HANSJOERG DOBLIAR: “HYSTERIE UND ABSTRAKTION”

May 3 – June 15, 2013
 
Johannes Vogt Gallery is pleased to announce German artist Hansjoerg Dobliar’s first solo show with the gallery, Hysterie und Abstraktion (Hysteria and Abstraction). For the exhibition, Dobliar presents a new body of paintings on canvas and aluminum. Additionally the artist has designed an immersive wallpaper scheme for the rear room that serves as backdrop for an installation of paintings.
 
Dobliar’s paintings engage with the oil medium on a very material level. In his works, Dobliar builds up thick but fluid brushstrokes to form images. Dobliar’s practice strongly recalls and builds upon the traditions of German expressionism. In Dobliar’s engagement with abstraction, he enlivens the tension between figuration and abstraction. Subjects can be recognized, but only uncertainly, as if through a haze. In this way, he prioritizes the expressive handling of the material, neither blending his strokes to render his hand invisible, nor abandoning a subject in favor of pure abstraction. The expressionist brushstroke is understood for its ornamental value. This exchange is a theme also explored in his works on paper. By overpainting onto old magazine pages, Dobliar selectively obscures and represses the figures in these images. By intervening in the imagery of mass circulation, Dobliar symbolically questions cultural narratives, and the ways in which reality is undermined by myth.
 
Among the works in the front gallery is a series of small paintings on canvas. Referred to by Dobliar as the “dot paintings,” these works appear like a series of bullseyes, or a string of echoed permutations. In exploring a similar composition over a large number of small canvases, Dobliar enacts the decorative concealment of abstraction, and expresses a fixation with the aesthetic surface. These issues of representation and presentation also inform his practice of designing the manner in which his works are displayed. Previously, Dobliar has installed wallpaper, constructed shelving, and painted on the walls to modify the atmosphere in which his works are received. Dobliar continues this practice for his show at the gallery.
 
Dobliar’s vibrant paintings evoke the psychic worlds of the subjective experience. In his energetic and tactile engagement with the paint, Dobliar creates works that point beyond the limits of our knowledge, and force the viewer to ask where the abstraction ends and their projection begins.
 
Hansjoerg Dobliar was born in Ulm, Germany in 1970. Dobliar's work has been exhibited internationally, including Sammlung Rheingold at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Sammlung Falckenberg / Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Daniel Hug Gallery, Los Angeles; Kunstverein Oldenburg; and Beijing Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include Sies + Höke gallery, Düsseldorf; Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam; Galerie Ben Kaufmann, Berlin as well as a solo presentation at INDEPENDENT art fair in New York in 2011. He lives and works in Munich and Berlin.
 
Since its inception only two years ago, the gallery has taken on a challenging program leading to a change of location in November 2012. Johannes Vogt Gallery is committed to bringing attention to the complex artistic and cultural ties that bind New York to both Europe and Latin America.
 
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm and by appointment
 
For further details please contact Samuel Draxler at samuel@vogtgallery.com or at 212.255.2671

FEATURING
Matthew Brandt
John Chiara
Pierre Cordier & Gundi Falk
Agnes Eperjesi
Curtis Mann
Klea McKenna
Amanda Means
Floris Neusüss
 
Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present UNIQUE, a group show of non-editioned photography. Often made without negatives or a camera, the exhibited work is created with unique and diverse techniques that result in one-of-a-kind photographs. The included artists represent several generations, including Pierre Cordier and Floris Neusüss, who have been pioneers in the field of camera-less, unique photography since the 1950s.
In 1956, the Belgian artist Pierre Cordier invented the chemigram, a technique that employs resists to protect areas of the photosensitive paper from successive submersion in developer and fixer. Since 2011, Cordier has collaborated with the Austrian painter Gundi Falk. Floris Neusüss, a German photographer, explores the technical and visual possibilities of the photogram to create an innovative body of work that includes ethereal silhouettes of nude women and mysterious images of the natural world at night. Cordier and Neusüss share a spirit of experimentation and a desire to explore the infinite possibilities inherent to the chemistry of photographic paper and processes with the younger artists in the show. Following in Cordier’s chemigram tradition, Amanda Means delicately scores light-sensitive paper with a grid pattern and flows developer over it, creating organic abstract compositions that are inspired by her close connection with nature. Means worked for many years as a master printmaker for other artists, including Robert Mapplethorpe, and the fluid process she employs is liberating in contrast with the exacting precision that work required. Matthew Brandt uses the subjects of his Western landscape photographs as ingredients in their production. He soaks images of lakes in water from the same source, distorting colors and abstracting the captured vistas. John Chiara travels the California coastline with a room-size camera obscura of his own creation hitched to his car, capturing landscapes directly on photographic paper. His method invites exposure and processing anomalies, making the process part of the imagery. Although he starts with representational photographs, like Brandt and Chiara, Curtis Mann moves toward abstraction by obstructing journalistic scenes of conflict with chemically etched circles and stripes. Drawing on the tradition of photograms of the human body and of the natural world that Neusüss explores, Klea McKenna uses light-sensitive paper to capture images of elements, such as raindrops, while the Hungarian photographer Agnes Eperjesi projects multilayered and brightly colored shadows of hands, flowers, and household objects.
 
For further information or visual materials, please see vonlintel.com or contact the gallery at (212) 242-0599 or gallery@vonlintel.com.

African Photography from The Walther Collection
 
Distance and Desire:
Encounters with the African Archive
 
June 9, 2013 – May 17, 2015
 
The Walther Collection
Reichenauerstrasse 21
Neu-Ulm, Burlafingen 89233
Germany
info@walthercollection.com
www.walthercollection.com
 
The Walther Collection is pleased to present “Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive,” the third exhibition devoted to African photography and video art. This exhibition, curated by Tamar Garb, brings together late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century portraits, cartes de visite, postcards, album pages, and books from Southern and Eastern Africa, set in dialogue with recent photography and video by contemporary artists who have engaged with photographic archives. “Distance and Desire” offers new perspectives on the legacy of anthropological and ethnographic visions of Africans, reimagining the poetic and political dimension of the archive, its diverse histories, and its changing meanings. The culmination of a three-part exhibition series at The Walther Collection Project Space in New York, and the international symposium “Encounters with the African Archive,” co-organized by The Walther Collection, New York University, and University College London, the exhibition is accompanied by a major scholarly catalogue edited by Tamar Garb.
 
“Distance and Desire” unfolds in three thematic sections:
 
“Santu Mofokeng and A.M. Duggan-Cronin”
A juxtaposition of A. M. Duggan-Cronin’s “The Bantu Tribes of South Africa” and Santu Mofokeng’s “The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950” introduces the concept of the photographic archive as both a repository of documents and an assemblage of representations. Duggan-Cronin, an Irish South African who lived in the mining town of Kimberley, set out to depict what he considered the disappearing indigenous populations of South Africa. His monumental study, entitled “The Bantu Tribes of South Africa,” published between 1928-1954, includes photographs, descriptive captions, and anthropological essays. In addition to presenting all eleven Bantu Tribes books, a complete sequence of photogravure plates from “The Nguni: Baca, Hlubi, Xesibe” (1954) will be on view, alongside a selection of vintage gelatin-silver prints by Duggan-Cronin, which had previously circulated as individual objects.
 
In contrast to Duggan-Cronin’s renowned and contested ethnographic vision of African heritage, “The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890-1950” portrays the modern self-representation of African subjects. In the early 1990s, the artist Santu Mofokeng collected family studio portraits from late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century South Africa and transformed the images into a slide show, complete with narratives about the sitters. He also produced a series of gelatin-silver print reproductions of the portraits, which are on view together with a selection of the project’s original vintage prints and Mofokeng’s research notes. Envisioned as a “counter-archive,” The Black Photo Album challenges fixed ideas most often associated with images of Africans.
 
“Poetics and Politics”
The cornerstone of Distance and Desire is a presentation of previously un-exhibited vintage portraits, cartes de visite, postcards, and album pages, produced from the 1860s to the early twentieth century. Extraordinary in range and style, these images make visible both the ideological frameworks that prevailed during the colonial period in Africa and the exceptional skill of photographers working in the studio and landscape. “Poetics and Politics” offers a remarkable opportunity to view the narratives that emerge from this African photographic archive, describing in particular the experience of the studio: the curiosity between photographer and subject, the emergence and circulation of types, the range of portraiture, the negotiations of costume and pose, and the will for self-assertion.
 
The presentation investigates typical European depictions of Africans, from scenes in nature, to sexualized images of semi-nude models, to modern sitters posing in elaborate studios, critically addressing the politics of colonialism and the complex issues of gender, race, and identity. Original album pages of landscapes and ethnographic imagery are displayed alongside a series of carte de visite portraits of Africans, circulated in the 1870s from the Diamond Fields of Kimberley and popular “ethnic” post-cards from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The exhibition also features several double-sided displays of album pages, showing striking combinations of personal and stock images, and the juxtapositions of prominent figures in both African and Western contexts. Among over 150 images, the exhibition includes some of the finest examples of works by Samuel Baylis Barnard and the Lawrence Brothers of Cape Town, George T. Ferneyhough and the Caney Brothers in Natal, Barnett & Co from Johannesburg, W. Rausch from Bulawayo, and G. F. Williams from Port Elizabeth, as well as images by unidentified and unattributed photographers.
 
“Contemporary Reconfigurations”
Centering on contemporary photography and video by African and African-American artists who have engaged with photographic archives, “Contemporary Reconfigurations” shows how a stereotype or ethnographic vision in one era provides material for an irreverent reworking, satirical performance, or elegiac reenactment in another. Carrie Mae Weems, in her powerful series “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” appropriates mid-nineteenth-century anthropometric photographs of African-Americans, overlaying the images with poetic texts. Sammy Baloji, Candice Breitz, and Sue Williamson rework historic or ethnographic photographs onto collages. Samuel Fosso, Philip Kwame Apagya, and Kudzanai Chiurai create exuberantly staged studio portraiture, using backdrops and sets to critique stereotypes and identities. Zwelethu Mthethwa and Zanele Muholi examine sexuality, costume, and ritual, while David Goldblatt’s and Jo Ractliffe’s black-and-white portraits portray mineworkers and former military personnel as they chose to been seen in “traditional” clothing.
 
Sabelo Mlangeni’s photo essay “Iimbali” documents the reed dances of KwaZulu-Natal, showing the display of virgins vying to be chosen as brides. His series “Country Girls,” in contrast to the multiple visions of women posed “in nature” throughout the ethnographic archive, chronicles small-town transvestites who self-consciously perform their adopted identities for the camera. Pieter Hugo’s series “There’s a Place in Hell for Me & My Friends” examines ethnicity and skin tones through mug shots and Guy Tillim makes a typology of child soldiers training near Beni, in the eastern Congo. Jodi Bieber, in a reversal of previous voyeuristic visions of the black female body, presents women self-consciously posing in settings where they are in control of their own images. Working in video, Berni Searle performs as a statuesque deity engaged in domestic labor in “Snow White,” and Andrew Putter gives an indigenous voice to the effigy of Maria de la Quellerie, wife of the first Dutch settler in the area known today as Cape Town, in “Secretly I Will Love You More.” Together, through their work with the African archive, these artists pose compelling questions about identity and memory, leading to new readings of the exhibition’s vintage photographs.

James Juthstrom
(1925-2007)
 
FIGURES:
paintings and drawings, 1950s - 60s
 
Curated by James Cavello
 
May 11 – June 29, 2013
 
WESTWOOD GALLERY NYC exclusively represents
the Estate of James Juthstrom
 
WESTWOOD GALLERY NYC is pleased to present an exhibition of figurative paintings and drawings by James Juthstrom. For 50 years this reclusive artist dedicated himself solely to the creation of art in his SoHo loft. Even though he lived near a thriving gallery scene and created artwork alongside the camaraderie of New York School artists and Abstract Expressionists, he was reluctant to find representation. The drawings and paintings on view reflect Juthstrom’s intensive exploration into his private inner life as an artist.
 
The 27 works of art on exhibit provide insight into Juthstrom’s lifelong quest to balance his representational concept with his abstract vision. Trained at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art, he studied life drawing and created an expansive body of work. In a New York Times review of a Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibition, Roberta Smith speaks of drawing as “the most intimate and honest of all art mediums.” Juthstrom’s drawings are indeed very personal, meant as an artist’s exploration of form and line.
 
From the early line drawings, masterful in their simplicity and expressiveness, Juthstrom moved on to large scale paintings on canvas, challenging his perspective within the confines of space. His idiosyncratic depiction of his loft and the anonymous figures populating the empty rooms provide a unique psychological portrayal of an artist who severed his ties to the world of commercialism. The paintings always depict the artist’s studio with emphasis on the floorboard and a faceless figure, most likely the artist himself. The scenes of the interior become cryptic, with mirror like boxes reflecting hidden figures or space. Shadowy figures lurk in the background, watching the interior from behind screens; no faces are visible, except maybe as reflections. Often, the symbolic compositions disintegrate into pure color, line and form, reminiscent of fauvism. The narrative is always mysterious; his dystopic vision is most explicitly expressed in his color figurative drawings, which can be seen as a diary of the secretive artist’s innermost experience. The paintings illustrate the artist’s decision to withdraw from the outside world and create in the solitude of his studio.
 
James Juthstrom’s artwork has recently been re-discovered, uncovering five decades of painting, drawing, etching and sculpting. Westwood Gallery NYC is archiving the artist’s work of five decades including paintings based on circular abstract shapes and series of esoteric figurative work.
 
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James Juthstrom was recognized by critics early in his career and was included in numerous museum group exhibitions, including Whitney Museum of American Art, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Detroit Institute of the Arts and Brooklyn Museum. He also had several solo exhibitions at galleries, including Gallery G in New York, which received a review in the New York Times, Paul Schuster Art Gallery in Cambridge and Landmark Gallery in New York. He died in May of 2007, leaving behind a legacy of his lifetime dedication. Since the release of his estate collection, museums and collectors are reviewing the artwork for acquisition and discovering the history of this brilliant artist. Juthstrom’s most recent retrospective exhibition was reviewed by ARTnews and Art in America.

The Broken Kilometer, 1979, located at 393 West Broadway in New York City, is composed of 500 highly polished, round, solid brass rods, each measuring two meters in length and five centimeters (two inches) in diameter. The 500 rods are placed in five parallel rows of 100 rods each. The sculpture weighs 18 3/4 tons and would measure 3,280 feet if all the elements were laid end-to-end. Each rod is placed such that the spaces between the rods increase by 5mm with each consecutive space, from front to back; the first two rods of each row are placed 80mm apart, the last two rods are placed 580 mm apart. Metal halide stadium lights illuminate the work which is 45 feet wide and 125 feet long.
 
This work is the companion piece to De Maria's 1977 Vertical Earth Kilometer at Kassel, Germany. In that permanently installed earth sculpture, a brass rod of the same diameter, total weight and total length has been inserted 1,000 meters into the ground.
 
The Broken Kilometer has been on long-term view to the public since 1979. This work was commissioned and is maintained by Dia Art Foundation.