MITCH EPSTEIN
New York Arbor

Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne, Germany
10.11.2012 - 19.01.2013

Galerie Thomas Zander is pleased to announce an exhibition of Mitch Epstein’s latest series New York Arbor. For the first time, these large-format works show black and white photographs of the artist, who, along with William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, is a pioneer of artistic colour photography.

New York Arbor (2011/ 2012) is dedicated to Epstein’s hometown and examines extraordinary trees in New York City’s five boroughs. Rooted in parks, shopping centers, gardens, cemeteries, and sidewalks, some trees have adapted to their surroundings like contortionists, while others have been pruned into prized specimens. They are as diverse as the city’s populace. This project honours the endurance and mystery of these trees, and their importance to urban life.

In his œuvre, Mitch Epstein (b. 1952, lives and works in New York City) investigates the politics of human intimacy and how intimacy interacts with the world at large, while also examining how corporate and governmental power is changing the landscape in which we live. Epstein has developed a signature approach, wherein his pictures appear staged and spontaneous at the same time, displaying troubling or provocative content. His earlier series The City, created in the 1990s, already focuses on New York. The pictures from The City are uncannily prescient of the post 9/11 urban environment: images depict an increase in surveillance cameras and investigate individual attempts to safeguard or flaunt privacy in the public realm. Epstein’s recent, acclaimed photographic series American Power, which was awarded the Prix Pictet in photography and sustainability, examines energy usage and excess in the United States. These pictures were made on forays to energy sources and their environs.

Mitch Epstein’s photographs are collected by major international institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The artist published numerous books; a publication of his current series New York Arbor is forthcoming (Steidl, 2012).

© Galerie Thomas Zander 

OLIVER WEBER
Social Life at Beach

Oliver Weber’s new and evolving series Social Life at Beach is a wonderful documentary about the touristic life on the Canary Islands of Spain. Every year hundreds of thousands of tourists, mostly from Germany, England and meanwhile also from Russia, take over the Canary Islands and turn them into the perfect object for observation on “social life at the beach”. La Gomera based photographer Oliver Weber made this subject the theme for his newest series. The result are captivating photographs that show this bizarre, surreal, sometimes melancholic and always fascinating world of tourism with all its side effects and cliches. (Michael Werner)

Oliver Weber (born 1970) is a photographer who hails from Munich, Germany. Currently he lives and works on the Canary Island of La Gomera. His specialty areas are reportage, portrait and what has come to be recognized as street photography. He has become more widely known through numerous features with reputable magazines and publishing houses, like DIE ZEIT, DER SPIEGEL, El PAIS and MERIAN.

Through his 2007 exhibition “Humans” (Galerie Foto 21) in Bredevoort, Netherlands, Oliver Weber became more broadly accessible to an international audience. This occasion also saw the publication by Kulturbuch Verlag of his first book of photographs which was nominated for the German Photo Book Award.. 

Hessischer Rundfunk (11th February 2008) reviews the photographer and his work: “What characterises all of Oliver Weber´s work is the incredible calm and serenity captured in his photographs and in how he takes them. They communicate affection, dedication, and, most of all, a sense of time. (…) His pictures tell stories revealing deep insights into individual human lives, in different situations, and capturing an essence which unfolds in one´s viewing. This is exactly what good photography can and should achieve and for which Oliver Weber has a penetrating eye.”

2011 Oliver published his second book ‘Analogue’, which was featured by The Camera Club of New York during its photo book fair July 2011. 2012 Oliver Weber 2012 Weber took part on several “solo” and “group” exihibitions including his work, like the Documenta (13) in Kassel, Germany and the Photokina in Cologne, Germany. 

© Oliver Weber 

FRANCO VACCARI
‘In palmo di mano’

Palazzo dei Pio, Carpi
15.12.2012 – 27.01.2013 

Franco Vaccari’s conception of photography is indifferent to matters of technique, image quality, and formal balance. Instead, he is interested in disclosing the evocative power of each frame, a power which is revealed only after poring over its most secrets details. As an artist, he has always been committed to the management of perception in order to dig up the layers of meaning buried under the surface of every photograph. For Vaccari, the image is a field to be conquered. Aimed at grasping with clarity the sense of time hidden in details, his signature style entails using photography as an instrument of vision almost as if it was an extension of his sensory apparatus. Then, like an ethnographer, the artist engages in field research and delves into an expanded cultural field usually ascribed to anthropological disciplines. As the present publication shows, Vaccari is able to track down the typical features of a community by attentively searching archival images. 

[ … ] In his latest work, realized specifically for this publication, Vaccari appropriates photographs well-known to the local community and recast them in a new light. Along this journey into the images, he singles out some details that, despite their being visible, remain somewhat out of sight. His technique is simple and sophisticated at the same time: his own personal taste notwithstanding, he blows details up according to the demands of the image because he is driven by the urgency to bring to the surface latent information that lay inside the photograph and wait to see the light. Then, although these pictures had already been shown in the context of history exhibitions and publications, here they are presented with a new angle and reveal a truth that goes beyond the mere record of an action or an event. 

Vaccari is not so much interested in historic period costumes as in women’s anthropological development from the original freedom they enjoyed up until the 1930s and 40s, especially in the time off work, to the restraint and rigor of the 1950s when industrialization caged in the primitive energy that used to fuel production. On the contrary, economic development could provide Carpi’s women with a new role due to the fact they had already been hardened to toil in decades of working away from home as thousands of rice weeders had to do to reach the fields in Piemonte or making straw hats in their own dwellings. Their hands, ingeniousness, and creativity can now be applied to the knitwear clothing industries, the city’s latest pride and source of wealth, which indeed are often named after their women founders. Carpi’s situation turns out to be a unique case in the Italian industrial scene, a city where women are known to work harder than men. Then, it does not come as a surprise that, on occasion of this publication, Franco Vaccari selected the photographic series of men proudly holding their young female offspring “in the palm of the hand.” 

Luca Panaro, Empowering vision, from the exhibition catalogue APM Edizioni.

© Franco Vaccari 

Milo Montelli has launched his crowd funding campaign with Crowdbooks for his new photography book ‘Sunday, Back Home’. Here under a statement about the project by the author. Click here to support! 

I started to take the photographs that compose this work in 2010, when I left the house where I had spent the years of my childhood and adolescence with my family.

From that day I returned to my old house almost every Sunday, and almost every Sunday I took photographs. Those images represented a moment of intense inner research and recognition of my identity, made of memories sedimented between walls and voids, objects, presences and absences, old family photo albums, photos of photos.

As intimate as it can be, Sunday Back Home represents a collection of tiny personal photographic truths to share with those who wish to observe not only moments of awe and introspection experienced by a stranger, but also their own.

I believe the photographer represents the medium through which the purpose of photography is realized, a purpose which is first and foremost a personal choice, and that ends as a research of an image of the moment it encloses. [Milo Montelli]

Milo Montelly was one of the photographers selected by Urbanautica for the first edition of the Workshop ‘Landscape & Photography’ as an emerging Italian photographer. Of him we had feature already his series on ‘Urban Bonsai‘ 

© Milo Montelli

ARNOLD ODERMATT
‘Arnold Odermatt’

La Chambre, Strasbourg
14.12.2012 - 03.03.2013

There once was a Swiss officer named Arnold Odermatt, whose photographic work, long neglected, was an international echo while the author was past the age of retirement. Born in 1925 in the canton of Nidwalden in a family of eleven children whose father was a forester, Arnold Odermatt had first served an apprenticeship with a baker. However, the allergy away from his original profession and entered, quite by chance, in the cantonal police, in which he spent the next forty years.

In ten years, Arnold Odermatt won a camera in favor of a competition, which led gradually to develop an autodidact, a photographic practice that can be described as passionate. He took his Rolleiflex dual purpose with him everywhere and photographing the people and landscapes of the region, and later, his wife and children.

This photographic hobby, however, was met with indifference by his entourage, when one day, in the early 1990s, his son, Urs Odermatt rediscovered it. Photographs of police knew then gradual success. Exhibited in 1998 at the police station at the Frankfurt Book Fair, its black and white damaged cars hung the eye of the famous curator Harald Szeemann, who took them at the Venice Biennale in 2001 . Therefore, the shots of the Swiss police were rewarded with international recognition.

This exhibition aims to return to the “legend Odermatt”, through a selection of shots mixing personal and professional lives of the Swiss police which invite us to discover the different facets of the photographic practice Odermatt, whose photographs full of humor also reveal a keen sense of framing and staging.

PHILIP K. APAGYA

Photography was passed from father to son in Apagya's house. After basic training in his father's studio, the young photographer from Ghana studies at the "Institut de Journalisme d'Accra". Thrilled, he greets the revolution in the eighties: the appearance of colour photography. The demand for colour pictures for passports is insatiable en Apagya, like many of his contemporaries, concentrates on this.

After the initial ecstasy of the first months, the young man feels himself freeze up in this monotonous business. He is always been an avid fan of paintings, and now starts exploring a totally different genre: The portrait in a decor of kitsch. The "American Dream" and materialism has reached Ghana also… and thus the polyvalent artist creates paintings that for example represent a Manhattan skyline.

Do you dream of a beautiful interior? Apagya delivers it you: in fact, his models are posing in front of an ultramodern living room or kitchen, a hi-fi music installation, a VCR, beautiful flower vases and so on. The art of uniting the true with the false, that's Apagya's arena.

Philip Kwame Apagya is represented by Fifty One Fine Art Photography in Antwerpen, Belgium

© Philip K. Apagya

KATARZYNA MAJAK
Women of POWER

Central European House of Photography, Bratislava
19.12.2012 - 27.01.2013

Women of Power’ is a series 29 portraits of Polish witches, healers, enchanters, visionaries and spiritual leaders. According to what Ewelina Jarosz wrote about the project: “The title points to Katarzyna Majak’s intention to develop and socially rehabilitate women identifying themselves with the widely understood spirituality of their ancestors, Mother Goddess, pagan beliefs, and old sources of wisdom, which may still empower and inspire contemporary secularized consciousness by its valuable content and alternative energy”.

Poland is said to be more than 90% Catholic. Christianity was introduced centuries ago to have erased almost all the traces of paganism, witchcraft or shamanic traditions. Basically no line of heritage survived. Children at school learn Greek, Roman, or German mythology.

Only a few traditional healers (so called ‘whisperers’ who mix religion and primeval superstitions to heal and remove spells using prayers) survived on the Belarusian border and cannot be found anywhere else in the world. Others will try to revive a dead tradition – they may have had grandmothers who could ‘see’ or were herb healers. Some others say the knowledge survived in the subconscious but there is a need to learn from outer traditions… Thus many, left with no other choice, travel abroad - to North America, Peru, or New Zealand - to learn, come back and mix the knowledge with some local traditions - old Slavs ceremonials or demonology. Most believe pagan spirit and witchcraft somehow managed to survive in the subconscious.

This fascinating journey from a woman to a woman (the youngest in her early 30s and the oldest in her late 80s) all over the country was my search for female wisdom and plurality of spiritual paths hidden within a monoreligious society. For many of my models it was a ‘coming out’. While shooting women wore ceremonial outfits and hold their ‘objects of power’.

The project has been selected a Critical Mass finalist, has been presented at artxwomen during AA Fair in Los Angeles (January 2012), in Porter Contemporary Gallery in New York (May - July 2012), Slovene Ethnomuseum in Ljubljana (Slovenia) (June – July 2012), as a part of ‘31 Women in Art Photography’ at Hasted Kraeutler Gallery in New York (July – August 2012).

© Katarzyna Majak

Goshka Macuga
Untitled
Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
10.11.2012 - 22.12.2012 

The Andrew Kreps Galleryis pleased to present Untitled, Goshka Macuga’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.  The show is comprised of works that were recently shown at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, which was the first major presentation of her work in a public institution in Poland. 

At the core of the show lies the theme of censorship in Polish art after 1989 and the related attacks against artists, curators, directors and cultural institutions.  For the project Macuga adopted her characteristic method of delving into the archives of the hosting institution and drew upon exhibition documentation, artist portfolios, press clippings and photographs, as well as guest books, emails and letters, including private correspondence addressed to Zachęta.  The show features a tapestry taken from a photograph of a protest (originally a 1967 happening by that the artist Tadeusz Kantor) that the artist re-enacted – in which 7 postmen deliver a letter addressed to Zachęta.  The original “letter” was subsequently destroyed by the viewers – but Macuga’s letter was not – and thus serves the role as prop – or evidence.

The exhibit will also feature large-scale photographs in which the main figures have been silkscreened out – or redacted from the image.  The photos were taken from the Zachęta’s own archives and feature those artists and curators such as Adam Szymczyck and Piotr Uklanski - at the opening of their exhibition The Nazi’s- which was later attacked by a famous Polish actor Daniel Olbrychski with a sword; and a portrait Anda Rottenberg who was attacked for displaying Maurizio Cattelan’s La Nona Ora – which was later destroyed by two Polish MP’s.  Macuga also displays this act of violent censorship with a triptych of images of the damage to this same sculpture (which features Pope John Paul II felled by a meteor) – serving as a reminder that the work’s destruction was a symbolic gesture as well as an act of vandalism.

Through addressing censorship in Poland during the Culture Wars the exhibition attempts to analyze the mechanism by which demagogy replaces education, and politics interferes with art.

Goshka Macuga was born in Warsaw and studied at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art and in Goldsmiths College in London. In 2008, she was amongst the four nominees for the Turner Prize. She has had solo projects at the Whitechapel and Tate Britain in London, at the Kunsthalle Basel and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.  She was included in Documenta 2012 and was the recipient of the Arnold Bode Prize.  Her first American survey show will take place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, curated by Dieter Roelstraete.   She currently lives and works in London.

©  Andrew Kreps Gallery

MICHAEL GENOVESE
‘Lines and Cracks and Zebras and Horses’

OHWOW, Los Angeles
12.01.2013 - 09.02.2013

OHWOW is pleased to announce Michael Genovese’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, titled Lines and Cracks and Zebras and Horses. His first show in Los Angeles, on view from January 12 through February 9, 2013, at 937 North La Cienega Boulevard, presents a recently completed body of work based on lineation, cleave, and the concept implied by the aphorism: “When you hear hoof beats behind you, don’t expect to see a zebra.” A series of plasma-cut steel wall reliefs located throughout the gallery compose a subtle arrangement based equally on materiality and concept.

These raised, sculptural “drawings” suggest following the maxim that common sense is the shortest distance between two points or to recognize the grace in directness. Genovese recreates various, common occurrences of line – an architectural fracture; a hair in the bathtub; the mark of automatic writing; a military line of demarcation; a varicose vein, or a simple fabric seam. He considers where these delineations appear, why they develop, and how they are finally perceived. With a piece titled Mimesis, 2013, Genovese merges a crack found in a Pompeii fresco with a line from Metallica’s …And Justice for All album cover artwork. By stitching these unrelated strands together, Genovese formulates a new pattern, but one that still reads as spontaneous as chance. The compound of seemingly disparate fissures subsequently reveals self-similar patterns, as in the logic of fractal mathematics. Therefore, variations in contour between unrelated sources are not as far removed from one other as they may first appear, and conceptually framed, what one assumes a chasm may actually serve as a suture.

Michael Genovese creates work that aims to connect with collective experiences, be it social or existential. He speaks to the familiar; however, through mark making, reduction, or transformation of the recognizable, he reassigns power. Rather than eliminating evidence or obscuring facts, he re-contextualizes our perception of meaning and history. His work deals with archives, permanence, and the designation of value. His concern with materiality and the treatment of his chosen media furthers his investigation of worth. Genovese’s particular approach, and the work’s content, move to alter our preconceptions, changing our proximity to what is tangible. Lines and Cracks and Zebras and Horses traces pressure, time, and the role of division, or more aptly put, it traces the ideology of those measures, questioning why we don’t see something for what it isn’t.

© OHWOW 

VIVIEN AYROLES
Jardins de béton

«Living in Paris for two years, and moving around the city especially by walk, I noticed at the entrance to some buildings often built since the 60’s a curious architectural or even urbanistic thing. In jardinières of variable sizes, some of them vast, some of them small, sometimes at ground level or raised up, an assemblage of rocks (more often pebbles) and cement fills up a determined space. These sterile rock gardens punctuate the front of a building and invite the visitor to come in, or to move away. A few compositions distinguish themselves by their exuberance: Zen inspirations, a blooming touch, waves petrified in concrete. Various explanations are presented to the spectator who is a tiny bit amused: lazy green fingers, aesthetic oxymoron, scarecrow for homeless people. I photographed the “jardins de béton” (concrete gardens) that lined on my itineraries and I precisely reported them on a map. Titles of the photographs recall the number of the building and the name of the street.

This series is the first I completely realized about the city where I’m living, since I was not able to tackle it yet. I grew up in the countryside; these “jardins de béton” are a reverse of the gardens that I know and of the landscapes that I photograph, this is one image of urbanity». 

© Vivien Ayroles