" Ζωγραφιζω εκεινο που δεν μπορει να φωτογραφηθει και φωτογραφιζω εκεινο που δεν επιθυμω να ζωγραφισω...Δεν με ενδιαφερει να γινομαι κατανοητος ως ζωγραφος, ως δημιουργος αντικειμενων ή ως φωτογραφος".... "Δεν ειμαι φωτογραφος της φυσης αλλα της φαντασιας μου ... θα προτιμουσα να φωτογραφισω μια ιδεα παρα ενα αντικειμενο κι ενα ονειρο παρα μια ιδεα" Man Ray (1890-1976)

" Δεν ενδιαφερει να αποδωσει κανεις το ορατο, αλλα να κανει ορατο οτι δεν ειναι" Paul Klee (1879-1940)

9/24/2012

Sally Mann . Upon Reflection

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Untitled (Self-Portrait), 2006-12.
© Sally Mann/Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

























Sally Mann
Upon Reflection
13 September – 3 November 2012
745 Fifth Avenue , NY 10151 New York
info@houkgallery.com http://www.houkgallery.com Opening hours: Tue-Sat 11 am-6 pm

Sally Mann Upon Reflection
Edwynn Houk Gallery, in cooperation with Gagosian Gallery, is pleased to announce an exhibition of new photographic self-portraits by Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) from 13 September through 3 November 2012. An opening reception for the artist will be held on Thursday, 13 September 2012, from 6-8pm.
Most people know Sally Mann as one of the most influential and important photographers working today, but what is far less known is the fact that Sally Mann is also an avid and successful equestrian. On her farm in Lexington, Virginia, Mann fills her pastures with Arabians, a breed known for their spiritedness, loyalty, and for their unyielding courage, a combination of character traits which are essential for endurance riding, Mann’s chosen sport.
Sally Mann’s photography has focused primarily on her immediate surroundings and on those things closest to her; her husband, Larry Mann (the subject of Proud Flesh, 2005-2009), her three children: Emmett, Jessie and Virginia (the subjects of Immediate Family, 1984-1994, and What Remains, 2004); her farm (Mother Land, 1993-1996), the South itself (Deep South, 1998 and Last Measure, 2001-2002) as well as the ephemeral nature of life, inextricably linked to the concept of death, as it relates to all the above (What Remains, 2004).But most recently, it was her relationship with horses, and with one horse-related event in particular, that gave birth to this newest series. On August 11, 2006, we received the following email from Sally Mann:I had a real smash-up on Saturday...my stallion, cantering along way up in the mountains, suddenly staggered, reared back and fell over on me. I was knocked out but my friends say in his struggles to get up, he pummeled my back with his (newly shod that morning, *sigh*) hooves, bouncing me like a ragdoll...anyway, I came to consciousness in time to see him come crashing down next to me, dying. Terrible, indescribable. Walked delirious 4 miles off the mountain and have been flat on my back for 6 days— Damaged everything, ribs, sternum, vertebrae, and black and blue from my eyes to my knees. The doctor who came out said, "You're going to hurt like crap for a long time" and so far he's been right. Sad about the horse, too. I was really crazy about him. Probably an aneurysm killed him. Anyway, if ever I can get vertical and move my arms, beyond typing that is, I will try some printing... That was an optimistic sentiment; it was many months more of recovery and limited activity, a torment for a prolific artist. But Sally Mann found she could take pictures of herself without having to haul the camera around, finding a trove of material within the confines of her own face (Self-Portraits) and her own damaged torso (Omphalos). Mann has continued, now long after her recovery, to make more then 200 new ambrotypes since the accident in 2006. And characteristic of Sally Mann, the artist has created a new technique for this project which is based on 19th century processes but that incorporates a modern sensibility. Each unique image is captured as a wet-plate positive on a large, black glass plate and then is joined with others in groupings of 3, 9, 20, and even up to 75 plates. Two grids of Sally Mann’s Self-Portraits were included in the 2010-2011 exhibition, “Sally Mann: The Flesh and The Spirit,” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. In the accompanying book, John B. Ravenal, the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, wrote about the Self-Portraits:…Mann complicates the logic of the flattened geometrical order with references to the antiquated, the irrational, and the horrendous. The repetitive display of degraded images calls to mind discards from a mid-nineteenth-century photo studio – plates flawed by the sitter’s movement or the medium’s unstable actions, of which they present a catalogue: pitting, scarring, scratching, streaking, graininess, blurriness, erosion, fading, haziness, delamination, over-exposure, and under-exposure. For the very first time, the works from the Omphalos series will be on display. In this series, the focus is on the artist’s torso. Akin to the faces, the process is the same, but the grids of Omphalos examine more abstract, sculptural forms. The plates themselves have been treated as such: chiseled, scratched and smoothed until flesh becomes stone. Clearly a departure from one of the earliest and most timeless motifs in art, Omphalos is a title not only referring to the torso, but also to the symbolic continuation of the themes explored in Mann’s previous work: fertility, family, and heredity, recorded in the human form and in the land.
Walked delirious 4 miles off the mountain and have been flat on my back for 6 days— Damaged everything, ribs, sternum, vertebrae, and black and blue from my eyes to my knees. The doctor who came out said, "You're going to hurt like crap for a long time" and so far he's been right. Sad about the horse, too. I was really crazy about him. Probably an aneurysm killed him.
Anyway, if ever I can get vertical and move my arms, beyond typing that is, I will try some printing...
That was an optimistic sentiment; it was many months more of recovery and limited activity, a torment for a prolific artist. But Sally Mann found she could take pictures of herself without having to haul the camera around, finding a trove of material within the confines of her own face (Self-Portraits) and her own damaged torso (Omphalos). Mann has continued, now long after her recovery, to make more then 200 new ambrotypes since the accident in 2006. And characteristic of Sally Mann, the artist has created a new technique for this project which is based on 19th century processes but that incorporates a modern sensibility. Each unique image is captured as a wet-plate positive on a large, black glass plate and then is joined with others in groupings of 3, 9, 20, and even up to 75 plates.
Two grids of Sally Mann’s Self-Portraits were included in the 2010-2011 exhibition, “Sally Mann: The Flesh and The Spirit,” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. In the accompanying book, John B. Ravenal, the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, wrote about the Self-Portraits:…Mann complicates the logic of the flattened geometrical order with references to the antiquated, the irrational, and the horrendous. The repetitive display of degraded images calls to mind discards from a mid-nineteenth-century photo studio – plates flawed by the sitter’s movement or the medium’s unstable actions, of which they present a catalogue: pitting, scarring, scratching, streaking, graininess, blurriness, erosion, fading, haziness, delamination, over-exposure, and under-exposure.For the very first time, the works from the Omphalos series will be on display. In this series, the focus is on the artist’s torso. Akin to the faces, the process is the same, but the grids of Omphalos examine more abstract, sculptural forms. The plates themselves have been treated as such: chiseled, scratched and smoothed until flesh becomes stone. Clearly a departure from one of the earliest and most timeless motifs in art, Omphalos is a title not only referring to the torso, but also to the symbolic continuation of the themes explored in Mann’s previous work: fertility, family, and heredity, recorded in the human form and in the land.


Untitled (Self-Portrait), 2006-12.
© Sally Mann/Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York




























Untitled (Self-Portrait), 2006-12.
© Sally Mann/Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York


























 Sally Mann lives and works in Lexington, Virginia. A Guggenheim fellow, and a three-times recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Mann was named “America’s Best Photographer” by Time magazine in 2001. She has been the subject of two documentaries: Blood Ties (1994) and What Remains (2007), both of which were nominated for Academy Awards, She has been the subject of major exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.. Her photographs can be found in many public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Sally Mann is represented by Gagosian Gallery and Edwynn Houk Gallery.

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Editor: Claudia Stein
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9/22/2012

Heinz Hajek-Halke.Late Photo-Graphics

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Das Schifffahrtszeichen, c. 1960
C print, 27,7 x 38,6 cm
Photo: Heinz Hajek-Halke
Sammlung Michael Ruetz / Nachlass Heinz Hajek-Halke
The Alchimist
Heinz Hajek-Halke
Late Photo-Graphics
8 September – 4 November 2012
Akademie der Künste Pariser Platz 4, 10117 Berlin
+49 (0)30 200 57 - 1000 info@adk.de
http://www.adk.de   http://www.facebook.com/akademiederkuenste

Untitled, c. 1956
Gelatin silver print, 39,7 x 29,8 cm
Photo: Heinz Hajek-Halke
Sammlung Michael Ruetz / Nachlass Heinz Hajek-Halke
 The Alchimist

Heinz Hajek-Halke
Late Photo-Graphics
What László Moholy-Nagy did for the photography of the Bauhaus and of the 1920s, Heinz Hajek-Halke accomplished for the 1950s and Abstract Art. Hajek-Halke (1898-1983) was an artist who worked in a genuinely photographic manner: what he achieved in the darkroom in terms of physical-chemical work could well be called alchemy; even today, no software program is able to achieve the same effects.
Among the photographic artists of the twentieth century, Heinz Hajek-Halke was a maverick who did not belong to any school and nonetheless influenced many others. Already famous as a poster artist in the early 1930s, he reached artistic maturity in the 1950s. He is one of the great abstract artists and also one of the first artists in photography.
The Akademie der Künste has over 200 photographic works from his later years, which is being presented comprehensively for the first time in the exhibition on Pariser Platz. The exhibition offers one of the few rediscoveries that can still be made in twentieth-century art photography.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue (German/English) published by Steidl.
Within the context of the European Month of Photography Berlin, www.mdf-berlin.de, and the Berlin Art Week, www.berlinartweek.de
Gläsernes Monument, c. 1955
Gelatin silver print, 29,3 x 23,9 cm
Photo: Heinz Hajek-Halke
Sammlung Michael Ruetz / Nachlass Heinz Hajek-Halke
 [Biography]
Heinz Hajek-Halke was born in Berlin in 1898. He spent his childhood in Buenos Aires and returned in 1910 to Berlin where he attended school and art college. He served as a soldier for two years during the First World War. From 1918 to 1920, he studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Berlin where Emil Orlik taught him, among others. He then worked as a commercial graphic artist. His interest in photography began in 1924. During the years ahead he created a wide range of works including posters, advertisements, compositions and press photographs, collaborating partly with photographers like Yva and Martha Astfalck-Vietz. From 1934 to 1946, Heinz Hajek-Halke lived in Kressbronn, Lake Constance, where he bred small animals and continued his photographic work. During the early 1950s, he lived in Ehrenbreitstein near Koblenz and exclusively concentrated on experimental and abstract photography. His works were exhibited alongside other examples of “subjective photography”. In 1955, Karl Hofer appointed him as Lecturer in Photographics at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste, (now the Berlin University of the Arts) where he lectured until 1967. When photography became an established artform in about 1965, Heinz Hajek-Halke, too, earned wider acclaim: by the late 1970s, he had successfully curated several solo exhibitions. He was also represented in numerous group shows and awarded several photography and art prizes. During this period, however, his health deteriorated. In 1973, he sold all his pictures and materials to the photographer Michael Ruetz. In spring 1983, Heinz Hajek-Halke died in Berlin.
[Introduction]
Alchemists are solitary individuals who experiment in a grey area between art and science and Heinz Hajek-Halke was an individualist par excellence among 20th century photo artists. He was not an affiliate of any school in particular, although he taught and influenced many others. Already established as a poster artist, photographer and photo collagist in the early 1930s, he started afresh and created entirely new groups of works in the 1950s. These made Heinz Hajek-Halke’s name as the first genuinely abstract photo artist. No exhibition of this era was complete without his pictures. Thanks to a foundation set up by the owner of the artist’s estate, Michael Ruetz, the Academy of Arts, Berlin has a collection of over two hundred light graphics – a term coined by the art critic, Franz Roh – that date from Heinz Hajek-Halke’s late work. These clearly chart his development from surrealist and often ironic over-exaggeration of the existing pictorial world to a formally stringent, but surprisingly rich cosmos of the individual imagination. Yet there is no particular chronological order. Time and again, his previous solutions were reviewed to decide whether or not they could support further experiments. Throughout this process Heinz Hajek-Halke always remained a photographer, even if many pictures were the result of his preliminary sketches. His preparatory work transformed his photographic prints into pictures in their own right; he thus relied on a modern, alchemist’s practice

Untitled / Hansaviertel, c. 1957
Gelatin silver print, 29,5 x 37,6
Photo: Heinz Hajek-Halke
Sammlung Michael Ruetz / Nachlass Heinz Hajek-Halke
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Christopher Bucklow . Anima

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Tetrarch, 9.53 am, 2nd July, 2011, Unique Cibachrome print. © Christopher Bucklow
Christopher Bucklow . Anima
6 September - 27 October 2012
Stockerstr. 33, CH-8002 Zurich  Switzerland  zuerich@houkgallery.com 
www.houkgallery.com   Opening hours: Tues-Fri 11am-6pm, Sat 11am-5pm

Galerie Edwynn Houk is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent photographic work by the British artist Christopher Bucklow (b 1957). This will be Bucklow’s first exhibition with the gallery, and his first in Switzerland.
“Anima” will showcase new pictures from Bucklow’s longstanding series of Guests and Tetrarchs. Each unique work is a cross between a photograph and a drawing, created using his own adaptation of a pinhole camera, a photographic process popular in the 19th Century. Bucklow begins each work by delineating a human silhouette on a metallic sheet, then puncturing it with thousands of holes. Photographic paper is placed at the bottom of a light-sealed box, with the punctured sheet above the paper. Then sunlight is allowed to filter though the holes, every one of them acting as an aperture. And so a photographic image of the sun-lit human body made of thousands of small suns is captured on the photographic paper below. There is no negative, no enlargement. Each picture is one-of-a-kind; its appearance is dependent upon the time of day, the intensity of the sunlight at that time, and the length of the exposure.

Tetrarch, 9.53 am, 2nd July, 2011, Unique Cibachrome print. © Christopher Bucklow



















Initially, the Guests and Tetrarchs were based on portraits of his friends and family, yet, for Bucklow, they have come to represent a self-portrait, a response to the vitality he believes resides within himself as much as every other living being. The exhibition’s title, “Anima,” refers to the Jungian argument that certain archetypes define the unconscious: every male harbors a female archetype; every female, a male. We only ever encounter our inner archetype in our dreams. For Bucklow, each Guest and Tetrarch is a rendering-in-light of those figures haunting and animating his unconscious. Bucklow began his career as a curator at the Victoria Camp; Albert Museum, London. He has exhibited extensively in Europe and abroad, and his paintings and photographs are included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the High Museum, Atlanta and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Recent publications include “If This Be Not I,” a collection of his writings, drawings and paintings. He is the author of an iconographical study of Philip Guston’s late paintings entitled “What is in the Dwat, The Universe of Philip Guston’s Final Decade.” Bucklow lives and works in Southwest England.
Tetrarch 11.46 am, 16th April, 2012, Unique Cibachrome print. © Christopher Bucklow


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Editor: Claudia Stein

9/03/2012

Andreas Gefeller | Blank

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Andreas Gefeller: CS 02, 2010, 150 x 200 cm, Pigmentprint




















Andreas Gefeller | Blank
8 September – 13 October 2012
Opening reception: Friday, 7 September 2012, 6–9pm
Thomas Rehbein Galerie
Aachener Str. 5, 50674 Cologne Germany
art@rehbein-galerie.de    www.rehbein-galerie.de
Tues-Fri 11am-1pm + 2-6pm . Sat 11am-4pm

Andreas Gefeller’s fourth solo show in the Thomas Rehbein Gallery is presenting his most recent series Blank. Again the photographer focuses his attention to urban and industrial areas, aspects of our contemporary life. Similar to his previous work The Japan Series Gefeller’s youngest photographs bear a perceptible resemblance to drawings or watercolours and oscillate between documentation and construction. Photography’s objectivity and its claim to depict reality are poetically and subtly undermined by Andreas Gefeller.

Andreas Gefeller: SV 05, 2012, 32 x 32 cm, Pigmentprint




















Using modified satellite images of urban agglomerations Gefeller is offering a view on earth from the orbital perspective. Reminiscent of cartographic elements in his Supervisions series, these images give an impression of the colonization of our planet. Brightly illuminated, they enable us to define city centres and lit streets. The speckled spreading and tentacle-like structure of the urban areas underline the apparently unstoppable increase in urban growth. The deep black surrounding the cities turns the two-dimensional surface of the earth into an endless space, where primeval microorganisms seem to float.

In his large-sized pictures, which were also taken by night, Gefeller zooms straight into the hearts of civilization. Excessively overexposed photographs of building façades, motorway intersections, container terminals and refineries reveal vast faded areas. The normal purpose of artificial light to make things visible is manipulated to achieve the opposite effect. Instead of light, the darkness reveals its secret: What existed before is fading away. Only the unlit and darkest areas could resist the long exposure, remaining as fragments to provide indications of the erased reality. Merely preserved as a silhouette-like, totally white—just blank—negative.
Andreas Gefeller: CS 13, 2011, 160 x 149 cm, Pigmentprint
























The contour-like effect awakens the need for reconstruction and completion of the blank spaces. In the truest sense of the word the photographs leave space for interpretations. Pictures of a chemical industry park resemble architectural exploded view drawings, the series of windows on a building façade seems to enclose a coded message, and stacked containers look like data packets. Almost reduced to structural patterns, the portrayed places symbolize the dissolution of postmodernism. Confronted with a flood of information which provides more information than people are able to handle or comprehend. The blinding light of civilisation allows the series Blank to become an allegory of today’s fast-moving and over stimulated society. The artist combines multiple images into one surgically precise photograph that unveil an intimate silence. His specific photographic approach to the world is a philosophical, analytical, intrinsic desire for deceleration.

Miriam Walgate

Andreas Gefeller: IP 12, 2012, 117 x 174 cm, Pigmentprint

















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