All Things Art & Photography
Known for her political charged Collage and photomontage works, Hannah Höch appropriated and rearranged images and text from magazines and newpapers to speak about Hypocrisy the German Government of her time. As a Dadaist Höch was inspired by the collage work of Pablo Picasso and fellow Dada exponent Kurt Schwitters but only she alone could of made these distinctive works.
“How to explain the sudden renown of 90-year-old artist León Ferrari? Few knew this Argentinean figure before he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennial in 2007. When his MoMA exhibition was announced in 2009 (a retrospective he weirdly shared with the late Brazilian conceptualist Mira Schendel), news of the show elicited as many blank stares as it did words of praise. So how did the work of a mostly forgotten South American gadfly go from last century’s oblivion to this season’s revelation?
Ferrari’s story is, among other things, part of the larger narrative of the making and unmaking of artistic influence—especially as it applies to the world’s two most influential museums, namely MOMA and the Tate. Another artist whose career, like Marina Abramovic’s, announces the expansion of these buttoned-down institutions into new arenas of art history, Ferrari and his newfound popularity effectively illustrate the most recent reinvention of the worldwide modernist canon.
via Village Voice Article Wednesday, Feb 9 2011
León Ferrari exhibition at MoMA (with Mira Schendel)
His website containing all his work is here
Most of the big advancements in Fine Art Photography have not come from photographers but from artists using the camera (with the exception of Thomas Ruff). David Hockney used cameras constantly in his painting and did a large number of pure photographic works as his photographic composites and collages attest. His Poloroid Portraits, melding collage, Cubist multiple view points and time, are some of my favorites images in the history of photography.
If you want to study a dynamic style of documentary photographic composition this is the guy to to look at. Always inventive, with images possessing enormous energy, Lee Friedlander explores varied aspects of the American social landscape. You can see most of his work at the The Frankel Gallery web site.
Lee Friedlander, born in 1934, began photographing the American social landscape in 1948. With an ability to organize a vast amount of visual information in dynamic compositions, Friedlander has made humorous and poignant images among the chaos of city life, dense landscape and countless other subjects. Friedlander is also recognized for a group of self-portraits he began in the 1960s, reproduced in Self Portrait, an exploration that he turned to again in the late 1990s, and published in a monograph by Fraenkel Gallery in 2000. Friedlander’s work was included in the highly influential 1967 New Documents exhibition, curated by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art. Included among the many monographs designed and published by Friedlander himself are Sticks and Stones, Lee Friedlander: Photographs, Letters From the People, Apples and Olives, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan, Family, and At Work. Friedlander was the subject of a major traveling retrospective and catalog organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 2005. In 2010, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York exhibited the entirety of his body of work, America by Car.