Mitch Epstein @Sikkema Jenkins

JTF (just the facts): A total of 13 large scale black and white photographs, framed in black with no mat, and hung in the entry, the main gallery space, and one of the back rooms. All of the prints are selenium toned gelatin silver prints made in 2011/2012. The works on view are sized 68x54, in editions of 6+2AP; a smaller 40x30 size is also available for each image (but not on display), also in editions of 6+2AP. (Installation shots at right.).

Comments/Context: It doesn't take much thinking to quickly come up with a list of photographers across the history of the medium who have made great images of trees. Starting in the 19th century, Fox Talbot, Le Gray, Cuvelier, Watkins, Kinsey, and Muybridge and many others might be the beginning of a small sampler. Cross into the 20th century and the list explodes: Atget, Renger-Patsch, Stieglitz, Strand, Adams (both Ansel and Robert), Sudek, Friedlander, Porter, on and on, evolving into a more conceptual realm with folks like Rodney Graham, Myoung Ho Lee and Robert Voit. With his new work, Mitch Epstein has stepped into this long line of tree lovers, documenting the towering, ancient specimens that hide in and around New York city.

Epstein's photographs are decidedly old school: large format black and white works, rich in detail and tonality. Most are portraits of the individual trees, capturing their idiosyncrasies and personalities with up close botanical attention. These pictures are classically beautiful, documenting thick trunks, cascading branches, and spindly growths, square in the frame (with just a tiny bit of elevation) and rendered with meticulous care.

The challenge with this kind of perfect image making is that it loses the hand of the photographer. In many of these photographs, it's hard to see Mitch Epstein. A few of the images step back just a bit to give a sense of the larger human context (a foggy Staten Island neighborhood, the wintry apartment buildings of Washington Square, or a row of Korean storefronts in Queens) and these juxtapositions and small ironies seem to connect better to the ideas in Epstein's earlier work. There is more of a sense of the tree being surrounded by the encroaching human environment, and persevering/triumphing against the odds, and I found these works more fresh and successful. I think the concept of time scale (that of tree versus that of the city around it) could have been explored even more.

These prints are very large, and I think this is a case where the scale is a bit too much. At this size, there is an opportunity to fall into the pictures, to be drawn in from across the room and enveloped in their stories. I'm sure this was the point, and given the massive size of the trees themselves, I guess I can understand the logic. But I couldn't help feeling like the photographs were too big, and that a slightly smaller size would have made the encounters less operatic and more intimate.

All in, these are certainly well made, formally strong tree photographs. I think the ones that go further and tell broader contextual tales are more representative of Epstein's approach to photography, and as a result, I think this subset will be the group that is the most durably intriguing.

Collector's POV: The 68x54 prints in this show are priced at $28000 each; the smaller 40x30 prints which are also available are $15000 each. Epstein's work has become more available in the secondary markets in past few years, but the volume of prints for sale has still been very small. Prices for those lots that have come up for auction have ranged between $3000 and $15000.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• NY Times Magazine (here)
• Interview: NY Times 6th Floor (here)
• In Focus: The Tree @Getty (here)

Mitch Epstein

Through April 14th

Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

530 West 22nd Street

New York, NY 10011

Vik Muniz @Sikkema Jenkins

JTF (just the facts): A total of 11 large scale color photographs, framed in black and unmatted, and hung in the entry, the main gallery space, and one of the two back rooms (a group of 6 Muniz sculptures, including a Tupperware sarcophagus and an ivory crowbar, are on display in the other back room). All of the works are digital c-prints made in 2011, from the Pictures of Magazines 2 series. The prints come in two sizes: “large” ranging from roughly 71x87 and 71x120 or reverse, and “small” ranging from roughly 40x42 to 40x50 or reverse; there are 9 large and 2 small prints in the show. Both sizes are available in editions of 6+4AP. (Installation shots at right.)
 
Comments/Context: Vik Muniz has made an astonishingly successful artistic career out of a relatively simple formula: take a famous image from art history (or an appropriated celebrity portrait), match it with one of a dizzying variety of unlikely media, painstakingly recreate it in that physical medium, and make a photograph of the end result. His works have forced us to reconsider these icons, and to see layers of connections, embellishments and ironies based on their transposition from paint into something altogether more unexpected.

In the past, Muniz has experimented with uniform media (like sugar, diamond dust, and chocolate syrup) and more three dimensional, multi-colored materials (like pigment, toys, and garbage) in his set-ups. And while he has employed fragments of magazines in a previous series, his new works expand beyond small punched discs into much larger torn scraps and strips, often bringing recognizable pop culture objects, faces and words into the mix. The effect is something more akin to a collage or rebus than ever before, with more of an invitation to unpack the swirling component parts and enjoy their underlying relationships, jokes, and allusions at a micro level. The jagged, uneven edges of the scraps also change the nature of Muniz’ use of texture; these works feel feathery, as if a soft wind was blowing across the surface of the image, catching the frays and creating a subtle flickering motion. These refinements add a new burst of energy to Muniz’ recreations of Friedrich, Van Gogh, Manet, Cezanne, Carracci and others (his re-interpretation of Caillebotte’s Floor Scrapers is particularly successful, in the center of the top installation shot), making the up close experience even more dense and complex.

I think it would be entirely possible for Muniz and his studio assistants to continue to crank out a flood of variations on his signature themes that would be happily consumed by the art market, but would fail to push forward in any meaningful way. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to find that these images both leverage his past successes and continue to take challenging risks, edging into territory that is less strictly visual and more layered and media savvy. Compared to his works from a decade ago, these new pictures are far more complicated; the density of recognizable visual clues is much higher, offering the viewer much more than a simple squint of artistic identification.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced based on size. The “large” prints are $45000 and the “small” prints are $32000. Muniz’ works are ubiquitous in the secondary markets for both photography and contemporary art, with dozens of images available at auction every season. Recent prices have continued to rise, ranging between $5000 and $270000, most finding a buyer in five figures.

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system defined here)

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Reviews: NY Times (here), New Yorker (here)

Vik Muniz
Through October 15th

Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
530 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

Antonio Caballero, Las Rutas de la Pasión, Mexico 1960's -1970's @Sikkema Jenkins

JTF (just the facts): A total of 19 individual black and white images and 1 group of 28 black and white images as a single work, hung in the entry, the main gallery space and two side rooms. All of the prints are modern gelatin silver prints (made between 2005 and 2010) made from negatives taken between 1960 and 1980. There are 7 smaller 24x20 prints on view in the entry, framed in white and matted, in editions of 6. There are also 12 larger prints on view in the other rooms, each 40x40, framed in white and not matted, in editions of 6. An intact portion of a fotonovela is displayed as 28 images hung edge to edge, pinned directly to the wall in a long line, each print 7x7 unframed, the entire set in an edition of 3. (Installation shots at right.).

Comments/Context: During the 1960s and 1970s, Antonio Caballero was a prolific maker of Mexican fotonovelas, a kind of photography-based graphic novel form, filled with soap opera-style narratives of love and betrayal. By taking them out of their original sequenced context and blowing them up to large scale, this show takes these dated pop culture images and recharacterizes them, highlighting their entertaining retro-melodrama.

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The images on view are full of big sculpted hair, exaggerated expressions, and staged moments of intrigue: a man cradles a slumped woman in the street, a young woman looks on in horror as she discovers a stolen kiss, a dead woman lies face down on the stairs as another woman looks on with barely concealed glee, two stylish women exchange secrets on a train platform. The scenes are theatrical and exaggerated, with plenty of opportunities for good looking people to pose with fashionable glamour.

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While these confections are simple and diverting, I don't think they deliver much more than a dose of outlandish fun with a sliver of muted irony. They are the kind of stills that Cindy Sherman re-enacted and dissected by adding an underlayer of conceptual rigor. As such, they are the original article: their artificiality pleasingly amusing, but ultimately empty of deeper ideas.
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Collector's POV: The smaller 24x20 works are priced at $4500 each, while the larger 40x40 prints are $8500 each. Caballero's work has little or no secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

• Review: New Yorker (here)

Antonio Caballero, Las Rutas de la Pasión, Mexico 1960's -1970's

Through January 22nd

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Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
530 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

Valérie Belin, Recent Works @Sikkema Jenkins

JTF (just the facts): A total of 7 large scale black and white and color works, generally framed in black with no mat, and hung in the back two galleries. The images on view are a mix of pigment and c-prints, ranging in size from 49x39 to 71x71. All of the works were made between 2006 and 2008. (Installation shots at right.)
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Comments/Context: The work of French photographer Valérie Belin seems to be popping up all over the place recently. A group of her color model portraits was included in Dress Codes at the ICP last year, and one of her black and white mannequin heads is now on display in the Pictures by Women show at MoMA. This small exhibit provides a sampler of her most recent work, covering four different projects, all from the past few years.

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If there is a common theme to Belin's photography, it appears to be the exploration of the edge between the artificial and the real. In the past, she has made images of body builders and ballroom dancers, shop mannequins and Michael Jackson impersonators, all touching on the human impulse to manufacture identity. This concept is explored further in this show via three recent black and white images of Lido dancers, each wearing an outlandish and ornate costume (complete with leather, fur, or sequins), and punctuated by an identical plastic smile. These women look like stylized characters from a science fiction novel, simultaneously beautiful and altogether weird and unsettling in their perfection.

Belin has also considered the idea of artificiality in the context of the traditional still life. Two massive color images of fruit baskets dominate the first room of the show. These over-saturated pictures were paired with still lifes by Manet in a recent exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay (linked below). In Belin's compositions, the explosion of fruit has become so controlled that it has been transformed into luscious, comical kitsch; real fruits look like decorative imitations, displayed for maximum visual effect. While there are echoes of Baroque still life allegories of prosperity and abundance in these works (there is also a direct link to Roger Fenton's dense, exotic piles of fruit), her images are wonderfully over-the-top, bold and vibrant exaggerations of the importance of surface beauty. A black and white floral still life hangs on the back side of one wall, a dark and shadowy foil to the colorful chaos of the fruit baskets. The artful bouquet hovers in the air disembodied from any context, reminiscent of the delicate 19th century still lifes of Adolphe Braun, but somehow more puzzling and aggressive.

While I might have preferred to dig into any one of these projects more deeply by seeing a wider selection of images from the same series, this one-of-each style exhibit did successfully highlight a variety of her recent ideas. Having not seen a collection of her work in person before, I came away impressed by both the deceptive depth of her thinking and the quality of her execution. There is evidence of an original artistic voice coming into maturity here, building momentum with each successive project.
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Collector's POV: The works in this exhibit range in price from $20000 to $34000. Belin's work does not have a deep history at auction; only a few of her works have come into the mainstream secondary markets in the past few years. Prices for these works have fallen between $5000 and $9000, but since the sample size is so small, they may not be entirely representative of the actual market reality. I do think that one of Belin's fruit baskets would hold an entire wall with startling ease.

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

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Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Exhibits: Musée d'Orsay, 2008 (here), Peabody Essex, 2009 (here)
• Review: Time Out (here)
• Feature: Guardian (here)

Valérie Belin, Recent Works

Through July 2nd

Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

53o West 22nd Street

New York, NY 10011

Book: Mitch Epstein, American Power

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2009 by Steidl (here). 144 pages, including 63 color plates and an essay by the artist. The images in the book were taken across the United States between 2003 and 2008. (Cover shot at right, via Photo-Eye.)

Comments/Context: In the future, when we look back on the first decade of the 21st century, I think Mitch Epstein's American Power will be one of a handful of cornerstone photography books that will be considered thoroughly representative of the post 9/11 Bush years. Its catchy double-meaning title succinctly exposes the focal points of the period: energy, in its many forms and its pervasive impact, and power, in the form of political, governmental, industrial, and corporate influence and how it permeated the fabric of the society.

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The essay in the back of the monograph is particularly enlightening in terms of setting the mood for the pictures. During the project, Epstein was routinely hassled and detained, harassed and searched, and generally prevented from making the pictures he wanted to make by the various powers that be; his frustration was real and palpable. As a result, there are very few "insider" images of the power industry in this book; nearly all of the images are taken from afar, settled into the surrounding landscape and given context by the local environment. Unlike Edward Burtynsky's recent work which centers on the massive and monumental scale of the oil industry, Epstein's images of the world of energy are grounded in human sized neighborhoods. The cooling towers, smokestacks, windmills and refinery pipes loom in the distance, hovering over otherwise normal everyday activities (football practice, backyard gardening, a riverside baptism, smoking a cigarette, golf, cattle grazing, fishing), a constant "Big Brother" reminder of the insignificance (and powerlessness) of the ordinary citizen. Fear is never far away in these images as well; bored guards with machine guns, surveillance cameras, fences and barriers, safety refuges, gas pumps hawking "terror-free oil", they all become part of the energy narrative.

What I found impressive about these images is that nearly all of them have subtle details and hidden ironies to discover. Epstein isn't shouting or hectoring. He has put forth an understated narrative that encourages both balanced and conflicted thoughts: the enormous American flag draped across the side of a refinery, smiling "Boots" Hern and her handgun, the mind-numbing boredom of the nuclear regulatory office time sheets and phone logs, the pipeline defaced with "bend over baby", the post-Katrina mattress in the tree, the white "bathtub ring" left by the drought at the Hoover Dam, the nuclear missile in the lobby at the DOE, and the hurricane weather map on the Jumbotron at the Republican National Convention (held at the Xcel Enegry Center of all places). At first glance, it's easy to miss these tiny subtexts and wry jokes; when they are finally recognized, they transform the images into something altogether more complicated and disturbing.

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Stylistically, it seems Epstein has used the 1970s mindset of Robert Adams and his views on suburban expansion as raw material, and applied some of the same thinking on a more personal level to the current/recent energy situation. There are also parallels to Alec Soth's The Last Days of W in terms of the overall level of exhausted and resigned angst. Overall, this is an excellent body of work, both well crafted and thought-provoking, and likely to resonate more loudly and fully as the years pass.
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Collector’s POV: Mitch Epstein is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York (here). The works from this series are c-prints, made in two sizes: 70x92 (in editions of 4) and 45x58 (in editions of 6). While Epstein's work has not been consistently available in the secondary markets in past years, the recent Berman sale at Christie's had quite a few of his prints; prices for these lots ranged between $3000 and $15000.

Transit Hub:

• Artist website (here)
• Features: NY Times, 2009 (here)
• Book reviews: Modern Painters (here), Conscientious (here)
• Interviews: Bomb (here), Foto8 (here), Neiman Storyboard (here)
• Gallery review: NY Times, 2007 (here)

Mitch Epstein in the NY Times Magazine

A handful of Mitch Epstein's images from his ongoing series American Power were used to highlight an article about wind power in this past weekend's New York Times Magazine (here). There was an additional picture used on the table of contents page, but I can't seem to find a link to that specific image anywhere (it was another one of wind turbines, in this case, flanking a golf course).

Epstein has been working on this series for many years now (artist site here, review of 2007 Sikkema Jenkins show here), and new images seem to find their way into the press from time to time. With all the attention focused on climate change and energy policy in this country, these images couldn't have come at a more opportune time. A monograph of the entire body of work is in progress, to be published by Steidl in September (here).

Vik Muniz, Verso @Sikkema Jenkins

JTF (just the facts): A total of 23 works, 9 "backs of paintings" in the main room, and 14 "backs of photographs" in the back room (see installation photo at right.) Editions of 3 for the backs of paintings and editions of 6 for the backs of photographs. All dated 2008.

Comments/Context: If we use a narrow definition of the word "photographer", I'm not sure that Vik Muniz would be included. Over the past 20 years of so, he has used a dizzying array of materials to make his images, and photography has been one of his tools in producing final works. However he gets categorized, his work has been consistently thought provoking, especially if you take the time to get beyond the initial novelty of his approach and media (sugar, chocolate, diamonds, caviar, etc.).
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The works in this show are physical copies of the backs of famous paintings and photographs. As you look at these works up close, you can see that they have been painstakingly recreated, down to every last nick, scratch, smear, and dent, with real residues of glues, labels, ink stamps and marking crayons. One might call them sophisticated trompe-l'oeil; one might also call them forgeries. While the "physicalness" of the paintings is amazing, I was drawn more to the works representing photographs. These works were intriguing in several ways (in my opinion).
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Firstly, these works challenge you to reconsider the idea of the photograph as an object, rather than as an image or a subject. The backs remind you of the tangible quality of photographs, and of their use in magazines, newspapers and exhibitions. In this digital age, we have already evolved to be wary of the truth of the photographic image; these works make you wary of the truthfulness of the object itself, even when it all "looks right".
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Second, it is clear that Muniz has gone far beyond the appropriation art of the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike, for instance, the Sherrie Levine of Walker Evans' Alabama tenant farmers, which appropriates the image itself, these works appropriate the backs. Rather than an end itself, the appropriation seems to have been a starting point for reconsidering the image. Indeed, much of Muniz' work could be said to have started with an external image, that was then put through the filters of the artist's mind, only to come out the other end as something recognizable as related to the original, but wholly different.
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Finally, I think the backs ask us something about how memory works. I found myself looking at each image and trying to conjure up the front (the recognizable image) in my mind. While I got most of them to some degree, I was amazed at which of the details of any one of the images might have stuck in my mind. And then I got to wondering if it was the original image that I remembered, or some later appropriation of that image that was in my memory. That really made my head spin.
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By all means, swing by and take a look at these pieces, if only to make you mind work a bit.

Collector's POV: The backs of paintings are priced between $75000 and $90000 based on size. The backs of photographs are $16000. These don't even remotely fit into our collection in any way, but they sure are mind boggling.
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By the way, as flower collectors, we have been on the lookout for any of the series of still lives that Muniz did in the late 1990s of artificial flowers (another testing of the limits of truth). If anyone has one or knows where to find one, please do let us know.
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Rating: * (1 star) GOOD (rating system defined here)
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Vik Muniz, Verso
Through October 11th

Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
530 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011