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 at the 2012 Frieze New York Art Fair, Part 3 of 3

This is Part 3 of my review of the photography at the 2012 Frieze New York Art Fair. Part 1 can be found here, along with some background information on the fair and an explanation of the format I'm using for the the booth by booth details. Part 2 can be found here.


Purple Section

Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery (here): Barney Kulok (1)

Kaufmann Repetto (here): Shannon Ebner (1). Another entry in the "built to be photographed" category; this large graphic symbol in cinder blocks by Ebner was priced at $12000.

Rampa (here): Huseyin Bahri Alptekin (3)

Galerie Eva Presenhuber (here): Steven Shearer (3), Amy Granat (1). These floral photograms by Granat are reminiscent of similar images made by Kunie Sugiura, although these have been cropped, reoriented, and transformed into a repetitive, high contrast grid. The work was priced at $20000.

Regina Gallery (here): Nikolay Bakharev (5). I've seen a few of these engaging 1970s beach portraits from Bakharev of late, and they're starting to grow on me. They were priced at $3000 each.

Maureen Paley (here): James Welling (2), Wolfgang Tillmans (2), David Salle (1), Gillian Wearing (1). If there was any one photographer whose work was ubiquitous at this fair, it was Wolfgang Tillmans. This was the best image of his that I saw (due to the complex use of color), a new one priced at $57000 and already sold.

Stuart Shave/Modern Art (here): Linder (10)

Galerie Perrotin (here): Sophie Calle (4 diptychs)

Galleria Continua (here): Mona Hatoum (1 Polaroid triptych). A simple idea, well executed - deadpan portraits with hair exploded by static electricity. This unique set of three prints by Hatoum was priced at $30000.

Frith Street Gallery (here): John Riddy (1), Tacita Dean (1 set of 14). Extra large versions of these Dean film strip works were recently on view at the Tate Modern. The set of 14 prints (offset not photographic) was priced at £45500.

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (here): Vik Muniz (1). Washington Crossing the Delaware in Muniz' most recent style, a dense collage of magazine scrap imagery. Priced at $45000, and not surprisingly, already sold.

Galerie Bucholz (here): Wolfgang Tillmans (2), Sam Lewitt (1 set of 10). I liked Lewitt's layered NY Times transparencies, algorithmically reconstructed and subtracted to zero. Priced at $18000.

Kukje Gallery (here): Candida Hofer (1), Jenny Holzer (1)

Alison Jacques Gallery (here): Robert Mapplethorpe (3). I had never seen these particular Mapplethorpe florals before. The single blossoms are bathed in ghostly, almost garish, colored light. Priced at $35000.

Sprüth Magers (here): Andreas Gursky (1), Astrid Klein (4 collages), Thomas Demand (1), John Baldessari (1), Cindy Sherman (1). The reason I included this $285000 Baldessari image in this review has nothing to do with the pig, or the hands, or the composition really. What is impossible to see in this installation shot is that the work had surprising depth; the different colored portions are built up in inch thick layers. Yet another example of reimagining photography with sculptural qualities.

Pink Section

Wallspace (here): Daniel Gordon (1), Shannon Ebner (1), John Divola (1). Textures and patterns abound in this new work from Gordon, playing with idea of the sculptural bust, priced at $5800.

Galerie Neu (here): Bernadette Corporation (3), Tom Burr (1)

Galeria Fortes Vilaça (here): Jac Leirner (1)

Victoria Miro (here): Alex Hartley (1), William Eggleston (1), Isaac Julien (1 diptych)

303 Gallery (here): Hans-Peter Feldman (4), Collier Schorr (1), Stephen Shore (1 set of 8). This is an early conceptual series by Shore from the late 1960s (recently reprinted), where he stands and rotates in a circle, the desert background changing in each shot. Probably been done before and since, but still effective. Priced at $25000 for the set.

White Cube (here): Jeff Wall (1), Gilbert & George (1 set of 9)

Galerie Martin Janda (here): Roman Signer (1 set of 5, 1)

Daniel Gordon: Still Lifes, Portraits & Parts @Wallspace

JTF (just the facts): A total of 13 color photographs, framed in black and unmatted, and hung in the main gallery space, the smaller back room, and the office area. The prints are chromogenic prints, ranging in size from 16x20 to 46x36 (or reverse), available in editions of 3, from 2010/2011. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: When I was first exposed to the work of Daniel Gordon at the 2009 version of MoMA's New Photography show (here), I remember thinking that the images were somewhat grotesque and off-putting, with a psychological roughness that made them hard to get close to. In the intervening years since that exhibit, I'm not sure whether Gordon's work has become slightly more refined or whether my interest in photography that is challenging and unexpected has increased (or both), but I certainly found his newest batch of pictures to be rich and exciting.

As a reminder, Gordon's process is both elaborate and resolutely physical. He starts with appropriated digital imagery (both sharp and pixelated/distorted), which is then printed out onto actual paper. These prints are then collaged together into three dimensional tabletop sculptures, with torn edges, fishing line, and dollops of glue left bare as evidence. The final constructed results are then photographed using a view camera, providing extra clarity and detail.

Gordon's portraits reuse elements of Cubism in a modern way: his faces are made of disassembled, mismatched scraps of features, which are then reconstructed and layered in non-obvious ways, mixing male and female, hard and soft, and often employing multiple conflicting angles. His newest portraits seem tighter than the ones I saw a few years ago, less jolting for the sake of shock value and more nuanced and interconnected. His still lifes of flowers and fruit take a well-worn genre and introduce combinations of texture and color that upend expectations: a vase is simultaneously crumpled and out of focus, peaches are both pink and blue, their roundness both flat and crinkled. And a third group of pictures moves more toward crafty sculptural abstraction, with Dada-like side silhouetted faces that cast shadows across intermediate spaces.

What I like about these photographs is that there are some risks being taken. The images are proof of a constant process of reuse and reformulation, less in the hackneyed digital sense, but more in the manner of fragmentation and reassembly, of seeing photographs as open-ended, malleable raw material to be employed in more complex and original visual descriptions.
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Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced between $3500 and $6500, based on size. Gordon's work is not yet widely available in the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only real option for interested collectors at this point.
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By the way, this show was hung quite sparsely, with large expanses of empty white wall in between the prints. To my eye, the rooms could have held a few more images, which assuming they were available, would have made for a more powerful overall impression of Gordon's recent work.
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Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)

Daniel Gordon: Still Lifes, Portraits & Parts

Through December 17th

Wallspace
619 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10011

New Photography 2009 @MoMA

JTF (just the facts): A group show of the work of six contemporary photographers, variously framed, and hung in a two room divided gallery on the 3rd floor. The exhibit was curated by Eva Respini. (Installation shots at right.)

The following photographers have been included in the show, with the number of works on view in parentheses:

• Walead Beshty (4), all from 2008
• Daniel Gordon (4), from 2008 and 2009
• Leslie Hewitt (6 as 3 works), from 2002-2008
• Carter Mull (5), from 2008 and 2009
• Sterling Ruby (4), from 2005-2007
• Sara VanDerBeek (4 as 1 work), all from 2006

Comments/Context: This year's New Photography exhibit at the MoMA takes us far out beyond the traditional boundaries of conventional straight documentation, and emphatically declares that the museum's 21st century definition of "photography" will be broad and inclusive.

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I actually believe that this definitional discussion is long overdue and much needed at this point in the medium's history. Since the beginning of photography, there have always been subcultures of artists who rejected the sharp reality of what a camera could capture, and spent their time and energy exploring how the various technologies could be used to create wholly unreal worlds. Out of this experimentation came multiple negatives, collaged and photomontaged works, images of staged performances, ephemeral sculptures and conceptual hoaxes, appropriated images and rephotography, camera-less darkroom creations and photograms, etc. etc. All of these were generally still gathered under the umbrella of "photography", perhaps because their endpoint output was a photographic print of some kind.

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As we cross into the digital age, new tools have expanded the number of degrees of freedom artists can now play with; there are now even more variables that can be tweaked and modified. Many of the works in this show might be best called mixed media contemporary art, as they bear little resemblance to the black and white masters of traditional photography. But while most of the works don't look familiar, nearly all of them are further extensions of practices and ideas with roots found decades ago, just supercharged and taken way out into the unknown, often bridged into this white space by the additional of computer-based manipulation. But it seems the definitional construct is still the same: if the product is a photographic print, no matter how it was created or how unorthodox it may seem, it's still "photography".

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I'd say it's impossible to walk into these galleries and not notice Walead Beshty's huge floor-to-ceiling photograms; they are so blindingly colorful, full of electric magenta and bold yellow, that they drown out everything else. Abstract lines and rectangles cluster into dense overlapping layers. Beshty's work is clearly a distant relative of Man Ray's and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's photograms, albeit with a much more expressionistic palette.

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Daniel Gordon's cut paper collages of disturbing figures have a Picasso-esque feeling to them, adapted to the culture of image appropriation. Hair, eyes, and other random body parts have been assembled into unsettling and Surreal hybrid characters, not exactly funny, just odd. These piece part people and their flattened surroundings finally emerge as photographs, documents of the elaborate tableaux that have been painstakingly constructed.

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Sterling Ruby's images seem the farthest from "photography" as we know it. These seem to be pure digital creations: a gathering of found images collaged together with seamless perfection and then covered with computer generated "effects" like drips of paint/blood and sprayed on scrawls, creating a violent mood. While the output is still a photographic print, these works seem to have no relationship to the old school operation of a camera; we're in the realm of digital wizardry here and the opportunities for artistic expansion seem limitless.

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The works of Carter Mull, Leslie Hewitt and Sara VanDerBeek travel some of these same experimental roads, but to lesser effect in my opinion. LA Times spreads are washed with distorted colors and patterns of martini glasses and roses become swirls of darkroom effects, staged tabletop still lifes adorned with old photographs are turned upside down, and elaborate temporary sculptures of found pictures and dripping white paint become a patchwork of symbols and inside references.

While overall this exhibit is a mixed bag of work, I enjoyed the fact that this annual show was once again being used to dig a little deeper into a topic of current importance to the medium, rather than simply a gathering of fresh but unrelated imagery. The discussion of what "photography" is or isn't is far from over, but this show is at least a stake in the ground for people to consider.
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Collector's POV: The photographers in the show are represented by the following galleries:

• Walead Beshty is represented by Wallspace in New York (here).
• Daniel Gordon is represented by Claudia Groeflin Galerie in Zurich (here).
• Leslie Hewitt is represented by D'Amelio Terras in New York (here).
• Carter Mull is represented by Marc Foxx in Los Angeles (here).
• Sterling Ruby is represented by Metro Pictures in New York (here). (UPDATE: I've been told this may not be the case anymore, and that the right pointer should be to Pace Wildenstein (here))
• Sara VanDerbeek is represented by D'Amelio Terras in New York (here).

None of these artists has any significant secondary market track record, so gallery retail will likely be the only option for acquiring their work in the short term. While none of this work is a fit for our particular collection, I enjoyed Beshty's eye-popping photograms the most.

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

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Transit Hub:

• Walead Beshty: Directions @Hirshhorn Museum 2009 (here)
• Daniel Gordon: artist site (here)
• Leslie Hewitt: artist site (here)
• Carter Mull: former Rivington Arms site (here)
• Sterling Ruby: The Masturbators @Foxy Production, 2009 (here)
• Sara VanDerBeek: NY Times review 2006 (here)

New Photography 2009

Through January 11th

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Museum of Modern Art

11 West 53rd Street

New York, NY 10019