Performance // Frame

 

 

15 years after the symposium "LIFE IS ART ENOUGH - Performance and expanded art forms. One approach" - organized by Anita Beckers in collaboration with the Institute Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt - we would like to pick up the thread again in the gallery and through selected positions question the current situation of Performance as an artistic medium.. In a moment when the art market regenerates, artists whose work deals with one's own body and is commercially difficult, seem to trigger new critical discourses.

 

 

Image:
Paul Wiersbinski
Videostill from the video "Mr. Babyape is Passion", 2009
09:59 min,
Color, Stereo, DV, 4:3
Courtesy Galerie Anita Beckers | Frankfurt

 

Galerie Anita Beckers
Frankenallee 74
60327 Frankfurt
Germany
+49 69 739 009 - 67

 

 

 

 

 

 

September 04 - October 17, 2009

Galerie Stefan Röpke is pleased to present Robert Mapplethorpe: Polaroids and Silver Prints In Context on view from September 04 - October 17, 2009.

The exhibition presents for the first time the early Polaroid works of Robert Mapplethorpe alongside and intermixed with the silver print photographs of the 80's; the mature work that he is most renowned for.

Mapplethorpe first began taking instant photographs with a Polaroid camera in 1970 as a tool to create material for the collages that he was making at the time, but very shortly after, he appreciated the medium for itself, taking hundreds of pictures and eventually having a solo show in January of 1972.

In 1975, Sam Wagstaff, Mapplethorpe's lover at the time, gave him a Hasselblad 2¼-inch camera that would allow him greater control and quality. Mapplethorpe would never return to the regular use of the Polaroid materials again, embracing the sophistication and precision of the new equipment that he would use to produce the later works that would bring him commercial success and artistic recognition and notoriety.

To see these two bodies of works together gives one the opportunity to see, on one hand, the differences between them - the experimental and spontaneous Polaroids versus the precise and formal silver prints - and on another, the similarities that give us a view into the creative development of Mapplethorpe's eye and his early preoccupation with the classical form, line and light that inform his mature work a whole decade later.

 

Galerie Stefan Röpke
St.-Apern-Straße 17-21
D - 50667 Köln
+49 221 255559

 

 

 

 

 

 

September 10 - October 31, 2009

ClampArt is pleased to announce the exhibition of Amy Stein's photographic series, "Domesticated"- the artist's first show with the gallery.

In this body of work Stein explores the archetypal motif of man verses nature. More specifically, her photographs explore the tenuous relationship between man and animals as human civilization continues to encroach upon nature. Informed by actual newspaper accounts and oral histories from citizens of the small town of Matamoras in Northeast Pennsylvania, which borders a state forest, Stein's photographs are inspired by true events.

The artist writes: "My photographs serve as modern dioramas of our new natural history. Within these scenes I explore our paradoxical relationship with the 'wild' and how our conflicting impulses continue to evolve and alter the behavior of both humans and animals. We at once seek connection with the mystery and freedom of the natural world, yet we continually strive to tame the wild around us and compulsively control the wild within our own nature. Within my work I examine the primal issues of comfort and fear, dependence and determination, submission and dominance that play out in the physical and psychological encounters between man and the natural world."

Amy Stein was raised in Washington, DC, and Karachi, Pakistan. In 2007, she was named one of the world's top fifteen emerging photographers by American Photo Magazine. Her work has been exhibited extensively in the United States and in Europe, and her photographs are represented in such prestigious public collections as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; the San Jose Museum of Art, California; and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona.

Copies of Stein's first monograph will be available for sale during the run of the show. [Domesticated (Portland, Oregon: photolucida, 2008), 64 pp., 25 color illus, $24, with an essay by George Eastman House curator, Alison Nordström.]

 

 

CLAMPART
521-531 West 25th St
Ground Floor
New York, NY 10001
+1 646.230.0020

 

 

 

 

 

September 05-October 03, 2009

Exile, the Art and Residency space in Berlin-Kreuzberg, will open its fall program by presenting two bodies of work, American Trip 1974-1978 and A Series of Human Decisions, by American artist Bill Jacobson. The exhibition brings together these two distinctly different photographic perspectives, separated by 30 years of artistic production and life experience, and explores their common grounds.

The first body of work, American Trip 1974-1978, includes some of Jacobson's very first photographs, taken shortly after turning 17 during cross-country trips, and while attending college in San Francisco and Providence, Rhode Island: "I always had a car and a camera...."

While being clearly influenced by some of the photographic role models of the time, the unique strength of these photographs stems from their curious immediacy. They are not only an exploration into seemingly strange and unfamiliar cultural and social landscapes, but also a young artist's discovery of his personal and artistic identity. The photographs have a striking intensity and intimacy between observer and subject matter: in that particular moment, both seem on the road to self-discovery, divided only by the lens of the camera. Thirty years later, while giving a glimpse into an almost mythologized era of American photography, these photographs still speak of the worries, anxieties, and excitements of the small but meaningful moments of life.

Later, between 1990 and 2002, Jacobson became well known for a body of work that negates the clarity of photographic vision in favor of an immateriality of light and form. His photographs became increasingly ethereal, haunting, and momentary.
In 2002, Jacobson returned to the sharp-focus image with A Series of Human Decisions. He began to photograph a variety of interior and exterior scenes ranging from art students' studios to details of therapists' practices.

Characteristic for these photographs is Jacobson's analytical, at times funny, but always poignant approach. Remarkably, in all of these quite formal photographs the human figure, while ever present, is itself absent. A Series of Human Decisions results in a poetic observation of life as a collection of small, intricate and distinct situations.

When viewed together, both bodies of work, American Trip 1974-1978 and A Series of Human Decisions, while distinctly different, have the same seemingly simple question and curiosity at their core. In both, Jacobson searches for 'the little things': life's often overlooked minute details and moments. Spanning over 30 years of artistic work, the two bodies of work show Jacobson's passionate investigation into nothing less than who, what and where we are.

 

Exile
Alexandrinenstr 4, HH
D - 10969 Berlin
+49 176 83097626

 

 

 

 

September 9 - October 25, 2009
Opening Wednesday, September 9, 6-8pm

This exhibition presents portrait photographs, objects and drawings, displaying the artist's practice of detachment from the obligation or facility to form language or function. The works instead preserve and politicize the irony, idolatry and emotion specific to the time of formation..

From a letter to the artist by João Ribas:

Zipora....

We have both come to think of hands as instruments of transcendence, the source of our entry into the symbolic. Are our hands not at the origin of self-consciousness (Tallis), of gesture and agency, of reaching out (towards others) and intention, of command and causation? Is it not through the hand---with its transformative, manipulative potential----and the traces it leaves, that the subject, if not nature itself, is radically reconceived, shaped into its own image?

The human hand lies at the origin of the labor that allows for the collective record of human difference to exist; for the making, moving, and repeating that transcends nature. What is at hand is what makes the world. Yet what of those things that seems so indifferent and accidental in their form, the products of nature, time, and chance that seem imperceptibly 'unmade', those very things between imagination and necessity that force us to admit that perhaps no hand can in fact have made this .. Are these not the very things the human hand is always enticed to fashion or to mime as objects, and moreover to repeat; these things that seem out of the common order of perceptible phenomena always surrounding us, neither tool nor weapon, but some heteroclite thing that is only further exaggerated by our poor mimesis. In doing so, we come to see in such a thing---like that shell Valery writes about holding and turning between his fingers---some plan, some form, a purpose, as if through invention we could somehow grasp its place, its utility, its necessity, the need it somehow exists to appease, correct, or fulfill. Our labor-in these moments of repeating---only makes such things stranger, almost by a negative inversion; we craft, handle, and care for this thing. We know it, if in fact to make a thing is to know it, but it somehow grows ever stranger in our hands, despite have been made by us---some strange haecceity. Our hands: abutting metaphor and function, repeating, working meticulously by proceeding with an aim we think neither chance nor machine can fulfill. Our hands, indexing, repeating, doubling... Lucretius writes somewhere that if the hand is pressed underneath the eye the things we see appear to become doubled before us as we look at them, such that what is already before us can be doubled by the use of our hands. Must not something always slip away for the transcendence afforded by the human hand to exist---don't our hands transcend precisely only in this deviation, by the very difference we perceive in such repetition, by the variance in imitation we want to call invention ? What of those things, like that shell, that seem almost imperceptibly made, even when made by human hands? With such quiddity and purpose. So our hands cover up and inexplicably reveal; they trick the eye into disbelief, and simple gestures or things are transformed as if under frail utility lies some other metaphysic waiting to be forged out by hands......

João Ribas, 2009

On Stellar Rays
Candice Madey
133 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002
+1 212 598 3012

 

 

 

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