Under My Skin - Nudes in Contemporary Photography @Flowers

JTF (just the facts): A group show containing a total of 24 photographic works by 23 artists/photographers, variously framed and matted, and hung against white walls in a series of three connected gallery spaces. Nearly all of the works were made in 2007 or later. The show was curated by Mona Kuhn. (Installation shots at right.)
 

The following artists/photographers were included in the show, with the number of prints on view and image details as background. The works of 3 of the artists/photographers originally planned for the exhibit were not on view:

• Adou: 2 gelatin silver prints, 13x16, edition of 10, 2011
• Jeff Bark: 1 digital color print, 33x41, edition of 8, 2007
• Polly Borland: 1 giclee print on German etch paper with felt, 27x20, edition of 15, 2009
• Christopher Bucklow: 1 cibachrome print, 40x60, unique, 2012
• Ana Casas Broda: 1 c-print, 24x36, edition of 5, 2010
• David Dawson: not on view
• Maciek Jasik: 1 giclee print, 30x24, edition of 6, 2012
• Sarah Anne Johnson: 1 pigment print with acrylic inks, 30x20, edition of 3, 2013
• Nadav Kander: 1 chromogenic print, 36x47, edition of 6, 2010
• Kim Joon: 1 digital print, 87x44, edition of 5, 2007
• Bear Kirkpatrick: 1 archival inkjet print, 34x28, edition of 8, 2010
• Mona Kuhn: 1 chromogenic print, 30x30, edition of 8, 2012
• Justine Kurland: 1 c-print, 30x40, edition of 6, 2007
• Christophe Kutner: 1 color pigment print on fiber paper, 24x30, edition of 20, 2009
• Deana Lawson: 1 pigmented inkjet print, 36x34, no edition information, 2007 
• Malerie Marder: not on view
• Geir Moseid: not on view
• Mariah Robertson: 1 print, 11x14, unique, 2009
• Jenny Saville/Glen Luchford: 1 chromogenic print, 40x31, no edition information, 1995-1996
• Collier Schorr: 1 collage, 48x43, edition of 2, 2007
• Alec Soth: 1 archival pigment print, 30x40, edition of 10, 2011
• Bill Sullivan: 2 c-prints, 28x21, edition of 3, 2010
• Esther Teichmann: 1 fiber based print hand tinted with inks, 20x24, edition of 3, 2013
• Spencer Tunick: 1 c-print sealed between plexiglas, 30x38, edition of 6, 2009
• Shen Wei: 1 chromogenic print, 30x45, edition of 3, 2011

Comments/Context: Summer group shows have never been a favorite of mine (recall a 2009 diatribe on the subject here), so I am always pleasantly surprised to run across one that actually merits some attention. This show eschews the tired "one each from the gallery stable" formula and instead takes stock of a classic genre: the photographic nude. Curated by Mona Kuhn (herself a successful photographer of nudes), the exhibit brings together a broad sampler of contemporary nudes, charting how artists are handling the aesthetic challenges of such a traditional form. It's a vibrant, uneven bunch of known and unknown names, proving that innovative experimentation is still very much taking place.

 

At its essence, the classical nude has always been about line and form, about the elegant shapes the unadorned human body (male or female) makes when seen from different angles. Even in its contemporary form, this concept still holds true for many artists. Nadav Kander's white on black nude makes the ample curves of his model look like polished marble, while Jenny Saville and Glen Luchford use glass to flatten out the female form into a fleshy distortion. Christopher Bucklow directs light through tiny holes to create nude silhouettes, while Mona Kuhn contributes warm palm tree reflections to her standing nude. The bending legs and folded arms of Sarah Anne Johnson's female nude echo a familiar Weston, aside from the tattoo covered limbs and the hand painted clown nose and ruffled collar which undermine its seriousness; Polly Borland works in a similar manner, starting with a body that is all linear arms and legs and adding on red felt dots over the eyes.

 

The added effects of Johnson and Borland point to a further investigation of process and materials in the context of nude subject matter. Mariah Robertson uses nudes forms in her expressionistic color photograms, while Kim Joon turns the nude into body art by painting intricate patterns across the flesh of his subjects. Esther Tecihmann adds gestural overpainted color, while Bill Sullivan allows the pixelation of a rephotographed TV screen to obscure his nudes. In each case, there is a sense of starting with the standard form but pushing the subject beyond its normal boundaries via non-standard interventions and mediations.

 

Many of the other works in this show follow a more narrative strain of nude making, where the naked bodies have more context and plausible storyline. This approach ranges from the personal (Shen Wei, Deanna Lawson, Collier Schorr) to the allegorical (Justine Kurland, Jeff Bark, Bear Kirkpatrick), where introspection and intimacy are exchanged for staged scenes and posed groupings. Alec Soth's nude bends over to pick something up in her scraggly suburban back yard, while kids draw all over their mother with markers in Ana Casa Broda's playroom nude, and puzzling narrative scenarios like these turn more exaggerated, surreal and performative in the hands of Adou and Spencer Tunick. Across this diversity of work, the common thread is the vulnerability of the primal human form, where a naked body stands out in an unexpected place. 

While this show generally leaves out the male nude, the fashion nude, and the more aggressive, risk taking gender studies, I think Kuhn has done a solid job of taking the pulse of the contemporary photographic nude and providing a sampler of some of the vitality in the genre. It's proof positive that even in categories where we might assume we've seen it all before, there is still plenty of white space for original thinking.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows:

• Adou: $2500 each
• Jeff Bark: $14000
• Polly Borland: $2800
• Christopher Bucklow: $18000
• Ana Casas Broda: $5100
• David Dawson: not on view
• Maciek Jasik: $3500
• Sarah Anne Johnson: $10300
• Nadav Kander: $12400
• Kim Joon: $27000
• Bear Kirkpatrick: $2800
• Mona Kuhn: $11000
• Justine Kurland: $8500
• Christophe Kutner: $1500
• Deana Lawson: POA
• Malerie Marder: not on view
• Geir Moseid: not on view
• Mariah Robertson: $3500
• Jenny Saville/Glen Luchford: NFS
• Collier Schorr: $24000
• Alec Soth: $12730
• Bill Sullivan: $3500 each
• Esther Teichmann: $4500
• Spencer Tunick: $8400
• Shen Wei: $3900

In terms of secondary market history, this show contains a wide sweep of artists/photographers, from those with well established track records (Saville/Luchford, Soth, Bucklow, Tunick et al) to those whose work has recently entered the secondary markets or has little or no action history at all. For those collectors interested in following up, gallery retail likely remains the best option for many of these photographers.

 

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

 

Transit Hub:

• Features/Reviews: New York The Cut (here)
• Interview: Le Journal de la Photographie (here)

 

Under My Skin - Nudes in Contemporary Photography

Through July 27th

 

Flowers Gallery

529 West 20th Street

New York, NY 10011

New Photography 2011 @MoMA

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

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

• Moyra Davey (2 works, consisting of grids of 25 and 16 c-prints respectively, unframed and pinned directly to the wall, from 2010-2011)
• George Georgiou (8 pigmented inkjet prints, framed in white and unmatted, from 2006-2007)
• Deana Lawson (7 pigmented inkjet prints, framed in white and unmatted, from 2007-2010)
• Doug Rickard (8 pigmented inkjet prints, framed in white and unmatted, from 2009-2011)
• Viviane Sassen (8 pigmented inkjet prints, variously framed and unmatted, various sizes, from 2006-2010)
• Zhang Dali (20 gelatin silver prints, with photomechanical reproductions and type written text, framed in white and matted, from 2003-2011)

Comments/Context: There's a little bit of everything in this year's New Photography exhibit at the MoMA, making it much broader and more inclusive than other recent incarnations of this annual survey. Rather than highlighting a particular theme or grouping similar/contrasting approaches, this show runs the gamut from documentary to digital appropriation, with relatively equal measures of conceptual and straight photography, offering us diversity and divergence as opposed to a particular institutional point of view. The implication is that the medium is expanding and extending in so many directions that it's impossible to use any one narrow definition anymore, and there's quality and innovation to be found in a plethora of styles and working methods.

In terms of sheer visual elegance, Viviane Sassen's photographs are far and away the most successful. Her pictures have a perplexing, mesmerizing magic, where simple forms and odd compositional angles create an atmosphere of the unexpected. Orange soda is poured into a hole in the sidewalk, a boy lies tipped over in a blue plastic chair, a paper bursts into flames in front of a subject's face, and a woman's body lies draped in a light blue sheet. Seemingly normal subjects take on an air of confusing mystery, and decoding some kind of plausible narrative becomes tricky, pushing the viewer back into an exploration of the lines, color, and space of the formal elements of the pictures. The enigmatic, unknowable secrets of the images give them a power that goes far beyond their straightforward appearance.

I think the opposite wall pairing of Doug Rickard and Zhang Dali was an inspired connection of related ideas, where elusive photographic truth and power-driven propaganda mix with surveillance, privacy, and the omniscience of the digital Internet. Rickard's photographs are full of thorny conceptual questions, from how they were made (appropriated from Google Street View and then selected/cropped/reframed) to what they might represent (the digital embodiment of "everything", the intrusion on the edges of personal freedoms, and the details of suburban decline which they so clearly document). All of the works look downward from the all-seeing robot cameras, finding a depressing array of rusting cars, muddy lots, wayward youths, and poverty stricken streets, unvarnished and exposed to the eyes of the Internet. Zhang's pictures are proof positive of deliberate photographic censorship and alteration in a more political sense, where history and collective memory get changed by airbrushing out undesirables. Photo ops of Chairman Mao are retouched and enhanced, simplifying the visual story, collaging together separate parts, or cropping out distractions to get to a new kind of truth. Both sets of work consider the nature of documentatio, manipulation and archival memory, and standing between them, the resonance of interchangeable ideas is very strong.
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The remaining works by Moyra Davey, Deana Lawson, and George Georgiou are all accomplished in their own ways (although slightly less exciting to my eye/brain), ranging from voyeuristic portraiture to documentary photography capturing the dichotomies of old/new, returning all the way back to a pleasingly retro, analog dip into the tangible. Davey's intellectual taxonomies of bare bulb light fixtures and book bindings/empty coffee cups are much better in grid form than in the long around-the-room hang of her last gallery show; the visual echoes and repeated patterns of tape are much more apparent.

All in, this show has a something-for-everyone safety that makes it approachable, while still educating viewers about the complex heterogeneity of the contemporary photographic world. In the future, I think this incarnation of the New Photography series will be remembered as a coming out party for Viviane Sassen, and as a further validation of the artistic white space created by Internet driven digital imagery, as embodied by the work of Doug Rickard.

Collector's POV: Given this is a museum show, there are of course no prices. The photographers in the show are represented by the following galleries:

• Moyra Davey: Murray Guy (here)
• George Georgiou: unknown
• Deana Lawson: unknown
• Doug Rickard: Yossi Milo (here)
• Viviane Sassen: Motive (here), Stevenson (here)
• Zhang Dali: Eli Klein (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.

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

Transit Hub:

• Exhibition site (here)
• Reviews: NY Times (here), New Yorker (here), Time LightBox (here), PhotoBooth (here)
• George Georgiou artist site (here)
• Deana Lawson artist site (here)
• Doug Rickard artist site (here)
• Viviane Sassen artist site (here) 

New Photography 2011
Through January 16th

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019