Events

                               February 6 - March 28, 2009

                               "Soul Rebel: An Intimate Portrait of Bob Marley"

                              February 6- March 14, 2009

                              David Robin, "Homestead Project"

                              February 5 - April 25, 2009   

                              Jason Florio, "Makasutu: Mecca in the Forest"

"War in Lebannon"

May 1 - June 17, 2007

Opening talk with Scott Anderson.

"In the Shadow of Power: Poverty in Washing D.C."

March 12- May 8, 2007

"The Price of Oil"

Opening talk with Sebastian Junger

Cycle of Violence

November 6, 2006 - January 7, 2007

The Outcasts of Slovakia

June 27 - August 22, 2006

Judge of the Undergraduate Photography show.

Afganistan Embedded

April 17 - June 25, 2006

March 5th - April 16th, 2009

opening reception: Thursday March 5, 2009 6-9 pm

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NEW YORK, NY (March 9, 2009) — Jonathan LeVine Gallery is proud to present Paperweight, a solo exhibition of new works by Phil Frost. For his first show at the gallery, Frost has created a new series of works on paper, including paintings and original drawings. As his first exhibition in New York in the past three years, Paperweight marks a highly anticipated event for this celebrated artist.

Using mediums such as ink, aerosol, gouache and oils, beneath a layer of correction fluid, Frost has been known to paint elaborate installations on found objects such as baseball bats, windowpanes, and old barn doors. Oscillating between modernist design and primitivism, abstraction and representation, Frost’s work is tied together cohesively by his signature top-layer of crisp white patterning—remarkably drawn free-hand with a correction fluid pen, without the use of stencils. This white-out element often appears to form a code or language, composed of letters, hearts, dots and mask-like faces, reminiscent of tribal and indigenous art. These symbols, which the artist refers to as “glyphic distinctions,” are painted on top of heavily textured backgrounds. The overall effect is a masking yet highlighting of negative space, like a delicate lace of personal faith and truth, veiling the decay of humanity. Frost’s deep pantheistic spirituality is expressed through imagery such as in the open-heart motif, which represents the surrender of self to a higher purpose. 

NEW YORK, NY (March 9, 2009) — Jonathan LeVine Gallery is pleased to announce Hindi Love Song, a solo exhibition of new works by Gary Taxali. For his fist solo show in New York, the artist has created a series of mixed-media paintings and sculptures in what will be his largest collection of original work to date, both in quantity and in scale. Highly explorative when it comes to application methods, Taxali combines layers of collaged materials and silk-screening techniques. His images are produced using a variety of mediums—ink, oil, acrylic, enamel, and gouache—applied to a number of different surfaces including: paper, plywood, masonite, steel, aluminum, and vintage book covers.

Hindi Love Song features Taxali’s anachronistic aesthetic, evoking nostalgia for an era before his own time. Expanding upon his signature style, works in the show feature playful imagery inspired by vintage animation and packaging, often combining the artist’s hand-rendered typography with geometric patterns to compliment his figures. In a Los Angeles Times review, Holly Myers wrote: "The work of Gary Taxali takes a basically juvenile bibliophilic impulse—doodling in the leaves of borrowed books—to a more artistically sophisticated level. There is an appealing sense of play, drawn from childhood but supported by a mature iconographic sensibility."

An award-winning illustrator, Taxali’s process in creating commercial work remains void of digital assistance (a rare trait in an increasingly electronic industry) which perhaps has led to the appeal and stylistic development of his retro-looking visuals. The same is true of his approach to gallery work, which is based on a deep love of drawing and hands-on printmaking methods. Taxali’s subjects, with their minimalist yet exaggerated facial expressions and gestures, are painted in flat color onto found materials and other non-traditional canvases. Some of his characters have been created in three-dimensional form, first as a series of vinyl figures, and later in fiberglass. For this show, one of Taxali’s reoccurring characters makes his debut appearance as a limited edition bronze sculpture. Gary Taxali’s new line of limited edition gold and porcelain cufflinks, produced by Hobbs & Kent, will also be on view and available for purchase during the exhibition.

School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents “Mentors,” an exhibition of work by BFA Photography Department students inspired by their year-long mentorship with key figures in the New York arts community. Drawn from the ranks of city’s best-known photographers, curators, art directors, publishers, art dealers, critics and writers, the mentors are paired with students based upon their field of expertise and the student’s area of concentration. The 2008-2009 mentors include creative director Fabien Baron, cinematographer and SVA alumnus Harris Savides, New York Times writer Philip Gefter, and photographers Ari Marcoupolis, Sally Gall and Gregory Crewdson, among others. 

Calumet Photographic is pleased to host the 2009 BFA Exhibition by students from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts Department of Photography and Imaging. 

This diverse exhibition features work by 28 emerging artists and is comprised of a wide range of media, including traditional black-and-white and color photographs, digital art, publications, web-based projects, video, collage, drawings and sculpture. 

On view from April 16 to May 1, 2009 

Gallery Hours are M-F 8:30-5:30, Sat 9:00-5:30 

Join us for an opening reception on Thursday, April 16th from 6 to 8 p.m.  

What: “Stoked on Spring” – Stoked Mentoring’s Annual Spring fundraiser 

Date: Saturday May 16th 

Time: 6-10pm (6-7pm VIP, 7pm opens to the public) 

Venue: Open House Gallery www.openhousegallery.org 

Event Overview 

May 16th will mark our annual Spring fundraiser, which will include 125 works of art 

and one-of-a-kind items in a silent auction format. We will also have 15 select pieces 

of art sold during a live auction alongside 10 Stoked Scholarships. Our VIP champagne 

reception will be held from 6-8 pm and will provide a chance for guests to learn more 

about Stoked Mentoring in an intimate setting. VIP Ticket holders will also have first 

access to preview the art and will receive an exclusive gift bag. There will be limited 

tickets available for the VIP reception. The event will include an open-bar, celebrity 

hosts and DJ. 

Ticket price: 

VIP: $100, General: $75, Jr. Member: $50 

Confirmed Artists: 

Peter Max, Michael Dweck, Kenzo Minami, Jack Laroux, Chris Gentile, Abe Lincoln Jr.- 

ELC, Matt Siren, J. Strickland, Andrew Kessler, Aaron Aujla, Inga Huld Tryggvadottir, 

Julian Ungano, David Cook, Mara Sprafkin, Dana Veraldi, Tommy Agriodimas, Deryck 

Todd, Agatha Wasilewska, Daniel Zvereff, Adam Gianotti, Russell Short, Bwana Spoons, 

Noh J Cole, Col RWK, Royce Bannon-ELC 

Expected Audience: 

300 young professionals from the action-sports, art, and fashion industries, including 

artists, beginning and seasoned art collectors, as well as on-going supporters. 

Press Coverage from Past Art Events: 

The NY Times, NY Daily News, Gotham Magazine, Juxtapoz Magazine, Nylon Magazine, 

Fashion Week Daily and The Onion 

A selection of contributing artists from last year's event includes: 

Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, Tom Sachs, Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol Estate, Phil 

Frost, Kehinde Wiley, David Hockney 

Personal

May 7th - June 6th

Artists' Reception: May 13 7pm-9pm

Featuring artists: Brad Harris, Timothy Hogan, Henry Leutwyler, Giles Revell, Martin Schoeller, Mark Zibert

Personal examines the personal photographic explorations of six artists who work in multiple realms of contemporary photography.  The exhibition discusses the elements of style and vision and how an artist, be it a fine artist or commercial artist or those that blur the lines, create work for their own personal expression.

Opening Reception: May 16, 2009 7-10 pm

Crown of the Lost

Featured Artists: Eliud Carrizales, Giovanni Cervantes, Debra Holt, Mathias Kessler, Hugo Lopez, Christoph Morlinghaus, Julie Pike.

The show's main focus is the foreboding aspects of nature and the inevitable decay of beauty through the exploration of behavioral aspects of biological and technological ecosystems and environments, their development, peaks, and ultimately their breakdowns.

Opening Reception: Wednesday, May 13  6pm-8pm

Michael Mazzeo Gallery is pleased to present Transmutations: Abstraction in Nature, featuring work by Caleb Charland, Christian Erroi,  Young Hee Kim, Sebastian Lemm, and Chris McCaw.

Transmutations consists of imagery in which either the photographer alters nature or allows nature to alter the photographic material.  The exhibition will be on view from May 13 through June 20.

Praia Piquinia, Lyon-based artist Christian Chaize's first US solo exhibition, Wednesday May 20, 2009. You may recognize Christian's work from another Jen Bekman Project, 20x200. His editions debuted there back in December of last year and were featured in the pages of Domino Magazine. Christian's large prints (44" x 37") are the perfect way to welcome summer and keep the beach close by all year round!

Opening Reception: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 | 6pm-8pm
Please join us at the gallery Wednesday, May 20th from 6pm-8pm, at a reception for the artist.

  7 - 10 p.m.

 Black Star presents: Wishful Thinkers- A Milk        Gallery Project

 Portraits of 50 Inspirational Women to Benefit FINCA  International

 DJ:Seeps

 Reception generously sponsored by Charles Noian  and Andy Tobias

Hans Gissinger's Exploding Cakes project

The Gallery @ Stockland Martel

Opening: Thursday, June 4th, 6-8 pm

The explosion of the cake sets into motion different mechanisms that go beyond the formal frame of the work.   Each tart gives rise to an installation.

Curator Marshall Kappel has compiles an exhibition in Dumbo of all Polaroid-based artitsts.

Thursday, June 4th 6:30 - 8:30 p.m.

Please join us as we celebrate the work and achievement of the ICP students in the General Studies and Documentary Photojournalism Certificate Programs with their exhibition Pluperfect.

Curated by Alison Morley, Chair of the Documentary Photography and Photojournalism Program and Marina Berio, Chair of the General Studies Program.

This exhibition will be on view June 27-August 16.  The Education Gallery is open 10:00am-6:00 pm.

Gallery 151 invites yo to the opening of "Coexist: The Universe and I" the newest exhibit from the Urban Green Initiative- an ongoing series of art exhibitions, music concerts and dance performances that encourage an artistic approach to conversations of about environmental awareness.

  Open: June 16- July 16  1-6pm Wednesday-Sunday

  Open house every Thursday from 6-8pm

Inaugural Show in our New Space: Same Address, Now Ground Floor

THE WORLD IN BLACK AND WHITE:

Vintage Prints from the National Geographic Archive

Exhibition: September 17 – October 17, 2009

Reception: September 17th, 6-8pm

Steven Kasher Gallery is proud to present the first exhibition and sale of vintage prints from the archives of the National Geographic Society. The exhibition will feature over 150 unique vintage black and white prints representing the earliest days of the Society (founded in 1888) through the 1940s. It will present premier examples of the most aesthetically and historically significant prints in the archive.

Hey, Hot Shot! 2009 First Edition Exhibition

Opening Reception | Wednesday, September 9, 2009 | 6–8 p.m.

images | statements | press release

Hey, Don't Forget!

Please join us TONIGHT Wednesday, September 9, from 6 to 8 p.m., at the opening reception for the Hey, Hot Shot! 2009 First Edition Exhibition, featuring eighteen works from five photographers: Michelle Arcila, Daniel Cheek, Mike Sinclair, Parsley Steinweiss and Kurt Tong.

The exhibition will be on view Thursday, September 10th through Saturday, September 19th, 2009.

Until the Kingdom Comes

September 10, 2009–October 31, 2009

Artist's Reception

Thursday, September 10, 2009, 6:00–8:00 pm

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new images and sculptures by Simen Johan, entitled Until the Kingdom Comes. The exhibition will open on Thursday, September 10, and close on Saturday, October 31, with a reception for the artist on Thursday, September 10, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

In his ongoing series Until the Kingdom Comes, begun in 2004 and first shown at the gallery in 2006, Simen Johan depicts a natural world hovering between reality, fantasy and nightmare.  Merging traditional photographic techniques with digital methods, Johan’s images are crafted over time and may include a synthesis of landscapes from various geographical locations and animals photographed in captivity or in the wild.

An albino deer is camouflaged in a lattice of trees, shadow and light in one image; in another, a weeping willow is enshrined in an apocalyptic fog. Three of Johan’s recent sculptures incorporating taxidermy, insects and foliage into miniature ecosystems will also be included in the show.

In his work, Johan blurs the boundaries between the real and the unreal, re-imagining worlds that, much like our own, are forever a mystery. Majestic animals in fantasy landscapes are set in relief against a darker reality, one of absence and longing. The work addresses primal experiences, shaped by desires and fears—solitary paths towards imagined fulfillment.

Simen Johan’s work is included in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Cleveland Art Museum. He recently received a grant from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In 2010–11, work from the series Until the Kingdom Comes will be presented in solo exhibitions at the Frist Center of Art in Nashville, TN and at the Pollock Gallery at SMU, Meadows School of the Arts in Dallas, TX. His work has been featured in solo museum exhibitions at the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, Norway and the National Art Museum of Lithuania, and in group exhibitions at the George Eastman House, the International Center of Photography, the Australian Centre for Photography, the Neuberger Museum of Art and the University of Iowa Museum of Art. In 2003, Twin Palms published his monograph, Room to Play. Simen Johan was born in Kirkenes, Norway in 1973. He was raised in Sweden and has resided in New York City since 1992.

The Open Society Institute invites you to its sixteenth group photography exhibition Moving Walls.

Please join us for the opening reception

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

6-8:30pm

400 West 59th street 

The exhibition is open to the public through May 21, 2010.

http://www.krisgravesprojects.com/

jonathanlevinegallery.com

jonathanlevinegallery.com

http://www.foleygallery.com/exhibitions/exhibitions_up.php3

This major career retrospective on Tim Burton (American, b. 1958), consisting of a gallery exhibition and a film series, considers Burton's career as a director, producer, writer, and concept artist for live-action and animated films, along with his work as a fiction writer, photographer and illustrator. Following the current of his visual imagination from early childhood drawings through his mature work, the exhibition presents artwork generated during the conception and production of his films, and highlights a number of unrealized projects and never-before-seen pieces, as well as student art, his earliest non-professional films, and examples of his work as a storyteller and graphic artist for non-film projects. The opposing themes of adolescence and adulthood, and the elements of sentiment, cynicism, and humor inform his work in a variety of mediums—drawings, paintings, storyboards, digital and moving-image formats, puppets and maquettes, props, costumes, ephemera, sketchbooks, and cartoons. Taking inspiration from sources in pop culture, Burton has reinvented Hollywood genre filmmaking as a spiritual experience, influencing a generation of young artists working in film, video, and graphics. 

Throckmorton Fine Art is pleased to offer an exhibition of thirty-five rare vintage prints by Tina Modotti. Some of the works shown are unique images. Modotti only took photographs during her seven tumultuous years in Mexico, from 1923-1930. It is estimated that her artistic legacy is limited to six hundred photographs, the majority of which are now in museum collections. (The holder of the most images is the Museum of Modern Art in New York.) Gathered for this exhibit is the largest group of Modotti photographs still in private hands. The photographs exhibited are from a number of distinguished collections, including those of Francis Toor, Xavier Guerrero, and Luis B. Traven. A few of the images were loaned to the retrospective of Modotti at the Philadelphia Museum in 1995, which traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1996, and then to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art the same year.

Although Modotti learned photography from Edward Weston, with whom she had a long, intimate relationship, her photography is distinct from his work. Modotti’s images fit into the innovative photography of the 1920s that pushed the boundaries of the medium—and of art itself. This work, often called modernist photography, embraced experimentation, unusual points of view, and unconventional subjects. Modotti’s subject matter varies, including as it does crowd scenes, industrial views, Mexican folk culture, flora, and even portraits. Her compositions, though, mark her work: there are strong angles and an unnerving starkness that give her photographs a captivating immediacy.

During their years together in Mexico, Modotti and Weston were part of a celebrated circle of artists and intellectuals, including Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Modotti’s involvement in politics led to her expulsion from Mexico in 1930. Leaving Mexico, she became even more consumed by politics, ending her work as a photographer. She leaves us, though, a rich body of images, which is amply represented in this exhibit.

http://www.throckmorton-nyc.com/

jenbekman.com

http://www.marvelligallery.com

Giant Robot is proud to host Paul Hornschemeier and Jay Ryan as they hit the road together in November and December for an extensive book tour to promote their respective new releases, All and Sundry and Animals and Objects In and Out of Water.

Paul Hornschemeier began self-publishing his experimental comics series Sequential in college. Graduating with a degree in Philosophy, he moved to Chicago and began his series Forlorn Funnies, producing the graphic novels Mother, Come Home, The Three Paradoxes, Life with Mr. Dangerous, and the short story and illustration collections Let Us Be Perfectly Clear and All and Sundry. Hornschemeier's work has been translated into multiple languages and won international acclaim and awards, including honors at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. His clients include, Intel, CNN/Mother Industries, the Wall Street Journal, Life magazine, This American Life, Brooks Running, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Books UK, Marvel Entertainment, DC Comics, and Nickelodeon. He currently resides in Chicago, where he is still at work on Forlorn Funnies as well as various illustration, prose, and music projects.

Jay Ryan has been making screen-printed concert posters in Chicago since 1995, and at his own print shop, The Bird Machine, since 1999. Known for his hand-drawn type, humorous animal subjects, and muted color selections, he has worked for thousands of indie bands such as the Melvins, Shellac, Andrew Bird, Fugazi, the Flaming Lips, and the Jesus Lizard, as well as clients like Patagonia Clothing, Converse Shoes, and the BBC. When he's not playing bass in his band, Dianogah, Jay lectures to students and shows his prints at universities and galleries across the US and Europe.

The in-store appearances and book signings by Paul and Jay will take place from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. on Monday, November 16 at GRNY. For more information about the artist, the Giant Robot stores, or Giant Robot magazine, please contact:

Eric Nakamura
Giant Robot Owner/Publisher
eric@giantrobot.com
(310) 479-7311

Bruce Silverstein Gallery: Martin Denker

http://www.hastedhunt.com/exhibition.php?p=u&e=152

The New York Times, September 4, 2009

Treading in the footsteps of Charles Marville, Brassaï and Atget, German photographer Christopher Thomas creates black and white images of cities in a state of repose, as if only the viewer's gaze could animate these empty streets. After years of photographing his native Munich, Thomas turned his camera on his adopted city, New York. The resulting exhibition of 30 large-scale landscapes feels both nostalgic and contemporary, offering an elusive glimpse of 19th century tranquility while hinting at a cryptic apocalyptic ending just around the bend.

The exhibition, co-curated by Ira Stehmann and Petra Giloy-Hirtz, accompanies the publication of New York Sleeps, by Christopher Thomas, Petra Giloy-Hirtz (editor) Ira Stehmann (editor), with essays by Robert Shamis and Ulrich Pohlmann. (Prestel, Munich, Berlin, London, New York, 2009)

Curator  Bob Shamis writes in his essay Coming Upon New York: “The quietness that these photographs evoke, so at odds with our expectations, is at first unsettling for someone well acquainted with New York. The urban landscape may be familiar, but this is not the city that most of us know and experience. The total absence of people in Thomas’ photographs is the result of shooting in the early morning hours, when even New York’s streets are almost deserted, and because of the necessity of making long exposures with his view camera. With his lens shutter opens for many seconds for each exposure, moving figures did not register on the slow film that Thomas used, reinforcing the impression of the city as the site of a lost civilization.”

From views of an abandoned Staten Island ferry terminal to the deteriorating Coney Island Cyclone, Thomas documents urban scenes that while outwardly static, show a city in perpetual transition. The presence of previous inhabitants lingers heavily within each frame, like dinner plates that have recently been cleared away.

Like a Surrealist flaneur, Thomas explores the complex tension between absence and presence in his dreamlike outer landscapes. Devoid of human figures, his images of winding alleyways, imposing monuments and gleaming mist-filled harbors veer off at random into psychological terrain. Using a custom large-format camera and Polaroid film, he has created a nebulous archive of our collective inner longings.

Born in Germany in 1961, Christopher Thomas has worked for magazines such as Geo, Stern, Merian, and the SüddeutscheZeitung Magazin. He has produced numerous photo essays and received international awards for commercial and fine art photography. He lives and works in Munich and New York.

Christopher Thomas: New York Sleeps will be on view December 3, 2009 through January 9, 2010.

http://stevenkasher.com/html/exhibinfo.asp?exnum=1070

Artists include: Julia Fullerton-Batten, Mercedes Helnwein, Anthony Lister, Ian Whitmore, and Sarah Wilmer.

http://www.randallscottgallery.com/

myplasticheart presents "Saline" the latest exhibition featuring Atlanta based artist/designer Dosa Kim. Using the canvas as his soap box, Dosa looks at the world he inhabits and uses his medium of choice to give us a glimpse of how he sees society and the world around him. With a very specific point of view and no qualms about sharing it, Dosa skillfully expresses his thoughts and perspective metaphorically through his work. Please join us at the opening reception on December 18th from 6-9PM. Dosa will be in attendance to chat and discuss his work.

http://myplasticheartnyc.com

www.hastedhunt.com

http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/upcoming.htm

http://www.klompching.com/kcg/upcomfront.htm

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of two bodies of work by Jacob Aue Sobol, Sabine and I, Tokyo. The exhibition will open on Thursday, January 14, and close on Saturday, February 20, with a reception on Thursday, January 14, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm.

Jacob Aue Sobol’s series Sabine (1999-2001) chronicles three years the artist spent in the settlement of Tiniteqilaaq in Greenland, his life as a fisherman and hunter, and his intimate relationship with Sabine and her family. The series of black-and-white photographs is a visual diary of a love story and daily survival, capturing private moments with Sabine contrasted with the harsh arctic environment of the east Greenlandic coast.

Photographs from the series I, Tokyo were taken between 2006 and 2008 while the artist lived in Tokyo. Overwhelmed by loneliness and isolation due to the unfamiliar culture and large city, the artist used the camera to find “individual human presence” in a swarming metropolis. The photographs offer a personal view of Tokyo, a result of the artist’s need to connect to the people and the city.

Jacob Aue Sobol’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museet for Fotokunst, Odense, Denmark, and Rencontres D’Arles, Arles, France. In 2006, he received the First Prize, Daily Life Stories, World Press Photo. Jacob Aue Sobol’s recent book,I, Tokyo, was awarded the Leica European Publishers Award 2008. The book Sabine was published in 2004. Aue Sobol studied at the European Film College and Fatamorgana, Danish School of Documentary and Art Photography. He was born in Denmark in 1976 and grew up in Brøndby Strand south of Copenhagen. He currently lives and works in Copenhagen.

http://www.yossimilo.com/exhibitions/2010_01-jaco_aue_sobo/

http://www.sashawolf.com/Exhibition_Upcoming.html

www.yanceyrichardson.com

Amador Gallery is pleased to present the series “New Trees” by German photographer Robert Voit. These large-format color photographs focus on seemingly commonplace trees within urban and rural settings. In their typology, Voit has appropriated the strategy of Bernd and Hilla Becher and his former instructor Thomas Ruff. Yet Voit updates this strategy in a humorous, insightful and visually intriguing commentary on networks and illusion as pervasive mainstays of contemporary life.

Voit’s “Trees” are initially slow to reveal their true nature. Prolonged viewing, however, discloses the artificiality of these central focal points, which, in reality, are cell phone masts that have been meticulously disguised by telecom companies to blend in with their surroundings. One of the photos features a seemingly real palm tree looming above a trailer park in Las Vegas; it stands, dwarfing the other—real—palm trees. Despite its initially convincing appearance, the tree begins to seem uncannily rigid and linear. A subtle, but jarring, sense of artificiality comes to pervade the image, a feeling which is confirmed by the sight of mechanical antenna structures somewhat cloistered within the fake tree’s long, artificial leaves. The trees’ attempts to fit in with their surroundings creates the tension of Voit’s work and make for its great departure from the typological studies of the Bechers; his subjects are aggressively tied to their surroundings and to the social sphere rather than an objective and abstracting gaze. 

The attention drawn by Voit to these all-too-perfect imitations calls to the fore the communications and surveillance networks, which pervade the seemingly natural and commonplace world of our everyday lives. Trees, an emblem of shelter, solidity and the incorruptibility of nature, appear ironically co-opted, channeling information invisibly, through walls and in the service of social, commercial and political interests. Likewise, photography is put under scrutiny in these images, its oft-declared allegiance to verisimilitude undermined and its own artificiality and manipulation highlighted by the very illusionism of the documented scene. Voit’s commentary, however, is not acerbically critical. Rather, by stressing the singularity of these objects in contrast to their intended uniformity with their surroundings, Voit humorously exposes the invisible networks the fake trees represent, and he furthermore quips at the absurdity of the effort. Too valuable to be left open, the massive fake trees are often surrounded by fencing or other protective barriers, emasculated and protected from the world into which they are attempting to blend.

A graduate of the prestigious Düseldorfer Akademie, Robert Voit currently lives and works in Munich. The publication “New Trees” is forthcoming from Steidl. He has won several awards including the Europäischer Architektur Fotografiepreis, the Munich Hausderkunst Preis and the Sophie Smoliar Award. In addition to his native Germany, Voit has exhibited widely in Europe and Asia.

Amador Gallery is located in the landmark Fuller Building at 41 East 57th Street on the 6th floor. Gallery hours are 11 to 6 Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment. For additional information, please contact the gallery at (212) 759-6740, for more information visit www.amadorgallery.com or contact us at info@amadorgallery.com.

Dean Project is pleased to announce, “Parallel States” a group exhibition featuring the work of Palma Blank-Rosenblum, Sangbin IM and Kris Tamburello.

The works in this exhibition explore concepts of structure and visual perception, which includes image construction, deconstruction, transformation and the perspective-dimension of space. The artists in this exhibition have approached these concepts by creating paintings or photography based on abstract geometric compositions or from photographs of city and landscapes.

Through the chosen building process and medium by each of the artists the viewer is presented with a group of works that display elemental and conceptual ideas of image perception.

In the process of layering transparent colors with simple geometric structures Palma Blank-Rosenblum acrylic paintings create both multiple spaces, directions existing in a state of flux, multidimensional evolution and an amplifier of color and light.

Kris Tamburello’s work originates from the use of his architectural photography from in which he chooses details of light and reflections. He then transforms the photo by way of a digital process of stretching and pulling the image in order to uncover the layers of the inner structure of the image.

Sangbin IM’s photographs are the meticulous result of transforming and assembling his own photography and paintings. Acting as a curator he selects a group of images from a pool of his photographs of specific places or subjects. He then organizes imaginary environments of both unfamiliar images of landscape or compositions based on real life elements.

Palma Blank-Rosenblum is based in New York and received her MFA from Yale University in 2006. Sangbin IM is based in New York having received his MFA from Yale University in 2005 and is presently completing his PHD at Columbia University. Kris Tamburello is based in New York where he has been working in photography for fifteen years.

http://www.deanproject.com/

The Walsh Gallery at Seton Hall University is hosting a traveling exhibition by photographer Susan Nolan, Associate Professor of Psychology and United Nations representative for the American Psychology Association. Dr. Nolan’s photographs capture the spirit of post-war Bosnia-Herzegovia, focusing on young people working to improve their lives in the aftermath of war. The images are quite different from the stereotypical depictions broadcast by American media outlets. Instead, Nolan captures youthful subjects engaged in leisure activities, providing positive portrayals of youth expressing their identities through their vocations and avocations. The energy radiated by the young people she encountered during her visits is incredibly uplifting.

Nolan’s photographic essay was inspired by her recent trips to the region, the first of which dated to 2005. She stated, “I was struck by the contrast between the realities of life we saw in Bosnia compared to the images I had come to know through American mass media.” Because Nolan’s initial stay lasted 15 months and her husband Ivan is fluent in the local language, she was able to gain the trust and friendship of the people, resulting in images that penetrate the private worlds of her subjects. The exhibition will subsequently travel to the city of Banja Luka in Bosnia.

http://academic.shu.edu/libraries/gallery/current.htm#budi_

Known for her innovative use of current technology, like search engines and picture sharing services, the work of Brooklyn-based Penelope Umbrico reveals truths within the seemingly ordinary in two new interventions. In Leonards for Leonard, Umbrico investigates the history of the space where she will exhibit – the Leonard Natman Room – creating a project that would draw attention to the disparity between the pre- and post-digital worlds while providing a strange, new subject with companionship. In 5,537,594 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 5/30/09 - for BAM, Umbrico reimagines an ongoing project, using images of sunsets sourced from Flickr in the context of BAM spaces.

Winkleman Gallery is very pleased to inaugurate our new location with This Much Is Certain, the first New York solo exhibition by German conceptual photographer Ulrich Gebert. With selections from two series of his image-cycles, Typus (2005) and Life among beasts(2009), This Much Is Certain serves as an introduction to Gebert’s work in which he examines explosive topics—such as racism and power structures—via unspectacular motifs presented in quasi-scientific and sometimes unsettlingly humorous arrangements.

In each of the three tableaus from the Typus series, for example, Gebert presents 6-7 photographs of coniferous trees ordered by species. Photographed by trekking to remote botanical gardens and parks, often retracing the steps of 19th century scientists, the Typus tableaus are juxtaposed with an “List of Invalid Names”: a list of Latin terms that are no longer in use, making the reconciliation of competing names a difficult process and shattering the fantasies of their original christenings toward an authoritative ordering of nature. In doing so, Gebert also alludes to the darker side of cataloging nature, specifically with regards to totalitarian categorizations of humans.

Similarly, in the Life among beasts series, Gebert presents tableaus of two to five cropped photographs of humans physically interacting with animals. The results are both disturbing and awkwardly tender. New unusual creatures are suggested through the compositions, as impressions of brutality are counterbalanced with an almost absurd humor. Here again, the crisp aesthetics of the presentation suggest a fantasy of order that undercut by closer consideration.

Ulrich Gebert was born in Munich and lives and works in Munich and Leipzig. He received his Masters in Photography at Royal College of Art, London, and studied at the Glasgow School of Art and with Timm Rautert at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at KLEMM’S in Berlin; a group exhibition at project space 176/Zabludowicz Collection, London; and exhibitions at the Kunstverein Hildesheim, the University of Salamanca, and the Pfaffenhofer Kunstverein.

For more information, please contact Edward Winkleman at 212.643.3152 or info@winkleman.com.

Winkleman Gallery
621 West 27th Street (NEW LOCATION)
New York, NY 10001

The Front Room Gallery is proud to present "Wildfire," by Sasha Bezzubov. This will be the first public exhibition of photographs from Bezzubov's recent book by the same name, published by Nazraeli Press. In the "Wildfire" series Bezzubov focuses on the devastation wrought by wildfires on the American west, with dramatic large-scale landscapes containing charred, burned-out forests, houses and neighborhoods. In one image a spiral staircase rises skyward out of the wreckage, the last remnant of a once standing home. Other photographs in this series focus on the damage inflicted on nature, the pine forests, and whole mountainsides reduced to ashes. 

These heartwrenchly beautiful landscapes draw us in and confront us with the uncomfortable notion that we might be somehow to blame. In the introduction to the book "Wildfire," writer Bill McKibben explains these distressing statistics: in the last 35 years the number of fires increased by a factor of four; the average fire went from lasting a week to lasting five; the total area burned increased by six and a half times; the average fire season increased by 78 days, or 64 percent. McKibben then goes on to express that these fires are an indicator of global climate change, caused in part by the earlier thaws of snow in the mountains and longer dry seasons. Within these series of photographs, the larger scope of our involvement with the natural world and our ability to protect and preserve against some of the more devastating effects of natural disasters is brought to question...are we to blame, and can we prevent the onslaught of wildfires, are just a few of the questions that arise from Bezzubov's most recent series. 

This is Sasha Bezzubov's third exhibition at the Front Room Gallery, and a continuation of his ongoing series "Things Fall Apart," landscape photographs of the aftermath of natural disasters. This series, which began in 2001, contains photographs of forest fires, earthquakes, tidal waves, and tornados, around the world. "Wildfire," Bezzubov's most recent presentation from this larger series, targets an intimate look at the catastrophic impact of these uncontrollable fires on many varied landscapes, from urban to wilderness. 

The Front Room Gallery is located at 147 Roebling Street in Williamsburg Brooklyn. Gallery hours are Friday-Sunday 1-6PM and by appointment. Press contact: Daniel Aycock 718-782-2556 

“I don’t deal directly with reality but with representations and stories. The truth basis of what I’m doing is not interesting to me. In an act of storytelling, there is a truth.” Omer Fast, as quoted in New York Magazine, December 21-28, 2009.

These exact words were never uttered in this order. But, like in Fast’s works, it is precisely in re-telling, editing, interpretation, misunderstanding and subjective recollections that we encounter the kernels of what is real.

Postmasters Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of two video works by Omer Fast. The show coincides with Fast’s exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“Take A Deep Breath” (2008)

In the summer of 2002, Martin F. was standing outside a Falafel shop in Jerusalem when it exploded. A trained medic, he went in and discovered the body of a young man on the floor. The young man had lost both legs as well as an arm, but his eyes were open and focused. Hoping for a miracle, Martin F. decided to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. After a few minutes though, the young man’s eyes rolled up into his head and he expired. A crowd of onlookers had gathered outside and the police showed up. They wanted to know how many casualties were inside. When he responded that there was only one, Martin F. realized the young man he had just left inside was the suicide bomber

In “Take A Deep Breath,” extracts from a conversation recorded with Martin F. in Jerusalem alternate with scenes filmed in Los Angeles in which a team of actors attempts to stage his ordeal for the camera. There are two cameras shooting simultaneously. Each shoots a different view.

“De Grote Boodschap” (2007)

Filmed on-location in Mechelen, Belgium, “De Grote Boodschap” presents the stories of paired Flemish characters who appear to be caught in a time-warp: A stewardess and her unemployed husband, an old junkie and her caregiver, a white beatboxer and his black girlfriend, a real-estate agent and a taciturn Arab. As the characters interact, the story of a family’s diamonds is revealed and retracted in an endless loop that mistakes the scatological for the profound.

“Fast is interminably drawn to the figure of “the witness”—the individuals un/officially earmarked to repeat their personal experiences for something like the greater good. And it is precisely in these active, “acted” retellings, in which memory is vocally rehashed, that Fast encourages his protagonists to stumble. Rather than drawing a fine-tooth comb through their dreams à la psychoanalysis, Fast surveys their seemingly-scripted public stories, and from stilted syllables and logical missteps excavates flashes of that abstract notion of the “real.” (…)Perhaps because of this interpretive flair, Gideon Lewis-Kraus has called Fast a “reanimator”; in particular, it is his ability to imagine an interviewee’s (beaten, dead) tale as something other than it is (alive). Trafficking in structural manipulation allows Fast to avoid the video artist’s inevitable gambit of camera-as-confessional, leaving critical, and even ethical, space for the viewer to wallow about in."? Kari Rittenbach “Dramatic Witness: The Art of Omer Fast (Art In America online December 2009)

Omer Fast was a recipient of the Bucksbaum Award at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. In October 2009 he has received National Gallery Prize for Young Art in Berlin. Most recently Fast’s works were shown at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Gallery of South London, Berkeley Art Museum, Lund Konsthall, Indianapolis Museum of Art and Performa 2009.

Giant Robot is proud to host Playful Extremities, a group show featuring new works by Louise Chen, Hellen Jo, Sara Antoinette Martin, Tran Nguyen, and Sylvia Park.

Although Louise Chen is freshly graduated from UC Santa Cruz's art program, her work is uncommonly diverse and realized. She transfers the clean, effortless lines of her etchings and woodcuts to her drawing, seamlessly inserting them into otherworldly landscapes rendered with equal craft and tremendous atmosphere.

Hellen Jo was born in Starkville, MS in 1983 and lived in Florida and New Mexico, but is firmly entrenched in Northern California, where she plays in indie bands and makes indie comics. Her style is loose but attentive--as evidenced in her full-color issues of Jin & Jam, which combine the raw humor and honesty of underground comix with the precision of alternative manga.

Brooklyn-based Sara Antoinette Martin takes familiar subjects of cryptozoology, symbols of Freemasonry, and tattoo flash art and presents them in highly graphic and surreal forms. The bold arrangement of commonly-known-but-mysterious imagery forces viewers to revisit their preconceptions about truth, legend, and aesthetics.

The surreal art of Tran Nguyen has a faded, antique look, but the subjects are timeless.The Savannah, GA-based artist depicts young, beautiful subjects in dark settings--surrounded by melancholy and/or ectoplasm, if not actually emitting them from their pores. The effect is strangely hypnotic and hauntingly beautiful.

Sylvia Park is a New York City-based artist who depicts an imperfect real world with perfect lines. Using only contours, she is able to create out hyper real scenes with depth and feeling. Her precision line work is highly effective for editorial purposes publications, but wavers just enough to convey subtle emotion and urge closer viewing in a gallery setting.

Giant Robot was born as a Los Angeles-based magazine about Asian, Asian-American, and new hybrid culture in 1994, but has evolved into a full-service pop culture provider with shops and galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City, as well as an online equivalent.

A reception featuring many of the artists will be held from 6:30 to 10:00 on Saturday, January 16. For more information about the artists, GRNY, or Giant Robot magazine

http://farmanigallery.com/en/upcoming.php

The Harlem School of the Arts (HSA) Visual Arts Department presents Hank Paper’s Ascension: The Journey of John Coltrane.

In hopes of designation as a national landmark, The Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism provided Hank Paper a grant to photograph the Philadelphia home John Coltrane shared with his cousin, Mary Blair. More than thirty years after Coltrane’s death, Mr. Paper began the task of tracking the musician’s life from birth in North Carolina, through the beginnings of his career in Philadelphia, to his success in New York City. Ascension takes the viewer on a “photographic jazz evocation of a life.” Mr. Paper “wanted his show to be something like a jazz song itself, free-flowing and lyrical, with structure and harmony, and yet with a sense of improvisation, that finally disappears into the air, leaving an ineffable trace of the man and his music.”

The Director of Visual Arts, Adarsh Alphons says, “We are delighted to host Mr. Paper’s ten-year project about the legendary John Coltrane. The exhibition’s photographic journey tells the story of dedication, hard work and perseverance, attributes that the artistic and talented faculty at HSA instill in our students everyday.” During Black History Month, Mr. Paper will also host a Saturdays at Noon discussion about his travels documenting Mr. Coltrane’s life and the subsequent exhibition on February 6th.

Evoking the life of a legend through photos is no easy task yet, Mr. Paper has done so by “visiting surviving neighbors and neighborhood haunts, empty lots and abandoned buildings, old jazz clubs whose sounds had long ceased, and still-thriving venues whose sounds have forever been changed by the music he brought there.” The Harlem School of the Arts is proud to display the talent of Mr. Hank Paper and John Coltrane.

Hank Paper has photographed around the world. His many solo exhibits include The African American Museum in Philadelphia, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the High Point Historical Museum in North Carolina (Grand Opening Exhibit), The Jewish Museum of New Jersey; the Morgenthal-Frederics Gallery is SoHo, and the Tamarkin Leica Gallery in New York. He has also exhibited extensively in New Haven, has received numerous awards and honors, and been published widely. The Kehler-liddell Gallery in New Haven represents him.

This group exhibition includes five photographers whose work explores fascination with “the other" through gendered, sexual, racial and subcultural costuming. 
The exhibiting photographers depict white Europeans and westerners who glamorize and vilify other cultures, at times presenting them as the enemy, while at 
others declaring them a cultural muse. On the surface, the latter appears to be an attempt to understand or elevate them, but in many cases this actually leads 
to further complication by turning their identities into caricatures. This exhibition also explores the motivations for this role-play: is it an act of mere flattery? What does it mean to try on the skin or cultural signifiers of another?

Helen Maurene Cooper makes studio portraits of white women from varying socio-economic back-grounds as they costume themselves in various adornments and/or stereotypes of American hip-hop culture. Cooper’s images explore these performances of synthetic identities and investigate where she sees them fail. How do women use cultural synthesis to signify identity of race and class? What happens when economically privileged white women use the same props as less privileged 
women? At what point do each of these performances break apart and rupture? What is the obsession with the super-feminine and how does it play into “ghetto glam” culture?

Claire Beckett’s series “Simulating Iraq” focuses on military training for the war in Iraq. Her pictures depict the appropriation of Iraqi culture by Americans (both soldiers and civilians) role-playing as Iraqis, using specific costumes, objects and architecture. Shot with a large format camera, her images also raise questions of the nature of documentary photography and the implicit subjectivity of the photographer.

In Michael Buhler Rose’s series, “Constructing the Exotic,” he photographs American born white women raised with Indian culture, religion, dress, in a new community in suburban Florida. These white women in “foreign” garb ultimately become a new kind of "other" in an environment with which they would generally be associated as a majority group.

Interested in displacements and confusions of cultures, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher’s “German Indians” is a series of photos of Germans participating in an annual celebration called “Karnival”, or “Fashing.” Over a period of several days, participants get together, celebrate, and have parades and parties, all dressed in homemade or store-bought native American costumes which they have mimicked from American movies and other sources.

Humble Arts Foundation is a not-for-profit organization that works to advance the careers of emerging fine art photographers by way of exhibition and publishing opportunities, limited-edition print sales, twice–annual artists grants, and educational programming.

Founded in 2005 by amani olu and Jon Feinstein, Humble has been a pioneering hub for showcasing new fine art photography, and has served as a resource for collectors, galleries, museums, curators, photo editors, and bloggers internationally. http://hafny.org/

Like the Spice is pleased to announce Bennett Morris: Climate Untamed.  This will be the artist's first solo show in New York highlighting twelve photographs made between 2006-2009 that diagram Morris's unique examination on beauty, fear, politics, and the sublime.

Steeped in the visual language of Romanticism, Morris's photographs examine the intimate relationship between beauty and fear while playing on the diluted modern politics of  "shock and awe". Re-examining the classical thresholds like harmony and unity, Bennett follows in the path of painters like Salvatore Rosa who was drawn to the foreboding beauty of the Pyrenees when the term "awesome" was still weighted by a near-religious awe. The result of Bennett's exploration into this godlike fear and beauty creates a show that is more about climate than atmosphere, releasing singular moments to a vast array of emotions.

For Bennett the photograph becomes a means to an end as he begins his process by constructing large-scale dioramas within water tanks using fragments from fallen architectural structures, wax, model building parts, and other found materials. These post-human controlled environments are built for ruin; as he fills his tank with water what took many months to build disassembles in minutes. While paint pigments are added with perfect control Bennett has only minutes to capture with his digital camera these transcendent yet ever ephemeral color reactions. He infuses these underwater landscapes with elements from the German Romantics and the Hudson River School and then steeps them with Gothic Revival. What comes from this is sculpture, forced into false scales, and a strange, terror-stricken beauty, born from a luminiferous aether made ‘simply’ from water and paint. Balancing between beauty and terror in this design one is able to look through this cloud to see the deception and recognize beauty.

Born in Portland, Maine in 1978 Bennett Morris earned his BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth in 2001 and his MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art from the Maine College of art in 2007. He is a recipient of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture fellowship. Mr. Morris work has been exhibited extensively in group shows across the US. Mr. Morris will also be featured in Skowhegan at 92YTribeca: An Alumni Exhibition running concurrently with this exhibition. Bennett is an Assistant Professor at the Maine College of Art. This will be Mr. Morris' first New York Solo Exhibition.

Announcing the launch of 1500 Gallery, located in New York City’s West Chelsea

gallery district at 511 West 25th Street, #607. 1500 Gallery specializes in Brazilian

photography, and is the first art gallery in the world with this explicit focus. 1500

interprets the notion of “Brazilian photography” to comprise photography made

by Brazilian photographers, as well as images bearing a conceptual or thematic

relationship to Brazil. 1500 represents the work of 17 artists, both emerging and

established: 6 of 1500’s photographers are represented in the Sao Paulo Museum

of Art’s Collection of Photography. 1500’s collection of images includes both

contemporary and vintage photography.

1500’s inaugural exhibition is a group show entitled Brazilian, which will run Feb

11 – May 1.

1500 Gallery represents the following photographers: Rémy Amezcua, Julio

Bittencourt, Bruno Cals, João Castilho, Marc Dumas, Antonio Augusto Fontes,

Bina Fonyat (1945-1985), Edouard Fraipont, Garapa (collective), Christian Gaul,

Hirosuke Kitamura, Marc van Lengen, Murillo Meirelles, Gustavo Pellizzon,

Eduardo Queiroga, Vincent Rosenblatt, Jens Stoltze.

For further information about each artist, as well as the works presented, please

see online at www.1500gallery.com

1500 Gallery was founded by Alexandre Bueno de Moraes and Andrew S. Klug.

Alex was born in Rio de Janeiro, and raised in Paris and New York City. He now

lives between New York City and Rio de Janeiro, where he owns a photo

production company and photographers’ agency (www.1500brasil.com), one of

the most prominent in Brazil, with offices in Rio de Janeiro and New York.

Andrew graduated in 2009 with an MBA from Columbia University, and prior to

that worked as a corporate lawyer (specialized in banking and finance) at the

Montreal office of one of Canada’s top-tier national law firms.

Contact: Andrew Klug

c: +1.917.362.0770

e: andrew@1500gallery.com

Luhring Augustine is pleased to present its first exhibition featuring the work of Daido Moriyama, one of Japan’s leading figures in photography. Witness to the spectacular changes that transformed postwar Japan, his photographs express a fascination with the cultural contradictions of age-old traditions that persist within modern society. Providing a harsh, crude vision of city life and the chaos of everyday existence, strange worlds, and unusual characters, his work occupies the space between the objective and the subjective, the illusory and the real.

Moriyama takes pictures with a small hand-held camera that enables him to shoot freely while walking, running or through the windows of moving cars. Blurred, taken from vertiginous angles or overwhelmed by close-ups, his images are charged with a palpable and frenetic energy that reveal a unique proximity to his subject matter. Snapshots of stray dogs, posters, mannequins in shop windows or shadows cast into alleys present the beauty and sometimes terrifying reality of a marginalized landscape. His anonymous and detached approach enables him to capture the “visible present” made up of accidental and uncanny discoveries as he experiences them.

Moriyama emerged as a photographer in the 1960’s at the tail end of the VIVO collective, a revolutionary and highly influential group of Japanese artists who reexamined the conventions of photography during the tumultuous postwar period. William Klein’s loose, Beat style images of New York City in the 1960s also served as a major turning point for Moriyama, who found inspiration in Klein’s free-form photographic style. Taken by these innovative approaches at home and abroad, Moriyama ultimately went on to forge his own radical style.

“Hawaii”, Moriyama’s most recent body of work, was produced over a period of three years and presents his distinct perspective on the daily lives of the people living on the islands of Hawaii and Oahu. Returning to the island five times before feeling prepared to shoot these surroundings, Moriyama’s overall approach is purposeful and considered despite his loose and highly informal style. The series was recently exhibited at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and published in a volume by the institution.

Daido Moriyama was born in Osaka in 1938. He has had museum shows around the world including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. His work is part of many major public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Getty in Los Angeles.

The Silverstein Photography Annual (SPA) is part of the gallery's ongoing effort to provide exposure to emerging artists whose work incorporates the medium of photography. Bruce Silverstein Gallery with the guidance of curatorial advisor Nathan Lyons, annually invites ten prominent curators to nominate one artist whom they feel deserves the opportunity for further exposure within New York's cultural milieu.

David Zwirner is pleased to present Thomas Ruff’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery, marking the New York debut of new work in two series: zycles and cassini. 

Among the most influential photographers working today, Ruff has redefined photography’s conceptual possibilities, simultaneously capturing and questioning the essence of photography as both a means and a tool for visual experience. Over the past twenty-five years, he has approached various photographic genres in his work, including portraiture, the nude, landscape and architectural photography. He carries out these investigations using his own analog and digital photographs, computer-generated images, alongside images culled from scientific archives, print media, and the Internet. 

In both of his new series — drawing from the natural sciences, astronomy, neurology, and art history — Ruff creates elaborate, open-ended visual systems that challenge viewer’s perceptions, demonstrating that structures can become increasingly complex the more one contemplates the details. 

The zycles series, grounded in mathematics and physics, shows computer screen-grab recordings of curves modeled in three dimensions. The views captured by the computer are produced as large-scale chromogenic prints, or are printed directly onto canvas. Inspired by 19th century science books, Ruff’s zycles present abstract contours based on “cycloids,” the mathematical curves obtained from rolling one curve along a second, fixed curve. Particularly interesting to Ruff was Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s (1831-1879) treatise on electro-magnetism, accompanied by copperplate engravings of magnetic fields. Ruff found these delicate traceries, while not intentionally aesthetic, suggestive of minimalist drawings. To explore their visual and spatial possibilities, Ruff used a three-dimensional rendering program to translate the algebraic formulae of the cycloids — regarded in mathematics as “the most aesthetic of curves” — into computer-generated imagery. The resulting virtual structures display the intricate linear filigree of cycloids as they would appear in space. The spiraling formations, always faithful to their mathematical origins, evoke a multitude of forms: the trajectories of planets, cascading ribbons, line drawings, or musical vibrations. 

The works in the cassini series are based on photographic captures of Saturn taken by NASA’s Cassini-Huygens Spacecraft, which launched in 2004 and completed its initial four-year mission in June 2008. The spacecraft orbited around Saturn to provide the first in-depth, close-up study of the planet and its domain, including its rings, moons, and magnetosphere, the enormous magnetic bubble that controls its planetary movement. Ruff acquired these black and white raw images from NASA’s website, where they were broadcast directly from the spacecraft and made available for public download. Through computer manipulation, Ruff infused each gray-scale image with saturated color. The resulting chromogenic prints transform the originals into visual statements that both capture the sweeping enormity of planetary structures while still distancing themselves from concrete forms, evocative instead of abstract and minimalist compositions.

Thomas Ruff (born 1958, Zell am Harmersbach, Germany) is known for his exploration of the mechanical production of images, and how technical mediation can influence a picture’s expressiveness. His telescopic views of the night sky, Sterne, printed from pre-existing negatives; his provocative nudes borrowed from pornography websites; Substrat, his colorful manipulations of Japanese manga and anime; and his jpegs demonstrate Ruff’s approach to reinventing existing images. Together with zycles and cassini, these serialized considerations draw attention to the abstraction that occurs when the visually explicit is re-imagined.

He was the subject of solo museum exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Museum für neue Kunst, Freiburg; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Mu˝csarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest (all 2009); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Sprengel Museum, Hanover (all 2007). His work is held in the collections of many major museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Art Institute of Chicago; Essl Museum, Klosterneuberg; Dallas Museum of Art; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. He was the 2006 recipient of the Infinity Award for Art presented by the International Center of Photography, New York, and in 2009 Aperture published jpegs, 

As the country struggled to regain its sense of direction following the political activism 

and social idealism of the 1960s, photographers embarked on a search to discover new 
subjects, methods and meanings. Color offered an obvious if indistinct way forward, a path 
leading beyond the void left by the 1960s and the era of the "concerned photographer" 
(as defined by Cornell Capa in 1968) toward some new as yet to be defined sense of purpose.
1970s color photography may thus be characterized as a chaotic and disparate search, 
a heterogeneous effort encompassing diverse bodies of work by artists as dissimilar as 
Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston and others toward the rediscovery of 
something ennobling and purposeful in modern American life. 

Opening February 25th, Owls Have More Fun is a solo show of works by Danish artist Lisa Grue featuring the artist's bold and exuberant nature illustrations on custom-made wallpaper, handprinted porcelain plates, and more. Lisa, known for her playful and sometimes shocking illustrations that mix girlishness with feminism, puts her spin on owl and nature motifs, surrounding viewers with a magical world via domestic objects.

The show will comprise a large, custom-made wallpaper, 100 handprinted porcelain plates, and a rug, all customized with Lisa's black and white illustrations that mix owls, flowers, and words. Limited-edition prints will also be available.

Lisa's powerful and fun illustrations remind viewers to never forget the magic in everyday life. In addition, they make a statement to girls and women that wisdom and beauty go hand in hand. And of course, Lisa's artwork reminds us all to love and take care of our natural world.

Please join us and the artist for a cozy opening with (limited!) owl goody giveaways on Thursday, February 25th, at 7-9 pm!

In conjunction with this show, gallery hanahou is asking owl-lovers everywhere to share their own owl artwork in the new gallery hanahou Flickr group. We already have some wonderful owls posted - keep them coming!

galleryhanahou.com

RSVP: info@galleryhanahou.com

This March, Factory Fresh welcomes heliumcowboy artspace of Hamburg, Germany as we partner to presents the art of Boris Hoppek & Alex Diamond. Our two galleries will bring together German Artist Boris Hoppek & transient Alex Diamond’s work as they have received increasing international popularity in recent years. These artists have exhibited in solo and group shows in museums, galleries, festivals and art fairs in Europe as well as in the US. In a joint effort the artist will show new works on paper and Boris has promised an up the skirt installation.

Boris Hoppek, has been an acclaimed name in the Graffiti-world since the late eighties, more recently he has become an outstanding talent within the contemporary art scene. By thematizing sexuality, violence, racism and oppression in a very clean and accurate style, the artist isolates provocative themes for contemplation. Since 2004, the heliumcowboy artspace has exhibited his works in three solo shows and on diverse art fairs. In Basel and Miami 2007, Hoppek set up huge interactive cardboard installations at SCOPE, and today he is one of the most prominent European artists coming from a background in Street Art/Graffiti. For SCOPE Basel 2008, Hoppek was invited to convert the water taxis commuting across the Rhine into floating artworks, bringing his narrative potential away from the constrictions of a traditional booth scenario onto the water.

Alex Diamond is unseizable as a person and difficult to categorize as an artist, he is more fantasy than reality. His main issue always centres around his work and its presentation, but never around the personality of an individual. Alex Diamond appears always as a new and different creation of a role or character with every one of his shows. Not limited by a CV, a formative education or even a dedicated technique or style, Alex Diamond constantly develops a new specific presence for the “Artist behind the work“. Alex Diamond is an artist who apparently lives solely through the art he creates – and vice versa. He plays mind tricks with visual aids, pleasing at one moment, disturbing in the next. Independent from styles and techniques, he mirrors life and our constant fight for possession, superiority, survival and love in an almost nonchalant way. Having focused on his project Being Alex Diamond for the last year and a half (and of which also a catalogue has been published lately), the artist will now present a whole new body of drawings at Factory Fresh.

Steven Kasher Gallery is pleased to present the first exhibition of previously unpublished and unexhibited photographs that Warhol selected for his 1979 book Andy Warhol’s Exposures.The exhibition will feature over 70 unique vintage black and white photographic prints. It will be accompanied by a new book, Andy Warhol: Unexposed Exposures (Steidl/Kasher, 2010), edited and with an introduction by Bob Colacello (who was executive editor of the original book as well). Starting in 1976, Warhol shot several rolls of film every week and selected images for the 1979 book. He had intended to title it Social Diseases, but his concept was heavily watered down by his publishers at the time and many of the selected images were removed. Colacello writes: 

There is a sense of intimacy as well as of voyeurism, of funny-looking, insecure, wistful Andy, through flattery and attentiveness, trying to connect. Yet, because he was not just any photographer but a famous artist, a star, there is often a sense that the looking is being done at the man with the camera as well as by him. In some cases, the subjects are clearly performing for their fellow luminary, or close friend, or boss. As spontaneous as these images may seem, they are intrinsically staged, with Warhol himself as both chronicler and catalyst of the moments he is documenting.

And what moments they are! Only Andy could get David Hockney in extra-brief running shorts, or Susan Sontag batting her eyelashes across a fancy restaurant table at Gloria Vanderbilt, or Halston’s Venezuelan window dresser and lover, Victor Hugo, sitting under Goya’s Red Boy in Kitty Miller’s Park Avenue parlor. Here’s Faye Dunaway smooching fashion designer Giorgio di Sant’Angelo; Paloma Picasso spreading her hands to indicate the width of one of her father’s paintings; Margaret Trudeau, Canada’s First Lady, chatting up Milos Forman. Indeed, almost all the face cards of the late 70s scene are here, at ease behind the velvet rope: brash Steve Rubell and reticent Ian Schrager, Diane Von Furstenberg and Barry Diller with Henry Kissinger, Mick Jagger beside Catherine Deneuve, Roman Polanski, Diana Ross, Tatum and Ryan O’Neal, Liz Taylor deep in her Senator John Warner period, Arnold Schwarzenegger before politics, and O.J. Simpson when everyone still loved him. So are the footnotes of celebrity history: Elvis’s ex, Priscilla Presley, with her Scientologist model boyfriend, and Ruth Kligman, the woman who was in the car with Jackson Pollack when he crashed it into a tree and was killed. And let’s not forget—Andy didn’t—Don King, boxing impresario; little Edie Beale, Jackie’s batty cousin; Famous Amos, the cookie king, and Norman the neighborhood coke dealer, if your neighborhood happened to be the West Village. Enough! You get the picture. Andy always did.

A.M. Richard Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by photographer Andrew Garn.

In the summer of 2008, Andrew Garn was assigned by the Smithsonian Institution to document biodiversity in a remote area of the Peruvian Amazon. This mission was an incomparable opportunity to photograph an unexplored region of the jungle. Accompanied by six scientists and a number of macheteros, the team traveled throughout the brush, many times creating new trails in untouched rain forest.
Soon the duplicitous nature of the expedition surfaced. The Smithsonian was in place to document the pristine conditions of the forest during the early stages of an extensive oil exploration project initiated by the Spanish energy giant Repsol. Leasing an immense 800 sq mile tract from the Peruvian government, Repsol created over 20 helicopter landing fields by clear cutting immense swaths of forest. Explosive charges were set off to measure the oil reserves under the jungle floor. Eventually, pumping rigs were flown in and a 50-mile pipeline was constructed to bring the oil to market.

Mr. Garn’s experience in the Amazon reveals a place of majestic beauty as well as one of overwhelming chaos, confusion and terror. His photographs and 8 minute video, Lost Amazon, depict a setting of obfuscation, where the boundaries of heavenly reprieve frequently dissolved into torment and wretchedness. 
Two series of photographs detail the jungle inhabitants in their grace and inevitable demise. The Shadow Series illustrates a troubling world where lies an artificial sense of safety. The main body of work, set in a darkened gallery, conveys both the seduction and fear that make up the Amazon.

This is Mr. Garn’s third exhibition at A.M. Richard Fine Art. Mr. Garn is the recipient of numerous grants. His works are in several private and public collections. Most recently, Mr. Garn was invited by the U.S. Consulate General in Russia to participate in the First Biennale of Contemporary Art in the Urals (September 2010).

In the project room, Toxic Molecules, welded steel and paper wall sculptures by artist Christy Rupp. Ms. Rupp has long been pre-occupied with global environmental issues. Her work, deceptively whimsical, is charged with dangerously lucid social concerns.

Sugar is honored to host A sense of Humor, a select group of photographs that will hit your funny bone. Elliott Erwitt, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Diane Arbus, and more.