ARTINFO's review of Norton Museum's "Now WHAT?"

Exhibitionists at the Art Fair

"Two curators from the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, Charles Stainback and Cheryl Brutvan, spent 45 hours over five days cruising 13 of this month's art fairs in Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach, viewing thousands of artworks in the hope of finding a common thread and then showing the best of the bunch. 

"The hard part of the assignment was not the looking," says Stainback, the William and Sarah Ross Soter curator of photography at the Norton. "The hard part was trying to select a cohesive body of work that said more than 'these are our favorites.' That was never our intention." 

Allyson Strafella's "Inverted Red Catenary," 2010

Within a short time, Stainback and Brutvan determined that information sharing, communication, and messaging were much on the minds of artists today, and the show they organized at the Norton, titled "Now What?" and running through March 13, includes several works that use actual materials — books, newspapers, receipts, and so on — as both medium and message. In all, there are 39 drawings, photographs, and sculptures by 21 artists, many of them previously unknown to the curators (and quite a few new to this writer as well). 

Some were modest but painstakingly crafted efforts. Allyson Strafella's drawings are made with a typewriter, repeatedly pounding on punctuation marks to arrive at a pattern of garbled language and tidy grids. Mark Dion's "Herbarium" offers re-creations of plant drawings made by an ambitious horticulturist murdered by Seminole Indians in 1840. Richard Gilpin's abstracted cityscape, "Splinter XVII," was arrived at after scoring and peeling away the surface of a photograph to produce a lively syncopated surface that calls to mind a delightfully tipsy but anorectic Mondrian. 

With works like these, a certain amount of backstory is helpful in understanding the artists' goals (this is a hurdle "typical of much contemporary art," notes Stainback, who promises that wall text will soon alleviate some puzzlement), but others beguile without revealing their stratagems. Mickalene Thomas's "You're Gonna Give Me the Love I Need" is a 12-foot-long tableau of an African-American odalisque, studded with rhinestones, reclining on a gaudy patchwork divan. It's not clear what this has to do with "information sharing" or "messaging," but the work certainly radiates heat. As does Liza Lou's elaborate "tapestry" of glass beads on aluminum panels, which appear to have been partly effaced or defaced by a creepy mold-like growth across the surface."

Read full review @ ARTINFO

ZOU CAO | EVERLASTING CLASSIC - ArtDaily Review

Von Lintel Gallery Present an Exhibition of Paintings by Chinese Artist and Philosopher Zou Cao

Zou Cao, Internationale – Andy Warhol, 2010, oil on canvas, 15 panels, 35.4 x 35.4 inches each. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery.

"Von Lintel Gallery present Everlasting Classic, the first United States solo exhibition of paintings by Chinese artist and philosopher Zou Cao.

Some say the rising tide of globalization threatens to drown individuality in a sea of sameness. Zou Cao resists this possibility by using his own fingerprint as a motif, asserting his unique identity, and by extension, the importance of all individuals. In past works, Cao used actual fingerprints as a drawing technique to render politically charged scenes.

For the paintings in this show, he has expanded the technique, literally, by enlarging a single print to overlap portraits of well-known figures such as Chairman Mao, Madonna, Audrey Hepburn, Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson.

The images declare that all people, famous or not, are unique and that despite our increasingly collective existence, every individual adds their singular mark to our shared history. Combining individual and group identities this way, Cao has found a patch of high ground on which we might all avoid globalization's torrent of anonymity."

Zou Cao has exhibited widely throughout the globe, including at the Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai; the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; the Walter Art Museum, Augsburg, Germany and the Indonesia Yudeyao Museum of Art, Jakarta, Indonesia"

ArtDaily

DAVID MAISEL | 'Place as Idea' @ Wooster Art Museum

David Maisel, Terminal Mirage #215-9-4, 2003, Chromogenic print, Gift of Edward Osowski in honor of the photographer and the Eliza S. Paine Fund, 2005.102

"Place as Idea explores the idea of place as a vehicle for visualizing time, displacement, memory, and fantasy in works by an international roster of contemporary artists.

Anchoring the show conceptually and chronologically is Rundown, a video of three 1969 projects by Robert Smithson, each of which involved the pouring of viscous substances: glue, concrete, and asphalt. Voiceover by the artist explains some of his concerns specific to these works, as well as elucidates Smithson's still-influential ideas about entropy, geologic time, and the positioning of the artwork in the land as opposed to the gallery. In her 2008 single-channel video, The Vanishing, Julia Hechtman takes us into the land to witness the digital disappearance of a lone tree in a barren landscape and leaves us to reconcile an emotionally-charged absence and ghostly afterimage. Other artists, including Yun-Fei Ji, David Maisel, Paul Noble, Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz, and Rachel Whiteread consider ideas of place as sites of human intervention into the landscape, drawing our attention to acts of fantasy and folly, erection and erasure, ruin and reclamation. 

Uta Barth, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Abelardo Morell expand our expectations of the photograph as a record of architectural experience. Cinematic time and place are re-conceptualized by John Baldessari, Fiona Banner, and Hiroshi Sugimoto as stationary imagery or text. Martin Kippenberger's collaborative project, created in 1991 under the conceptual umbrella of the “The William Holden Company,” takes the form of a series of postcards (a universal conceptualization of place) mailed from various locations along a trek in Africa, signifying then and now connections and distances between individuals, geographies, economies, and cultures."

This exhibition has been supported by the Don and Mary Melville Contemporary Art Fund and Worcester Magazine.

Link

MARCO BREUER 'The Nature of the Pencil' Brooklyn Rail Review

MARCO BREUER The Nature of the Pencil

by Shane McAdams

"In Nature, Breuer strays from his standard gallery presentation by placing each work irregularly within a soot-gray band of paint, adding chalk marks that make a clear reference to a blackboard. This enveloping motif suggests an experimental relationship between the classroom and the darkroom as it relates to Breuer’s photo-based work. Most of the chalk marks are cryptic: the word "extraction," some Twombly-esque scrawls, several half-erased schematic marks around framed art works. There’s some German text that translates to something like "what's important is the white between the words." Though one can try to decode these words and glyphs, their real function seems to be symbolic, to be seen and felt rather than read. Kind of like the work we were required to show in math class to let the teacher know we weren’t using a calculator to get the answers.

Breuer's individual photographs are mysterious and seductive even if you don’t know how they came to be. Though "how" is integrally tied to "what" in his work. I won’t reveal how certain images in this show, his fifth at Von Lintel, were made, because as a viewer, guessing their nature is part of the experience. In the past, Breuer has burned, cut, shot at, and otherwise maimed photographic paper to create imagery. Unlike Alberto Burri, who embraced the brut rawness of, say, a burned piece of plastic, Breuer’s work uses violent and unorthodox actions to transform his materials into more refined visual delectations.

...

The title of the show comes from William Henry Fox Talbot's book The Pencil of Nature, which is another cue to Breuer's interest in experimentation. Talbot was one of the pioneers, if not the inventor, of photography, and his investigation into the medium reflects Breuer's own interests in the mechanics of the photographic image and the development of cameraless photography.

The experimental bent of Breuer's practice is revealed slowly and surely as one sees more of it. A single photo might be a cousin of Andreas Feininger's image of the lights of a Navy helicopter; another might be an Uta Barth, or a photo of a bacterial culture stolen from a microbiology laboratory. But as a whole, the seduction of the images gives way to the integrity of Breuer's search itself. This abiding experimental spirit is as important as the images formed from the manipulated emulsion. The experimental impulse is the common ancestor of contemporary art and science. Unfortunately, the two disciplines have diverged dramatically. As a portion of the scientific world has become more and more proficient at reverse-engineering the mechanics of human emotion, and devising formulas for manufacturing popular entertainment, art has taken on an antagonistic role in order to keep things unfamiliar (Victor Shklovsky) and new (Ezra Pound).

Thus, we get bloated, soulless entertainment with the power to transfix and opiate, and art that is often as preoccupied with its opponent as it is by its own creative obligations. The reason Marco Breuer's work can be an antidote to a saccharine animated film about dragons isn’t because it's less flawed, more transfixing, or more morally upright; it is because it’s full of flaws and indulgent curiosity. His work is built on scrapes and scars; indeed his work is the scars of experimentation that represent the will and drive to make something unique."

Read full review

ALLYSON STRAFELLA to be featured in Norton Museum's "Now WHAT?"

Two of  ALLYSON STRAFELLA's works from PULSE Miami have been chosen to be featured in Norton Museum's upcoming group exhibition "Now WHAT?":

"Now WHAT? will celebrate the world of contemporary art that will be at the Norton Museum's doorstep in December. The Norton is poised to take advantage of the energy and innovation found in the many representations of contemporary art at Art Basel Miami Beach, as well as the numerous satellite fairs which descend upon Miami Beach in early December. 

Through a selection by curators Cheryl Brutvan and Charlie Stainback, the Norton will provide a ― snapshot of this moment in contemporary artistic practice without the pretext of a biennial survey. Instead this exhibition will showcase some of the most engaging work being made today and provoke discussions about the art of our time and expanding the Norton Museum’s collection. Now WHAT? will inaugurate the contemporary galleries and adjacent photography galleries of the Norton Museum, recently designated by Norton Director and CEO, Hope Alswang.

Organized by the Norton Museum of Art.  

Local presentation of this exhibition is made possible in part through the generosity of Gilbert and Ann Maurer and the Contemporary and Modern Art Council of the Norton Museum of Art."

Link

PULSE Miami 2010

We also snapped Chelsea gallery Von Lintel owner Thomas von Lintel, whose gallery shows contemporary paintings and photography. He’s standing in front of a painting of Angkor Wat that’s so detailed, we thought it was a photo. 
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PULSE Contemporary Art Fair's Photos
PULSE Miami 2010

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ZOU CAO | EVERLASTING CLASSIC - Opening Reception Dec 9, 6-8 PM

 Zou Cao, Internationale Andy Warhol, 2010, Oil on canvas, 35.4 x 35.4 inches each, group of 15

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present Everlasting Classic, the first United States solo exhibition of paintings by Chinese artist and philosopher Zou Cao.

Some say the rising tide of globalization threatens to drown individuality in a sea of sameness. Zou Cao resists this possibility by using his own fingerprint as a motif, asserting his unique identity, and by extension, the importance of all individuals. In past works, Cao used actual fingerprints as a drawing technique to render politically charged scenes. For the paintings in this show, he has expanded the technique, literally, by enlarging a single print to overlap portraits of well-known figures such as Chairman Mao, Madonna, Audrey Hepburn, Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson. The images declare that all people, famous or not, are unique and that despite our increasingly collective existence, every individual adds their singular mark to our shared history. Combining individual and group identities this way, Cao has found a patch of high ground on which we might all avoid globalization's torrent of anonymity.

Zou Cao has exhibited widely throughout the globe, including at the Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai; the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; the Walter Art Museum, Augsburg, Germany and the Indonesia Yudeyao Museum of Art, Jakarta, Indonesia.

MARCO BREUER | Nature of the Pencil - Snapshots review

Sugimoto and Breuer in Chelsea

Posted by Jean Dykstra on November 19, 2010

"Two of the most interesting photography shows in Chelsea at the moment have as much to do with drawing as they do with photography. Hiroshi Sugimoto at Pace Gallery and Marco Breuer at Von Lintel are both showing cameraless images made by 'drawing" on photographic paper. Yet both bodies of work also have direct roots back to Henry Fox Talbot, inventor, polymath, and pioneer in the medium of photography. ...

Von Lintel Gallery terms Marco Breuer's show, Nature of the Pencil, on view through December 4, "a drawing installation," but his title is a play on Fox Talbot’s seminal book, The Pencil of Nature, and it explores the intersection of drawing and photography. This has been Breuer’s longtime subject and he continues to explore the idea of mark-making, without camera or film, through destruction and decay, using various chemical or physical processes. In previous works, Breuer, who has been called a "process photographer," has shot at photographic paper and set off small explosions over it, among other things. Here, too, the chromogenic paper, or color reversal paper, has been scraped and scratched, leaving weirdly luminous abstractions. The individual works are mounted on walls that appear to be blackboards, with titles notated in chalk as well as erased remnants of notes left barely visible, suggesting an experimenter at work. Experimentation, in fact, is the driving force behind both of these shows by artists who are not constrained by definitions of what photography should be."

Read full review @ Snapshots

'Marco Breuer’s Nature of the Pencil at Von Lintel Gallery' review @ The Drawing Center

By Kaegan Sparks

"Marco Breuer’s current exhibition, Nature of the Pencil, at Von Lintel Gallery pitches his hybridized practice into the purview of drawing. The title, an anagram of pioneering photographer William Henry Fox Talbot’s mid-nineteenth century treatise The Pencil of Nature, sifts dual modalities of Breuer’s work to the fore. Working primarily with photosensitive materials in the darkroom, Breuer engages photography obliquely through manual mark-making; he almost never uses a camera. Moreover, seeking to activate inherent chemical properties of photographic paper through constrained interventions, Breuer’s approach is both exacting and laissez-faire, circumscribed and organic, provoking generative tensions at the contact point of stylus and substrate.

Breuer says in an interview with Carter Foster, curator of drawings at the Whitney Museum of American Art, that his goal is “getting photography, ideally, to the immediacy of a drawing.” Driven by a formalist deference to his materials, Breuer’s work preempts photography’s traditional mimetic modes to favor its capacity as a more literal index of the physical mark. His hallmarked scratching, searing, scoring, perforating and other abrasive, subtractive processes, alongside controlled explosions, gunfire, and applied chemicals ranging from saliva to alcohol, are corporeal and often violent, yet at the same time carefully controlled. Breuer tends to commit the lifetime of a specific material or instrument to a single piece; he avoids the potential of reworking. For instance, many scratch pieces are limited to the use of a single blade in one working period, after which the work is completed and the tool destroyed. In others an object is set ablaze, exposing the paper by both emitting light and obstructing it; the product documents the duration of the event before the object is consumed.

Breuer’s recent installations at Von Lintel Gallery and earlier this year at the Minneapolis Institute of Art deviate from this unembellished self-determination, introducing subjective processes through chalked annotations on the gallery walls. The Von Lintel press release text suggests that “[t]he altered gallery, painted with a band of chalkboard black, refers to the photographic darkroom as well as the classroom.” Breuer has described his practice in the darkroom as performative, but private. The final state of the material is always paramount; the process behind his individual photographs is rarely legible to a viewer. This relationship is somewhat dismantled in his present installations, exposing the artist’s working process more transparently through handwriting (and traces of erasure) left on the wall.

Whereas at MIA Breuer integrated the chalkboard midway through the exhibition, footnoting his work with process notes and interjecting an Asher-esque institutional critique by indicating the gallery’s architectural and logistical apparatus with tick marks and arrows, at Von Lintel his voice is subdued and introspective. Unlike at MIA, there is no performative transformation stressing his pieces to react to their context; instead of explicating their methodologies to the extreme of optical diagrams, here Breuer defers to sparse musings. Inscribed on the south wall of the Von Lintel installation is an adage excerpted from the Tagebucher (Sketchbooks) of Swiss writer Max Frisch: What is important is what cannot be said, the white space between the words."

Read full review @ The Drawing Center

MARCO BREUER | Nature of the Pencil - DLK COLLECTION review

Marco Breuer's last show at Von Lintel (roughly a year and a half ago, here) was hung in a generally conventional manner: framed images were placed at eye level against the white walls of the gallery. The installation focused the viewer's attention on the finished product, object quality of the artworks, and on the underlying physical processes that were used to create their abstract colors and patterns. 
 

Fast forward to Breuer's newest show, and something altogether different is going on. The artist is still hard at work in the darkroom, taking light sensitive papers and experimenting with a dizzying array of loosely controlled scrapes, scratches, and cuts, searching for new visual outcomes. What's new this time around is that Breuer has installed the recent pictures in a way that invites us into his brain, to watch as he improvises and iterates on ideas. In many ways, it is almost an exhibition of the remnants of a cerebral performance piece more than it is an exhibition of photographs.

Each image or set of images has a series of cryptic annotations written in chalk near the framed works. The analytical, puzzle solver in me felt challenged to figure out what each one meant. Were they dimensions? Or commentary? Or symbolic references? 4.6.6 is scrawled above one of the pastel, geometric abstractions. I stood for a few moments before I figured it out: 4 lines, 6 colors, 6 shapes. Under a spider web of scratchings are images of a light bulbs with strike through slashes. Aha, these works were made by scratching the paper with a piece of glass, trying to find the approximate center of the paper, completely in the dark. As you walk around the room, there is a distinct sense of intellectual art in progress, of process being figured out along the way, with a little help from both chance and craft. 

 

I found the images of vibrant blue and yellow, almost like folded, interrupted waves across the surface of the paper, to be the most visually compelling; they really stick out from far away. The others require a more intimate look: tiny lines that shuttle and wiggle across the image as though they were raked by an array of manic seismograph needles. What I liked best, however, was the exposition of Breuer's thoughts, the ability to see how he makes aesthetic connections. The unconventional installation gives the artworks a more personal grounding and backstory, opening up an unusual opportunity for the viewer to appreciate the thinking that has gone on.

Read full review @ DLK COLLECTION

Marco Breuer in conversation with Brett Littman

Marco Breuer, Nature of the Pencil, Von Lintel Gallery, New York, October 14 - December 4, 2010 (installation)

In concurrence with his exhibition at Von Lintel Gallery, Marco Breuer will sit down with Brett Littman, Executive Director of the Drawing Center, to talk about his new show and his work leading up to this point. Breuer's show, "Nature of the Pencil" is on exhibit at Von Lintel Gallery from October 14 – December 4, 2010.

The event is free and open to the public, though seating is limited. To RSVP for the event, please contact the gallery at (212) 242-0599 or email at gallery@vonlintel.com.

Von Lintel Gallery will hold a public reception at the gallery prior to the event at 6 pm. Join us for wine and a look at the exhibition before walking over to the theatre. The gallery is located at 520 W. 23rd Street, New York. 

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Marco Breuer received his academic training at the Fachhochschule Darmstadt (1988-92) and the Lette-Verein Berlin (1986-88) in Germany. He has exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe and his work is in numerous collections, including the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the New York Public Library; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany.

Breuer is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2006), a Japan-US Friendship Commission/NEA Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship (2005), a Carriage House Residency at the Islip Art Museum (2004), a Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant (2000) and three MacDowell Colony residencies (2003, 2001, 2000). His publication SMTWTFS received wide critical acclaim and a photo-eye Award for Best Photography Book of 2002. In 2007 Aperture published a monograph of Breuer's work titled Early Recordings. Breuer lives in Upstate New York.

Brett Littman (B.A., Philosophy, UC San Diego) is currently the Executive Director of The Drawing Center, New York. Previously he was the Deputy Director at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; Co-Executive Director of Dieu Donné Papermill, SoHo; Associate Director of UrbanGlass, Brooklyn; and Chair of the Brooklyn Arts Council Visual Arts Panel. Littman is a member of the International Art Critic Association and has written for numerous publications, including GLASS Quarterly, Craft Arts, Object, Sculpture, *surface, modo, Art on Paper, and Pulp.

Littman has curated several exhibitions, including Civic Matters, an exchange project at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 2006; and Happy Campers, New York, 2006. For the Drawing Center, Littman has recently curated Yüksel Arslan: Visual Interpretations; Greta Magnuson Grossman: Furniture and Lighting; and Leon Golub: Live & Die Like a Lion? Future projects include Drawing and its Double: Selections from the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Rome; Sean Scully: Changes and Horizontals and Eugene Von Bruenchenhein at The American Folk Art Museum, NY.

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This event is co-sponsored by:

MARCO BREUER | Nature of the Pencil - Installations shots

 

Marco Breuer in Conversation with Brett Littman @ SVA

Marco Breuer in Conversation with Brett Littman

  

Photographer Marco Breuer will speak about his body of work and his current exhibition at Von Lintel Gallery in New York with curator and critic Brett Littman. Breuer's solo exhibition, "Nature of the Pencil," will be on view through December 4, 2010.  Born in Germany, Breuer has work in numerous museum collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the New York Public Library; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Brett Littman is the executive director of The Drawing Center in New York and the former deputy director at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Presented by the BFA Photography Department and Dear Dave, magazine.

Tuesday, November 16, 7pm
SVA Theatre, 333 West 23 Street
Free and open to the public

School of Visual Arts

MARCO BREUER | Nature of the Pencil - New Yorker review

 

Although it may not be exactly accurate to call Breuer a photographer—he uses photographic paper but no camera—it's still surprising to see his excellent new show described as a "drawing installation." His work, like Vik Muniz's, has a strong graphic element, but the effect of Breuer's mark-making relies on the unique properties of photosensitive paper exposed to light. For the work here, he's scraped, scratched, and incised color papers to produce a series of unique, compact abstractions that buzz with energy. They’re hung on a thick band of blackboard paint full of chalk erasures and notations (e.g. "Chance-Control") that suggest not a schoolroom but a mad scientist's lab. Through Dec. 4.

Read more 

MARCO BREUER | Nature of the Pencil - ArtDaily review

Throughout his nearly twenty-year career, Breuer has approached his work as a systematic investigation of the conditions of the photographic medium and its relationship to related media. For Nature of the Pencil—a play on William Henry Fox Talbot's seminal book The Pencil of Nature—Breuer examines and explores the intersection of photography and drawing.

A number of recent photogenic drawings by Breuer provide the starting point for this chalkboard installation. These photographic prints are interspersed with wall drawings, reworked images, and notes on photography and drawing, on mark-making in general, on perception, decay, and destruction. In Breuer's work, line is the result of a physical interaction between materials and forces. Line and color are excavated through surface violations, throwing off the conventional figure–ground relationship.

The altered gallery, painted with a band of chalkboard black, refers to the photographic darkroom as well as the classroom. Employing a range of tools such as drywall snap lines, stencils, and pounce bags, Breuer uses chalk to add notations, measurements, diagrams, and marks. The improvisatory nature of the installation is intended to highlight Breuer's relationship to the darkroom as a place where ideas and images are not merely executed, but generated and considered. 

In conjunction with the exhibition at Von Lintel Gallery, Dear Dave, Magazine will host a conversation between Marco Breuer and Brett Littman, executive director of The Drawing Center, on November 16 at 7 pm. The event will take place at the SVA Theatre at 333 West 23rd Street. The event is free and open to the public, though seating is limited. To RSVP for the event, please contact the gallery at (212) 242-0599 or email at gallery@vonlintel.com.

Marco Breuer has exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe. His work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Baltimore Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and New York Public Library. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2006. In 2007 Aperture published a monograph of his work titled Early Recordings. 

View original review @ ArtDaily 

MARCO BREUER | Nature of the Pencil - Opening photos

 

 

DAVID MAISEL | HISTORY'S SHADOW - British Journal of Photography review

DAVID MAISEL | LIBRARY OF DUST - Indie Trailer

DAVID MAISEL | LIBRARY OF DUST - Indie Trailer 

DAVID MAISEL | LIBRARY OF DUST - British Journal of Photography review

David Maisel is the latest photographer to join Institute for Artist Management.

Best known for his environmentally concerned aerial images – nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2008 and published in three books by Nazraeli Press over the last six years – the San Francisco-based photographer joins the agency, set up last year by former VII Photo director Frank Evers, alongside Nadav Kander, Jodi Bieber, Simon Norfolk and Zed Nelson.

Maisel’s last major project, Library of Dust, is a departure from his usual work, focusing on the multicolour pigments sprouting from the copper urns he found and photographed in a mental institution. They contained the unclaimed cremated remains of former patients, which had been left to rot in an underground vault.

He is currently working on History’s Shadow, a series of re-photographed x-rays of art objects from antiquity he began during a residency at the Getty Research Institute in 2007.

Max Houghton wrote about the Library of Dust, published as a book by Chronicle, in BJP in October 2008:

"Maisel's act of photographing these canned corpses reanimates the dead, allowing the observer to linger with them in a strange extraterritorial place, though the transformation is but temporary. Those who died here are still without name or face, but their passing has been attentively and assiduously marked. In another twist to this already strange and ghostly tale, in 1975 Oregon State Hospital became the screen location for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The 1975 film of Ken Kesey's book, filmed by Milos Forman, mobilised liberal America into questioning the accepted diagnoses of madness and caused a seachange in the way society treats the insane."

Read full article

Marco Breuer: School of Visual Arts (SVA) Photography Lecture Series

School of Visual Arts (SVA) announces a series of photography lectures, panel discussions and exhibitions organized by the BFA Photography; MFA Photography, Video and Related Media; and MPS Digital Photography Departments; along with the Arts Abroad program at SVA.

Marco Breuer in Conversation with Brett Littman

 
Photographer Marco Breuer will speak about his body of work and his current exhibition at Von Lintel Gallery in New York with curator and critic Brett Littman. Breuer's solo exhibition, "Nature of the Pencil," will be on view from October 14 - December 4, 2010.  Born in Germany, Breuer has work in numerous museum collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the New York Public Library; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Brett Littman is the executive director of The Drawing Center in New York and the former deputy director at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Presented by the BFA Photography Department and Dear Dave, magazine.

Tuesday, November 16, 7pm
SVA Theatre, 333 West 23 Street
Free and open to the public

SVA

Valerie Jaudon @ BMA: Sculpture Garden a 'Great Place' in America

"Visitors to the Birmingham Museum of Art already know that the Ireland Sculpture Garden is a great place, but now it's official.

The American Planning Association has named the museum's outdoor garden one of 10 Great Public Spaces for 2010. Part of its Great Places in America program, it is the first such designation for Alabama. The Chicago and Washington, D.C.-based organization based the award on the garden's plan and design that meld art with the natural landscape. It also cited its accommodation of all types of visitors, including the visually impaired. 

The garden's overhanging trees, Valerie Jaudon-designed blue pool and benches and surrounding sculptures by well-known artists such as Auguste Rodin, Fernando Botero, Sol LeWitt, Alexander Archipenko and Salvador Dali make it an idyllic spot for museum visitors.

"It's a space that can be meditative and a space that can be highly charged and social," said BMA Executive Director Gail Andrews on Tuesday. "To be recognized nationally is very meaningful for us."

APA Chief Executive Officer Paul Farmer mentioned the garden's design, sculpture collection and inviting approach. In a statement, he called it a "truly special place. This public space has really broken the mold, if you will, of what museums can be."

Birmingham Mayor William Bell said the garden is a downtown oasis, "one of several designed green spaces, including our newly dedicated Railroad Park, which we feel really draw people into our city center and make them want to linger and return."

Read full article

Marco Breuer | Nature of the Pencil - Opening Reception Thurs, Oct 14, 6—8 PM

Marco Breuer | Nature of the Pencil

Oct 14—Dec 4

Opening Reception Thursday October 14, 6—8 PM

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present Nature of the Pencil, a drawing installation by Marco Breuer, his fifth solo exhibition at Von Lintel Gallery.

Marco Breuer
Untitled (C-1031), 2010
chromogenic paper, scraped
11 15/16 x 8 7/8 inches
unique
BM10 C1031

Throughout his nearly twenty-year career, Breuer has approached his work as a systematic investigation of the conditions of the photographic medium and its relationship to related media. For Nature of the Pencil—a play on William Henry Fox Talbot's seminal book The Pencil of Nature—Breuer examines and explores the intersection of photography and drawing.

A number of recent photogenic drawings by Breuer provide the starting point for this chalkboard installation. These photographic prints are interspersed with wall drawings, reworked images, and notes on photography and drawing, on mark-making in general, on perception, decay, and destruction. In Breuer's work, line is the result of a physical interaction between materials and forces. Line and color are excavated through surface violations, throwing off the conventional figure–ground relationship.

The altered gallery, painted with a band of chalkboard black, refers to the photographic darkroom as well as the classroom. Employing a range of tools such as drywall snap lines, stencils, and pounce bags, Breuer uses chalk to add notations, measurements, diagrams, and marks. The improvisatory nature of the installation is intended to highlight Breuer's relationship to the darkroom as a place where ideas and images are not merely executed, but generated and considered.

In conjunction with the exhibition at Von Lintel Gallery, the School of Visual Arts will host a conversation between Marco Breuer and Brett Littman, executive director of The Drawing Center, on November 16 at 7 pm. The event will take place at the SVA Theatre at 333 West 23rd Street. The event is free and open to the public, though seating is limited. To RSVP for the event, please contact the gallery at (212) 242-0599 or email at gallery@vonlintel.com.

Marco Breuer has exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe. His work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Baltimore Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and New York Public Library. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2006. In 2007 Aperture published a monograph of his work titled Early Recordings.

Izima Kaoru, 'One Sun' - New Yorker Review

Izima Kaoru

Though he is known for the big, staged photographs he calls "Landscapes with a Corpse"—multiple views of fashionably dressed young women playing dead—in this show, Kaoru explores his own fear of death in a series of images of the sun. Leaving his camera's shutter open from dawn until dusk, he records the orbit of the sun across the sky as a bright, sputtering line, like a lit fuse or a live wire. A fish-eye lens renders this three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view as a perfect circle, with the horizon of various locations (Kenya, Tokyo, Hawaii) the dark edge around a pale-blue bowl. Although the work seems destined for yoga retreats and meditation rooms, the pictures' positive charge is hard to resist. Through Oct. 9.
 

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Marco Breuer commenting on his recent exhibition at the MIA

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Izima Kaoru, One Sun - Time Out Critics' Pick

 

 

Best in Photography 

Izima Kaoru, "One Sun"

"The Japanese artist, in the process of tracking and measuring the fine balance between hope and an awareness of mortality, turned his attention to the daily, arcing path of the sun. These round photographs, taken with a fish-eye lens, are both beautiful and meditative"

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New Work by Japanese Photographer Izima Kaoru - Review @ ArtDaily

Izima Kaoru, Nanyuki, Kenya (One Sun), 2007. C-print with acrylic diasec, 47 inch diameter.

"After fifteen years of exploring the macabre in his ongoing series Landscapes with a Corpse, Izima Kaoru looked to spirituality to ease his fear of death. Dissatisfied with what organized religion had to offer, he found his comfort in the natural world. The sun and its constancy in our existence proved to be his solace and inspiration.

Traveling the world, Kaoru tracked the path of the sun from sunrise to sunset on a single day in a given location. Using a fisheye lens and long exposure, he left his shutter open from dawn to dusk, capturing 360 degree views of the sun's progress as it made its way across the sky. The large-scale photographs in Izima Kaoru's new series are unusual in format. They are cut round and embedded in a circular frame, echoing the celestial orb for which the series One Sun is named. Each photograph features a single illuminated line against a wash of cerulean blue. The line is repeated from one photograph to the next, albeit in various forms, the sun altering its path depending on locale and season. It curves and bends, nearly forming a full circle in Norway at the poles; it is a wide reaching arc in Hawaii, a mere sliver of a crescent during Tokyo's winter solstice. In Kenya, at the equator, a single vertical line of the sun dissects the rounded photograph into halves.

First impression is of bold, graphic imagery, teetering on the edge of abstraction. Yet when one goes in for a closer look, recognizable clues—a volleyball net, cityscape, trees—cling to the edges of most circles, reminding us these are indeed photographs."

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Izima Kaoru, One Sun - DLK Collection Review

"Japanese photographer Izima Kaoru is perhaps best known for his series of cinematic images where models imagine their own ideal deaths, complete with dramatic locations, fabulous couture fashions, and elegant pools of blood. After more than a decade of staged death, his new body of work, entitled One Sun, is a radical departure from this morbid fascination, a life-affirming look skyward.

Using a fish-eye lens and day-long exposures, Kaoru's images trace the path of the sun across the sky, resulting in images of sparkling bright lines against light blue orbs of hazy color. Depending on his location (near the Equator, in the northern Norway, or at various other locations around the globe) and the time of year/season, the sun creates a variety of concave and convex arcs, straight lines and even perfect circles, with cloudy weather periodically adding a dashed effect. These beams of light parade across a spectrum of soft blue, light purple and fuzzy pink pastel backgrounds, with only a few silhouetted palm tress, buildings, or other minuscule points of landscape around the edges to provide local context. They are like big blue marbles, or vibrating discs, or portholes.

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Overall, while we have seen variations on these ideas before, Kaoru has added some new twists to the tracking of the sun, creating contemporary photographs that pulsate with collective optimism. He reminds us that wherever we might be on this diverse planet, the sun puts on a spectacular show if we would only take the time to look up and notice."

Read full review @ DLK COLLECTION

IZIMA KAORU | ONE SUN - Installation shots