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.
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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.
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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

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.

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