Rodney Graham @303

JTF (just the facts): A total of 4 large scale color works, mounted in painted aluminum light boxes, and hung against white walls in the single room gallery space. Each of the works is one or more chromogenic transparencies (single image, diptych, or triptych), made in 2012 and 2013. Individual panel sizes range from 93x60 to 120x72, and the works are available in editions of 4+1AP or 5+1AP. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The characters in Rodney Graham's most recent self-portraits have a going-through-the-motions world weariness that softens the wry comedy of his carefully staged scenes. While Graham's works have always had an underlying edge of ridiculousness, these new single frame stories capture their subjects at moments when their years seem to be catching up with them, when tedium, ennui, and what-might-have-been are weighing more heavily.

Graham's interest in the reinterpretation of images from art history continues here, with two works that reference famous paintings. Echoing Eakins' The Champion Single Sculls, Graham replaces the wiry oarsman in the painting with his own bearded frame in a preciously fancy wooden canoe, the active boaters and arched viaduct in the painting replaced by a rusty trestle bridge and an industrial park in the distance. Graham's scene finds a much different mood, a futile, trying-too-hard effort to capture lost glory. His Cactus Fan is a similar recasting, taking Spitzweg's original The Cactus Enthusiast and placing it in a science lab context, replacing the bowing windowsill examination of specimens with an aging professor gloomily staring at a jolly gift basket arrangement of a cactus and some attached balloons. In Graham's scene, the cactus almost seems to be mocking the scientist, an almost incomprehensible third place prize for not-quite success.

The other two works on display follow this same pattern of past-their-prime protagonists. While hanging drywall might normally be a young man's task, Graham poses himself up on metal stilts, taking a smoke break while the tape and spackle dry behind him, the seen-it-all boredom palpable in his stance. And Graham's too old punk, his hair gelled into a mohawk and sporting a studded leather jacket, uses a graffiti-covered payphone, a left behind throwback in a world that has moved on.

Graham's humor is full of self-deprecating realism, a quiet acknowledgement of the small absurdities of these aging characters. These newest pictures are stronger than the last batch, their emotional context much more nuanced and less overtly ironic. Graham's teasing and spoofery is still there, but its arrows hit closer to home. In these works, his gibes mix with a deeper sense of plausibly authentic emotion, making the vignettes more rounded than just quick caricatures.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced between $250000 and $650000, based on size. Graham's photographs are only intermittently available in the secondary markets, with recent prices ranging from roughly $5000 to $185000; with so few lots to chart, these prices may not be entirely representative of the market for his work.

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

Transit Hub:

• Features/Reviews: New York Times (here), GalleristNY (here)

Rodney Graham
Through June 15th

303 Gallery
507 West 24th Street (new location)
New York, NY 10011

Travess Smalley, Capture Physical Presence @Higher Pictures

JTF (just the facts): A total of 6 large scale photographic works, framed in white and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the single room gallery space. All of the works are unique pigment prints, made in 2011. Physical sizes range from 42x32 to 47x34. This is the artist's first solo show in New York. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Travess Smalley is out exploring the undefined borderlands of what we used to traditionally call photography. Using neither camera nor darkroom, he has instead married a flatbed scanner with the digital manipulations of Photoshop, pushing aesthetic boundaries by capturing, editing, printing, and cutting in a never ending circle of iterative digital collage. What separates Smalley from the growing legion of slick Photoshop jockeys and their crisp digital mashups is his incorporation of the tactile and the physical, or more broadly, his innovate way of connecting the immediacy of authentic texture with the power of software in a kind of lo-tech/hi-tech hybrid.

The cut paper abstraction has always been a staple of art school photographic experimentation, but Smalley's version of this studio practice is dynamic and multi-layered rather than muted and static, less about the nuances of falling light and more about the action of repetitive stratified creation. Construction paper is Xacto knifed into arcs and angles, then arranged and scanned, the process leaving behind tiny ghosts and shadows like the edges of photocopied zines. Color and pattern run the gamut from fine gradients and tight repetitions to expressive gestural lines and swirling psychedelic blobs. Gritty grainy texture is always present, no matter how frenetic and complex the compositions get - there is always a sense of being grounded in some kind of physical reality, even when highly engineered modifications are taking place. Piled into layer upon layer of overlapping, obscuring forms and then flattened back to one plane by the scanner, the works have a vitality and energy that isn't often associated with cut paper photocollage.

In these works, Smalley is testing the limits of modern photographic image construction in smart ways. Instead of falling into the trap of being satisfied with the capabilities of the ubiquitous digital environment, he has found a way to reintroduce the rough and hand-crafted back into the conversation. His abstractions combine contrasting elements of perfection and imperfection, never letting one side dominate the other.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced at $13000 each. At this early point in his career, Smalley's work has no secondary market history, so gallery retail is really the only option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

Transit Hub:

• Feature: L Magazine (here)
• Interview: Future Shipwreck (here)

 

Travess Smalley, Capture Physical Presence

Through June 1st

Higher Pictures

980 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10075

The Checklist: 5/16/13

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

Uptown

ONE STAR: Chuck Close: Eykyn Maclean: May 24: review
ONE STAR: After Photoshop: Met: May 27: review
TWO STARS: William Eggleston: Met: July 28: review

Midtown

ONE STAR: Karine Laval: Bonni Benrubi: May 24: review
ONE STAR: Toshio Shibata/Toeko Tatsuno: Laurence Miller: May 25: review
ONE STAR: Alma Lavenson: Gitterman: June 1: review
ONE STAR: Charles Fréger: Gallery at Hermès: June 8: review
TWO STARS: Henry Wessel: Pace/MacGill: June 15: review
THREE STARS: Bill Brandt: MoMA: August 12: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Charles Fréger: Yossi Milo: May 18: review
ONE STAR: Bryan Graf: Yancey Richardson: May 18: review
ONE STAR: Peter Piller: Andrew Kreps: May 18: review
ONE STAR: Hannah Starkey: Tanya Bonakdar: May 25: review
ONE STAR: Sara VanDerBeek: Metro Pictures: June 8: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

ONE STAR: Michele Abeles: 47 Canal: May 19: review

Elsewhere Nearby

No reviews at this time.

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

May 16: Post-War and Contemporary Art (Morning): Christie's (New York): catalog
May 16: Post-War and Contemporary Art (Afternoon): Christie's (New York): catalog
May 16: Contemporary Art (Evening): Phillips (New York): catalog
May 17: Contemporary Art (Day): Phillips (New York): catalog
May 17: Photographs and Photobooks: Bloomsbury (London): catalog
May 18: Post War/Contemporary/Collection of Joshua P. Smith: Rago (Lambertville): catalog
May 24: Photographie: Kunsthaus Lempertz (Cologne): catalog
May 24: Photographs from the Teutloff Collection: Kunsthaus Lempertz (Cologne): catalog
May 24: 8th Photo Auction: WestLicht (Vienna): catalog
May 29: Photographies: Sotheby's (Paris): catalog
May 29: Photographs: Villa Grisebach (Berlin): catalog

Sara VanDerBeek @Metro Pictures

JTF (just the facts): A total of 18 color photographs and 8 sculptures, hung against white walls in the three adjoining gallery spaces on the first floor. All of the photographs are digital c-prints made in 2013, framed in white and unmatted, in some cases covered by tinted Plexiglas (pink/blue) or mirrored Mirona glass. Sizes range from 20x16 to 96x48, and all the prints are available in editions of 3 (two of the works are diptychs). The modular sculptures are made from concrete and latex paint, and were also made in 2013. (Installation shots at right.)

 

Comments/Context: Sara VanDerBeek's new show is an exercise in atmosphere, where contrasts of shape, texture, color and scale are mixed with muted subtlety. Classical curves are matched by rough Minimalism, creating a back and forth dialogue between forms. The result is a loosely wandering rhythm, the whole of the installation trumping the power of any one contributing work.

 

The first room of the exhibit is balanced by four oversized images of Classical female sculpture, cropped down to sinuous bending torsos. Elegant bodies in soft white and enveloping black are paired with colorized partners in hybrid pink and blue, creating a calm sense of elemental grace. Flanked by tall corner-shaped concrete columns in stark white, the visual conversation moves between simple refinement and pared down, blunt geometry. The last room in the show follows this same pattern, capturing rounded female heads in bronze and marble in similar dusky pink and blue tonalities, once again offset by the rigid, rectilinear lines of the nearby sculpture.

 

The works in the main gallery space take these contrasts in a more abstract and ephemeral direction, combining a colonnade of vertical blocks with a series of shifting color studies in pink and blue. Up close, the photographs are full of grainy splashes and misty gradients, drifting between foggy billows and textural oxidations. From afar, their surfaces are mirrored, so they bounce reflections around the room, echoing the spatial relationships between the visitors, the color fields, and the white concrete pillars. While I think I understood the intention here, to my eye, this mirroring became a distraction, making it nearly impossible to see the nuanced variations in the photographs with any clarity; the photographs lost their diaphanous mystery when covered up by recognizable reflections, especially when the gallery was crowded.

 

While this installation is successful in creating a dreamlike mood and making a visual point about contrasts, I think only a handful of the torso images can really function successfully as stand alone photographs; the rest really require the proximity of the columnar sculptures to resonate fully. Overall, I came away more intrigued by what VanDerBeek was discovering in the fleeting in-between spaces between these artworks than with the individual pieces themselves.

 

Collector's POV: The photographs in this show are priced between $6000 and $30000 based on size. VanDerBeek's work has not yet reached the secondary markets with any regularity, so gallery retail is still likely the best/only option for those collectors interested in following up.

 

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

 

Transit Hub:

• Feature/Review: New York Times (here)
• Interview: Aperture (here)

 

Sara VanDerBeek

Through June 8th

 

Metro Pictures

519 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011

Auction Results: Photographs, May 8, 2013 @Phillips London

Phillips' various owner Photographs sale in London last week delivered solid, workmanlike results. With a Buy-In rate just over 30% and Total Sale Proceeds that found the middle of the estimate range, it generally performed according to plan.

The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 123
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: £1184000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: £1676500
Total Lots Sold: 86
Total Lots Bought In: 37
Buy In %: 30.08%
Total Sale Proceeds: £1291750

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 49
Low Sold: 36
Low Bought In: 13
Buy In %: 26.53%
Total Low Estimate: £182500
Total Low Sold: £159375


Mid Total Lots: 59
Mid Sold: 41
Mid Bought In: 18
Buy In %: 30.51%
Total Mid Estimate: £714000
Total Mid Sold: £574125

High Total Lots: 15
High Sold: 9
High Bought In: 6
Buy In %: 40.00%
Total High Estimate: £780000
Total High Sold: £558250

The top photography lot by High estimate was lot 32, Nobuyoshi Araki, 77 works, n.d., estimated at £100000-120000; it was also the top outcome of the sale at £110500.

96.51% of the lots that sold had proceeds above or in the estimate range, and there were 5 positive surprises (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate):

Lot 63, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Ice Skating Waiter, St. Moritz, Switzerland, 1932/later, estimated at £6000-8000, sold at £16250 (image at right, top, via Phillips)
Lot 73, Elliott Erwitt, New York City, 1974/later, estimated at £1500-2500, sold at £5250
Lot 112, Albert Watson, Monkey With Gun, New York City, 1992, estimated at £2000-3000, sold at £6000 (image at right, bottom, via Phillips)
Lot 117, Loretta Lux, The Drummer, 2004, estimated at £4000-6000, sold at £13750 (image at right, middle via Phillips)
Lot 122, Helmut Newton, Sumo, estimated at £2500-3500, sold at £10000

Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Phillips
Howick Place
London SW1P 1BB

Toshio Shibata and Toeko Tatsuno: Given @Miller

JTF (just the facts): A two artist show containing a total of 13 black and white and color photographs by Toshio Shibata and 12 paintings by Toeko Tatsuno. Shibata's photographs are a mix of c-prints and gelatin silver prints, framed in white and matted/unmatted, and made between 1989 and 2008. His prints come in three sizes: 20x24 (in editions of 25), 32x40 (in editions of 10), and 40x50 (in editions of 10). There are 9 color works and 4 black and white works on view, split between the main gallery space, the entry area, and the smaller print room. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Toshio Shibata doesn't come from the cherry blossom in springtime school of Japanese landscape photography. His interest lies the intersection of the man-made and the natural, not so much the harsh contrasts of the American New Topographics photographers but something more tightly integrated and humanized. Paired with the geometric abstractions of Toeko Tatsuno in this back and forth show, his eye for linear pattern and sculptural form comes through even more clearly.

Stone retaining walls, concrete spillways, landslide nets, and reservoir dams are the main characters in Shibata's natural drama. Patchwork combinations of bricks, squares, and herringbone patterns dot the hillsides, intermixed with scrubby greenery and erosion mediating trees. His waterscapes turn man-made waterfalls into flat curtains of flowing white, adding an element of passing time to his images; concrete blocks and other debris bob in swirling eddy pools and at the bottom of still runoff areas. Whether using the girders of a bridge or the edge of a waterfall, Shibata manages his lines and angles with precision, seeing landscape as rigid structure, even when it is a line of trees or the rusty residue falling from a drainpipe.

Toeko Tatsuno's blocky stacks and ladder-like bookcase forms provide an insightful foil for Shibata's focus on man-made abstraction. In this context, his compositions resolve even further into systems of line, a rope of buoys becoming a graceful arc and a tethered net turning into an obtuse triangle. Shibata's landscapes depict this strict human-imposed order not as ugliness or interference, but as something graceful and well-integrated, finding harmony where others have found dissonance.

Collector's POV: The Shibata photographs in this show are priced between $3500 and $25000, based on size and place in the edition. His prints have not developed a consistent presence in the Western secondary markets; only a handful of lots have come up for recent public sale, fetching prices between $1500 and $7500, but these prices may not be entirely representative of the broader market for his work. As such, gallery retail may be the best/only option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

Transit Hub:

• Shibata exhibit: @Peabody Essex Museum, 2013 (here)
• Shibata interview: Eyecurious (here)

 

Toshio Shibata and Toeko Tatsuno: Given

Through May 25th

 

Laurence Miller Gallery

20 West 57th Street

New York, NY 10019

Photography in the 2013 Frieze New York Art Fair, Part 5 of 5

Part 1 of this five-part Frieze report can be found here. Start there for introductory background and explanatory notes.

Galleri Nicolai Wallner (here): Joachim Koester, $8000. In a fair full of bright, shiny things, Koester's all white snowscapes stood out in quiet, nuanced, contrarian defiance.

ProjecteSD (here): Jochen Lempert, €7000. A simple, well executed exercise in dappled light, leafy shadow, and shimmering all over movement.

Altman Siegel (here): Sara VanDerBeek, $16000. While VanDerBeek's Metro Pictures show is already in my review queue, this elegant tilted sculptural interpretation isn't part of that exhibit. The skewed frame aligns with the angles of the arms and offsets the verticality of the subject.

Sprüth Magers (here): Thomas Demand, €75000. Indoor plants in fancy modern planters for a windowless office are already an odd creation, but when they are abstracted even further into cut-paper constructions by Demand, controlled nature becomes even more artificial.

Team Gallery (here): Ryan McGinley, $50000. This whole booth was filled with recent large scale McGinley nudes, with young men and women in various states of falling, lying, and running around. This nighttime mix of fire and water is certainly dramatic and full of exuberance, like some secret ritual.

Alexander Gray Associates (here): Lorraine O'Grady, $25000. Up-close hair becomes an undulating textural landscape.

Murray Guy (here): Zoe Leonard, $25000. This booth had a selection of mid-1990s animal images by Leonard, taken during a multi-year stay in Alaska. While the animals were hunted by the artist, the images have the feel of taxidermy or staged diorama, but with an edge of rawness.

White Cube (here): Jeff Wall, $450000. This was the only work by Wall I saw at Frieze, a small backyard study of poppies and scrubby greenery.

Sfeir-Semler Gallery (here): Walid Raad, $25000. Images of minimal paintings hung in white, formless, galleries, the corollary of Louise Lawler, where context tells us nothing.

Photography in the 2013 Frieze New York Art Fair, Part 4 of 5

Part 1 of this five-part Frieze report can be found here. Start there for introductory background and explanatory notes.

Sikkema-Jenkins & Co. (here): Vik Muniz, $75000. Muniz' take on Courbet's Stone Breakers, using his recent follow-the-ideas, rebus-like scraps of magazines approach.

Paul Kasmin Gallery (here): David LaChapelle, $65000. A glowing model gas station in a nighttime jungle.

Reena Spaulings Fine Art (here): K8 Hardy, $10000. Two fashion handbags sliced apart and glued back together in a mismatched hybrid. Shown on a lightbox for added brightness.

Galerija Gregor Podnar (here): Attila Csörgö, €8000. An intricate mirrored structure, used to capture the falling trajectory of a lighted die. The result is both a sculpture of movement and an illusionistic multi-angle view.

Wallspace (here): Daniel Gordon, $10000. These Gordon still lifes were among my favorite works at the fair. They erupt in a riot of color and pattern, with layers of photographs collaged into a multi-dimensional installation and then flattened back into a single plane. They take ideas begun in previous smaller still life works and boldly extend them into much more complicated constructions and compositions.

Jack Shainman Gallery (here): Richard Mosse, $20000. These cotton candy Mosse landscapes have become an art fair staple, but there always seems to be a new one to catch my eye.

Almine Rech Gallery (here): Taryn Simon, $35000. Simon's archival investigations have turned to photographs of collections of images around a certain word or theme (in this case "wealth", perfect for an art fair). I was more intrigued by the underlying system of sorting/choosing than the actual end results, and maybe that was the point.

Stephen Friedman Gallery (here): Rivane Neuenschwander, $12000. Talcum power and water constructions that recreate the swirling look of oil spills.

Kadel Willborn (here): Barbara Kasten, $25000. The architectural patterns of World Financial Center, doused in candy colored light and repeated via mirrors, 1980s abstraction gone wild.

Art: Concept (here): Geert Goiris, $32700. The wailing girl in the newspaper clipping is an ominous, almost traumatic partner for this dead bird.

Continue to Part 5 here.

Photography in the 2013 Frieze New York Art Fair, Part 3 of 5

Part 1 of this five-part Frieze report can be found here. Start there for introductory background and explanatory notes.

Alfonso Artiaco (here): Darren Almond, $38000. A densely layered, fluttering mass of Tibetan prayer flags.

Mitchel-Innes & Nash (here): Catherine Opie, $50000. This work seems to point to more narrative in Opie's newest portraits. The sisters from Rodarte are her models, with sewn blood and a whisper coming out of the deep darkness.

Marc Foxx (here): Anne Collier, $28000. This front and back diptych of a postcard of a Turkana girl with a camera ("Say cheese before I click") is one of the strongest works I have seen in Collier's ongoing examination of found photographic ephemera. It's kitchy and head-shakingly dated, which is why it is so successful when seen through her rigorously conceptual eyes.

Yvon Lambert (here): Douglas Gordon, individually $2500 to $12000. A salon hanging jumble of textural still life images.

Dvir Gallery (here): Ariel Schlesingler, €10000. The external protective glass on this work is broken to echo the broken glass in the underlying photograph.

Laura Bartlett Gallery (here): Simon Dybbroe Møller, €11000. Five layers of still life electronics, wired together into one witty three dimensional pile.

Taro Nasu (here): Jonathan Monk, €2400. Araki's bondage nudes with the body parts removed, leaving drooping kimonos and empty ropes.

Galleria Raffaella Cortese (here): Barbara Bloom, $15000. Not only is this down-the-hallway photograph optically compelling, check out the wild, three color telescoped mat used to reinforce the color progression.

Jack Hanley Gallery (here): Torbjorn Rødland, $4000. Quirky microphone antics in the scrubby forest.

Goodman Gallery (here): Candice Breitz, $5500 each. In these stills, the artist has inserted herself into a South African soap opera, an oddly out of place white presence among black actors. There is a sense of deliberate randomness here, of being unrelated to the story going on around her, that makes the contrived situations all the more unsettled.

Continue to Part 4 here.

Photography in the 2013 Frieze New York Art Fair, Part 2 of 5

Part 1 of this five-part Frieze report can be found here. Start there for introductory background and explanatory notes.

Miguel Abreu Gallery (here): Eileen Quinlan, $15000. This is a pulsating, attention grabbing color study - the shiny material of the woven rubber yoga mat picks up tiny reflections, dotting the electric yellow green with flecks of textured red.

Andrew Kreps Gallery (here): Roe Ethridge, $16000. There's something unexpectedly off about these red tennis tights (the racquet seems overly big as well). It's an eye-catching example of Ethridge's mix of commercial and fine art aesthetics working together to produce something puzzlingly compelling.

Frith Street Gallery (here): Dayanita Singh, $19400. This work is actually three, housed in a custom wood box with interchangeable slots. The overflowing piles of ledgers are documented in all three images, giving the entire work a richer resonance.

Stuart Shave/Modern Art (here): Linder, £15000. A simple image intervention interrupts this self-portrait, creating a jarring hybrid face..

Maureen Paley (here): Gillian Wearing, £35000. Another in Wearing's ongoing series of self-portraits in the guise of famous photographers, this time peering out from the face of Weegee.

Salon 94 (here): Katy Grannan, $14000. This booth had a powerful wall to wall installation of images from Katy Grannan's new 99 series. Taken along California's Route 99 and set against blistering, eye squinting white backgrounds, the images get close up to a parade of weathered faces and forgotten lives. They recall Dorothea Lange and Richard Avedon's In the American West, mixing unflinching harshness and quiet authenticity.

Cheim & Read (here): Adam Fuss, $60000. While I had seen this same mattress covered with a tangle of writhing black snakes in Fuss' last gallery show, I hadn't seen the snakes replaced by a black female mannequin before; it adds another detail to Fuss' garden/Eve story.

Sean Kelly Gallery (here): James Casebere, $45000. Casebere's picture perfect stage set world given a darker, worn out alter ego, with a moss covered rooftop, a broken fence, and a landscape of barren, lifeless trees.

Galerie Krinzinger (here): Otto Muehl, complete portfolio €150000. This booth was dominated by an edge to edge hanging of images documenting 10 different actions/performances by Muehl - Viennese Actionism captured in raw, transgressive, experimental brashness.

Massimo Minini (here): Luigi Ghirri, $12000. A street scene through an ice cream store window, seen with Ghirri's subtly surreal playfulness.

Continue to Part 3 here.