Photography in the 2013 Frieze New York Art Fair, Part 2 of 5

Part 1 of this five-part Frieze report can be found here. Start there for introductory background and explanatory notes.

Miguel Abreu Gallery (here): Eileen Quinlan, $15000. This is a pulsating, attention grabbing color study - the shiny material of the woven rubber yoga mat picks up tiny reflections, dotting the electric yellow green with flecks of textured red.

Andrew Kreps Gallery (here): Roe Ethridge, $16000. There's something unexpectedly off about these red tennis tights (the racquet seems overly big as well). It's an eye-catching example of Ethridge's mix of commercial and fine art aesthetics working together to produce something puzzlingly compelling.

Frith Street Gallery (here): Dayanita Singh, $19400. This work is actually three, housed in a custom wood box with interchangeable slots. The overflowing piles of ledgers are documented in all three images, giving the entire work a richer resonance.

Stuart Shave/Modern Art (here): Linder, £15000. A simple image intervention interrupts this self-portrait, creating a jarring hybrid face..

Maureen Paley (here): Gillian Wearing, £35000. Another in Wearing's ongoing series of self-portraits in the guise of famous photographers, this time peering out from the face of Weegee.

Salon 94 (here): Katy Grannan, $14000. This booth had a powerful wall to wall installation of images from Katy Grannan's new 99 series. Taken along California's Route 99 and set against blistering, eye squinting white backgrounds, the images get close up to a parade of weathered faces and forgotten lives. They recall Dorothea Lange and Richard Avedon's In the American West, mixing unflinching harshness and quiet authenticity.

Cheim & Read (here): Adam Fuss, $60000. While I had seen this same mattress covered with a tangle of writhing black snakes in Fuss' last gallery show, I hadn't seen the snakes replaced by a black female mannequin before; it adds another detail to Fuss' garden/Eve story.

Sean Kelly Gallery (here): James Casebere, $45000. Casebere's picture perfect stage set world given a darker, worn out alter ego, with a moss covered rooftop, a broken fence, and a landscape of barren, lifeless trees.

Galerie Krinzinger (here): Otto Muehl, complete portfolio €150000. This booth was dominated by an edge to edge hanging of images documenting 10 different actions/performances by Muehl - Viennese Actionism captured in raw, transgressive, experimental brashness.

Massimo Minini (here): Luigi Ghirri, $12000. A street scene through an ice cream store window, seen with Ghirri's subtly surreal playfulness.

Continue to Part 3 here.

Roe Ethridge, Le Luxe @Kreps

JTF (just the facts): A total of 12 large scale color works and 2 sets of bookshelves, framed in white and not matted, and hung in the entry, the main gallery space, and the office area. All of the works are c-prints, ranging in size from roughly 37x25 to 77x52. The photographs were made between 2005 and 2011, and have been printed in editions of 5. The bookshelves are alternately made of stainless steel (1 unit) and pine wood (9 units), from 2011. A monograph of this body of work was recently published by Mack Books (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: It has taken me quite a while to get my head around just what exactly Roe Ethridge is doing in his photography. The first couple of times I saw his work, all I could discover was a sense of impersonal randomness, often executed in a glossy commercial style, mixing appropriated and original work with equal facility. Without any apparent connection or narrative to link the works, I simply couldn't find my way in, and was left mystified by the ordinariness of it all.

This show of new work was my first experience in seeing a larger group of images actually sequenced by Ethridge, rather than simply catching a glimpse of a picture or two taken out of context. What I found was that I started to understand how this approach operates, especially in the open-endedness of what the pictures taken together might (or might not) imply. It sounds corny I'm sure, but it's almost as if the space between the pictures is what Ethridge is after, rather than the specific images themselves.

What's actually on the walls is a puzzling group of seemingly unrelated subjects and styles: a group of images from a commission by Goldman Sachs to document the building of its new offices (still lifes of wet sand pits and mottled concrete floors, workers installing glass curtain walls), a plastic shopping bag against a glossy red brick wall, a shiny over-pixelated bow, an appropriated Point Break poster with the artist's face superimposed over Patrick Swayze, two aerial views of Tokyo with rainbow lights and glittering gold haze, a grid of women in bikinis, etc. In seeing these all together, I began to see a strong relationship to the work of Wolfgang Tillmans. The similarities between the two are structural I think, not stylistic; Ethridge has substituted an impersonal often commercial view for Tillmans' deadpan observations of small moments, but the effect is the same - it's how the pieces are put together and recontextualized that generates the insights. This idea of the pictures as a scaffolding for the narratives that fall between them is reinforced by the empty bookshelves installed in the gallery. Whether wood or steel, all they do is provide structure; the information is missing, to be supplied by the viewer.

As stand alone images, I continue to have trouble with many of Ethridge's slicker efforts, as I don't think they hold up particularly well on their own. But as an environment (or perhaps as a book I imagine), I finally saw the core of his originality. The ideas are a bit obtuse and reach beyond what we normally think of as the normal boundaries of "self-contained" photography, but as digital images exponentially proliferate, perhaps Ethridge's approach to mash-up and shuffled rework of any and all may signal a new way of thinking about conceptual relationships within photography.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced between $12000 and $28000 (with intermediate prices at $14000, $18000, and $24000), roughly based on size. Ethridge's work is not consistently available in the secondary markets; prices for the few lots that have sold at auction in recent years have ranged between $12000 and $20000. 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:

• Reviews: New Yorker (here), TimeOut New York (here)

Roe Ethridge, Le Luxe
Through July 2nd

Andrew Kreps Gallery
525 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

Photography at the 2011 Armory, Part 1 of 4

If I have any takeaway from this year's photography scavenger hunt at the Armory Show in New York, it is that this show is evolving away from the heavy hitters and "best of the best" toward more of an international melting pot. As I wandered through the alleys of white booths that cover both Piers 94 and 92 (roughly 275 galleries in all), I saw very few million dollar prints or acknowledged contemporary icons, and instead encountered a satisfying diversity of work, much of it on the fringes or entirely new to me.

With a few years of doing these reviews under my belt, my approach to this show has now become ruthlessly systematic: back and forth, up and down the aisles, scanning each nook and cranny for photography. All in, I found 96 galleries showing at least one photograph (down from 115 last year); as always, I certainly missed or omitted a few, but I'd like to think I looked at nearly everything that was on view.

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I'm going to break my notes into four posts, roughly grouped by their physical location at the fair. Part 1 of this summary covers the booths in the area to the right of the entry at Pier 94 (if you are facing the registers) and continuing up along the far right side of the pier. In general, these reviews will list the photographers on view, with the number of works in parentheses. Additional commentary, price details, and the like will be added for noteworthy discoveries. As always, all of the galleries are linked back to their websites for further investigation and follow-up:

Studio La Città (here): Vincenzo Castella (2), Massimo Vitali (1), Gabriele Basilico (2). The angles and textures in this Basilico from Istanbul are subtly spectacular; it's also big enough to draw you into details. Priced at 10000€.

Angles Gallery (here): Augusta Wood (1), Ori Gersht (2), Soo Kim (1)

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Galleria Raffaella Cortese (here): Kim Sooja (1), Marcelo Maloberti (3)

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Hales Gallery (here): Sebastiaan Bremer (2)

Filomena Soares Gallery (here): Helena Almeida (2), Vasco Araujo (1 diptych), Pilar Albarracin (1), Joao Penalvia (2)

Corkin Gallery (here): Chad Gerth (22 as one installation), Frank Madler (1+1 diptych), Iain Baxter (2), Barbara Astman (7), NE Thing Co. (2), Andre Kertesz (9), Lazlo Moholy-Nagy (1), Margaret Bourke-White (1), Walker Evans (1), Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1), Brassai (1), Thaddeus Holownia (24). In addition to a wall of vintage work on the outside of the booth, the interior was a single artist installation of Holownia's Walden Pond Revisited, a suite of large scale black and white tree trunks on all four walls. I didn't get a price.

Galerie Grita Insam (here): Candida Hofer (1)
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Giorgio Persano (here): Michele Zaza (18), Per Barclay (1), Michelangelo Pistoletto (5), Mimmo Paladino (24 in a spiral)

303 Gallery (here): Stephen Shore (1), Rodney Graham (1), Collier Schorr (1), Florian Maier-Aichen (1)
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Ratio 3 (here): Mitzi Pederson (2), Ryan McGinley (1), Lutz Bacher (1 group), Geof Oppenheimer (1), Miriam Böhm (2). These visual puzzles by Böhm were among my favorites at the show. I liked the layered approach to simple art materials, photographing and rephotographing from slightly different angles to create echoes and spatial depth, while maintaining apparent alignment. There was a terrific article on Böhm in ArtForum a few months back. They are priced at $4500 each.

XL Gallery (here): Blouesoup Group (1), Igor Moukhin (1)
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i8 Gallery (here): Hrafnkell Sigurdsson (6), Olafur Eliasson (16 in grid), Sigurdur Gudmundsson (5). I never seem to tire of Eliasson's grids of images; this one captures windswept green plants in black rocky dirt. I should have also taken a picture of Sigurdsson's series of chucks of ice on the back side wall. There was no one around to get a price for the Eliasson.

Galerie Barbara Thumm (here): Sabine Hornig (1)

Andrew Kreps Gallery (here): Roe Ethridge (1), Peter Piller (12, pinned to wall), Andrea Bowers (1). I have been a bit of an Ethridge skeptic to date, but I found this double layer image to be more complex and compelling. It's priced at $10000.



Arndt (here): Vik Muniz (3), Sophie Calle (1)

Kerlin Gallery (here): Paul Seawright (1)

Murray Guy (here): Kota Ezawa (1), Moyra Davey (group of 25)

Rhona Hoffman Gallery (here): Vito Acconci (1), Robert Heinecken (9), Gordon Matta-Clark (1). I've always wanted to find a Matta-Clark photograph with dense layers of geometric cut aways for our own collection, so I was particularly covetous of this multi-image work. The price was $175000.

Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art (here): Ori Gersht (1)

Anna Schwartz Gallery (here): AES+F (1)

Galleri Charlotte Lund (here): Maria Friberg (1), Andres Serrano (2), Denise Grünstein (2). I very much liked the mix of performance and lushness in these images by Grünstein. The series uses hair to mask the model's face. I was shown another excellent image (in a monograph) where the model's head is being held by some kind of 19th century model posing contraption, once again, the tactile red hair blown across her face. They were $17000 each.

Clark & Faria Gallery (here): Scott McFarland (1), Greg Girard (1)

Part 2 can be found here.

New Photography 2010 @MoMA

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

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

• Roe Ethridge (8 chromogenic prints, framed in white, from 2008-2010)
• Elad Lassry (15 chromogenic prints in matched color frames from 2008-2010, 1 16mm video from 2009)
• Alex Prager (6 chromogenic prints, framed in white, from 2007-2010, 1 HD video from 2010)
• Amanda Ross-Ho (2 chromogenic prints from 2010, 1 inkjet print on canvas (unframed and pinned to wall) from 2010, 1 chromogenic print on wood shelf from 2007, 1 sheet rock wall with holes, photographs and other objects from 2010)

Comments/Context: This year's New Photography exhibit at the MoMA might better be called "Offspring of the Pictures Generation". The show gathers together the work of four contemporary photographers who have continued down the path of image appropriation and recontextualization, evolving their aesthetic approaches in the crucible of the recent explosion of media. They borrow from movies, magazines, fashion, and commercial/stock photography with equal ease, often infusing the seemingly random with unexpected significance.

So how have these descendants changed the culture of appropriation, 25 years later? To my eye, they have stripped away the biting humor that made the images from the Pictures Generation so striking; gone is the subtle wry wit with an undercurrent of emotional outrage that lurked beneath those compositions. These new works seem more neutered, much cooler and more distant, rich in intellectualism and conceptual theory, but generally lacking in the spark that grabs and holds a viewer's attention. For Roe Ethridge, only the lusciously furry bowl of rotten fruit provides much of a jolt. His blurry pixelated plate on top of a crisp black and white scarf seems a bit forced and self-conscious. For Amanda Ross-Ho, appropriation and process have been mixed together, documenting a calculated inner landscape of studio remnants and familial connections. Her sculptural installations clearly have layers of conceptual significance, and yet they left me cold.

Elad Lassry's matchy-matchy isolated magazine images against paired colored backgrounds/frames at least have a bit of playfulness to them. I particularly liked the wild pink hat (owned by collector Peter Brant); the red nailpolish on green pedestals and the Herend monkeys against green were also vibrant and memorable. Lassry smartly breaks up the monotony of the commercial photography feel by adding in a blur or multiple exposure here and there, so the walls don't feel like an endless parade of candy colored stock images. Alex Prager is in many ways an outlier in this show, since her large scale photographs aren't direct appropriations or theoretical exercises, but glossy stylistic echoes of cinematic glamour. That said, they are by far the most approachable works in the exhibit, evidenced by the continued clustering of the crowd in her corner of the gallery. Her retro world is invitingly dramatic and visually stunning, and quite a bit less overtly intellectual.

In the end, while I like the thematic construct of this show (and I think it is altogether worthwhile to explore how appropriation is being updated by contemporary artists), the payoff isn't particularly stunning or sensational. I wonder if simple image reuse has now become so commonplace that it wholly fails to surprise us, unless some additional element of originality or shock (visual or intellectual) is introduced. Is this photographic genre slowly being anesthetized by overuse? Most would say no (it's only the beginning), but perhaps it is time to re-evaluate this approach once again, and look for a crackling disruptive jump to someplace entirely new.

Collector's POV: The photographers in the show are represented by the following galleries:

• Roe Ethridge: Andrew Kreps Gallery (here), Gagosian Gallery (here)
• Elad Lassry: Luhring Augustine (here), David Kordansky Gallery (here)
• Alex Prager: Yancey Richardson Gallery (here), Michael Hoppen Gallery (here), M+B (here)
• Amanda Ross-Ho: Mitchell-Innes & Nash (here), Cherry and Martin (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), Huffington Post (here)
• Amanda Ross-Ho interviewed by Elad Lassry, BOMB (here)

New Photography 2010
Through January 10th

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