Archives For Exhibitions

This was THE landmark photography exhibition of all time.  MoMA brings it back in all its glory.

Walker Evans American Photographs

July 19, 2013–January 26, 2014

This installation celebrates the 75th anniversary of the first one-person photography exhibition at MoMA, and the accompanying landmark publication that established the potential of the photographer’s book as an indivisible work of art. Together and separately, through these projects Walker Evans created a collective portrait of the Eastern United States during a decade of profound transformation—one that coincided with the flood of everyday images, both still and moving, from an expanding mass culture and the construction of a Modernist history of photography.

Comprising approximately 60 prints from the MoMA collection that were included in the 1938 book or exhibition, the installation maintains the bipartite organization of the originals: the first section portrays American society through images of its individuals and social contexts, while the second consists of photographs of American cultural artifacts—the architecture of Main streets, factory towns, rural churches, and wooden houses. The pictures provide neither a coherent narrative nor a singular meaning, but rather create connections through the repetition and interplay of pictorial structures and subject matter. The exhibition’s placement on the fourth floor of the Museum—between galleries featuring paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol—underscores the continuation of prewar avant-garde practices in America and the unique legacy of Evans’s explorations of signs and symbols, commercial culture and the vernacular.

via MoMA | Walker Evans American Photographs.

Robert Therrien thinks big. He is a very famous artist who happens to show at Gaggoisian, yet no one really knows much of him. He is quiet, does not play the art game and lets his work speak for itself. He actually got his ideas crawling under furniture and taking photographs.  This summer he gets  a solo museum show….

Wednesday, July 3–Sunday, October 27, 2013

 

Mr. Therrien’s breakthrough came in 1992, when he returned to photography and began shooting the spaces under an old wooden table. He was fascinated by the object’s underside and by the hidden engineering made visible in the photos. “It would be perfect just to have that as a sculpture,” he recalls thinking. He set out to make a table that was so big that viewers could get a good look at its details, as they would in one of his photographs. The Brobdingnag object he ended up fabricating, which was 10 feet tall, became the first in a series of household goods that he has scaled up to three and a half times their normal size.

via the NYTimes

Only James Turrell would have a museum in the middle nowhere high on a plateau in Argentina (and built by the wine billionaire Donald Hess). Here is a short tour.

 

 

 

 

Starting off as a film maker Gregory Colbert has had many critics in his rise to fame. Having no gallery and what seems to be an unlimited budget to build a 45,000 square foot floating museum to himself (that packs up and travels around the world) he rejects any normal exhibition solution available to even the most famous (and wealthiest) of artists.

As Roberta Smith reported in the in The New York Times:

Some times it takes a temple, a big awe-inspiring chunk of architecture to give art a proper aura. Sometimes such a setting makes matters worse. A case in point is “Ashes and Snow,” Gregory Colbert’s spectacularly vacuous exhibition of 200 large photographs and a slow-moving film in the vaulting Nomadic Museum, a temporary structure made of shipping containers that covers most of Pier 54 on the Hudson River at 13th Street.

Installed in this environmentally smart, if eminently Egyptian pavilion, designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, Mr. Colbert’s efforts form an exercise in conspicuous narcissism that is off the charts, even by today’s standards.

Roberta Smith via the New York Times

Still it is his imagery that we are left with in the end and it is undeniable poetic, moving and seemingly impossible. Many images (to most of us seasoned pros) look as if they had to be digitally manipulated – but if you watch his films I think its clear they all just might be actual documentary shots. If so he has become one of the best photographers working with animals today.

“In exploring the shared language and poetic sensibilities of all animals, I am working towards rediscovering the common ground that once existed when people lived in harmony with animals. The images depict a world that is without beginning or end, here or there, past or present.”

via his web site

via the web site

 

 

 

 

 

This should be a very good survey of Bartlett’s long and great career as one of our most intellectual and best living painters.

Interview with her by the painter Elizabeth Murry on Bomb here:

PAFA is pleased to present Jennifer Bartlett: History of the Universe —Works 1970-2011 organized by the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York.  Jennifer Bartlett emerged in the 1970s as one of the leading American artists of her time and one of the first female painters of her generation to be both commercially successful and critically acclaimed. When her monumental painting Rhapsody was first shown in 1976, it was regarded as a tour­de­force postmodern pastiche of the history of modern art. In Rhapsody, Bartlett illustrated with unprecedented intellectual and visual acuity her groundbreaking vision, in which all painting styles and forms are equally valid and available for artistic appropriation. Often such early initial success will inevitably overshadow an artist’s subsequent development. In Bartlett’s case, however, Rhapsody became merely a point of departure for an exceptionally prolific and inventive career.

from the museum web site.