely option for those collectors interested in following up.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Exhibit: MCA Chicago, 2012 (here)
• Reviews: New Yorker (here), Daily Serving (here)

Laura Letinsky: Ill Form & Void Full
Through October 20th

Yancey Richardson Gallery
535 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

Hillary Holsonback and Danielle Georgiou, I'm Looking Through You @Horton

JTF (just the facts): A total of 5 large scale color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung in the small single room gallery space. All of the photographs are c-prints, made in 2012. The prints are each sized 55x43, and are available in editions 3+1AP. The show also includes 5 separate video works by Danielle Georgiou, which run in sequence on a single monitor. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Hillary Holsonback's new works remind us that an entire generation of younger artists have been following in the conceptual footsteps of Cindy Sherman, watching the evolution of her art and using it as a jumping off place for their own explorations. Holsonback's photographs start with a bit of Pictures Generation-style image appropriation and then move someplace new via a combination of physical performance and optical distortion, delivering a fresh, layered examination of feminine identity.

Golden age Hollywood glamour is the baseline for these works. The images begin with oversized advertising head shots of Audrey Hepburn, Liz Taylor, Senta Berger, Hedy Lamarr and the like, which have been projected up onto a studio wall. Wearing a billowy draped dress and a white eye mask, Holsonback literally climbs into the images of the famous women, standing in front of the projected light and merging into the backdrop. As she moves back and forth, the gauzy fabric folds and gathers, creating swirling blurs and distortions in the faces: Liz's right eye moves up into her forehead while Holsonback's face peeks through in her cheek and Audrey's face puckers as Holsonback appears under the curve of her hairline. The disruptions are unsettling, undermining the controlled perfection of the ads. Both physically and metaphorically, Holsonback is locating herself in this history (thus the "looking through" title of the show), borrowing from and reconfiguring the famous women as she defines herself.

While this is a simple visual conceit, I think Holsonback has executed it with flair. The works are bold and bright, with just enough puzzling disfigurement and peek through personality to keep the viewer off balance.

Collector's POV: The photographs in this show are priced at $4500 each. Holsonback's work has no secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail is likely the only option for those collectors interested in following up.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Holsonback artist site (here)

Hillary Holsonback and Danielle Georgiou, I'm Looking Through You
Through September 29th

Horton Gallery
504 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

The Checklist: 9/13/12

Current New York Photography Shows
New reviews added this week in red.
(Rating: Artist/Title: Venue: Closing Date: link to review)

Uptown

THREE STARS: Rineke Dijkstra: Guggenheim: October 8: review

Midtown

TWO STARS: The Shaping of New Visions: MoMA: April 29: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Richard Misrach: Aperture: October 6: review
ONE STAR: Lise Sarfati: Yossi Milo: October 13: review
ONE STAR: Rosemary Laing: Galerie Lelong: October 20: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

No reviews at this time.

Elsewhere Nearby

TWO STARS: Hank Willis Thomas: Aldrich: September 30: review
THREE STARS: Robert Adams: Yale: October 28: review

Forward Auction Calendar
New auctions added this week in red.
(Sale Date: Sale Title: Auction House: link to catalog)

September 19: First Open (New York): Christie's: catalog
September 20: Under The Influence (New York): Phillips de Pury: catalog
September 21: Contemporary Art (New York): Sotheby's: catalog

Lise Sarfati, On Hollywood @Milo

 

JTF (just the facts): A total of 19 color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the East and West gallery spaces. All of the works are digital c-prints, made in 2009 or 2010. The prints in the East gallery are sized 22x30, in editions of 5+2AP; the prints in the West gallery are somewhat larger (32x44), also in editions of 5+2AP. (Installation shots at right.)

 

Comments/Context: Lise Sarfati's images of Hollywood women are a far cry from anything that might be called glamorous. These aren't pictures of the already famous or the soon to be celebrities, they're spare photographs of the countless forgotten women who have set out to chase a dream and have found the path to stardom to be much harder and grittier than they ever imagined. Aspiration mixes with vulnerability, hope with despondency, frustration with weariness: these are some of the casualties in the heartless struggle for fame.

 

Sarfati has been making solitary images of men and women for years, often composed with indirect glances, empty settings, and an.adept eye for muted color. These new works certainly fall into this larger pattern, albeit with an even grimmer mood and a dirtier palette. The back gallery is filled with head shots taken from underneath, seen with city buildings and tired, rundown storefronts (drug stores, strip clubs) in the background. There is an echo of Callahan here, but with a more cinematic West coast mystery. The women alternate between quiet confidence and fragile despair, the sense of struggle apparent in everything from their body language to their blank expressions. A dreary cigarette is never far from view, taking the edge off on a random street corner or a washed out sidewalk.

 

The photographs in the front gallery step back a few paces, making the images into wider, more narrative scenes. A blond girl smokes a bored, languorous cigarette in a cheap poolside chaise, another lingers outside a convenience store next to a fluorescent-lit green wall, and a goth girl in black coolly poses outside a closed movie theater. Women stare into storefront windows, idle near chain link fences, and sit on seedy concrete stoops, always smoking, down on their luck and waiting for something that probably isn't going to arrive; a few might be credibly be mistaken for hookers, which makes the subtle desperation in the images even more discouraging.

 

Both sets of pictures have a quiet, downtrodden grace in the face of this unforgiving environment. In Sarfati's Hollywood, life on the fringes doesn't look too appealing, but there is a sense of moody perseverance in nearly every image, of making the best of it even if the self-delusions are wearing thin.

 

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The 22x30 prints range from $6600 to $10600, while the 32x44 prints range from $9300 to $13200. Sarfati's work has only been sporadically available at auction in recent years, with secondary market prices ranging from roughly $3000 to $14000. This body of work was also on view at Rose Gallery in Santa Monica, CA (here) earlier this year.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Magnum Photos page (here)
• Features: Time LightBox (here), Le Journal de la Photographie (here)

Lise Sarfati, On Hollywood

Through October 13th

 

Yossi Milo Gallery

245 Tenth Avenue

New York, NY 10001

Rosemary Laing: leak @Lelong

JTF (just the facts): A total of 9 large scale color photographs, generally framed in white and unmatted, and hung in the main gallery space and the smaller side gallery. The 8 c-prints in the main gallery range in size from 34x52 to 49x103, and are available in editions of 8+2AP or 10+2AP. The inkjet pigment print on laminated adhesive that is on display in the small gallery is sized to the dimensions of the room and affixed directly to the wall. All of the works were made between 2010 and 2012. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: All of the images in Rosemary Laing's new show are different vantage points of the same puzzling scene: a rolling Australian hillside landscape, where the inverted wooden frame of a one story house looks to have been dropped haphazardly on the crest of a scrubby hill covered in gum trees. Its intrusion on this natural scene is altogether unexpected and alien, as though a giant had flung his plaything away into the weeds.

As a commentary on encroaching suburban sprawl and the destruction of the environment wrought by such expansion, Laing goes beyond simple documentation of ugly tract houses and strip malls and instead opts for an approach that mixes a Land Art style intervention with a more conceptual visual motif. In blue skies and in grey, with sheep and without, this skeleton of a house (built and installed in the land, not a Photoshop trick) clearly doesn't belong in this pastoral view. Laing takes this dissonance one step further by hanging some of the skewed photographs upside down (a la Rodney Graham's trees), creating a dizzying mix of land right side up/house upside down and land upside down/house right side up that keeps the viewer off balance (and I promise, no "down under" puns will be allowed). In a side gallery, she plays with scale even further by blowing one the views up to monumental scale and pasting it on to a curved wall; the small size of the room and the massiveness of the photograph make for a claustrophobic IMAX style effect.

Laing's suite of images seems most like the story of an invasion, an unwanted species plopping down in the middle of nowhere and digging in its stubborn roots. As a metaphor for the changing face of the Australian landscape, it is both simple and surprisingly haunting.

Collector's POV: The c-prints in the show are priced between $7000 and $24000, based on the size and the place in the edition. The wall sized laminated image is priced at $30000 (and will be sized at the collector's discretion). Laing's works have not yet become consistently available in secondary markets for photography. Prices for those prints that have sold at auction in recent years have ranged between $10000 and $15000.

 

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

 

Transit Hub:

• Review: Sydney Morning Herald (here)

Rosemary Laing: leak
Through October 20th

Galerie Lelong
548 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001

Petrochemical America: Project Room, Photographs by Richard Misrach, Throughlines by Kate Orff/SCAPE @Aperture

JTF (just the facts): A total of 32 color photographs and 20 maps, diagrams, and other informational displays/ephemera, hung unframed against dark blue and white walls in the main gallery space. Misrach's exhibition prints are sized either 96x120 or 60x76/82 and have been pinned directly to board, the largest leaning against the walls at angles. There is also an array of original contact prints, each sized 8x10. All of the works are digital c-prints, the vast majority taken in 1998, with an outlier or two made in 2010. Orff's diagrams are mounted directly to board and displayed on small ledges. A two-sided plexiglas divider wall contains a dense selection of sketches, emails, and preliminary drawings, and a small table contains two copies of the book and its supplement for easy viewing. An in-depth monograph of this body of work was recently published by Aperture (here) and is available in the bookshop for $80. (Installation shots at right.)

 

Comments/Context: The last decade has seen a marked increase in the photographic investigation of the oil industry in America. Many leading contemporary photographers have tackled this immense subject (most notably Mitch Epstein and Edward Burtynsky) and made pictures of wells, refineries, the Gulf oil spill, and the whole end-to-end delivery chain of petrochemical products that has touched nearly every corner of American society. Given the scale of the industry, most of these pictures play with size and scope in formal ways, juxtaposing large with small, corporate with community, ugly with beautiful. We have come to expect a looming hugeness in these kinds of images, where an attempt is made to simplify this bafflingly complex industry by boiling it all down to a handful of iconic visual motifs.

 

Richard Misrach's approach to documenting the world of oil is in many ways a contrarian response to this dumbing down trend. Pairing up with landscape architect Kate Orff, the two have produced an exhibit which positively revels in complexities, diving deep into the interconnected details and working extremely hard to connect the dots coherently. Instead of looking at issues on a worldwide scale, they have focused on a stretch of the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans (a corridor known as "Cancer Alley"), and have collaboratively explored the impact of the industry on virtually every factor of life in this zone, from economic growth to toxic waste, from swamp ecosystems to food cycles.

 

Given this intellectual mindset, Misrach's photographs come off as extremely careful and deliberate. The obvious juxtapositions are still there (a big refinery dwarfing a small house, a pipeline running through a swampy marsh, a forest of dead cypresses, a basketball hoop backed by another refinery etc.) but each image seems precisely chosen with an eye for illustrating a specific piece of the larger story. There are subtle angles on poverty, the gradual poisoning the community, misty historical ghosts, and the enduring life of the river. Orff's diagrams and maps trace and define these ideas more fully, grappling with the complexities of how waste is metabolized, how synthetic nitrogen cycles through the environment, and how the flora and fauna of the bayou is being transformed. It's brainy, time-consuming, scientific stuff, with a focus on secondary and tertiary downstream impacts, and its density is smartly balanced by Misrach's visually elegant vignettes which help bring home the key messages.

What I like best about this exhibit is its respect for the viewer, its attempt to unpack something seemingly impenetrable and make sense of it in a manner that requires real attention and thoughtful engagement. The dialogue between the photographs and the supporting material produces something that is successfully both emotional and educational, where the fluffy 19th century cumulus clouds over the Shell refinery are initially quite beautiful and then revealed to be fed by the flare of hydrocarbons coming from the plant, giving us a grim sense for the multi-layered complexity of what's really going on. Overall, Misrach and Orff make a persuasive, deftly constructed argument here, combining photography and rigorous investigation into something rich and weighty, going beyond the easy simplicity of a bunch of well made pictures.

 

Collector's POV: Since this venue is typically a non-selling environment, there were, of course, no posted prices for the photographs. Misrach's work is consistently available in the secondary markets, with prices ranging from roughly $2000 to $80000, with his newer, larger prints at the top end of that range. Misrach is represented in New York by Pace/MacGill Gallery (here) and in San Francisco by Fraenkel Gallery (here).

 

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

 

Transit Hub:

• Exhibit: High Museum of Art, 2012 (here)
• Kate Orff's SCAPE bio (here)

Petrochemical America: Project Room, Photographs by Richard Misrach, Throughlines by Kate Orff/SCAPE

Through October 6th

 

Aperture Gallery

547 West 27th Street

New York, NY 10001