Niko Luoma, And Time is No Longer an Obstacle @Wolkowitz

JTF (just the facts): A total of 18 large scale photographs, variously framed and matted, and hung in the entry gallery, the hallway, and the main gallery space in the back. 13 of the works are archival pigment prints, unframed and mounted on Diasec, and made between 2009 and 2012. These prints are sized 67x55 or reverse and are available in editions of 5+2AP. The show also includes 5 smaller archival pigment prints, framed in black and unmatted, and made in 2011. These prints are sized 14x13 and are also available in editions of 5+2AP. A monograph of this body of work was recently published by Hatje Cantz (here). This is Luoma's first solo show in the United States. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: "Drawing with light" is one of those overly mystical honeyed chestnuts I associate with bad writing about photography. But in the case of Finnish photographer Niko Luoma, drawing with light may indeed be an apt description of what he is actually doing. Using an entirely analog process, he methodically exposes his negatives to hundreds of individual lines of light, building up dense thickets of pulsing linear abstraction. His works have faint echoes of Minimalism, iteratively evolved into compositions brimming with futuristic energy.

The smaller works displayed in the hallway of the gallery have the most direct connection to a familiar Minimalist aesthetic. Thin almost invisible white lines arrange themselves with mathematical precision against a dark black background, becoming intimate arrays of horizontal and vertical stripes. It's easy to see a conceptual kinship with Frank Stella's black paintings or with Agnes Martin's delicate strips and bands.

Luoma's larger works are presented as glossy objects, scaled up in wall power and intensity. Straight school bus yellow lines radiate outward from a criss-crossed center and circular black swirls overlap into a bird's nest of interlocked basket weave curves. Most of the works play on ram rod straight horizontals and verticals, piled up and layered into symmetrical thatched rectangles and woven angled patterns. Their color is pure and electric, almost as if it is backlit or lasered, from blinding monochrome contrast to intense multicolored lines in rainbow hues. The works feel modern and machined, like the output of code running open loop or a controlled, systematized process that has been allowed to wander.

I think Luoma's brand of geometric abstraction is full of freshness and vitality. His lines flutter and palpitate with a precise cadence, drawing the viewer into their seemingly endless mathematical repetitions. And it is this mix of brashness and order that gives them their originality and punch, keeping them from becoming something we have seen before.

Collector's POV:  The works in this show are priced as follows. The large 67x55 prints are $17000 each, and the smaller 14x13 prints are $6500 each. These prices represent a small bump up from prices I have encountered at recent art fairs. Luoma's work is not yet consistently available in the secondary markets, so gallery retail is still likely the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

 

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

 

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Feature: Photo District News (here)

 

Niko Luoma, And Time is No Longer an Obstacle

Through February 16th

 

Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery

505 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011

Nadav Kander, Yangtze - The Long River @Flowers

JTF (just the facts): A total of 13 large scale color photographs, framed in brown wood and unmatted, and hung against white walls in a series of three connected gallery spaces. All of the prints are chromogenic color prints made between 2006 and 2009. The prints are available in three sizes: 38x48 (in editions of 5), 48x59 (in editions of 5), and 59x69 (in editions of 3). A monograph of this body of work was published in 2011 by Hatje Cantz (here). (Installation shots at right.)

 

Comments/Context: China's rapid economic and cultural transformations over the past few decades have provided a rich vein raw material that countless artists and photographers have continued to mine. The most common underlying narrative follows a nearly endless set of clashes and contradictions: West and East, modern and traditional, urban and rural, new and old, uneasy dichotomies and unlikely juxtapositions seemingly everywhere one might look. Nadav Kander's three year exploration of life along the Yangtze River explores this same terrain, centering on the dizzying cycle of destruction and construction that has wholly remade both the physical landscape and the day to day existence of millions of people along the river. But this isn't a Three Gorges Dam story exactly, nor is it a documentary study of displaced families or overlooked individuals; Kander has instead stepped back to take an outsider's wider view, creating images that revel in extreme contrasts of scale and outlook.

 

Printed large and bathed in the glow of a soft, foggy palette, Kander's photographs bring a contemporary sensibility to the grandeur of 19th Romantic painting. The rugged mountains, wide vistas, and turbulent storms of nature have been replaced by massive, often unfinished, man made structures. Soaring bridges, concrete spans, support pillars, and industrial smokestacks anchor many of the pictures, dwarfing everything around them in their sleek newness. Tiny figures are evidence of the immensity of the scale, their insignificance made obvious by the enormous physical size of these infrastructure projects. Paltry human activities like having a drink, washing a motorcycle, fishing with an old style net, or swimming in the river become almost wistfully comic when set against these manifestations of power, a few of these ominous scale mismatches bordering on something out of a science fiction novel.

 

Kander hits the underbelly of this forward looking, aspirational future with images that highlight both the disconnect between old and new and the messy, unfinished nature of the changes taking place. A Vegas-style hotel complete with a pirate lagoon stands like an oversized concrete hulk, while old school bamboo scaffolding holds up an immense flyover and rebar spikes are covered by incoming tidal sand. Rickety, rusted barges still do the work of the river, and entirely new cities explode in chaotic sprawls just across the river from now abandoned wastelands. Once again, tiny people look on, alternately forlorn and awestruck by the metamorphosis - it's impossible not to gawk at the pace and the scale of the activity, even if it means the only world you have ever known is disappearing.

 

I think the success in these pictures is found in their calm balance. They pepper the formally majestic and the atmospherically sublime with undercurrents of intimidated, vulnerable respect. They astonish and amaze with their can-do achievements, while never straying too far from the gritty realities of everyday life. And the emotions of personal anxiety and apprehension are quietly matched by national wonder and pride. It's an impressive photographic mix, smartly charting the complex character of China's modern personality.

 

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced in ratcheting editions, starting at $6500 (38x48), $10500 (48x59) or $16000 (59x69) based on size; prices range all the way up to $48000, and many of the images are NFS or sold out in certain sizes. Kander's work has just begun to enter the secondary markets in the past few years. That said, not enough lots have changed hands to generate any kind of auction pricing pattern, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

  

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

  

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Features/Reviews: NY Times Lens (here), Photograph (here), Conscientious (here), Guardian (here), New Yorker (here)
• Interview: Le Journal de la Photographie (here)
• Prix Pictet, 2009 (here)

Nadav Kander, Yangtze - The Long River

Through November 24th

 

Flowers Gallery

529 West 20th Street

New York, NY 10011

Mitra Tabrizian, Photographs @Heller

JTF (just the facts): A total of 7 color photographs, alternately framed in grey/white and unmatted or unframed, and hung against white walls in the single room gallery space. All of the works are c-prints made between 2006 and 2012. Physical dimensions range between 61x48 and 42x121, and edition sizes are 5+2AP. A recent monograph of Tabrizian's work, Another Country, published by Hatje Cantz (here), is available from the gallery for $57. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: With the widespread use of the wall-sized, photographic tableau, the underlying form has become as predictable to contemporary viewers as the structure of a minuet or rondo would be to classical music listeners. It's a style that is big, and glossy, and staged, mixing elements of realism and fiction into a heady brew of subtly dissonant, often cinematic or surreal ideas, continually evolving down a genetic line that can be traced back to Wall, diCorcia, Crewdson and others. Standing where we are today, with hundreds of tableaux in the rear view mirror, we're no longer particularly interested in the mechanics of this now commonplace form, but rather in how and whether the artist has employed the approach to show us something we haven't seen before.

Iranian-British photographer Mitra Tabrizian's new works use the tableau form to examine the abstract idea of cultural and political dislocation, of being simultaneously both part of a crowd and entirely alone. In many ways an outsider to both of her homelands, she has taken this feeling of alienation and expressed it in scenes that are quietly tied down by invisible weights. Moving back and forth between settings in Iran and England, her subjects inhabit a disconnected version of seemingly everyday reality, passively enduring forces of isolation, oppression, and sadness. Tabrizian's groups of Tehran citizens and London bankers face in all directions, each a solitary individual in the of expanse of the grubby desert (never far from the watchful eyes of the ayatollahs on the nearby billboard) or the polished marble of an anonymous corporate lobby. Even when clustered into bunches of people, there is a visible lack of cohesion, as if the situation was only temporary; while a mass of black clad women trudge along a dusty, soul-sucking road, there is no sense that they are unified by the circumstances. Her most recent images pare down the trauma to a single individual. Posed outside the empty, decaying factories of Leicestershire, solitary older men in dark suits ponder moss covered windows or fallen brick walls with a look of weary, resigned despondency, as if they were the only mourners at long overdue funerals.

Overall, Tabrizian has taken the tableau form and infused it with tough, deadpan desperation, a sense of resigned survival in the face of overbearing ruin. Her single frame narratives of dissociation are surprisingly lonely and forsaken, piling layers of subtle separation into something altogether more heavy and dispiriting.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced between £12000 and £40000 each (note the currency), based on size. Tabrizian's work has started to show up in auctions of Contemporary Arab and Iranian Art as well as in broader Contemporary Art sales in the past few years. Prices have ranged from roughly $10000 to $28000, but I haven't tracked the photography in all of these sales, so there may be more data points to consider when building up a relevant price history.

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

Transit Hub:

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

Mitra Tabrizian, Photographs

Through July 7th

Leila Heller Gallery

568 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980 @Princeton

JTF (just the facts): A large group show, containing a total of 581 images/works by 36 photographers, variously framed and matted, and hung in an open lobby area and a series of densely packed, winding rooms. All of the works (except those in the prologue and legacy addendum sections) were made by American photographers between 1970 and 1980. The exhibit was curated by Kevin Moore and was shown first at the Cincinnati Art Museum earlier this year (here). A detailed catalogue, containing 304 images, with essays by Kevin Moore, James Crump, and Leo Rubinfien, has been published by Hatje Cantz (here) and is available in the museum shop. Unfortunately, no photography was allowed in the galleries, so there are no installation shots of the show; the images at right come from the exhibition website. (Stephen Shore, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, August 13, 1974, at right.)

The following photographers are included in the main exhibit, with the number of photographs or other works on view in parentheses:

Harry Callahan (12)
William Christenberry (15)
John Divola (10)
William Eggleston (17)
Mitch Epstein (10)
Jan Groover (8)
Robert Heinecken (18 lithographs on magazine pages, 1 video, 1 case containing 5 reconfigured magazine spreads)
Barbara Kasten (8, 2 cyanotypes)
Les Krims (9)
Helen Levitt (40 color slides, projected onto gallery wall)
Joel Meyerowitz (14 photographs from two different projects)
Richard Misrach (12)
John Pfahl (9)
Leo Rubinfien (12)
Stephen Shore (312 images from American Surfaces in lobby, 10 commercial post cards, 10 photographs)
Neal Slavin (6)
Eve Sonneman (6 diptychs)
Joel Sternfeld (16 photographs from two different projects)
plus a glass case containing press releases, invitation cards, news articles and related ephemera

Two additional sections bracket the main body of the exhibit, and are not included in the catalogue; most if not all of the images seem to be drawn from the permanent collection of the PUAM. The photographers with work on view in these sections are listed below (John Divola, Zuma #21, 1977, at right):

Prologue

Diane Arbus (1)
Harry Callahan (1)
Harold Edgerton (1)
Robert Frank (1)
Ernst Haas (1)
Dorothea Lange (1)
Eliot Porter (1)
Aaron Siskind (1)
Edward Weston (1)
Minor White (1)
Garry Winogrand (1)

Legacy

Tina Barney (1)
Uta Barth (1)
Philip-Lorca DiCorcia (1)
Rineke Dijkstra (1)
Nan Goldin (1)
Candida Höfer (1)
Thomas Ruff (1)
Cindy Sherman (1)

Comments/Context: The well-known story of American color photography is often spun as a simplified tale of three misunderstood protagonists (Eggleston, Shore, and Sternfeld), fighting the black and white establishment and paving the way for an entire generation of colorists. Simple is easy to remember, so many of us mindlessly spit out these three names whenever the color conversation comes around. The fact is, while these three were undeniably important and massively influential, the actual history is much more complicated, with many more meaningful figures participating in the 1970s melting pot of photographic ideas. (Jan Groover, Untitled, 1978, at right.)

This excellent show does several smart things. First, it limits the playing field to a manageable size: we're only discussing Americans (no one else), color photography (not anything concurrently happening in the world of black and white), and the fixed decade of 1970-1980 (nothing before or after). These boundaries force us to focus on those artists who were really part of the active dialogue around the growth of color photography, without getting distracted and sidetracked by tangentially related themes and activities. Second, it grounds the imagery in the social and political history of the time and the current events of the 1970s, including Vietnam, Nixon, economic crisis, and the general mood of confusion and indifference. And third, it broadens the discussion far beyond the best known names to consider the contributions of many who didn't achieve a permanently meteoric rise.

The result of this set of curatorial framing decisions is an exhibit that isn't a linear, "this came first" kind of argument about the mainstream emergence of color in American photography, but more a snapshot of the diversity of color approaches that were being explored during those specific years, with plenty of opportunities to see connections and exchanges between different modes of experimentation. The story is much less straight and obvious than we have been led to believe - while Eggleston's show at MoMA in 1976 was clearly a watershed, his work didn't just arrive from an alien spacecraft to enlighten the world; many related ideas were percolating around in the artistic community (and in society at large), manifesting themselves in differing forms.

The exciting opportunity this exhibit provides is the ability to compare the work of a variety of contemporaneous artists and to stand in front of each display and ask two critical questions: how did this particular photographer use the newness of color, and most importantly, why?

The answers to these two questions are tremendously varied and utterly fascinating:

• Callahan and Levitt add color like a top layer over an existing black and white aesthetic. Callahan's approach created planes of color from the volumes and voids of Providence houses. Levitt's color allowed her to explore pattern and contrast (in fabrics, clothing, and street architecture), giving her another tool around which to coalesce a composition. Both of their color work can be seen as an extension of their earlier imagery, with color creating new opportunities within the existing framework.
• Christenberry matches his use of color with the sense of Southern vernacular history he is trying to document. His color is derived from a specific, drugstore print patina, layering a sense of everyday faded memory across the locations he has visited repeatedly over time.
• Epstein, Shore, Meyerowitz, Sternfeld, and Rubinfein all use color as a way to get at new kinds of relevant subject matter. Whether employing a snapshot aesthetic or a more formal view camera sense of control, these photographers were closely looking at the world of the 1970s, with its mass culture, its suburbia, its new ironies and unexpected vibrant garishness. Epstein uncovers a riot of patterned dresses, a woman with a snake, and a man sleeping on a cot near the West Side Highway. Shore documents hotel rooms, weird roadside interiors, and a parade of top down still life meals, and later turns his camera toward parking lots, piles of oranges, and empty streets. Meyerowitz grabs shots from passing cars, and captures the colored lights of gas stations, fast food joints, and Cape Cod cottages. Sternfeld finds blurred heads flashing by, and more formal views of beached whales, aquatic theme parks, and a basketball hoop in the desert. And Rubinfein sees the beginnings of empty globalization found in airports, taxicabs, ferries, and trains. In each case, color is an enabler, a method for making a new kind of picture that touched on the realities of 1970s life, without seeming stuck in the purity of black and white.
• Heinecken and Slavin are particularly interested in the colors of rampant commercialism. Heinecken boldly juxtaposes a Vietnamese soldier holding two severed heads with women's fashion ads, and collages provocative nudes into otherwise normal magazine spreads. Slavin uses the vocabulary of commercial portraiture to get at the wackiness of our subculutres, from Star Trek fans to rod and gun club members. Both are leveraging the ideas of advertising, of serial imagery, and of biting cultural commentary.
• Kasten, Groover, Krims, Pfahl, Divola and Sonneman are all using color in much more conceptual ways, getting beyond the found documentary moment to constructions, performances, and new ways of seeing. Kasten builds intricate sculptures made to be photographed, where color combines with geometric lines and forms to create complex abstractions. Groover makes elegant still lifes of fragmented kitchen utensils, carefully arranging forks, egg slicers and pie tins into controlled, formal compositions. Krims experiments with colorful staged sexuality, adorned with goldfish, pickles and balloons. Pfahl disrupts landscapes with tin foil, colored string, and oranges, playing with our sense of visual perception. Divola combines staged destruction with natural perfection, juxtaposing a destroyed beach house interior (complete with broken windows and spray painted decorations) and the the lilting colors of pink sunsets. And Sonneman plays with the idea of cinematic vision, making diptychs of action taken seconds apart, using color to highlight the changes from moment to moment. In all these cases, color is a subtext to a larger set of ideas, a tool for enhancing the conceptual pay-off. (Barbara Kasten, Construct II-B, 1979, at right.)
• I think Eggleston and Misrach are the most radical in their use of color, and this may explain both the initial negative reaction to Eggleston's work and its ultimate rise to stardom. Misrach tries something entirely unexpected - he creates blasting, glare-filled pictures of lush green Hawaiian jungles. The images take the normal landscape and turn it on its head, entirely via a change in the approach to color. Eggleston goes one step further - he takes ordinary fragments of life and pares them down to studies of color. While we've seen many of the images on display here before, the context of the other color photographers exposes just how extreme and unconventional Eggleston was. The stove interior, the red ceiling, the peaches sign are experiments in making the known unknown, in seeing the colors of the world as something wholly divorced from subject matter, even when there is an undercurrent of narrative. This was what upset people the most, and what liberated so many later on.

The exhibit itself suffers from some unfortunate quirks of architecture, where the huge array of Shore prints is divorced from the flow of the show (out in the lobby), and the one-way rabbit warren of narrow galleries makes it hard to double back and explore non-adjacent connections and echoes. Also, the "prologue" and "legacy" groups of pictures that bookend the show are entirely forgettable, and therefore fail to deliver the historical context they were attempting to provide. But these are only minor faults with an otherwise terrific and thought-provoking show.

In the end, the reason to get in your car and make a special drive down to Princeton is that this show doesn't offer any easy answers or a pat summary for cocktail parties. The story of 1970s American color is a mixed bag of experimentation, with artists and photographers going in all kinds of different directions, looking for new doors to open based on their own ideas of what was important in photography. So it isn't just Eggleston, although the show certainly helps clarify why he was ultimately so influential. And it wasn't a "school" so much as a group of artists loosely linked by a confluence of ideas, some inextricably tied to existing approaches to photography and others off on new tangents. The show reminds us that the common thread in this confused insider narrative is the richness of seeing the world in vibrant, chaotic, living color, and in adapting our collective art making to capture the broad diversity of that magnificence.

Collector's POV: Given the popularity of many of the photographers included in this show, collectors can easily find representative samples of their work in the secondary markets. In the event a more specific search is required, I've listed the gallery representatives and artist sites below (Richard Misrach, Hawaii V, 1978, at right):

• Harry Callahan: Pace/MacGill Gallery (here), Stephen Daiter Gallery (here), Fraenkel Gallery (here)
• William Christenberry: Pace/MacGill Gallery (here)
• John Divola: Gallery Luisotti (here), artist site (here)
• William Eggleston: Cheim & Read (here), artist site (here)
• Mitch Epstein: Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (here), artist site (here)
• Jan Groover: Janet Borden Inc. (here)
• Robert Heinecken: Pace/MacGill Gallery (here)
• Barbara Kasten: Yancey Richardson Gallery (here), Stephen Daiter Gallery (here), artist site (here)
• Les Krims: artist site (here)
• Helen Levitt: Laurence Miller Gallery (here)
• Joel Meyerowitz: Edwynn Houk Gallery (here)
• Richard Misrach: Pace/MacGill Gallery (here), Fraenkel Gallery (here)
• John Pfahl: Janet Borden Inc. (here), artist site (here)
• Leo Rubinfien: Robert Mann Gallery (here)
• Stephen Shore: 303 Gallery (here)
• Neal Slavin: artist site (here)
• Eve Sonneman: Nohra Haime Gallery (here), artist site (here)
• Joel Sternfeld: Luhring Augustine (here)

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: Wall Street Journal (here), NY Times (here), Daily Beast (here), CityBeat Cincinnati (here)

Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980
Through September 26th

Princeton University Art Museum
Princeton, NJ 08544

Book: Matthias Hoch, Fotografien/Photographs

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2005 by Hatje Cantz (here). 136 pages, with 61 color and 12 black and white images. Includes essays in German and English by Jutta Penndorf, Harald Kunde, Thomas Seelig, and Sabine Maria Schmidt. The catalog was published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Lindenau-Museum Altenburg in 2005. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: German photographer Matthias Hoch takes a meticulous and disciplined approach to building facades and patterned interior details, finding sculptural qualities in the rhythms of structural functionality.

Rows of windows, layers of ceiling lights, angles of empty concrete fountains, and repetitions of balconies become exercises in shape and form, where ordered design and simple symmetry are transformed into abstractions of motif and systems of mathematics. His locations are everywhere and nowhere (parking garages, apartment buildings, roadways), anonymous mundane places found in any modern city, stripped of human inhabitants and filled with futuristic absence. His pictures are austere and logical, cool and controlled, taken in neutral light with an emphasis on clarity.

Thematically and stylistically, I think this work could easily be tied to that of Ola Kolehmainen or Julian Faulhaber. If you like your architectural photography to be formally precise and rigorously geometric, then Matthias Hoch will be a photographer worth discovering.

Collector’s POV: Matthias Hoch is represented by Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco (here). Hoch's work has begun to become available in the secondary markets in recent years. Prices have ranged between $4000 and $7000, with most works printed in editions of 5.

Transit Hub:

• Exhibition: Ludwig Forum, 2006 (here, in German)
  

In Sook Kim, Inside Out @Gana

JTF (just the facts): A total of 14 large scale color photographs, framed in grey metal and not matted, and hung in the main gallery space on the ground floor, and in the smaller gallery upstairs. All of the works are c-prints on Diasec, made between 2004 and 2010. The works range in size from 43x63 to a whopping 181x118, and are variously available in editions of 5 or 10. A monograph on the work Saturday Night was published by Hatje Cantz in 2009 (here); it is available from the gallery for $50. There is also a thin exhibition catalog (Inside Out) that is for sale for $20. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Korean photographer In Sook Kim's first solo show in New York is a polished and sophisticated combination of meticulous architectural documentation, thoughtful staging and manipulation, and layers of rich conceptual ideas, all delivered in large scale, object quality works. It is the kind of photography that will easily cross over into the world of contemporary art, and will likely generate some buzz along the way.

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All of the works in this exhibit dissect the process of seeing and looking, pulling the viewer (who is also looking remember) directly into the frame, to peer through the brightly lit glass walls and windows of modern apartment buildings, hotels, museums, and storefronts at night. The geometries of the structures provide self contained boxes and boundaries for the interior action, like carefully controlled dioramas or theaters stacked together in grids, where cool antiseptic voyeurism meets the luridness and obsessiveness of the peep show. The boundaries of public and private are mixed and unraveled; people inhabit the buildings and fill the spaces, transforming them along the way.

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Kim's Saturday Night is the focal piece in this show, reaching floor to ceiling at roughly 10x15 feet. Each room in the hotel depicts a different nocturnal vignette, each drawn from actual newspaper stories and staged in candy-colored light. Boredom and loneliness compete with sexual perversion and violence; pleasure, pain, and emptiness are all on view, separated into isolated fragments. The viewer's eye travels from story to story, frantically jumping from titillation to sadness and back again.
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Other works in the show focus down on an individual scene, where the ideas of viewing, watching and display are examined more closely, from inside and out. In one image, a room full of dark suited men vie to bid on a naked woman on a pedestal; in another, a similar group of men "dine" on bloody women in bondage gear (viewed through a glass window). Her series Drug Store transforms this seeing in a more metaphorical manner: heroin and cocaine become staged scenes of a delusionally slimming/beautifying mirror and the fleeting pleasures of prostitutes on display in a streetside window.

Kim was a student of Thomas Ruff's in Düsseldorf, and there is a pared down conceptual rigor that is refreshing here. Whether we see a glass box museum slowly filling with visitors or watch a sordid narrative unfold in pastel pink light, her ideas have clearly been reduced and refined to their maximum potency; the staging is tightly controlled and executed, with little in the way of superfluous distraction. The different bodies of work and projects on display explore her ideas in confident, interrelated ways, spanning the objectification of women, the meaning of our spaces, and nature of drug addiction. All in, this is one of the best debut shows I have seen in a while, combining 21st century photographic craftsmanship with strong and multi-faceted ideas.
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Collector's POV: Nearly all of the works in this show are priced between $18000 and $52000, roughly based on size. The exception is the massive print of Saturday Night in the entry, which is priced at $190000. In general, these prices seem quite high for a first solo show, but the work is accomplished, her pedigree is sound, and the large glossy prints will appeal to crossover contemporary art collectors. Kim's work has not yet reached the secondary markets in any meaningful way, so it's difficult to chart any real pricing pattern. A smaller print of Saturday Night did sell at Christie's in London last year for roughly $50000. Kim is also represented by Richard Levy Gallery in New Mexico (here). While it doesn't fit into our particular collection themes, I actually think Saturday Night is going to end up being considered an important/signature piece, rewarding those risk takers who get in early.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: Daily Beast (here), New York (here)

In Sook Kim

Through May 8th

Gana Art Gallery

568 West 25th Street

New York, NY 10001

Book: Gerhard Richter, Overpainted Photographs

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2008 by Hatje Cantz (here), in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen and the Centre de la photographie Geneve. 392 pages with 495 color images. Includes essays by Siri Hustvedt, Markus Meinzelmann, Uwe Schneede, and Botho Strauss. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: Gerhard Richter has often explored the border between painting and photography in his art, but his series of overpainted photographs has been largely overlooked until recently. This fine volume gathers together these works going back to their first appearance in the late 1980s, and discusses in depth his techniques and approaches in making these small mixed media images.

In many ways, the project is a combination of the impulse for economy/reuse with Richter's artistic vision. The process begins with a group of commerically processed 4x6 family snapshots, made by Richter himself or others while on holiday, at his home or studio, or on walks in the park. These are however the images that didn't make it into the albums; they are the duplicates, or marginal compositions, or blurry red eye rejects. The second component is the leftover oil paint, with various colors melded together, smeared on the long plastic blade that Richter uses to scrape paint across his canvases.

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Richter than takes the photographs and pushes, pulls, and draws them through the surplus paint, lifting the prints to create ridges or allowing the paint to smear and drip to create spots and blobs. (No brushes are involved, although a palette knife is used from time to time.) The works are made quickly, with a large element of chance and spontaneity, full of simple gestural motion.

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What emerges from this process are strange hybrid works, often spectacular in their contrasts. The most noticeable effect is that the colored swaths of paint conceal parts of the underlying photograph, leading the viewer to struggle to fill in the pieces of the figurative story, creating a sense of mystery or unknown. The abstract smears and ripples of color themselves have a beauty of their own, richly textured and swirled surfaces highlighting the "painterly" qualities of the medium. These two forces are then juxtaposed in each picture, with complementary or contradictory color schemes in the two layers creating additional visual excitement.

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What is perhaps most surprising is the wide variation in outcomes that Richter can produce using different combinations of paint color and underlying photographs. There are literally hundreds of individual images in this book, and each one has its own merits. These are intimate pictures that are well suited to close inspection in book form, and the volume itself is extremely well crafted (I particularly like the understated cloth binding.) Richter is undoubtedly an important force in contemporary art, and the body of work represented here is well worth further exploration, especially for photography collectors.

Collector's POV: Gerhard Richter is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery (here) in New York. Some of his overpainted photographs have found their way into the secondary market from time to time over the past few years, ranging between $12000 and $25000 at auction. In terms of our particular collection, we need to dig through this book more carefully to see if we can uncover some images that were constructed with with floral or city scenes as the underlying motif, as they would create intriguing contrasts with our existing collection.

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Museum Morsbroich exhibit 2008 (in German) (here)
• 5B4 book review (here)

Book: Ola Kolehmainen, Fraction Abstraction Recreation

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2007 by Hatje Cantz. 108 pages, with 61 color images. Includes texts and essays by Martina Fuchs, Mark Gisbourne, and Timothy Persons. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: In the past few years, Scandinavian photography, and particularly that of the students of the so-called "Helsinki School" in Finland, have been getting some much deserved attention. Ola Kolehmainen is one such graduate of the University of Art and Design in Helsinki (TaiK) and has brought an unexpected Minimalist aesthetic to contemporary architectural photography.

Using the structured facades of contemporary buildings as raw material, Kolehmainen makes fragmented images of these grids and lattices (cropping out the sky and other environmental clues), capturing not only the strict geometrical order of the designs, but also the unexpected reflections and distortions that result from the use of mirrored glass surfaces. Clouds, trees, and nearby buildings all interact with abstract patterns to create compositions that juxtapose natural forms and hard edges. Both light and color also interact with these surfaces; think of them as additional tools the artist has to amplify or mute the serial variations.

There are plenty of direct and indirect echoes of artists like James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and Donald Judd in this body of work, but Kolehmainen is of course working in the two dimensions of photography, which imposes altogether different constraints. I think the best of these works fully abstract the subject matter into forms that are unrecognizable as documents of buildings; luscious patterns and eye catching colors, carefully controlled, pared down to something essential.

Collector's POV: Ola Kolehmainen is represented in New York by Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery (here) and in London by Purdy Hicks Gallery (here). Kolehmainen's works have only become available in the secondary markets in the past year or two, so no pricing pattern is yet discernible. For our particular collection, we again run into the issue of works that are too large; otherwise, these images would fit well with our other city/industrial pictures.

Transit Hub:

• A Building is not a Building, 2009 @Kiasma (here)
• A Building is not a Building, 2009 @National Museum of Photography, Denmark (here)
• Helsinki School (here)

Book: Andreas Gursky, Werke Works 80-08

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2008 by Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Vancouver Art Gallery, and Hatje Cantz. 272 pages, with 155 color images. Includes an essay by Martin Hentschel. (Cover image at right.)

Comments/Context: We already own two Gursky monographs: one from the 1998 Kunsthalle Dusseldorf show and another from the 2001 MoMA show. So why do we need another, you might ask? The reason is that this smaller volume is trying to do something different. Instead of being a large format, coffee table sized book with big, beautiful pictures, this monograph is the size of a hardback novel, and the pictures are printed much smaller; what's interesting is that there are many more of them, nearly twice as many as in either of the other books. While this isn't a catalog raissoné, and many of the thumbnail images fail to evoke the grandeur of their mural sized cousins, the deeper dive into Gursky's archives helps to tell a much fuller and more varied story about his evolution as an artist.

For quite a while now I have been wondering about the early work of the Becher students and how it shows the influence of their teaching style. An oversimplified definition of the Becher formula is as follows: 1.) choose a large subject, with lots of different potential examples, 2.) choose a consistent approach to picture making, 3.) take lots of pictures in this manner, and 4.) display some of them together (the "typology") to get at the underlying essence of the subject. How Gursky internalized this teaching (and how he eventually evolved it into his own personal vision) is clearly shown in this book. His first subjects were interiors of restaurants, and he soon moved on to desk attendants (pairs). If you've never seen these images, they have all the Becher hallmarks: cool detached, frontal viewpoint, uniform and meticulous view camera picture making. It's in Gursky's next series, the Sunday Walkers, where the rigidity of the formula starts to break down; the pictures are more fluid, still using a common theme, but allowing for more flexibility of vision.

In the next few years, Gursky started to make his first bird's eye view images, with tiny ant-like people dwarfed by the immense scale of their surroundings, the images still rigorous in their style, but now much less cookie cutter. By the time you get to the early 1990s, the Gursky that took the art world by storm is now in top form: extra large sized prints of far flung locales, where hotels, office buildings, industrial warehouses, raves and stock exchanges become metaphors for the spectacle of our anonymous contemporary lifestyle, minimalism and conceptualism merging (with the help of some digital manipulation) into something altogether new.

The reason I like this book is that many more patterns emerge when you see a larger sample of Gursky's images. Since most of his recent works are printed mural sized and have become so expensive, one hardly gets a chance to see more than one or two at any one time these days; it's hard to plot much of a line with only a couple of points. If you're interested in the broader trajectory of Gursky's career and want to place the themes and approaches he has come back to again and again in a larger context, this is a good book for your library. The exhibition should also be well worth a visit.

Collector's POV: Andreas Gursky is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery in New York (here). Gursky's large prints tend to be made in editions of 4, 5, or 6, and are routinely sold above $100000, ranging all the way up into the low millions of dollars. Smaller prints are often made in editions of 12, 25, 30 or even 60, which generally drives the prices down to a zone between $5000 and $50000.

Transit Hub:

• The complete list of Gursky's contemporaries while studying with the Bechers: Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Tata Ronkholz, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, and Petra Wunderlich
• 2001 MoMA exhibition (here)
• Jerry Saltz: It's Boring at the Top, New York magazine, 2007 (here)
• Video of Gursky exhibit at Kunstmuseum Basel (here)
• 2008 Matthew Marks show (DLK COLLECTION review here)
• Upcoming 2009 Vancouver Art Gallery exhibit, in conjunction with this book (here)

Book: Frank Thiel, A Berlin Decade, 1995-2005

JTF (just the facts): Published by Galeria Helga de Alvear, Sean Kelly Gallery, Galerie Krinzinger, and Hatje Cantz Verlag in 2006. 260 pages, with 131 color plates and assorted other images. With essays by Robert Hobbs and David Moos. (Cover at right.)

Comments/Context: German photographer Frank Thiel was an unknown for us prior to seeing his work for the first time at the recent Armory show. We were impressed by several of the large scale photographs we saw there, and bought this book to get ourselves up to speed on his larger body of work.

Most people know the highlights of recent German history: the falling of the Wall, the reunification of East and West, and the movement of the capital from Bonn to Berlin. What is perhaps less well known to outsiders and foreigners is that the reunification of the city (and country) led to a massive construction effort, both demolition of the old and building of the new. In joining the two cities once again, the entire fabric of the urban geography has been recently remade.

Thiel has spent the past decade documenting the architectural transformations going on his city, making wall sized images of both wide angle and close up views of destruction and construction. His pictures are full of cranes, scaffolding, bucket trucks, and temporary curtains. What he has chosen to pull out of these scenes of activity are the geometric patterns that lie beneath the perfect facades, often only visible during the building process. There are grids of rebar, intersecting lines of pipes, walls of tile, and repetitions of windows and concrete framing. Many of these pictures are extremely precise, meticulously aligned abstracted images of form and space. Thiel has also focused his eye on the deterioration and decay found in many of the older buildings. A series of peeling paint images recall Aaron Siskind and Minor White, but on a larger scale and infused with a spectrum of soft pastel colors.

What I found surprising in these images is that they are not particularly harsh or critical of the transformations being documented, as one might expect in our current age of skepticism and environmental awareness. Instead, these works have a little of the old 1920s/1930s romance in them, a more positive view of the efforts of man to make awe inspiring buildings; many of the close ups are in fact quite beautiful. Even the destruction shots have an underlying sense of optimism, a feeling that this new world could somehow be an improvement on the old.

Collector's POV: Thiel is represented in New York by Sean Kelly Gallery (here). A show of new photographs will be on display at the gallery starting in May (and we will surely make a visit).

There have been so many pictures made recently of the construction boom all over the world, as a collector, it is often hard not to get confused about which images belong to whom. And while a few of these pictures have echoes of Andreas Gursky in them, most have an authentic and recognizably different point of view (much less cool and detached, even though these are straight pictures), even though the subject matter may be similar. Thiel's work would fit very well into our collection, resonating with other city and industrial scenes we already own. The problem is that his work is universally way too large for our old Colonial home (low ceilings and small walls); we don't have much use for a mural sized image that won't fit through the doors. That said, I have very much enjoyed seeing more of Thiel's work and look forward to seeing a larger group of his pictures hung together later this spring.

Book: Peter Bialobrzeski, Lost in Transition

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2007 by Hatje Cantz. Includes 53 color images, taken in 28 cities around the world, with an essay by Michael Glasmeier. (Cover image at right.)

Comments/Context: There is an old song by the Band called Twilight that has a chorus that goes something like this:

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Don't send me no distant salutations

Or silly souvenirs from far away

Don't leave me alone in the twilight,

Cause twilight is the loneliest time of day

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German photographer Peter Bialobrzeski's newest pictures are all taken at this fleeting moment in the day, when dusk is falling, the lights have just come on, and the cooler breeze gives you a shiver. His subjects are the futuristic mega-constructions that are multiplying all over the world, rapidly gobbling up the old and remaking the world in their own distinct science fiction aesthetic. His pictures have no people, no identifiers of place, no signs or landmarks to give away their locations; whether we are in Abu Dhabi or Bremen, Jakarta or Zurich, it just doesn't seem to matter. When small towns are overrun by chain stores, we bemoan the "Starbucksification" of the neighborhood; Bialobrzeski's images remind us that this homogenization is happening on a much larger scale, as cities across the globe make the transition from old to new.

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While most photographs of great buildings from the 1920s and 1930s had a romantic aura, these pictures seem to have a more complex set of emotions mixed together. Some of the darker images seem to be precursors to a Metropolis or Blade Runner style world, a neo-noir movie in the making. Others are more mundane, with grubby construction sites encroaching on older warehouses and worn out factories.

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This is not to say that these are not beautiful images; indeed they are. One of my favorite pastimes with this book has been to flip through the images slowly, simply looking at the sublime palette of sky colors that Bialobrzeski has captured in this series: greys and soft blacks, mauves and deep purples, and a nuanced spectrum of blues, all carefully sequenced. Due to the stark fluorescent lights that inhabit nearly every locale, the images seem to radiate a silent and lonely brightness.

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Overall, this is a book that provokes some complicated thinking: about architecture and cities, about the "modern world", and about how our collective society is evolving around us.

The artist's website can be found here.

Collector's POV: There was an exhibition of Bialobrzeski's images from this series (printed 40x50) at the Laurence Miller Gallery last fall (here), which we somehow missed. His previous books, particularly Neon Tigers, have been well received.

For more on Bialobrzeski, see an interview (here) and another review of the book (here) at Conscientious.

Book: Wang Qingsong

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2006 by Albion and Hatje Cantz, in conjunction with an exhibit at Albion in London. 136 pages, with an essay by Zoe Butt. Includes large plate images, as well as a comprehensive list of works as thumbnails (with sizes and editions). (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: To Western eyes, the high points to the storyline of China's transformation in the past few decades have become predictably well known: unprecedented and explosive economic growth, staggering new construction projects and radical urban change, an increased openness to and embracing of Western culture, and a much larger and more powerful position on the world stage. It is not surprising that amidst these changes, and in concert with a gradual relaxation of central censorship, artists have begun to examine the changes going on all around them and to ask hard questions about how China is being recast.

Wang Qingsong is a contemporary photographer who uses sarcasm, irony, satire and humor to expose some of the undesired consequences and unintended effects of the country's modernization on the collective psyche of the population. Beginning in 1997, Wang has made theatrical images that have centered on the quiet war between traditional Chinese culture and the encroaching Western lifestyle. His early work was dubbed "Gaudy Art", for its garish colors and not-so-subtle surrealistic kitsch. His 1998 work, Prisoner, shows Wang trapped inside prison bars made of Coke cans; Thinker, also from 1998, has him seated on a lotus leaf in Buddhist prayer, with a huge McDonald's logo carved in his chest; Requesting Buddha no. 1, 1999, (at right) has the Buddha's many arms filled with a variety of consumer products. These and other images all parody the materialism of the West and how it has invaded the minds of the Chinese people. Instead of worshiping self denial, fulfilling every desire via consumerism is the new norm.

Unlike the heroic and patriotic battle scenes from propaganda films, Wang's series of images entitled Another Battle highlights the clash going on between the traditional and modern cultures, and shows Wang as a defeated and bloodied commander, lost among the razor wire decorated with soda cans. (Another Battle no.8, 2001 at right.) Other images show the battlefield complete with McDonald's trash cans and road signs. These images have been elaborately staged, and have the feel of film stills.

Wang's more recent output has evolved into elaborate and monumental tableaux, with large numbers of actors and painstaking stage sets, in the end becoming massive, scroll-like photographs, some more than 20 feet wide. While in approach there may be valid comparisons to Gregory Crewdson or Jeff Wall, Wang's images are firmly rooted in typical and traditional Chinese artistic forms and metaphors and make no pretense of their careful manipulation. The image at right, Romantique, 2003, shows both a small detailed section on the top, with a thumbnail version of the entire work below (impossible to see I realize). Here the world is a confusing, fabricated mixture of Chinese and Western allusions and symbols, full of staged snippets from famous paintings by a wide range of recognized masters, from Botticelli and Raphael to Manet and Matisse.

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Wang's exaggerated work brings home many of the subtler challenges posed to China by such rapid modernization. As traditions are exchanged for Western consumerism, his work points to continuing social questions about what lies ahead for this giant nation. This monograph is almost like a catalog raisonne, as it has a complete set of all Wang's images and other detailed print/negative information. As such, it is an excellent reference resource on this innovative Chinese photographer.

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Wang Qingsong's artist website can be found here.

Collector's POV: Wang Qingsong's work has become increasingly available in the secondary market in the past few years. Most of the images come in at least two sizes, and are in editions of 6, 10 or 20. Smaller single images have been priced starting at around $10000, moving upward toward $100000. Only a few of the large tableaux have come to market, and all have sold in the six figure range.