Photography at the 2012 Frieze New York Art Fair, Part 3 of 3

This is Part 3 of my review of the photography at the 2012 Frieze New York Art Fair. Part 1 can be found here, along with some background information on the fair and an explanation of the format I'm using for the the booth by booth details. Part 2 can be found here.


Purple Section

Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery (here): Barney Kulok (1)

Kaufmann Repetto (here): Shannon Ebner (1). Another entry in the "built to be photographed" category; this large graphic symbol in cinder blocks by Ebner was priced at $12000.

Rampa (here): Huseyin Bahri Alptekin (3)

Galerie Eva Presenhuber (here): Steven Shearer (3), Amy Granat (1). These floral photograms by Granat are reminiscent of similar images made by Kunie Sugiura, although these have been cropped, reoriented, and transformed into a repetitive, high contrast grid. The work was priced at $20000.

Regina Gallery (here): Nikolay Bakharev (5). I've seen a few of these engaging 1970s beach portraits from Bakharev of late, and they're starting to grow on me. They were priced at $3000 each.

Maureen Paley (here): James Welling (2), Wolfgang Tillmans (2), David Salle (1), Gillian Wearing (1). If there was any one photographer whose work was ubiquitous at this fair, it was Wolfgang Tillmans. This was the best image of his that I saw (due to the complex use of color), a new one priced at $57000 and already sold.

Stuart Shave/Modern Art (here): Linder (10)

Galerie Perrotin (here): Sophie Calle (4 diptychs)

Galleria Continua (here): Mona Hatoum (1 Polaroid triptych). A simple idea, well executed - deadpan portraits with hair exploded by static electricity. This unique set of three prints by Hatoum was priced at $30000.

Frith Street Gallery (here): John Riddy (1), Tacita Dean (1 set of 14). Extra large versions of these Dean film strip works were recently on view at the Tate Modern. The set of 14 prints (offset not photographic) was priced at £45500.

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (here): Vik Muniz (1). Washington Crossing the Delaware in Muniz' most recent style, a dense collage of magazine scrap imagery. Priced at $45000, and not surprisingly, already sold.

Galerie Bucholz (here): Wolfgang Tillmans (2), Sam Lewitt (1 set of 10). I liked Lewitt's layered NY Times transparencies, algorithmically reconstructed and subtracted to zero. Priced at $18000.

Kukje Gallery (here): Candida Hofer (1), Jenny Holzer (1)

Alison Jacques Gallery (here): Robert Mapplethorpe (3). I had never seen these particular Mapplethorpe florals before. The single blossoms are bathed in ghostly, almost garish, colored light. Priced at $35000.

Sprüth Magers (here): Andreas Gursky (1), Astrid Klein (4 collages), Thomas Demand (1), John Baldessari (1), Cindy Sherman (1). The reason I included this $285000 Baldessari image in this review has nothing to do with the pig, or the hands, or the composition really. What is impossible to see in this installation shot is that the work had surprising depth; the different colored portions are built up in inch thick layers. Yet another example of reimagining photography with sculptural qualities.

Pink Section

Wallspace (here): Daniel Gordon (1), Shannon Ebner (1), John Divola (1). Textures and patterns abound in this new work from Gordon, playing with idea of the sculptural bust, priced at $5800.

Galerie Neu (here): Bernadette Corporation (3), Tom Burr (1)

Galeria Fortes Vilaça (here): Jac Leirner (1)

Victoria Miro (here): Alex Hartley (1), William Eggleston (1), Isaac Julien (1 diptych)

303 Gallery (here): Hans-Peter Feldman (4), Collier Schorr (1), Stephen Shore (1 set of 8). This is an early conceptual series by Shore from the late 1960s (recently reprinted), where he stands and rotates in a circle, the desert background changing in each shot. Probably been done before and since, but still effective. Priced at $25000 for the set.

White Cube (here): Jeff Wall (1), Gilbert & George (1 set of 9)

Galerie Martin Janda (here): Roman Signer (1 set of 5, 1)

Sam Lewitt, Total Immersion Environment @Abreu

JTF (just the facts): A total of 7 large scale color photographs, framed in white with no mat, and hung in the two room divided gallery space. All of the works are chromogenic prints mounted on aluminum, and were made in 2010-2011. The prints range in size from 64x22 to 68x78 (a diptych printed as one image), and are available in editions of 3+2AP. The exhibit also includes four sculptures (a helmet, a truck side mirror, a long strip of film, and a flat mirror) covered in a thin film of dust, and a folio of prints soaked in the ink of a cephalopod. (Installation shots at right.)
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Comments/Context: With digital technologies now ubiquitous and information dissemination now immediate, Sam Lewitt's new photographs of anachronistic letterpress frames challenge the prevailing tide and return us to the wonders and mysteries of hand crafted language. Whether these brainy pictures are part of a celebration of the local and artisanal or a more technology-centric steampunk riff, they explore how the images of letters and words were once transformed into information and knowledge, and thereby ask questions about how linguistics and literacy will evolve in our drastically different virtual world.

In each photograph, a worn iron frame (shiny with the patina of age) provides the space into which letters are organized into sentences and paragraphs, with rough wood blocks holding the individual tiles in place. Given the way letterpress technology works, each letter is reversed and laid in right to left, so that the inking process creates the text right side up and forward as we expect it. As such, these images force the viewer to work hard to decipher the text and discover its meaning. It's a taxing and frustrating decoding process, and a fitting reminder of the complexities of language. Once understood, the snippets of text themselves reveal further strata of scientific and theoretical thinking: geometry for everyone, dimensions of space, Egyptian steam engines, quantum dimensions and signal-to-symbol systems. The fact that these works were actually composed digitally (letter by letter) adds yet another layer of analog to digital conversion.

I think there is something inherently pleasing about the look and feel of the old-fashioned letterpress process; it seems warm, idiosyncratic and human in ways that a computerized system can never be. Lewitt's pictures of the remnants of this printing method are at once both completely ordered and entirely disorienting, a cerebral duality that generates a number of arcane pathways into the changing meaning of 21st century words.

Collector's POV: The photographs in this show are priced as follows. The narrow 64x22 work is $10000, the 64x50 works are $14000 each, and the 68x78 diptych is $20000. Lewitt's work has not yet appeared in the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

My favorite image in this show was Paper Citizen 4328, 2011; somehow my installation shots didn't capture this particular work. In any case, I resonated with the conceptual juxtaposition of the reversed text describing quantum tunneling and the shrinking of transistors with the antique method of disseminating printed information.

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

Transit Hub:

• Review: New Yorker (here)
• Old Reviews: Time Out, 2008 (here), NY Times, 2007 (here)

Sam Lewitt, Total Immersion Environment
Through February 27th

Miguel Abreu Gallery
36 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002