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

Florian Maier-Aichen @303

JTF (just the facts): A total of 8 large scale color images, generally framed in white and not matted (the two smallest works are framed in black and matted), and hung in the main gallery space (with a partial dividing wall). All of the works are c-prints, ranging in size from 16x13 to 82x106. The works were made in 2011, and have been printed in editions of 6. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Florian Maier-Aichen's show of new work at 303 finds him moving further and further away from the traditional frameworks and definitions of photography. While all of the end products in this exhibit are photographic prints, Maier-Aichen has employed a dizzying array of artistic techniques and media (including painting, drawing, watercolor, animation, sculptural installation, and Photoshop) to expand the boundaries of the form. As a result, these works feel very process heavy; the "how" seems to dominate the rest of the ideas he is offering, making the "why" less clear.

Two of the new works seem to extend his exploration of broad romantic landscape, connecting back to his previous images most closely; one aerial depicts unexpected yellow blotches of farmland in a sea of blue and green, while another captures a steep fjord with boats in surreal tricolor fuzziness. A third takes a dated suburban scene from Los Angeles and transforms it with Photoshop snow and hand painted cars, creating a juxtaposition of incompatible styles and an impossibility of memory.

The rest of the works in the show drift away from a quasi-documentary approach toward interpretation and abstraction via rephotography. Two large pictures began as drawings/paintings on canvas, night scenes of stars against dark skies, with tree silhouettes or childlike waves as framing; up close, they are quite textural. Two others are photographs of animation cells and watercolors, one a swirling mass of happy abstraction, another a cartoon mix of landscape and a floating circular target. The last documents a copy of a Kenneth Noland painting being submerged in a flood of dark red water.

As Maier-Aichen moves away from the traditions of photography toward a new frontier of mixed media, I think it becomes harder and harder to understand or judge his work in a purely photographic context. Intellectually, I am intrigued by what he is attempting to do, as it represents a new confluence of ideas; the tools are being used in original, less "realistic" ways. Visually though, I continue to be less than moved; as his work gets more symbolic and impressionistic, it may indeed be leaving photography behind. There's clearly a conceptual redefinition going on here, but the resulting images need to be more than just inventive process.
.

Collector's POV: The prints in the show are priced between $25000 and $120000, with several at $70000. Maier-Aichen's work has become consistently available in the secondary markets in the past few years, with prices generally ranging between $25000 and $180000.
.

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

Transit Hub:

• Review: New Yorker (here)
• Interview: Art in America (here)

Florian Maier-Aichen

Through June 25th

303 Gallery
547 West 21st Street
New York, NY 10011

Collier Schorr, Journals & Notebooks @303

JTF (just the facts): A total of 16 works in a mixture of media, variously framed and matted, and hung in the single room gallery space, which is divided by a three-sided video display area. The show includes 10 photographs (both black and white and color), 2 videos, 1 banner, 1 painting, 1 drawing, and 1 photograph with additional collage elements. The majority of the photographs are archival pigment prints, in editions of 5, made between 2005 and 2008. Physical dimensions of the photographs range between 12x16 and 72x54. The other works were made between 2007 and 2010. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: As you enter the gallery space at 303, a small white banner hangs limply from the cavernous ceiling, stating that "This War Is Over". What might have been an emphatic, decisive or impassioned shout in a different context comes off as tired and a bit pathetic in this big space, its obvious weariness undermining its own potential power. Maybe the war isn't really over, whatever the sign says.
.
This unsettling undercurrent pervades all of the work in Collier Schorr's new show. I can't remember a show that made me feel as stifled and claustrophobic as this one did. Whether it was the expanse of identical empty seats in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, the shelves full of war books and catalogues from the 1972 Olympics, the historian carrying a chair and box strapped to his back (the "weight of history"), or the young girl arranging flowers, there is a palpable sense of being trapped and hemmed in by the past, where nostalgia fights with facts better left behind. Schorr's floral still lifes, tied together by wires and string, unnaturally suspended in mid-air, seem equally torn between being passive and aggressive.

The most startling piece in the show is a short voyeuristic video of a fragile-looking teenage boy waking up amidst the crowd at the park. As he gazes around, disoriented and trying to get a grip on his surroundings, he looks alternately fearful and stupefied, in a kind of dazed reverie, with his knees pulled up to protect himself. He is confused and uncertain, agitated but also surprisingly deadened. In the context of the rest of the works on display, the boy becomes a symbol of a national identity that has been thrown off balance and is struggling to regain its footing.

While I can't say I exactly "enjoyed" the strange juxtapositions of this show, it was absolutely successful in both creating a mood and getting me to think more deeply about how traumatic history informs the present. The work delivers its unsettling jolt with subtlety, leaving behind a haunting that isn't spooky, but more like a chronic ache.
.
Collector's POV: While there are artworks in a variety of media in this show, I only gathered price information on the photographs. Those prices are generally set by physical size, with the smallest images between $10000 and $15000, the medium sized images at $18000, and the largest images at $24000. Schorr's photographic work has only recently begun to enter the secondary markets, with prices ranging at auction between $4000 and $10000.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Yale faculty page (here)
• Book: Blumen (DLK COLLECTION review here)

Collier Schorr, Journals & Notebooks
Through December 4th

303 Gallery
547 West 21st Street
New York, NY 10011

Book: Doug Aitken, 99 Cent Dreams

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2008 by Aspen Art Press (here). 216 pages, with a total of 273 color and black and white images. Includes a short introductory text by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobsen. The works in this volume were made between 1993 and 2007. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: Doug Aitken is probably best recognized as a talented video artist, a maker of large scale, multi-screen installations and environments. What is perhaps a little less well known is that he is also an accomplished photographer, using the still frame of the photograph to explore many of the same themes found in his videos and films. This hefty monograph collects a significant portion of his photographic output from the past decade and provides an effective introduction to his photographic aesthetic.

Taken together, Aitken's pictures have been edited down into an exercise in non-linear story telling, of taking a narrative thread in one direction, letting it morph into something adjacent, following a tangential idea and then doubling back, repeating and improvising on common ideas, ending up with a swirling, switch-backing set of vignettes and moments that coalesce into an overall description of a way of living and its many moods. It's hard to say exactly what these images are "about": perhaps they are about the dislocating effects of our frenetic, nomadic 21st century lifestyle, of how mind-numbing travel leads to isolation and loneliness, or of how we somehow find ourselves and the small fragments of wonder in the world, caught between something more memorable or important.

There are plenty of subjects and themes that come back again and again in this body of work: shadowy single figures silhouetted against windows, bright squint inducing light fixtures, empty waiting rooms, airplane portholes, anonymous hallways and darkened hotel suites, abandoned junk, people seen from the back, parking garages and bus stations, the detritus of our lives, and the quiet of twilight. Time seems to speed up and abruptly slow down in this story, leaving us trapped in a fog of jet-lagged, motion-sick melancholy, fixating on some detail for just long enough to see something a little surprising or unexpected before we are whisked forward to yet another disconnected, disorienting limbo zone.

While most of these images have a casual, snapshot aesthetic, there is a remarkable consistency of vision across more than a decade of Aitken's shooting. This is a book that has grown on me as I have looked at it again and again, the work revealing its secrets modestly and slowly, telling the story patiently as I tried to reconcile some of its seemingly more random inclusions. Not every image is by any means a stand out or would necessarily function well as a single, solitary photograph, but the careful sequencing of the pictures delivers something subtle but profound, a multi-layered portrait of a transitory, in-between world.

Collector’s POV: Doug Aitken is represented by 303 Gallery in New York (here), Regen Projects in Los Angeles (here), Victoria Miro in London (here), and Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich (here). His photographic work has become more consistently available in the secondary markets in recent seasons, with a handful of lots coming up for sale each year. Prices have ranged between $2000 and $55000, based roughly on physical size and the number of works in the edition.

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)

Book: Collier Schorr, Blumen

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2009 by steidlMACK (here). 104 pages, with 50 color plates. All of the works included were made between 2005 and 2008. There are no essays, texts, or captions. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: As collectors of floral imagery, we are always on the look out for contemporary photographers who are taking on the traditional floral still life in new ways. While Collier Schorr is likely better known for her masculine portraits of wrestlers and young men in military uniforms, for quite a few years now, she has been working on a project called Forests and Fields, where she has been documenting life (real and imagined) in the small German town of Schwabish Gmund; Blumen is the second volume in this series.

Schorr's florals are a perplexing mix of nature and artifice. Many of the images are staged out in rolling meadows of lush grasses and wildflowers, against skies that run the spectrum from clear blue to murky grey. Against this backdrop, she constructs strange temporary structures, made of thin sticks and string or fishing line, from which she suspends bright blooms which have been picked from nearby gardens. Like flies trapped in a spider web, the flowers are suspended in mid air, disconnected from the rest of their natural world, strung up in a mess of tangled wires.

.

While these juxtapositions are thoroughly staged and arranged, there is something surprisingly odd and compelling about these compositions. The combination of exotic, boldly colored, cultivated blooms (roses, zinnias, cosmos, cacti etc.) with the simplicity of the natural landscape or a nondescript wall creates a sense of unease that is further deepened by the weird bondage of the cut flowers hanging from the string matrix. (Arrangement #12 (Blumen), 2008, at right, via artnet.) There is an undercurrent of Araki or Mapplethorpe here, of ephemeral human control applied to the specific manipulation of the landscape. (Richard Learoyd also recently used a similar string contraption on a fish heart.) The images have a sense of heightened theater, of unexpected drama being created out of commonplace materials.

.

In many ways, these pictures don't fit any usual definition of a floral still life. And most of the other non-floral images in the volume continue this line of thinking. A jumble of tools, a plastic bucket with potatoes, a red backpack and a yellow plastic shopping bag, an overhead view of a grey floor, an astroturf tennis court, the shadows of geraniums, they all appear controlled, seemingly found abstractions, but perhaps not. As a result, the entire atmosphere of this book is a bit unnerving, where artificiality is cloaked in the normal.

.

In the end, I'm not sure that I am particularly moved by most of these floral constructions. That said, I certainly appreciate and applaud Schorr's willingness to do something original and radical to explore the boundaries of the form.
.

Collector’s POV: Collier Schorr is represented by 303 Gallery in New York (here), Modern Art in London (here), and Galerie Barbara Weiss in Berlin (here). It appears that the floral prints from Blumen are generally printed quite large (between 38x31 and 49x41) and often come in editions of 5. Schorr's works have only intermittently been available in the secondary markets. For those lots that have become available, prices have ranged between $4000 and $10000.
.

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Book review: 5B4 (here)
• Features: ArtForum (here), Guardian (here)
• Interview: Dossier (here)

Rodney Graham, Music and Dance @303

JTF (just the facts): A total of 5 large scale color works hung in the single room gallery space. Each of the works is one or more chromogenic transparencies displayed in painted aluminum lightboxes. (Installation shots at right, via 303 website.)

The image details are as follows:

• Lighthouse Keeper with Lighthouse Model, 1955, diptych, each 113x72, in an edition of 4, from 2010
• Good Hand Bad Hand, diptych, each 35x29, in an edition of 6, from 2010
• Three Musicians (Members of the Early Music group "Renaissance Fare" Performing Matteo of Perugia's Le Greygnour Bien at the Unitarian Church of Vancouver, Late September, 1977), triptych, each 142x62, in an edition of 4, from 2006
• Dance!!!!!, diptych, 107x138 overall, in an edition of 4, from 2008
• Dead Flowers in My Studio, single image, 52x41, in an edition of 5, from 2009

Comments/Context: Rodney Graham's recent lightbox works are infused with a clever playfulness that is built up in layers of self-referencing, sometimes circular logic. As an actor is his own carefully staged scenes, Graham is often the central character in an elaborate and cinematic reenactment, his witty performances referencing art history and music with a subtle sense of wry comedy and underlying ridiculousness.

In Three Musicians, Graham portrays an earnest 1970's era musician, playing a period recorder in a Renaissance ensemble, complete with long hair and historically accurate costumes. The over-serious pretentiousness of this group is palpable (and quite amusing as a result), and the layers of time (a recreation of a recreation of the original) sharpen the satire. In other works, Graham is a solitary lighthouse keeper, warming his feet in the stove while reading about lighthouses (his scale model lighthouse project displayed in the background), a poker player in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses giving away his "tell", and a sweaty suited man in a top hat forced to dance by jig while being shot at by drunk cowboys in a Wild West saloon. Each vignette is a self-contained almost allegorical narrative, rich in implied humor and irony.

Given the complex stage sets and the presentation in large lightboxes, it would be hard not to draw a connection to the work of fellow Canadian Jeff Wall. I think it is also possible to see conceptual parallels to some of Cindy Sherman's work. By using photography, Graham has given his scenes a sense of hyper-reality or "truth", even though it is clear that they are operating on many levels. But what I saw most in this handful of pictures was an echo of the compositional and story-telling conventions of the masters of painting, of packing dense layers of ideas and allusions into a single controlled frame. When he gets it right, Graham's whimsy can't help but make you smile.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced between $100000 and $400000. Graham's photographs have come up for auction from time to time in recent years, with prices ranging from roughly $5000 to $170000. A parallel exhibition of Graham's work is on display this summer in London at Lisson Gallery (here).

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

Transit Hub:

• Interview: Art in America, 2010 (here)
• Exhibitions: MACBA, 2010 (here), ICA Philadelphia, 2005 (here)
• Reviews: NY Times, 2005 (here)

Rodney Graham, Music and Dance

Through July 2nd

303 Gallery

547 West 21st Street

New York, NY 10011

Is Florian Maier-Aichen Overrated?

The world of contemporary photography is filled with exciting artists pursuing a wide variety of picture making strategies and approaches. But once in a while a photographer comes along whose meteoric rise takes your breath away. Florian Maier-Aichen was a complete unknown to us until his work started to appear in the Contemporary Art auctions a year or so ago. With no auction history prior to 2008, his work was suddenly and routinely fetching six figures, a feat that rarely occurs in contemporary photography, much less with fresh names. Diving back into his bio, his work was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and he is now represented by 303 Gallery in New York (here) and Blum & Poe in Los Angeles (here), with a recent show at Gagosian Gallery in London (here).

Maier-Aichen had a show at 303 last spring (review here), which was our first in-person experience of his work, and I have to say I was somewhat underwhelmed; the images didn’t seem to match the hype created by the PR machine. But we are always willing to admit our own ignorance, so I chalked it up to just not understanding the work well enough and somehow missing the artist’s hidden (at least to us) genius. So it was with some anticipation that I sat down recently to watch the segment on Maier-Aichen in the Art 21 series on PBS (here).

In the short documentary piece, Maier-Aichen talks through a few images that he has been working on, as well as his overall approach to picture making. As a refresher for those less familiar with his work, Maier-Aichen takes large format color images (many of them post card-like landscapes) and then does a significant amount of digital post processing on the computer to create his works: negatives are sandwiched to create color irregularities, new elements are drawn in by hand using a digital stylus, and other details are eliminated or made less distinct/realistic. All of this rework has the effect of making parts of the images look remarkably painterly and hand crafted, while others retain some of the documentary preciseness of the original photograph; the representational and the abstract have been mixed.

In the past decade or so, we have certainly seen a faction of photographers react against the cool and rigorous conceptual detachment of the Becher school and move back toward a more painterly style of photography using digital tools (or via a return to older techniques and processes), some overtly embracing a Neo-Pictorialist sensibility. Lynn Geesaman’s images of elaborate European gardens would be one accomplished example of this line of thinking.

Given what I saw in the Art 21 segment, Maier-Aichen doesn’t really fit into this category of artists and work, even though there are certainly some commonalities of thinking. He doesn’t appear to be trying to make his photographs look like paintings (or more “beautiful” in some traditional sense), but to be making his photographs look less like photographs, via introducing areas of hand crafted artistry (this may be splitting hairs I realize, but I think the distinction is real). His central idea seems to be the undermining of the precision of the photograph for a more open ended, less predetermined state, where realism (especially in the case of iconic views such as Half Dome in Yosemite or various night views of waterfront cities) has been transformed into something more fictional and unknown. For me, this feels like an elaborate conceptual construct – perhaps Maier-Aichen is the first of the Conceptual Pictorialists.

Intellectually, having seen this video, I think I can now resonate a bit more with what Maier-Aichen is aiming to do, and I will happily grant that he is both out there trying something that no one else is really doing (especially in the realm of the landscape as a subject) and likely building a bridge to a new kind of working style for hand edited digital photography that others may value and follow in time. I also think I can follow the story line of the German photographer going to UCLA, reconsidering the idea of the American frontier and bringing a less deterministic approach to views we have all seen before.

But I’m afraid I have to admit that these works still don’t do much for me – while they might make me think a bit about what he is doing and saying (especially the idea of incorporating “drawing” in the digital sense), they don’t excite me or generate much emotion. As a collector, I continually come back to the opportunity cost of capital, and I can’t really understand the calculus of how I would come to the conclusion that spending $100K on a Maier-Aichen would make sense in the context of all that is available at that price point across the history of the medium. Which brings me back to the question in the title: is Maier-Aichen overrated? Has the buzz gotten ahead of the substance?

And so I open the floor to the rest of you, either to shout me down or voice your agreement. My goal here is not to drag Maier-Aichen down with zingers from the cheap seats; I'd like to have a thoughtful discussion of the merits of his work, which is what I have tried to provide above. What I would like most is to have someone out there deliver an impassioned, concise, and rational argument defending Maier-Aichen’s place in the contemporary photography hierarchy, as evidenced by his prices. Walk me through the logic of how you write the big check: I am eager to be educated.

Stephen Shore @303

JTF (just the facts): A total of 17 images on display in the main gallery and back room. In the front gallery, 15 modern prints from 1965-1967 negatives from The Velvet Years are on view. All are gelatin silver prints, 13x19 or reverse, in editions of 8, framed in black and matted. In the rear gallery, 2 panoramic black and white images of New York City streets are shown. These huge gelatin silver prints are 37x94, in editions of 4, and were made between 2000 and 2002. They are framed in black with no mat. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The Stephen Shore we are most familiar with as collectors is the one who took startling color pictures in 1970s America, who was one of the genuine pioneers in the use of color in photography. His books Uncommon Places and American Surfaces are now classics, well worn and dog-eared in our library.

The Stephen Shore on view at the current 303 Gallery show seems wholly unrelated to the Stephen Shore we know. Part of the show centers on work Shore did while hanging out at Andy Warhol's Factory during the mid-1960s, long before his forays into color. These are black and white snapshot-like images of Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed, and others, in the wide open warehouse space/art studio, not unlike Warhol's own images of this same glamorous scene. While Warhol's ideas about found imagery and repetition may have influenced Shore's later interest in vernacular postcards and banal subjects, these isn't any evidence of these concepts in his documentary pictures of the Factory.

At the other end of the spectrum, but in many ways of a related approach, come some new works from Shore in the back room. These follow long after his color heyday, and have returned to action oriented black and white images of people on the streets (in contrast to his color work which was largely unpopulated). These works reminded me a little of Harry Callahan's Chicago city streets of the 1950s, but updated with 21st century styles and enlarged to mural size.

At some level, both of these subjects have become photographic cliches, so it's hard to find something new in either of them that stands out as a truly different vision of these topics. What I found most of interest in this exhibit was not so much the details of the work on display, but the reminder that as collectors, it is easy for us to pigeon-hole a photographer based on his/her most well known or recognizable work, when in fact, nearly all photographers have many bodies of work that they pursue (some artistic, others more commercial) over their long careers. Seeing the less well known work may not induce us to want to add it to our collection, but it certainly forces us to expand our view of the overall measure of the artist and his/her approach, hopefully teasing out connections and evolutions along the way that help provide a broader view of the entirety of the photographer's art, including those works we think we already understand.

Collector's POV: The recent prints from The Velvet Years series are priced at $10000 each; the large cityscapes in the back are priced at $30000 each. Shore's color work (vintage and later prints) is readily available at auction, generally ranging in price between $2000 and $20000. Nearly all of Shore's prints are smaller than 16x20 (there have been a few larger prints made more recently), with many as small as 8x10. Some of Shore's prints have suffered from color fading, and so those prints that have been locked away in cold storage since the 1970s tend to fare best at auction. For our particular collection, we continue to search for just the right image by Shore to fit into our city genre, to sit alongside 1960s/1970s Lee Friedlander et al.

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

Transit Hub:

• Interviews: Conscientious (here), Darius Himes (here), Seesaw magazine (here)
• Artist statement from Uncommon Places (here)
• NY Times review, 2007 (here)
• Video (here)
• iPhoto books in FOAM (here)

Stephen Shore
Through July 18th

303 Gallery
525 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

Florian Maier-Aichen @303

JTF (just the facts): 11 large scale, wall sized images, all from 2008-2009, displayed in the main gallery space and back hallway. Most of the images are C-prints, although a few slightly smaller silver prints and one albumen print are included as well. All are printed in editions of 6. (Unfortunately, there are no installation shots for this show, as we were not permitted to take any pictures. See the gallery website below for images of the works and of the installation.)

Comments/Context: In putting together our summaries of the photography in the recent Contemporary Art sales in London and New York, German photographer Florian Maier-Aichen's came up several times. To be honest, he was not at all on our radar, so the current show at 303 Gallery gave us a chance to be more thoroughly introduced to his work.

In contrast to much of the cool aloofness found in the Becher school of objective German photography, Maier-Aichen is unabashedly painterly in his use of digital manipulation. His traditional landscape forms are undermined by streaks and swaths of neon color and artful romantic blurs. Sometimes these colors are introduced subtly, down in a corner or off to the side, in a way that makes you look twice to make sure you weren't mistaken; in other cases, these changes are so blatant and obvious as to entirely reconfigure your view of an otherwise standard panorama. There is a Pictorialist self consciousness to these unexpected modifications, taking us away from traditional definitions of beauty to a more conceptual dialogue about the limits of this particular subject matter.

While a few of the images do succeed in expanding the boundaries of the form into exciting places we have not seen before, many miss the mark just enough to feel overly clever and contrived. The best of these works breathe life into a pretty tired genre. If Maier-Aichen is willing to take more risks and push these ideas further, I think the hit rate will be higher. The ones where the manipulations are too subtle just aren't as effective at producing frame-breaking revolution.

Collector's POV: The images in the show range in price from $35000 to $90000 based on size. The images which sold at auction earlier this year were all over the map: one buy-in with a low estimate of $20000, one sold at roughly $30000 and another sold at roughly $180000, so there really aren't enough data points to determine a pattern. What is clear is that his work is creating some buzz.

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

Florian Maier-Aichen
Through April 11

303 Gallery
525 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011