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

Auction: Photographs, March 23, 2013 @Heritage Beverly Hills

Heritage has a various owner Photographs sale scheduled for later this week in Beverly Hills. While there are a few top end lots on offer, most of the work for sale is in the lower price bracket, with many later prints and lesser known images to be looked through. Overall, there are a total of 121 photographs available, with a total High estimate of $777500.

Here's the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 106
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $394500

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 14
Total Mid Estimate: $303000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 1
Total High Estimate: $80000

The top lot by High estimate is lot 74032, Irving Penn, Picasso, Cannes, 1957/before 1965, at $60000-80000 (image at right, top, via Heritage).

Here's the complete list of photographers represented by three or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Peter Basch (6)
Ansel Adams (5)
Alfred Eisenstaedt (5)
Leonard Freed (5 )
Irving Penn (4)
Herb Ritts (4)
Jerry Uelsmann (4)
Berenice Abbott (3)
Andre Kertesz (3)
Helen Levitt (3)
Thomas Mangelsen (3)
Minor White (3 )
Francesca Woodman (3)

Other works of interest include Lot 74117, Justine Kurland, Kung Fu Fighters, 1999, estimated at $2000-4000 (image at right, bottom, via Heritage).

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

Photographs
March 23rd

Heritage Auctions
9478 W. Olympic Boulevard
Beverly Hills, CA 90212

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

Justine Kurland, This Train is Bound for Glory @Mitchell-Innes & Nash

JTF (just the facts): A total of 22 color images, framed in white with no mat, and hung in the entry and the large main gallery space. The works are c-prints, in editions of 6, made between 2007 and 2009. The prints range in size from 11x14 to 40x50, with a few intermediate sizes in between. A monograph of this body of work is being published by Ecstatic Peace Library. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Unlike most of the contemporary photography shows on view this Fall, Justine Kurland's recent body of work doesn't follow the usual theme and variation project formula, but instead brings together a group of pictures that seem to illustrate a single all-encompassing atmospheric narrative; it's as if these pictures were taken from an illustrated novel, each one depicting a particular moment in the adventure story.

The recent tough economic times have brought a nearly endless set of comparisons to the Great Depression of the 1930s, and Kurland's subject matter is a portrait of the "neo-hobo" lifestyle, a 21st century version of the Great Depression wanderer: down on his luck, homeless, off in the wilderness, riding the rails to get from place to place. This old time, folk song narrative is infused with a more contemporary "off the grid" environmental sentiment; perhaps these people are living this life because of economic hardships or maybe they have simply chosen to get away from society and try to find some meaning out in the woods.

The sequencing of the images in the show brings several motifs back again and again:

• boxcars, hopper cars, tracks through the mountains, bridges, tunnels, the long S-shaped lines of distant freight trains off in the distance
• scratched out campgrounds, lean-tos, temporary structures of sticks and plastic tarps, shelters made of cardboard and plastic milk crates
• old men (vagrants, ramblers, travelers, mountain men) with scruffy beards and grubby clothing, naked children, sleeping in the back of a van or roaming in the weeds, bohemian backpackers communing with nature

Many of Kurland's images have the carefully composed quality of 19th century genre paintings, where the characters have been placed in the environment (along a riverside, perched on a fallen log, etc.) in such a way as to enhance the mood or to be representative of a larger allegorical idea/lifestyle. Unlike the documentary reality of the FSA pictures of the 1930s, Kurland's works have a romantic, utopian feel to them, a nostalgic back-to-the-land wildness and freedom, out on the frontier. And while there are fringe elements in all cultures, these pictures seem especially American to me, with a Huck Finn sensibility of self reliance and exploration, even if the times are hard.

This is a body of work that I think will be most successful in book form. While there are a few images that can easily stand on their own, the entire set of pictures is an evocative mood piece, where smaller pictures and train landscapes help fill in the gaps and details of the broader and larger narrative line; the best pictures benefit from being surrounded by the others. Overall, the images grew on me as I wandered through the gallery, and I left with the feeling of having been spun a yarn by an accomplished story teller.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show range in price between $2500 and $12000, based on size, with the middle range sizes priced at $6500, $7500 or $8500. Kurland's work has a very limited track record at auction - a handful of prints, in a range between $3000 and $6000, but not really enough sales to definitively chart a price trend. While these pictures don't fit into our collecting scheme in any way, I think they would be a solid fit for collectors interested in tableau-style work (the Crewdson/Yale school). As an aside, these works also reminded me of Alec Soth's recent body of work from the South (here); check them both out for a comparison of approaches to similar subject matter.

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

Transit Hub:

• NY Times feature, 2007 (here)
• Reviews: NY Times, 2004 (here), Art in America, 2004 (here), ArtForum, 2002 (here)

Justine Kurland, This Train is Bound for Glory
Through November 14th

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Mitchell-Innes & Nash
534 West 26th Street

New York, NY 10001