Every Booth at the 2013 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 4 of 6

Start here for Part 1 of this series. It provides some background and explanation for what's going on in these lists.

Weinstein Gallery (here): Vera Lutter, $12000. This image (and the others in the series on the wall nearby) has some visual kinship with Kertész' famous picture, but introduces Lutter's own signature reversed out aesthetic to the composition.

David Zwirner (here): James Welling, $20000. Welling was fortunate to receive a solo show in such a prominently placed booth, right in front of the fair entrance. A pair of these stark black and white abstractions (that look almost like industrial girders) hung on the outside wall.

Catherine Edelman Gallery (here): Keliy Anderson-Staley, $1000-4400 each. This installation of modern tintype portraits was striking and personal. Proof that the use of an antique process need not seem old timey or preciously retro.

Weston Gallery (here): Paul Strand, $65000. Down in the weeds Strand is always worth a deliberate inspection.

 

Charles Isaacs Photographs, Inc. (here): Julia Margaret Cameron, POR. An iconic portrait, one of the true greats in the history of the medium. Rich, haunting, and penetrating. I didn't need to ask the price.

Laurence Miller Gallery (here): Ray K. Metzker, $125000. While nearly all of Metzker's composites are astonishing, this car and lamp image layers light and shadow into a gentle rhythm.

Gallery 19/21 (here): Mario Giacomelli, $9000. This looking straight down image by Giacomelli recalls Moholy-Nagy, with buildings flattened into tiny squares.

Paul M. Hertzmann Inc. (here): Imogen Cunningham, $150000. This was the best Cunningham floral at the fair. Irises aren't always exciting, but this one has a richness and luminosity that is extraordinary.

Staley-Wise Gallery (here): Richard Avedon, $30000. How to add motion to an otherwise static composition - the lively poof of Jean Shrimpton's hair.

Contemporary Works/Vintage Works (here): Raoul Ubac, POR. I haven't seen many Ubac prints so it was a treat to see this clashing, overlapped, solarized nude, the bodies seemingly all cut up and smashed together in a chaotic muddle.

Stephen Bulger Gallery (here): André Kertész, $4800, $35000, and $4800. An important reminder to keep those artist greeting cards.

Brancolini Grimaldi (here): Heidi Specker, £10000. Rough rock walls, flattened into texture and edges, or a hint of Siskind in a modern form.

ClampArt (here): Mark Morrisroe, $27500. Morrisroe's sandwich negative tribute to Diane Arbus, a lonely bird in a murky fog.

Robert Mann Gallery (here): Mike Mandel, $4000 each. A fun series of car window portraits, full of goofy faces and genuine warmth.

Continue to Part 5 here.

James Welling, Overflow @Zwirner

 

JTF (just the facts): A total of 42 black and white and color works, framed in white and matted, and hung in two connected gallery spaces and a smaller side room down an adjacent hallway. 29 of the prints come from the series Wyeth, made between 2010 and 2012. All of these works are archival inkjet prints on rag paper, available in editions of 5. The prints come in one of two sizes (or reverse): 16x24 (with one at 18x16) or 28x42; each image is available either small or large, but not both. There are 19 in the smaller size and 10 in the larger size on view. The front gallery contains 6 abstract works from the series Fluid Dynamics, made between 2009 and 2012. These are archival inkjet prints, available in editions of 5, sized either 48x40 or 52x40. The side room contains 7 works from the Frolic Architecture project, made in conjunction with poet Susan Howe in 2010 and 2011. These are gelatin silver prints, in editions of 3 or 4, sized either 18x14 or 22x17. This room also contains a glass case with several copies of the related book. (Installation shots at right.)

 

Comments/Context: James Welling's newest show combines three recent projects that all revolve around the relationship between photography and painting. It's evidence of complex thinking, of dissecting and reconsidering how the two mediums can interact, both in the physical gesture and in the pictorial scaffolding.

 

The main body of the exhibit is made up of images from Welling's project channeling Andrew Wyeth. Welling traveled to various locations in Maine and Pennsylvania to visit landmarks, recreate certain scenes, explore the artist's studio, and generally immerse himself in Wyeth's environment and mindset. The result is a set of pictures which are quintessentially New England, spare and unadorned, simple and quietly intense: a dark shingled saltbox looms against the grey sky, a set of white framed windows frosted with misty ice, a chimney rising from a pitched roof, a barn flanked by scrubby grass and wildflower meadows. Interiors echo with empty stillness: a doorknob, a rustic cabinet, Wyeths' dry pigments, a cup and saucer. The project is at once an investigation of place and a communing with the painter's tactile sense of formal precision. Even the scenes which are not direct recreations feel etched with the same sense of pared down care and acute attention.

 

The other two projects on view are process driven photographic abstractions, images made from chemicals and wet paper, full of drips, swirls, splotches, and gestural motion. The Fluid Dynamics series starts with this kind of darkroom experimentation and then layers digital color gradients on top of the images later; a few underlying compositions become the basis for several color riffs, almost like satellite photos or fractals, from soft ice white, to pink and light blue, to copper brown and darker blue. The works in side room also turn on this painterly kind of craftsmanship, but this time in gelatin silver, with folds, lines and washes of ghostly white flowing into light-filled grey abstractions. Both sets of images are physical (almost sculptural), playing with movement and fluidity in the depths of the process.

 

On the surface, the bodies of work in this show could hardly be more different. And yet I took away a common sense of probing, of looking at painting in all kinds of ways, of parsing it down in search of its relevance to photography. Welling is clearly an artist who is thinking rigorously and systematically, who is constantly unpacking his influences and rebuilding his tool box from the ground up.

 

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The images from the Wyeth series are either $15000 (16x24) or $22000 (28x42). The larger works from the Fluid Dynamics series are $25000 and the smaller ones from the Frolic Architecture series are $12000. Welling's photographs have been become more available in the secondary markets in recent years, with auction prices ranging between $2000 to $22000.

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

 

Transit Hub:

• Interview: NY Times (here), Wadsworth Atheneum (here)
• Feature: ARTnews (here), Photograph (here)

James Welling, Overflow

Through October 27th

 

David Zwirner

525 West 19th Street

New York, NY 10011

The Permanent Way @Apexart

JTF (just the facts): A total of 30 black and white and color photographs, variously framed and matted, and hung in the two room divided gallery space. The show combines work from 5 contemporary photographers with railroad maps, hand colored wood engravings, vintage photo postcards (from the collection of Luc Sante) and other ephemera. The exhibit was curated by Brian Sholis. (Installation shots at right.)

The following photographers have been included, with information on the number of works on view and image details for reference:

• Jeff Brouws: 3 archival pigment prints, each 37x44, from 2010 and 2011
• Justine Kurland: 3 c-prints, each 15x30 or 40x50 (or reverse), from 2007, 2008 and 2012
• Mark Ruwedel: 19 gelatin silver prints, each 8x10, from 1995-2005
• Victoria Sambunaris: 2 chromogenic print, each 39x55, from 2007 and 2010
• James Welling: 3 toned gelatin silver prints, each 18x22 (or reverse, from 1990 and 1991

Comments/Context: When we think about history in an academic, tell us the truth about the past sense, the one genre of photography that tends not to be considered particularly relevant is fine art photography. Without a second thought, we rely upon photojournalism and documentary photographs of various kinds to provide evidence for our backward looking interpretation of historical events, but we normally don't include photographs with art as a first purpose in this analysis. Perhaps we assume they are too subjective or slanted to be instructive. This collective bias is what makes The Permanent Way such an unexpected show - it's unabashedly a history lesson, and yet, the reasoned argument put forth is supported by fine art photographs as primary source material.

With the passage of the Pacific Railway Act 150 years ago this year, the US government unleashed what would become one of the most ambitious transformations of the American landscape ever undertaken. Land grants and rights of way enabled massive, industrial scale earthworks - bridge building, canyon cutting, rock blasting, path clearing, and track laying with a unprecedented scope. It was a fifty year whirlwind of engineered nation building, with commercial friendly rail lines spreading like blood vessels to every corner of the uninhabited West. Fast forward a century, and these railways are now permanently embedded in our landscapes, reshaping the way our towns and cities evolved, how our economy grew and developed, and how we see the land and its natural marvels. Along the way, the entire genre of American landscape photography was similarly remade.

Curator Brian Sholis has smartly mixed 19th century maps, photo post cards, and other vernacular material from the period with recent photographs made by five contemporary artists, each photographer employing a different approach to documenting the trains and railway infrastructure. None of these artists is a "train photographer" in the way that we might label O. Winston Link as such an artist; instead, the assembled group takes a broader view of the impact the trains have had (and continue to have) on the land and the communities that have grown up near the tracks. Victoria Sambunaris uses elevated views of bending arcs of freight cars and straight arrow tracks to tell complex, layered stories about the borderlands between the US and Mexico and the landscape of the Utah desert. Justine Kurland is perhaps more interested in the hobo subculture that has developed around the train system, and her images of the slow S curve of tracks that follow a river through the California mountain wilderness or the broad flat plains dominated by sky are quiet and lonely, measured by the contrast in scale between the rootless riders and the immensity of the land. Both Mark Ruwedel and Jeff Brouws examine the train system as a pattern of ruins; Ruwedel sees the formal Becher-style repetition in sharp V shaped cuts through rock and the dark holes of abandoned tunnels, while Brouws follows the empty railbeds as the thin paths vanish into the encroaching forest. And James Welling makes low angle black and white "portraits" of engines, evoking feelings that are alternately heroic and grimy.

Together, these photographs provide a varied, surprisingly unsentimental picture of the impact of the railroads on the American landscape. It's an effective proof that the downstream effects of the decisions made some 150 years ago still reverberate in increasingly complicated and nuanced ways, even when the trains have long since ceased to run in many cases. Most importantly, I think this show is a fabulous reminder that fine art photography can be a vital resource in helping to interpret the complexities of our collective past; we ought to thoughtfully mix history and art more often.

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Collector's POV: The prints in this show are not for sale. The contemporary photographers included in the exhibit are represented by the following New York galleries:

• Jeff Brouws: Robert Mann Gallery (here)
• Justine Kurland: Mitchell-Innes & Nash (here)
• Mark Ruwedel: Yossi Milo Gallery (here)
• Victoria Sambunaris: Yancey Richardson Gallery (here)
• James Welling: David Zwirner (here)

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews/Features: Modern Art Notes podcast (here), Artforum (here), Daily Beast (here)
• Interview: Design Observer (here)

The Permanent Way
Through July 28th
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Apexart
291 Church Street
New York, NY 10013

Vision is Elastic. Thought is Elastic. @Murray Guy

JTF (just the facts): A group show consisting of 37 works by 14 different photographers, variously framed and matted, and hung in the two main gallery spaces and the back office area. The works were made between 1968 and 2011. The exhibit was curated by photographers Moyra Davey and Zoe Leonard. (Marginal installation shots at right.)

The following photographers have been included in this show, with the number of images and their details in parentheses:

Josh Brand (2 diptychs, gelatin silver prints/c-prints, 2010)
Roy Colmer (7 artist's books (displayed on widow sill), 1976-2009)
Pradeep Dalal (3 books/brochures/inkjet prints (displayed on shelf), 2009, 1 c-print, 2007)
Shannon Ebner (1 set of 10 c-prints, 2009)
Joy Episalla (1 pigment print, 2011)
William Gedney (1 gelatin silver print, 1967)
Roni Horn (1 set of 3 offset lithographs, 1999)
Katherine Hubbard (1 set of 24 black and white c-prints (displayed on shelf), 2011)
Babette Mangolte (1 gelatin silver print, 1976/2011)
Mark Morrisroe (1 black and white print from Polaroid negative, 1981, 5 issues DIRT magazine (displayed in case), 1975-1977)
Adrian Piper (1 photo-text collage, 1983)
Claire Pentecost (2 palladium prints, 2000)
James Welling (8 gelatin silver prints, 1977-1986)
David Wojnarowicz (1 gelatin silver print with silkscreen text, 1980)

Comments/Context: I've often written about my particular distaste for lazy gallery group shows which gather loosely connected works under some meaningless theme. I continually struggle with whether I am more annoyed, insulted or just plain bored by such forgettable endeavors, and regular readers here will know that I tend to avoid reviewing the vast majority of gallery group shows of photography, since I can hardly ever find anything nice to say. An exception to this general rule is the brainy, thought-provoking group show Vision is Elastic. Thought is Elastic. now on view at Murray Guy. This show starts with an intriguing premise (the artistic relationship between words and images) and then probes that concept from different angles, with each carefully selected photographic work providing an individual voice on the subject. 

The thematic construct here is dizzyingly layered: there are images of texts, images with writing in the margins, and texts overlaid and combined with images. There is the idea of the notebook, of notebook pages, where images act like a kind of shorthand, perhaps as a journal or diary (or artist's book). There is the idea of the library (as a physical place, as a storehouse of ideas, and as representation of personality), of books (as objects and representations of ideas), and of footnotes and textual recombinations and allusions. There is the idea of the surface, of writing, both with ink and with light. It's a fascinatingly heady brew of artistic process, image making, and wordy introspection.

While I didn't necessarily resonate with every image on display in its stand alone incarnation, when mixed and juxtaposed, the whole is remarkably larger and more rich than the sum of its parts. James Welling's paired images of Connecticut landscapes and pages filled with the flowing script of a 19th century journal provide a sense of nostalgic place and time. Roni Horn's annotated waterscapes have the feel of a busy brain, jumping from one idea to another and back again. Shannon Ebner's cool spectrum of blank notebook pages brought me back to the quiet emptiness of creation. And Pradeep Dalal's combinations of Indian architectural books and crumpled portraits left me probing other unseen connections. Together, the many ideas jostle and intermingle, creating a composite where every piece adds to the overall understanding of the theme.

This a group show where the curators have gotten beyond the "assortment of pictures" trap and focused the viewer on a central thesis; as such, the included works are less about themselves, but more about how they support the line of thinking being argued. What we're really seeing then is the opinions and interpretations of the organizers, and in this case, that set of ideas is robust, sophisticated, and satisfyingly cerebral.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows, by photographer:

Josh Brand (Diptychs either $6000 or $7000)
Roy Colmer (Not for sale)
Pradeep Dalal (Book/print combos either $1500 or $2500, c-print $2000)
Shannon Ebner (Set of 10 prints, $15000)
Joy Episalla ($4000)
William Gedney ($4500)
Roni Horn (Set of 3 prints, $90000)
Katherine Hubbard (Set of 24 prints, $2400)
Babette Mangolte ($4500)
Mark Morrisroe (Not for sale)
Adrian Piper (20000 Euros)
Claire Pentecost ($2500 each)
James Welling ($2000 each)
David Wojnarowicz ($125000)

While the work of Horn, Welling and Wojnarowicz can all be found in the secondary markets from time to time, the majority of the photographers in this show have little or no auction history. As such, gallery retail is likely the best option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

• Blind Spot 43 (here)

Vision is Elastic. Thought is Elastic.
Through June 4th

Murray Guy
453 West 17th Street
New York, NY 10011

James Welling, Glass House @Zwirner

JTF (just the facts): A total of 22 color works, framed in white and matted, and hung in two gallery spaces and the entrance hallway. 16 of the works are color inkjet prints, each roughly 33x50 (or reverse); they are printed in editions of 5, and were made between 2006 and 2009. The other 6 works are also color inkjet prints, but they have been individually overpainted with acrylic paint, making each unique. These prints vary in size from roughly 7x10 to 12x13, and were also made between 2006 and 2009. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: James Welling's photographs of Philip Johnson's famous Glass House in New Canaan, CT, are complex experiments in the properties of colored light. The house itself sits like a jewel box in lush landscaped grounds, and Welling has alternately used its transparency and reflectivity, in conjunction with a rainbow of colored filters, to create a kaleidoscope of flares, shadows, distortions, glares, and blurs. He has transformed the colorless glass building into a prism, where layers of colors seem to explode in all directions.

Welling's images highlight the combination of space in the architectural design, where interior and exterior merge, and views from the outside look right through the building, unbroken by the structure. But the real originality in these pictures lies in their wild overlapping colors, the psychedelic orange, the deep magenta, the neon green, the cool royal blue, and the acidic yellow. Sunsets, grassy lawns and snowfields take on unreal tints and hues, often made more chaotic by a multiple reflection of a nearby tree branch or the use of a negative reversal. Angles and geometries are carefully controlled to separate the colors, creating unexpected pairings and abstract mixtures. In a group of smaller images hung in the entry, Welling has gone further, adding a layer of painted washes to the photographs, the drips and swirls adding texture and further fogging to the already eye-popping compositions.

Stripped of their color, these images would likely be characterized as unspectacular shots of a masterpiece of Modernist architecture. The infusion of vivid, radical color has however taken this cool, detached structure and given it moods: melancholy, anger, anxiety, and hazy afternoon mellowness. The color is no longer embedded in the identity of the underlying subject, but sits as a layer or filter on top. In a certain way, it is as if Welling has "appropriated" this iconic building, and made it his own via mash-ups with intense, stratified veils of color. Straight representation and color field abstraction have been merged together, creating images that are both pleasingly decorative and intellectually challenging.

Collector's POV: The large color prints in this show are each priced at $25000; the smaller overpainted prints are available for $10000 each. Welling's photographs have been available in the secondary markets from time to time in recent years, generally pricing between $2000 to $10000. Welling is also represented by Regen Projects in Los Angeles (here).
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Artforum 500 words (here)
• Review: LA Times (here)
• Interview: Artinfo (here)

James Welling, Glass House
Through April 24th

David Zwirner
525 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10011

Book: James Welling, New Abstractions

JTF (just the facts): Published in 1999 by the Sprengel Museum Hannover (here), in conjunction with the DG Bank-Förderpreis Fotografie 1999 exhibit. 52 pages with 16 black and white images. Includes an essay by Alain Cueff in English, French and German. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: Given the recent surge of press around the Pictures Generation show at the Met (our review here), James Welling is once again back in the spotlight. This thin catalogue is, however, another of our recent finds at Printed Matter in Chelsea, and takes us back a decade or so, to the late 1990s, when Welling was experimenting with abstract photograms.

Welling's process for making these images is worth a quick review. He began by taking strips of cardboard/paper and placing them in intersecting and overlapping patterns on light sensitive paper, thereby creating a white on black image after developing. He then digitally scanned the images, reversed them, and created negative prints that were black on white.

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My first reaction to these images were that they were a riff on Modernism, an echo of the patterns of fire escape shadows, architectural skyscraper skeletons and the Third Avenue El from 1920s New York, only cleaned up and made crisp in a geometric, graphic design mode. (Untitled #9, 1998, at right, via artnet.)

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After looking at them a while, their representation of anything in particular fell away (particularly since the dark areas have no sense of depth or volume), and I was left with sharp edged angles and stark contrasts. Of course, there are obvious relationships to the history of photograms (Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy et al), but in many ways, these images seem to function more like Franz Kline Abstract Expressionist paintings, the thick lines anchoring the pictures and shaping the space.

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To our eyes, there is an undercurrent of simple art school cleverness here, but overall, these are compelling and visually exciting abstractions that challenge the edges of what we define as photography.

Collector’s POV: James Welling is represented by David Zwirner in New York (here) and Regen Projects in Los Angeles (here). Welling's photographs have come up at auction from time to time over the past few years, generally in the $2000 to $10000 price range. For our collection, one of his flowers would be the obvious best fit, although a print from this series of abstractions would also make a compelling foil to our city scenes from the 1920s.

Transit Hub:

• Welling's UCLA faculty page (here)
• Surface Histories, Art in America, 2001 (here)
• BOMB magazine interview, 2004 (here)
• Flowers (here)
• Whitney Biennial 2008 (here)
• Upcoming event at MoMA in October (here)