Come October, The Met will probably declare “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” exhibition their most visited ever. Those who have seen it in person, battled the phone-wielding crowds for that mandatory photograph will certainly agree that it will not be an exaggeration. The expansive installation of more than 150 ensembles ranges from elaborate wedding gowns, gem-encrusted capes and bolero jackets, to an armor dress Jeanne d’Arc would have on her wish board.

Thom Browne. Wedding Ensemble, spring/summer 2018. White silk organza,white nylon tulle, embroidered white silk thread, gold bullion, pearls, crystals, clear glass, and mother-of-pearl, white mink. “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination”. ©Kristina Nazarevskaia for galleryIntell

List of designers featured in this show reads like the “Who is Who” of haute couture: Valentino, Giorgio Armani, Christian Lacroix, Dolce and Gabbana, John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Jean Paul Gaultier, Lanvin, Chanel, House of Dior, Rodarte, Versace, Philip Treacy, and others. What unites them is the shared Catholic upbringing. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine Lagerfeld,  Gaultier or Galliano as pious church going folk, but for the sake of this gorgeous show, let’s pretend they are the confession-types.

Rodarte. Ensembles, 2011. Gold metallic silk satin trimmed with beige feathers, embroidered gold metal paillettes, wire, beads, and gold metallic ribbon. “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination”. ©Kristina Nazarevskaia for galleryIntell

Valentino SpA. Autumn/winter 2016-2016. Haute Couture. Black wool, black silk velvet and satin, nylon tulle, and appliquéd wool gabardine. “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination”. ©Kristina Nazarevskaia for galleryIntell

The exhibition extends across two of the Metropolitan Museum’s three buildings. It starts at the main building on 5^th Avenue and continues in The Cloisters, the tucked away medieval structure in Fort Tryon Park in Uptown Manhattan. What makes this a worthwhile exploration is not just the colorful visual journey (think of the surreal Comme des Garçons or the lusciously seductive Alexander McQueen shows). What makes this exhibition worth seeing several times is that Andrew Bolton and his curatorial staff installed each dress (or a grouping) in a dialogue with the religious work that inspired its creation. So as you meander  from gown to gown, pay close attention to the statues, altars, draperies, and paintings near the mannequins. Signs around the gowns will point you to the relevant work of art .

Ricardo Tisci. Ensemble, autumn/winter 2005-06. Black silk jersey, white cotton poplin, embroidered glass stones. “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination”. ©Kristina Nazarevskaia for galleryIntell

While you’re in the main building make sure to visit the Costume Institute’s lower level galleries where the “real jewels” are. Bolton and his team not only saved us a trip to The Vatican, but managed to bring to New York several exquisite Papal vestments (robes and accessories) that have never before left The Vatican. The workmanship on these pieces is breathtaking. In the hands of the craftsmen each thread comes to life, each object gains dimension.

Embroidered Papal dresses and coats shimmer and glow with unparalleled beauty. You can’t help but think, how is it possible to create something so beautiful with something so simple as a silk thread and a needle? Of course, we’ve all seen exquisite embroidery but trust me when I tell you that this is on a …. “celestial” level.

Unfortunately, by choosing to replace hi-resolution photographs of these gowns with scanned composites, the exhibition catalogue fails to capture the true beauty and dimension of each piece. You’re better off skipping the book and spending more time at the show.

Rodarte. Ensembles, 2011. Gold metallic silk satin trimmed with beige feathers, embroidered gold metal paillettes, wire, beads, and gold metallic ribbon. “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination”. ©Kristina Nazarevskaia for galleryIntell

Mugler. Ensemble, autumn/winter 1984–85. Ivory silk taffeta and gold-painted feathers. “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination”. ©Kristina Nazarevskaia for galleryIntell

From the Met: “Heavenly Bodies features the work of designers who for the most part were raised in the Roman Catholic tradition. While their current relationships to Catholicism vary, most acknowledge its enduring influence on their imaginations. On the surface, this influence is expressed through explicit Catholic imagery and symbolism as well as references to specific garments worn by the clergy and religious orders. On a deeper level, it manifests as a reliance on storytelling, and specifically on metaphor—which the sociologist Andrew Greeley describes as the essential characteristic of a particular sensibility he defines as “the Catholic imagination.”

This exhibition explores how the Catholic imagination has shaped the creativity of designers and how it is conveyed through their narrative impulses. These impulses are reflected in the organization of the exhibition, which unfolds as a series of short stories told through conversations between religious artworks in The Met collection and fashions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Catholic imagination also operates on an experiential level, and, accordingly, the show’s configuration evokes the concept and practice of a pilgrimage.”

The exhibition is on view until October 8, 2018 and if you pay full price admission on your first trip you can use your ticket for the next 3 days to visit the other Met locations!

This article and video © galleryIntell

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“I see in nature and in the best of humanity an incredible beauty; but I also see in our technology and aggression a will and ability to destroy that beauty, either actively or inadvertently … I paint to try to make people think of the fragility in which we exist.” – Morgan Bulkeley 

Morgan Bulkeley, ‘Blackpoll Warbler, Red-cockaded Woodpecker, Barnacle Goose Mask’, 2014. Image © Morgan Bulkeley

American artist Morgan Bulkeley has spent a life time exploring humanity’s impact on the environment, the perilous state of nature and the corporate agenda of promoting mass consumption that lies at the core of the increasing threat to wildlife and humanity itself.

Bulkeley has been described as the ‘The Hieronymus Bosch of the Berkshires‘. His superbly detailed and emotional paintings can be seen as modern-day calls to action for protecting the world around us. The wonderfully prolific artist, who communicates his vision through a variety of media, including sculpture, hand carved masks, paintings on canvas, gouache and watercolors on paper, and even short video, made advocating for the natural world the main focus of his narratives. It is through these poignant visual statements that Morgan Bulkeley, a soft-spoken, yet deeply passionate painter has constructed whole series of “sentences”. We sat down with Morgan Bulkeley to talk about his paintings and what informs his work visually.

Video interview transcript:

Morgan Bulkeley: “Most of my paintings are about a war between culture and nature and they really are about what is dominant, what is happening in our culture and in the world today. And the way I see it there are just so many sad tales of abuses to air, water, earth. Many of these things are produced by corporate interests and people doing things without really thinking what is the effect?

Philip Guston

Morgan Bulkeley, ‘Black-crowned Night-heron Mask’, 2013. Image © Morgan Bulkeley

Philip Guston really, was huge in my mind. I saw a show of his, probably in 1975, at the Whitney Museum of American Art and in that show I saw a piece that was probably 8 feet long and 5 feet tall and, basically, it was a line across the middle of the painting and the top half was sort of a dark green and the bottom was kind of a pearly grey. When I saw the piece, I didn’t know what it was. I felt like crying and I looked at it and I must have sat there for 15 minutes just staring at this piece. It was a transformation for me really to feel that intensity. And I began to really, think about his work a lot more after that and, really, that’s what kind of pushed me toward looking for a way to paint figures that weren’t specific.

I think of it as almost a mouse chewing on a bone, it’s like chewing and making little marks and building it up. Mine is much more agitated, anxiety-ridden, I guess. I think of it as little marks that are kind of almost shaking, your hand shaking or something.

I was an English major and read an awful lot of literature in my earlier days. There are too many stories to tell and there always will be.

Morgan Bulkeley, ‘American Golden Plover Mask’, 2014. Image © Morgan Bulkeley

One of the things that’s happened with my work is that I’ll do a piece and it gets so dense and complicated and kind of intricate, entangled really, and it feels like you can’t even move through it. Often after that it will feel like I have to do a piece that is more open, that has a clarity and a sense of possibility, of movement in it. I find that often pieces really suggest the next piece. So there’s been a kind of a natural progression for me in terms of seeing where I’m going by looking back at where I’ve just been.

Cy Twombly

The artist has had solo exhibitions at the Berkshire Museum in 1973 and in 2012. The 2017 50-year retrospective will offer viewers a complete look at his distinguished and prolific career. A catalog to accompany the retrospective is available starting September 2017.

Exhibition dates at the Berkshire Museum:

Morgan Bulkeley: Nature Culture Clash

September 29, 2017 through February 4, 2018

Opening Reception with the Artist
Saturday, October 7, 5:30 to 7:30 pm

This article © galleryIntell

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Collecting anything is about bearing witness to the process and development of a chosen topic or an object. Essentially collecting catalogues history through the objects one selects. It is a process where the collector is fully engaged with the artists and essentially becomes an active participant in the creative dialogue. This exchange, this conversation ultimately benefits all sides, and dealers are often essential in fostering this relationship between artists, their art, and collectors. We spoke to Edwynn Houk, founder and owner of Edwynn Houk Gallery, about AIPAD, The Photography Show, about what types of people attend the art fair, and what collectors should consider when buying art. Below is the transcript of our conversation.

Video interview transcript:

CONVERSATIONS AT THE PHOTOGRAPHY SHOW?

Edwynn Houk: “It’s a wonderful opportunity to meet the entire field; to look at the work from some of the youngest galleries to some of the oldest and most established; to meet the owners of the gallery. To have conversations and get the opinion of a lot of the leaders of the field in photography, which is a very different perspective then one would maybe get from an auction house, which is handling what passes through their doors and is limited to that, whereas the galleries have made personal decisions: this is the artist I want to show, this is the work of theirs I want to present.

Eleanor Carucci, ‘Love’, 2009. Edwynn Houk Gallery, AIPAD. Courtesy the artist and Edwynn Houk Gallery

WHO COMES TO THE PHOTOGRAPHY SHOW?

Edwynn Houk: The kind of people who attend an AIPAD fair contrast very sharply with our experience at all the other fairs. It’s really the most serious of collectors, the highest level of quality and, obviously, exclusively focused on photography. The audience has a very high representation of museum curators and collectors who come in person. Also, there’s more discovery, there’s more to learn by being there in person.

VIDEO: Steven Kasher on the 4 C’s of collecting. 

BEST ADVICE FOR COLLECTING ART?

Edwynn Houk: Don’t collect as an investment. One should collect work that you want to live with, that you find enriching, that you like looking at all the time. Also if you are spending a considerable amount of money, it also makes sense that you’d like to know the reputation of the artist, their standing, that it’s a major talent, someone who has a real role in the history of the medium.

ANALOGUE VS. DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY?

Andreas Meichsner, #12 aus der Serie ‘Willkommen im Club’, Robert Morat Galerie, AIPAD. Courtesy the artist and Robert Morat Gallery

Edwynn Houk: What I find very interesting about one of the areas really being explored recently is the renewal in interest in antique processes, whether it’s collodion printing, daguerreotypes and different forms of that but adapting it to very contemporary world, a contemporary esthetic. So someone like Vera Lutter using camera obscura, but taking pictures that are just hauntingly modern or Sally Mann doing collodion plates where her re-creation of the technique includes quite a few flaws. She hadn’t perfected it like the 19th century photographers but she didn’t expect to and embraces as though to make it part of the image. Or someone like Adam Fuss with daguerreotypes. At the same time, that other people are experimenting with the computer and scanning negatives, digitizing, making small to, sometimes, very large manipulation in it. So the public, unless they are very knowledgeable in photography, really needs some information, some education as to what is altered by computer, in a very modern sense, or what is very basic photo optics and technique.

WHAT DO DEALERS BRING TO AIPAD’S THE PHOTOGRAPHY SHOW?

Edwynn Houk: We like to have something new if we can. If we represent a photographer that would be a great opportunity to really announce it, to the public and to show whatever body of work we’re going to kick it off with. If we have major works of historical importance; we’d certainly bring it there more than any other fair.”

Maurizio Galimberti, ‘Casa di Leon Trotsky… studio, Città del Messico, ottobre 2002’, polaroid, Paci Contemporary AIPAD. Courtesy the artist and Paci Contemporary.

This interview was conducted in partnership with AIPAD.

The Edwynn Houk Gallery was founded in 1980. Since its inception, the gallery has specialized in vintage photographs from 1917-1939 by the leading figures of the Modernist movement. The gallery has mounted over 200 exhibitions and published more than a dozen monographs.

Houk Gallery has served as the exclusive representative of the Estates of Brassaï, Bill Brandt, Dorothea Lange, André Kertész, Ilse Bing, and the Robert Frank Archive. Beginning with exclusive representation of Sally Mann in 1989, the Edwynn Houk Gallery has acted as the sole agent for a select group of leading contemporary photographers, including Robert Polidori, Lalla Essaydi, Annie Leibovitz and Abelardo Morell.

In 2010, on the occasion of its 30th anniversary, the gallery opened a second location in Zürich. 

Mr. Houk has served on the Board of Directors for ADAA, Paris Photo, AIPAD, and on the Selection Committee for Art Basel and Paris Photo.

Edwynn Houk Gallery is a member of AIPAD. The gallery is located at 745 Fifth Avenue New York, NY

The Photography Show March 29th – April 2nd, 2017 at its new location on Pier 94, New York.

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It really is all about scale. We want our technology smaller, and at the same time we want to be able to interact with images on a larger, more life-like scale. So cameras are getting smaller, printers are getting larger and artists like Ed Burtynsky, Martin Usborne, Massimo Vitali, and Scarlett Hooft Graafland are now able to create images on a more monumental scale. Thanks to innovations in digital, photographers are now able to work on the scale Abstract Expressionists first adopted in the 1940’s and 1950’s. And it makes a difference.

We sat down with Howard Greenberg, founder and owner of one of the most influential and prominent fine photography galleries in the US, to talk about the origins and evolution of landscape photography, the importance of skilled print making, and how our expectations of landscape photography have changed over the years and decades since Andre Giroux, Eugene Atget, Gustave Le Gray, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston first printed their images. Howard, who really is one of the most engaging and charismatic people we’ve ever had the pleasure of talking to, opened up a whole new world that only an expert like himself would ever be privy to.

And if you think of landscape photography and large scale landscape photography the name that instantly comes to mind is Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky is a star in his own right and has been featured in many illustrious print and digital publications. Ed is a master of melding reality and abstraction, often producing mesmerizing aerial views that read like a Helen Frankenthaler, Conrad Marca-relli, or a Jack Tworkov colorfield painting. In November Burtynsky’s newest images were shown simultaneously at two major NYC galleries: Howard Greenberg Gallery and Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery.

Salt Pan #16, ‘Little Rann of Kutch Gujarat’, 2016. Chromogenic Color Print. © Ed Burtynsky. Courtesy the artist and Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York. AIPAD

Burtynsky is the recipient of the ICP Infinity Award for Art (2008), the Rogers Best Documentary Film Award (2006), the inaugural TED Prize (2005), the Dialogue of Humanity Award at Rencontres d’Arles (2004), and the Roloff Beny Book Award (2003).  In 2006, he was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of Canada, and holds six honorary doctorate degrees. Burtynsky was recently commissioned to create an immense permanent installation of photographs at the National Holocaust Monument of Canada.

Video interview transcript

Howard Greenberg: “It’s that way in every art fair including AIPAD. I’m always surprised that there are collectors who collect exactly what we have in the gallery who I’ve never met before.

ON BECOMING A PHOTOGRAPHY ART DEALER

Howard Greenberg: I came through the door being a photographer. I loved beautiful print making. When I look at photographs in galleries or museums, that’s what turned me on. I love the sense of photography as vision and craft. You know you make the picture and then the craftsmanship that you put into making the print, creates the final photograph.

Beth Moon, ‘Shebehon Forest’, 2010. Courtesy the artist and Vision Neil Folberg Gallery, Jerusalem. AIPAD

INFLUENCES

Ed Burtynsky: With Weston it was that ability to take the ordinary and elevate it to the extra-ordinary, in a way as a painter would look at a blank canvas and how do you fill it and how do you make every square inch of it intentional. So I was heavily influenced by Robert Adams and Baltz, and [Frank] Gohlke, and Joe Deal, and the ability to begin to look at landscape. Not just as an esthetic exploration but as a critique that there’s something else being told. AIPAD has a more select audience that appreciates photography and understands the history of photography.

Edward Burtynsky, ‘Rice Terraces #4, Western Yunnan Province’, China, 2012 Chromogenic color print on Kodak Endura Premier Paper. Printed 2014. Courtesy Ed Burtynsky and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York. AIPAD

TRENDS IN PHOTOGRAPHY?

Howard Greenberg: I think scale in photography is its own unique evolution. In the past, landscape photography was more about making a beautiful print of the landscape which was wonderful. 8×10, Ansel Adams brought it up to maybe 16×20 and larger, but basically it was a small image and if you were a good printmaker and you could make luscious beautiful prints fully detailed and so on. You could hold a small landscape and be moved by it but again, that’s shifted.

Jörn VANHÖFEN ‘Chicago 2767’, 2010. Chromogenic color print mounted to dibond. © Jörn Vanhöfen, courtesy Robert Mann Gallery, New York

Today one wants to look at a larger picture. We’re getting sensitized. It feels more natural to look at a larger picture. I enjoy looking at large format now.  You can walk into it, you can really see it.

If you look at content, content is about history. Content is about a moment in time. The digital revolution if you will, has opened up a door really wide that just didn’t exist before and the fact that you can make large, and larger, and larger prints, and the quality remains equal, in the sense of sharpness and tone, gradations, and all that kind of thing, it’s really changed color entirely.

WHAT’S AN ‘ICONIC’ IMAGE?

Ansel Adams,’ Jeffrey Pine, Sentinel Dome, Yosemite’, 1940. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy G Gibson Gallery, Seattle. AIPAD

Howard Greenberg: Sometimes a photograph becomes transformative. Something in the combination of ingredients, that makes that final print. I say it works. What’s working? You get some feeling from it. You get some sense of place, of time, of human emotion, of information that you just don’t get other ways. What you include in the picture, what you don’t include in the picture, and then there is light and shadow, and there are happy accidents. When the Gods are good and the universe is lined up – a great photograph can happen.”

This interview was conducted in partnership with AIPAD.

Howard Greenberg Gallery is a member of AIPAD. The gallery is located at The Fuller Building, 41 East 57th Street, Suite 1406, New York, NY.

The Photography Show March 29th – April 2nd, 2017 at its new location on Pier 94, New York.

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In the age of smartphones and the ever-improving (and shrinking) optics, taking pictures of ourselves and others is as easy and simple as tapping on the screen. Tap and you have captured that moment in time. Tap and you have a record of your favorite place, person, event, object. But when does a picture of someone become a portrait of someone? What makes one image simply a picture and another a portrait? Is there a clear definition? And is a selfie the same thing as a self-portrait?

Eugène Pelletan by Nadar, 1855 – 59, Salted paper print from glass negative. Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

In the late 1800’s, once the photographic technology became commercially available, photographic portraits almost entirely replaced painted portraits (and changed the history of art in the process). This technical innovation allowed the genre to transform from something that was once only accessible to the rich, to something any family could now have: a record of themselves. This desire to capture and preserve our likenesses, this vanity, if you will, remains one of the driving forces behind innovation in photography.

“In portraiture, the impact of photography is huge; the correlation between ‘reality’ and ‘likeness’ as perceived within the format of the photograph is undeniable. This combination of illusion and real life, guarantees its continuing success as a medium for this purpose, whether digital, moving or other lens-based methods of making portraits.” – National Portrait Gallery, London.*

In anticipation of their year’s AIPAD photography fair, we sat down with James Danziger, the owner of the eponymous Danziger Gallery, which recently moved from Chelsea to the Lower East Side of Manhattan to talk about how the genre has changed since its inception, what he looks for in a photograph, what remained and what changed, and who makes for a better model, men or women?

Interview Transcript:

James Danziger: “What I look for in a photograph is always something that moves you in one way or another whether it’s surprise or whether it’s an emotion, you know it has to be something that takes you out of the ordinary. I’ve been doing the AIPAD fair for 25 years and one of the great things about the AIPAD fair is the variety of work that you see both chronologically and in terms of style.

AIPAD 2017. Hendrik Kerstens, ‘Toilet Paper’. Courtesy Hendrik Kerstens and Danziger Gallery

The genre of Portraiture in photography is, to some extent, related to the technology and development of photography. The idea of a good photograph was something that was very painterly and as the medium progressed it’s definitely branched out into being a much more original medium.

Progress Of The Genre

What we look for is something, which adds to the history of the medium. So just as you could say in painting, once you got to Impressionism and Abstraction, the next thing to do was conceptual work. It’s the same with photography. Once there have been beautiful painterly likenesses, the next thing is how do you do something that, that builds on that and changes it and adds something to photography to make it interesting?

Portrait Vs. Potrait

Phil Borges: “Asgeli, (age 52), Afar tribe, Awash Fontale, Ethiopia, Africa. As a leader of the circumcision ceremony, Asgeli had performed hundreds of female circumcisions. Now, like others in the village, she is supportive of the change in custom that Abay had advocated. She said, “We did the circumcisions because that is what had always been done. We were in the dark house and did not know.”

Portraiture seems to be very much slanted towards images of women so it’s always interesting for me when you find a portrait of a man which is a powerful, as good as a portrait of a woman.

What is specific to a photographic portrait is that in most cases it is a record of a single instant that is a fraction of a second. How that fraction of a second is chosen is something that is unique to photography. In the case of a sculptor or a painter, the image is created over time but in photography it’s created in a very finite moment and that gives it a quality that is very different from the other mediums.

The Importance of Intention

AIPAD 2017. Josef Breitenbach, ‘Max Ernst’, Paris, 1938. Vintage gelatin silver print. Courtesy Gitterman Gallery

What makes things interesting in photography is leaps of imagination that take you to new places that you wouldn’t think of before. Vernacular photographs can be great but they’re great because of the perception that we bring to them.

The medium of photography happens to be a very open and a universal one. It’s parenthetically interesting that, I think, of all the branches of art, photography is the one that has been most open to women, to people of any minority.

It’s a very democratic medium.”

* “Portrait Photography. From the Victorians to the present day“. National Portrait Gallery, London

This article © galleryIntell

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In conjunction with the Galerie St. Etienne’s current exhibition, ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER: Featuring Watercolors and Drawings from the Robert Lehman Collection (through July 1), Eric Fischl shares his thoughts on the art of drawing.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ‘Resting Head’, 1912. Pen and ink on thin cream wove paper. Image courtesy Galerie St. Etienne

Video interview transcript

The nature of painting and drawing, and sculpture, as well as photography, is to stop the world. [To] create for the audience, the feeling of something fleeting that people can come and perceive over and over. The object, actually, was forever, but it gave you an experience of evanescence or ephemerality, or something like that.

Color is amassing form and it’s light-filled so you simultaneously get through a gesture, a relatively simple gesture, you can get an essential feeling of a body that’s very physical and real, and also get the luminosity of it, the lightness of it.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ‘Three Figures At Cafe Table’, Circa 1915. Graphite on thin cream wove paper. Image courtesy Galerie St. Etienne

In black and white, and certainly in the charcoals, it’s a slower labor to achieve. There is an essentialness to the black and white, a spontaneous, an essential quality to that it seems like it’s a revelation of the first order.

Gustav Klimt, ‘Pregnant Woman and Man’ 1903-04. Blue crayon on heavy tan wove paper. Image courtesy Galerie St. Etienne

One of the fun things to do when looking at drawings is to imagine where on the pencil they’re holding. It gives you a sense of their deliberateness, sensitivity, the heaviness or the lightness of the line. With Klimt, he seemed to almost be holding the feeling of it, not the actual thing. It was almost like he was holding it closer to the top, so it had a kind of a interesting ‘stroking’ quality to it.  He was also somebody who never took his eyes off the model. That [hand-eye] coordination, that confidence with which he cold not see what he was doing, and also accept the distortions which were not based on realist observation, but were based on a feeling.

[Egon] Schiele knew from the neck down to the tip of the finger exactly where he was going and was nervous the whole way.

Egon SchieIe. ‘Self-Portrait in Street Clothes, Gesturing’
1910. Watercolor and pencil on brown paper. Image courtesy Galerie St. Etienne

I work from photographs. The photograph slices life so thinly that everybody is off balance. Everybody is in a state of motion and within a narrative structure you need that kind of animation to trigger the whole scene. Photography receives the image, Kirchner goes out and gets it.

I think that one thing that people do looking to art is they are looking for authenticity: the authenticity of beauty, the authenticity of eroticism, and anguish. It’s where you go to feel that this is the essential place for meaningfulness.

Founded in 1939, Galerie St. Etienne specializes in Austrian and German Expressionism and in works by European and American self-taught artists from the 19th century to the present.

This video and transcript © galleryIntell. Images courtesy Galerie St. Etienne.

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“There are numerous, varied and sometimes conflicting aspects to my work, usually intended but definitely also spontaneously emerging.” – Wim Botha

Some artists spend their careers exploring properties and limitations of a single medium: working all their creative lives exclusively in oil, bronze, or wood; while others prefer to construct a broad narrative and deliver it through an all-inclusive range of materials. Wim Botha, a young South African artist, who represented his country at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 is, certainly, the latter. Wim’s grotesque busts, surrealist torsos, spatially complex light processions, and various abstracted shapes catch the uninitiated by surprise, forcefully and monumentally inserting themselves into the viewers’ space: mental and physical. Once you see and engage with a Wim Botha sculpture, you can’t forget the emotional impact it had on you.

Wim Botha, Bust, Encyclopedias, Wood, Stainless Steel. Image © Wim Botha, Courtesy  the artist and STEVENSON Gallery

It’s an immersive process, one which takes the viewer through several stages of realization. First comes the recognition of classical Roman sculptural portraiture as the principal influence in Botha’s busts and torsos. Then subtle purpose and intention of the chosen materials reveal themselves much like physical and visual elements in Antony Minghella’s cinematic masterpieces. Each decision in Wim Botha’s work is deeply imbued with purpose. White Carrera marble, one of the most expensive sculptural materials, is carved to reveal typically African features — symbolism most pertinent in a country whose recent history was defined by Apartheid and oppression of its black citizens. Conversely, burned and charred wood is used to portray typically European faces – another commentary on the issues of perception and inequality.

Bust of a Man Early Imperial, Julio-Claudia mid first century AD. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

Wim Botha, ‘A Thousand Things’ part 10, Detail. Treated wood and black ink. Image © Wim Botha

Busts that feature double heads, or heads attached to sculls recall Hamlet’s famous conversation with Yorick’s scull at the start of the play’s third act.

“In my paper works, I carve subjects from stacked or compressed documents containing selected texts with content and meaning significant to the work. By carving a form from these texts, the information it conveys becomes a part of the physical substance of the work and is directly related to the form.”

Wim Botha, bust, 2010 Portrait Bust (Daughter), 2010 carved Afrikaans bibles, 56 x 53 x 38 cm

In Wim’s elaborate installations Afrikaans bibles are used to create images from Western culture and history, drawing attention to the invasion of one culture by another and, subsequently, inverting it. White polystyrene busts are cast in bronze, transforming weightless objects into heavy, immovable ones. And then there is the issue of the pedestal. Like Rodin, Boccioni, and Giacometti before him, Wim Botha reinterprets the purpose and perception of the classical support element, adding to its evolution.

Wim Botha, ‘Prism 10 (Dead Laocoön)’ 2014. Bronze, Image © Wim Botha, courtesy the artist and STEVENSON Gallery

“In my work there is seldom a distinction to be drawn between the prominence of the concept and that of the medium. I work with materials central to mass consumerist applications, that are subsequently transformed in essence and meaning to a point at which material and concept becomes integrally interdependent. The works take the form of sculptural installations. I appropriate well-known, sometimes trite and over-saturated subject matter which, coupled with traditional shaping and technological elements, become the nucleus of a series of references around the inherent implication of the subject.” 

‘Solipsism 4’ (detail) 2012 Polystyrene, wood, fluorescent tubes . Image © Wim Botha, courtesy of the artist and STEVENSON Gallery

His sculptures are best viewed in the context he creates where each individual object carries equal conceptual weight in relation to the entire composition, as well as the space itself. Abstract paintings and drawings often complete the narrative and should be regarded as part of the statement.

Wim Botha, ‘Self-Portrait as a Heretic’, 2008, bibles in South African indigenous languages. Image © Wim Botha, courtesy the artist and STEVENSON Gallery

Legato Bereng, Associate Director of STEVENSON Gallery, Capetown and Johannesburg talked to galleryIntell about Wim Botha’s most recent body of work, his reinvention of Michelangelo’s ‘Pieta’, and the philosophy behind the artist’s imagery.

Video interview transcript:

Legato Bereng: It’s kind of a moment of South African intervention of Western history which, essentially, we all have been fed. Wim inverts that. He’s done it through subtle ways of looking at the Afrikaans bible and creating it into this marble bust, sort of imposing South African-ness on a particular history, which is removed from the country. Wim is really interested in history and art history, looking at the traditions of marble and classical sculptural busts and he is also interested in material, in kind of looking at the different ways the material can invert itself. He creates these busts out of wood, out of marble, and out of books. Basically he carves it as one would a marble sculpture. Working with it as though it’s this obsolete material. The information in the encyclopedias, I mean, it’s a completely obsolete medium now.

He also creates sculptures out of polystyrene and then casts them in bronze, so this light, white, weightless substance becomes this heavy, immovable dark substance, which is another thing he likes to do: invert the meaning of the material.

The pedestal and its significance in Wim Botha’s spaces

He often decides to create rooms more than he decides to create sculptures. He creates interventions within the sculptures in the way that they are exhibited. So, the pedestals for instance, at times he does traditional, refined looking pedestals, other times he decides to use found wood, or chunks of wood, in other instances he suspends them, but it’s all just playing with the idea of presentation and how he’d like them to exist in space.

‘The Epic Mundane’, 2012 various materials. Image © Wim Botha, courtesy of the artist and STEVENSON Gallery

‘Untitled’, 2014, Wood, cardboard, lacquer. Image © Wim Botha, courtesy the artist and STEVENSON Gallery

Each artwork travels with its own room. It could be a subtle piece of wood that emerges from the wall, or a suspended frame that implies particular kind of architecture in the space, so he likes to carve space. He likes to suggest new spaces: spaces within spaces.

Wim Botha’s ‘Pietá’

Wim Botha’s maize meal ‘Pieta’. Image © Wim Botha, courtesy the artist and STEVENSON Gallery

His most memorable work to date is this mieliepap “Pietá” that he made out of maize meal. He created the ‘Pietá’ to scale, recreated it, and carved it, as one would a marble block, but it was made out of maize meal, which is a staple food that is seen across the continent of Africa. There are those kind of subtleties, or particular kind of a poetic language that he uses and his choice of material.

This video interview and transcript © galleryIntell. Images © Wim Botha. Courtesy of the artist and STEVENSON Gallery.

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We were delighted to meet Patricia Conde, founder and director of the Patricia Conde Galeria, during this year’s installment of The Photography Show.

The Mexico City based gallery was invited to participate in the photography art fair (this is the last year that the fair is held at The Park Avenue Armory before moving to Pier 94) and we had a chance to talk to Patricia about the images she brought with her.

Watch Steven Kasher on the 4 “C’s” of collecting

Some of our favorite images were jewel-like, one-of-a-kind, hand-colored photographs from the 1920’s. Other notable images were rare glimpses into the lives of legends, while others – candid snapshots from people’s every-day lives. The gallery began its programming by exhibiting mid-career artists with no prior gallery representation, then expanding the roster to show previously unseen archives as well as promising contemporary photographers.

Mexico – Tenochtitlan Francisco Mata. Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico City at The Photography Show 2016 presented by AIPAD.

Rodrigo Moya. Frutas y Pascuines. Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico City at The Photography Show 2016 presented by AIPAD.

Hector Garcia. Entre el Progreso y el Desarrollo 1950. Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico City at The Photography Show 2016 presented by AIPAD.

Video interview transcript:

Patricia Conde: Mexican photography has great recognition in the world, and here I brought a history of techniques and the best of the best that I have. And I decided to bring these unique pieces and start from this, to the newest, to the more contemporary [art]. I started with only the mid-career artists, who never had a gallery that represented them, but slowly I have moved towards archives because they look for me and I have access to these archives and also to the most contemporary young proposals.

Rodrigo Moya El Che Melancolico, 1964. Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico City at The Photography Show 2016 presented by AIPAD.

I have Héctor García, Rodrigo Moya, who had the opportunity to shoot Che [Guevara]. [Che] was available for only 20 minutes and [at that time] there were only rolls of 24 frames, so [Moya] only had the chance of taking 24 shots. This is one of them. I have, of course, Graciela de Iturbide, Francisco Mata, who is a great and recognized artist in our country, and I have [Enrique] Metinides. He started in the press very, very young, at the age of 9 – 10 years-old, and these are the first photographs he took. I brought this beautiful mosaic, which are unique pieces too.

Kati Horna was at Jeu de Paume and the Museo Amparo, and she is going to the Reina Sofia, and [other] important museums all over the world. Carlos Jurado, who is having a [retrospective] in Centro de la Imagen very soon, and Manual Ramos, who was working with the revolution during the very first decade of the 20^th century.

Katy Horna. Remedios Varo Mexico, 1957. Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico City at The Photography Show 2016 presented by AIPAD.

I am the only gallery that specializes in photography and I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to meet wonderful people who have archives, so they look for me to carry them to some places like [AIPAD] or Paris Photo, or places like that, in which they can be seen and known, so I am starting to build some names. These names are very important in Mexico: for the professors, for people who know, but maybe they are not known as well. That is why I bring them.

Patricia Conde Galeria is the only gallery in Mexico that specializes in photography and represents primarily Mexican mid-career and emerging photographers.

This video and interview transcript © galleryIntell

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With the 36th installment of The Photography Show about to launch at The Park Avenue Armory galleryIntell sat down to talk to Christiane Fischer and Vivian Ebersman of AXA Art Americas to talk about the international insurer’s long time support of the fair and its member galleries, and what they offer to the collectors of photography — be they experienced connoisseurs of the medium, or someone making his or her first steps into the world of photography collecting. Below is the transcript of the video interview, and in the coming days we’ll be posting a full transcript of our conversation, so make sure to come back and read all the wonderful insights and recommendations these two experts shared with our team.

Video interview transcript:

Gordon Parks Invisible Man Retreat Harlem 1952. Image © The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation and Weinstein Gallery

Christiane Fischer, President & CEO AXA Art Americas: AIPAD brings together the world leaders in photography, and what they provide with this fair is a place for the galleries to show their knowledge, to show their wares, obviously, and represent the artists, but also to help reach collectors that are specifically interested in photography collecting, and foster that level of understanding and connoisseurship. I think it’s this interaction between the gallery representatives and the collector that ultimately brings a lot of value to the fair and to the membership of AIPAD.

Vivian Ebersman, Director Art Expertise at AXA Art Americas Corporation: We like our collectors to be aware of aspects of their collection that they might not think about, having chosen the works – then what happens next. We feel that we are very, very well versed in the care and handling of works of art through our collective experiences as a global company. In others words, there are lots of stories that we’ve heard. So we try to talk about furthering the depth of their enjoyment of the collection through connoisseurship, through research. We try to encourage people to be very good record keepers about what they have, and we try to encourage best practices in shipping and handling. We’ve seen such a growth of interest in photography and it’s really blossomed and it’s blossomed among collectors as well as artists. And in a way, coming to the fair really helps the visitors prepare to look at the works that they see in museums and in galleries and to understand how artists, who’s primary practices may be focused on sculpture and painting, also utilize photography. So the fair is a wonderful delight for us.

Ruth Bernhard, Two Leaves, 1952, Silver Gelatin Print, Image courtesy Scott Nichols Gallery AIPAD 2016

Christiane Fischer, President & CEO AXA Art Americas: We are honored to be supporting the only global art photography fair that is happening in the world. For the last 4 decades, AIPAD has been promoting and encouraging the connoisseurship as well as the appreciation of photography as a medium, and that is very important, especially also because photography is the way for many young collectors to enter the collecting market. We can support the AIPAD members on a global scale. So wherever AIPAD members are located, AXA Art will be able to offer them an insurance solution and support their activities locally, I think one of the advantages of being a truly international art insurer is that we have the knowledge in each individual market place, and we are very, very closely working with all the local members in each art, sort of, community. So we know all the international shippers but we also know the local people. We know the local conservators, we know the local appraisers so our network is very international and very local at the same time and this is what we can bring in support to also the members of AIPAD and their clients ultimately, if they have questions.

This video and transcript © galleryIntell and ArtReels Production.

Gordon Parks, Untitled, Nashville, Tennessee, 1956, Archival pigment print PHOTOGRAPH BY GORDON PARKS
COPYRIGHT: COURTESY OF AND COPYRIGHT THE GORDON PARKS FOUNDATION. Image provided by Weinstein Gallery
Gordon Parks, Invisible Man Retreat, Harlem, New York, 1952 Gelatin silver print, PHOTOGRAPH BY GORDON PARKS
COPYRIGHT: COURTESY OF AND COPYRIGHT THE GORDON PARKS FOUNDATION. Image provided by Weinstein Gallery
Ruth Bernhard, Two Leaves, 1952. Silver Gelatin Print Courtesy Scott Nichols Gallery
Eikoh Hosoe, Kamaitachi No. 31, 1968, Vintage silver gelatin print. Image courtesy Eikoh Hosoe and Michael Hoppen Gallery

Installation images in the video provided by AIPAD, The Association of International Photography Art Dealers, AXA Art Americas, Kristina Nazarevskaia.

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In our second exclusive video interview for AIPAD and The Photography Show we sat down with Steven Kasher, Founder and Director of Steven Kasher Gallery and member of AIPAD to talk about the photography’s origins, primary types of photography collectors and the one trait that unites most AIPAD dealers. Lots of unique insights, facts, humor, and, as always beautiful images provided so graciously by the many wonderful AIPAD members. So, our thanks to everyone who sent us photographs on such a tight schedule! You can find a complete listing of images at the bottom of the article. Enjoy!

Video interview transcript:

Max Kozloff, Francesca Woodman, 1981. C-print, Image courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery

Steven Kasher: I find photography so interesting because it’s a bastard. It’s a bastard medium. It has one foot in the technical apparatus of photography: recording of light in this mechanical, chemical process, and then it has its other foot in so many other places. It could be in the art world. The thinking behind the photograph could come from fashion, it could come from science, journalism and it’s just this very broad endeavor, that everybody in the world participates in.

Gallery Exhibitions as Educational Tools

One of the things we do as photography dealers is educate the public. The primary means we do that is through exhibitions. So exhibitions are this incredible resource. Where else do you get something for free, that has been organized with so much care, and time, and understanding, and presented in a beautiful way, in a beautiful space?

Customer, Client, Collector, Curator

AIPAD 2016, The Photography Show. Image © Kristina Nazarevskaia

So, who are the people who buy photographs from us? I sort of categorize them as 4 ‘C’s’. There is, first of all, a Customer – someone who comes in, buys something once…he may want to have a picture to hang in the living room… Then there is a Client – The client is someone who is a repeat customer, who comes back, who enjoys our gallery, who enjoys several of our artists, who finds it comfortable in any particular gallery. The third is the Collector. The collector is somebody who is deeply engaged in understanding the medium, in understanding, maybe a particular artist, a particular photographer, who is amassing a story, a narrative, about a subject through the subjects they collect. And then the fourth ‘C’ is the Curators. We often times work with museums. Museums are some of our best and most important clients and they have their own stories to tell.

AIPAD Dealers

Massimo Vitali, #4874 Tropea Shadow, Calabria, 2015 © Massimo Vitali. Courtesy the artist and Benrubi Gallery

So, one of the things I like to do, and I think all of the AIPAD dealers would agree with me, we like to listen. We don’t only like to talk, we like to talk too, but we like to listen. We need to hear, from our clients, whether they are new collectors, or very experienced collectors, whom we’ve gotten to know, or curators we know, we need to know what they are interested in. It’s a big part of our job to find out what you’re interested in, what kind of photograph do you want? We will point you in different directions. I mean, all of us have these vast inventories in our galleries and we basically, want to expose all of it to everyone, but what we have to do is listen to find out what particular things you’re interested in, what artists, and even within the artists, what aspect of their work? Their beginning work, their portrait work… so it’s really a wonderful dialogue we’re trying to have all the time, and I would say, the most important part of that dialogue is the listening part.”

Featured images:

Photogram, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1939, Gelatin Silver Print, Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
Chuck Close, Woodburytypes, 2012, Courtesy Kristina Nazarevskaia
Aline Smithson, Pink Feathers, 2013, Courtesy Verve Gallery for Photography
Whitney Hubbs, Body Surrogate (SelfPortrait), 2015 Gelatin Silver Print, Courtesy of artist and M+B Gallery
Micky Hoogendijk, Fortitudo, 2014 C-Print, Courtesy Verve Gallery for Photography
Hellen Van Meene, Untitled, 2015, Chromogenic Print, Courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery
Max Kozloff, Francesca Woodman, 1981. C-print, Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery
André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, Prince Lobkowitz, 1858 Albumen silver print from glass negative, Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
Massimo Vitali, #4874 Tropea Shadow, Calabria, 2015 Courtesy the artist and Benrubi Gallery
Edward Weston, Two Shells, 1927 Silver Gelatin Print, Courtesy Scott Nichols Gallery
Edward Weston, Shells, 1927 Silver Gelatin Print, Courtesy Scott Nichols Gallery
Ellen Carey, Pull 01 Unique Polaroid color dye-diffusion transfer print, Courtesy the artist and M+B Gallery
Denis Brihat, Pelure d’oignon (onion skin), 2006 Gold-toned gelatin silver print, Courtesy Nailya Alexander Gallery

Gallery installation images courtesy:
FAHEY/KLEIN Gallery, Benrubi Gallery, Steven Kasher Gallery, VERVE Gallery of Photography

This video and transcript © galleryIntell and ArtReels Production.

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This year, in anticipation of the 36th annual Photography Show that will take place at the Park Avenue Armory April 14 – 17, 2016, galleryIntell and AIPAD, the Association of International Photography Art Dealers joined forces to bring you a series of exclusive video interviews with the Association’s top photography dealers.  As a curatorial and educational platform, galleryIntell has covered The Photography Show for a number of years, and this year we are thrilled to partner with AIPAD as its Exclusive Video Partner.

Our first interview is with Catherine Edelman, President of AIPAD and founder of the eponymous Chicago gallery. We spoke to Catherine about photography’s evolution, its increasing presence in the public’s collective perception, addition of photography t many private and corporate collections, and how technology changed the progress and direction of the medium.

Video interview transcript:

Photography has become a much more present medium in many galleries, museums and private and corporate collections. Could you tell us why it is so relevant in today’s world?

Catherine Edelman: I think photography is the most relevant tool because it can respond immediately in a way that maybe, by process, painting can’t, or sculpture can’t, because it is so immediate. It’s also an understandable and relatable tool.

It’s invaluable for communication and it’s invaluable for art, and you see it exploding everywhere. The photographic medium, whether it’s the mixed media photo-based collages, videos, or paintings, people are just mixing it all up and using that art form as a good foundation. And there are still regular photographers who just take these straight black and white photographs, but there are more and more people who are using it within other art forms and are mixing it all up, which didn’t use to happen.

Broadway on a Rainy Day, Edward Anthony, Albumen Print, 1859 Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

How has photography changed over time?

Back in the day, when photography was a big hand-held camera and you had to look down, it was very much a profession that the average person didn’t have access to. Then through instant cameras like Polaroid or other cameras where we sent in our film to a drug store, we all started to understand the access to photography. Most people use cameras to document their own histories. Photographers, who are using it as an art form, use it to document other people and other situations. Predominantly, sometimes their own, but to talk about a politic greater than them.

Fred W. McDarrah Robert Kennedy in Slum Apartment, May 8, 1967 Vintage gelatin silver print. Image courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery

Who are the AIPAD dealers and what should collectors be looking for at this year’s Photography Show?

AIPAD, which is the Association of International Photography Art Dealers, started more that 35 years ago by a group of dealers who came together to support the medium. Over the years, of course, we’ve grown to be more than 120 dealers world wide, who are considered to be the experts in the medium, and we pride ourselves on great ethical standards, understanding the medium much more so than any other dealer who is not specifically involved in photography, and the exhibition allows us to showcase that. And so, in the exhibition you see everything from the first photographs ever made: from salt prints, to mixed media, photo-based videos that are behind me, which really have expanded the direction that artists are working today with the medium. So our strength is to show you, obviously what we think, is the best, as dealers, but also sort of give you a history of the medium within a setting over the course of a few days at an art fair. And you’ll see some of these real gems: undiscovered pieces, that might come out of an attic, so to speak, to pieces that could have been made by a recent graduate that haven’t been tested in the market but the dealer thinks there is fantastic because it’s advancing the ideas and concepts behind photography.”

The Photography Show will move to Pier 94 in 2017

Cover image (detail): © James Welling, “001, A+& (from ‘Flowers’)”, 2006, Chromogenic print, Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

Featured images:
Milly, Tom Butler, Goauche on Albumen Print, 2014 Courtesy Charlie Smith, London
Where Is It Now, Marie Navarre Film positive, book page, glass, steel, 1998 Courtesy Lisa Sette Gallery, Phoenix, Arizona
Slip 17, Farrah Karapetian, unique photogram, 2014 Courtesy Von Lintel Gallery
Alison Rossiter Nepera Chemical Company Carbon Velox, shipped from works November 8, 1897, processed 2014 (#1), Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery
Broadway, New York City in the Rain, Edward Anthony, Albumen Print Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
Church Gate, Sebastao Salgado, Silver Gelatin Print Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery
Dinka Camp, Sebastian Salgado, Silver Gelatin Print Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery
Fred W. McDarrah Robert Kennedy in Slum Apartment, May 8, 1967 Vintage gelatin silver Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery
Reclining Odalisque, Roger Fenton, Salt Print, 1858 Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
Der Fotograf, Willi Ruge, Silver Gelatin Print, 1931 Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
Kahn & Selesnick, The Reluctant Conscript Courtesy Kopeikin Gallery
Eugène Pelletan by Nadar, Salted paper print from glass negative, 1855 Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
Sandro Miller, Richard Avedon / Ronald Fischer, Beekeeper, Davis, California, May 9 (1981), 2014, Courtesy Catherine Edelman Gallery
Album d’Études-Poses, Louis Igout, Albumen Silver Prints from Glass Negatives Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
Steamboat Lake, CO7 Matthew Brandt Courtesy M+B Gallery

Video installations featured in the interview with Catherine Edelman are by Gregory Scott

Gallery installation images courtesy:
Laurence Miller Gallery, Danziger Gallery, Kopeikin Gallery, Lisa Sette Gallery, Howard Greenberg Gallery,

This video and transcript © galleryIntell and ArtReels Production.

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The process of creating a work of art is often laborious, private, very complex, and requires intense and prolonged focus. Rarely do artists invite the audience to witness it. So, when Hauser & Wirth sent out an announcement that Takesada Matsutani, member of the second wave of  Gutai artists will be doing a performance at the Upper East Side Gallery, I had to see it. We mingled downstairs, waiting for everyone to arrive and then made our way to the second floor where a camera was set up in front of a large horizontal work that featured a vast field of dense black graphite across the top portion of the suspended white surface. The bottom half was bare and dropped to the floor, waiting to be marked. As artists, critics and collectors gathered in front of the yet-unfinished painting, Matsutani (he goes by his last name) took a wide brush and in one swift, continuous motion made a wide brush mark across the length of the paper surface. And just like that in 30 seconds it was over. The work was complete.

Takesada Matsutani
MATSU70577
Photo: Genevieve Hanson

In front of us was a juxtaposition of two parts: one a deeply meditative and time-consuming, neatly organized and quietly restrained field of graphite marks. Another – a burst of the artist’s energy expressed through one controlled yet forceful motion. Spontaneous and uneven, lacking perfection of form and line, yet in perfect harmony with the constrained order of its sister element above.

As the audience arranged itself in front of the artist, art dealer Olivier Renaud-Clémentand, and Reiko Tomii, an independent scholar and moderator for the evening, Matsutani began to speak about the influence Gutai philosophies had on his art. Principal among them was its founder’s demand of all its members to create something new, something that’s never been done before. Jiro Yoshihara expected his artists to find new materials, new ways of expressing themselves, create and innovate. Matsutani soon discovered his material: vinyl glue and his technique: blowing air inside the hardened surface to create subdural air bubbles, using hair driers to shift and shape glue’s drying surface and manipulating the medium to create a three-dimensional painting.

Cercle 96-6-2, 1996
Polyvinyl acetate adhesive, graphite pencil on canvas mounted on board
2 parts, each: 205 x 153 x 6.5 cm / 80 3/4 x 60 1/4 x 2 1/2 in

Matsutani, his wife Kate, and I sat down at the 69th street gallery several days later to talk more about his process, inspirations and how he brings together traditional Japanese art forms and contemporary philosophies. Below is the transcript of the video interview with the artist.

Interview transcript.

Object-G, 1975
Polyvinyl acetate adhesive, acrylic, wood and plexiglass
14 5/8 x 6 1/4 x 4 3/4 in

galleryIntell: You’ve likened your painting process to calligraphy – a skill that takes years to master and requires tremendous focus and discipline. In your own work, elements of practiced, meditative and perfected movement, like those of calligraphy, are often disrupted by a spontaneous gesture that can be viewed as a disruptive and a creative force. Tell me about that process.

Takesada Matsutani: My epoch in the 60’s was Action Painting. I am quite influenced by that movement, but I started to use vinyl glue, which takes quite a lot of time to dry and afterwards I put color, so this kind of the moment… Vinyl glue takes time to completely dry, to make shape and composition both. Calligraphy is kind of a movement; I like it, but how to continue my idea, with glue as it takes time. So how to make my work original and make it fresh. Still I am thinking about it.

GI: What are your preferred materials?

TM: Glue has a transparency then it becomes dry and becomes a little bit opaque, but even behind it there is color and you can see transparency, so we make space that’s why I always use this type of glue and color. Sometimes black I’ll use behind blue, green. And finally I do graphite pencil also.

GI: How do you achieve balance in your compositions?

(Detail) Stream, Hauser & Wirth, London, 1984—2013
Graphite pencil on paper
59 x 393 3/4 in
Pictured at Espace Bateau Lavoir, Paris, France, 1984

TM: It’s a difficult question, but I think we live every day as paintings do… I am satisfied – I stop. That’s when I’m finished. I think, I’m finished. Don’t think too much about it – just do it. We call it hara – hara-kiri. In Japan we sit down on the floor and make tea ceremony, sometimes before warriors to to battle they sit down and have tea, but they always put the power here. Chikara we call it, not from the heart – here. How do you say it? Bend the legs and we are very quite, concentrate the mind and then we go POW.

GI: What are the artist’s responsibilities to the viewer?

TM: We have quite a sophisticated mind. Our speech, our art too, so not only paintings, music, language, literature, and poems. And that is what humans make. And humans can’t make it if they don’t have the freedom to look at this moment. I must honestly from my inside, create a sense of beauty and to communicate. It’s not producing cars or camera, that’s also beauty, but ours is something very special, they are creative things. We have to, we must do it. We must always communicate with each other. That quality is important.

See Thirty Six Views of Mt. Fuji

From Galerie Richard exhibition page:

The Gutai Art Association was founded in the summer of 1954  by Jiro Yoshihara and seventeen other young Osaka-area artists… The Gutai Art Manifesto declared, “Gutai  Art does not change the material but brings it to life.“

Matsutani has often recounted Yoshihara’s single requirement for admittance to the Gutai circle: whatever an applicant showed him had to be totally new. Encouraged by Motonaga, whom he had chosen to be his mentor with that prospect in mind, for several years Matsutani experimented in search of a technique that would match his interest in the natural elements and biomorphic forms in particular. This curiosity had been heightened by a biologist friend who showed him cells under a microscope. Matsutani was looking for the right material to reveal itself to him so that he could appropriate it. “After a period of experimentation, in the spring of 1962 I had the idea of using vinyl wood glue, which you could find anywhere… By laying out a canvas flat on the floor and pouring glue on it, I obtained a sort of circular pancake, and I immediately turned the canvas over so that the glue would start to run. The glue began to drip, and as it dried, stalactites formed. They looked like the udders of a cow. It happened to be a windy day, so that the glue formed blisters as it dried.”  Before long, instead of relying on the chance intervention by a natural force, he would produce the gust of air himself by blowing through a straw to make the glue swell up. After noting the interest shown by Saburo Murakami and Shuji Mukai, already Gutai members, Matsutani took the risk of presenting these experiments to Yoshihara who, together with Michel Tapié, immediately recognized the novelty of this method. Most importantly, these experiments revealed the possibilities offered by the use of this material to Matsutani himself. They still amaze him to this day. – Germain Viatte. Paris, October 24, 2012

Takesada Matsutani’s exhibition ‘Currents’ is currently at the Omani Memorial Art Museum, Nishinomiya, Japan.

This video © galleryIntell. Artwork © Takesada Matsutani courtesy of Hauser & Wirth and the artist.

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Part II of our video interview with Arne Svenson focused on the artist’s process of finding that perfect gesture or that perfect emotion within the larger image. It can be a process filled with excitement, anticipation and anxiety.

galleryIntell: Your images capture a very different moment in time that’s typically associated with a portrait. We rarely glimpse their faces, instead piecing together their identities through a puzzle of elbows, necks, ears and wrists. What is the thought process behind this decision? 

Arne Svenson: Most of my work is predicated on the idea that something just happened, or something will happen, but rarely do I photograph something that is happening. I much prefer it when the sitter gets up and turns their head, that’s the picture I take.

Arne Svenson, Neighbors 11. Image © Arne Svenson. Courtesy the artist and Julie Saul Gallery

And all of ‘The Neighbors’ series and especially ‘The Workers’ are just bits and pieces of people. They are the head that turns away, the arm that comes into frame for a moment. For me those gestures carry the human kind in them, and if I was photographing faces they would only be Mrs. So-and-so. This is all they could be, but if you only see the elbow of someone, and the light is perfect, and the setting is perfect — that can be anybody. That can be the people you love, that can be the people you hate, that can be the people you feel sorry for, the immigrant off the boat, it could be the man…the ‘hedge fund man”, and you have to complete that puzzle. I demand a lot of my viewers and one of the things I demand is that I will give you the opening sentence, or the opening paragraph of a narrative, but you have to work on it, you have to finish it. And that’s my job as an artist. And specifically my job is to only give you enough.

GI: Do you have an emotional connection to any of the images in the exhibition?

Arne Svenson, The Workers 9. Image © Arne Svenson. Courtesy the artist and Julie Saul Gallery

AS:  Any photographer has an emotional attachment to the process, which is very difficult sometimes, because you have enjoyed, or have been horrified by the process and you think that may be in the image. I always wait. I take the photograph and then I wait days before I look at it, because I am afraid of that excitement and that emotional connection to the process. So I let that die down. So when I have actually printed the work I have print it in a relative… I wouldn’t say objectively unemotional way, but in a way it is. But then, when I have in this case, I have centered the oval and I have isolated bits and pieces, because all these photographs, all these are taken from larger photographs, though I saw, in my mind’s eye an oval when I took the photograph, I had to find it in actuality, so it would match up with my head. And as I printed them an emotional bond, more than any other work that I’ve done, it grabbed me. I felt that they were very vulnerable and that I had a responsibility to picture them in the best light possible, if that makes sense. It’s respect for the image, but it’s respect for the sitter, I think that’s really important for me. I can’t work, unless I have that.

GI: What images in this series do you feel personally connected to?

AS: It’s very hard for me to determine which one resonates the most for me. It’s extraordinarily difficult; we’re not even talking about the process here. I love that dark eeriness of the man leaning forward with the scarf and the white mask, totally obliterating his face and it’s kind of simian look. But I also like the man in the white overalls who is leaning against plastic and as he leans, it creates almost a wing coming off of his back. Which, I though was so exquisitely lucky that that happened, and that it was elevating him to kind of the highest heights. If you’re going be comparing it to Renaissance painting and Baroque painting, you know, he’s taken a wing.

There is a pair of the man in the blue shirt who has a razor blade and those two as a pair are also very important to me and one of the reasons is that I hadn’t seen the razor blade when I took the photograph and when I was printing the image I saw it and pretty much fell back in my chair. There is a sensuality, which is rare in my work, where he is blowing on the razor blade and it was something about his lips and that blade approaching them that created a really interesting dynamic because I didn’t now if the blade was going towards his lips or away. So it’s this effect of vulnerability but also of strength. Is he going to cut or be cut?

There is the one with the man with a scarf and he has, this was my answer to the ‘Girl with the Pearl Earring’, but he has an ear bud that’s coming out of one ear. And from the distance it does look like a pearl until you go up and realize that no, it’s Apple and there is a handprint in the glass that I focused on that has a for me a very sinister look on it, so I’ve managed to get a hand in the dust and the glass is infused with the image, but I should stop there because I realize that I’m going through every photograph that I have taken.

This video interview and article © galleryIntell. Images © Arne Svenson and courtesy of the artist and Julie Saul Gallery.

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Exhibition on view April 9 – May 30th, 2015

Besides never sleeping, New York City also never stops growing and expanding. The familiar orange construction netting, with carefully rounded perforation squares, seems to float through the various neighborhoods of the city, briefly annunciating an impending birth of a new structure. And then it’s off to another street, another project, another new beginning. But the army of paint-splattered, dust-covered, helmet-shielded workers behind the magically growing glass and concrete structures often remains unseen. Well, they are, of course, the center of many jokes, complaints, stereotypes and soft-drink commercials, but most of us perceive these builders as one with the structures they build.

Arne Svenson, The Workers 16. Image © Arne Svenson. Courtesy the artist and Julie Saul Gallery

Not so with Arne Svenson, who came to see these men and women in a new light after completing his previous series of photographs ‘The Neighbors’ — an intimate series of partially obscured portraits of wealthy residents going about their lives in a glass building across from the artist.

The absolute transcending beauty of ‘The Workers’  lies in the way Svenson translated the ordinary person inside an ordinary city scene into a jewel-like cameo filled with motion, gesture, light and a mille-feuille of internal narratives. He is, very obviously, not interested in a posed sitter, instead finding beauty in the moments before and after. “I take the photographs and don’t look a them for 3-4 days, allowing the excitement of the moment to die down. Then as I examine each one I have to once again “find” that space and moment within the oval.” And it is these moments that allow the viewer to construct his/her own dynamic narratives. In fact, the viewer is expected to make as much effort in interacting and establishing a personal bond with the photograph as Svenson made in creating it. And that’s fair. “I start the sentence; I give you a paragraph, but you must finish it,” says the artist.

On a personal note, I found it interesting that in an earlier interview, Svenson referred to himself as someone who immigrated to NYC from California. A term rarely used when describing movement within he same country, intentional and final as it may be. “I was done with California. I left with no intention of coming back” he clarified when I mentioned the article just before we started taping. And so I find this connection particularly fascinating, since most people who traditionally come to build our cities, and in all probability subjects of his photographs, are themselves immigrants.

For this interview Arne and I met at his exhibition at Julie Saul Gallery in Chelsea and talked about some of the important visual and conceptual aspects of this series, as well as the connections between his portraits and some of the well-known examples from the centuries past. Here is the first part of our interview.

Video interview transcript.

The palette, gestures, composition and of course, the oval that holds your subjects in ‘The Workers’ all point to the influence of the great European portraiture tradition. Are these references intentional?

Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of a Man, 1632, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Arne Svenson: Everything from the Baroque, to Renaissance, to Mannerism, to the Edward Hoppers. And I didn’t see it at first because I was looking for something completely different in these images, but as people started telling me this – I started seeing it. So I went to The Met and I looked around and not being a student of art history I don’t have the academic knowledge, but I was looking for something different. I was looking for: how does the light rake across the canvas and is that my light?

So, when I started this new series, ‘The Workers’, I used that knowledge of not only critical analysis of my own work by others, but I used my trips to The Met. And one thing I did see immediately with this new work, with ‘The Workers’, was that I had to use an oval and it was a very tough decision to make because it’s an extraordinary statement – an oval. It has a lot of connotation. And part of the motivation behind this particular series was that I wanted to illustrate and show us the people that build the palaces for ‘The Neighbors’. So, I started looking in neighboring buildings, and buildings up and down the street and out of the neighborhood, and looking through glass and seeing workers and as I saw them, it came to me that it was a noble profession and how is nobility shown in many-many paintings and through history? It is through the oval. So, I turned the tables, in a way so that ‘The Neighbors’, the wealthy inhabitants of New York City were relegated to these harsh and geometric containers, and ‘The Workers’ were awarded the oval.

While many would consider dust and dirt hindrances to the integrity of the final image, you use them to your benefit. Tell me how these elements became integral parts of ‘The Neighbors’ and ‘The Workers’?

When I started ‘The Neighbors’ series I had a large lens and was looking through to the neighbors’ windows and I photographed the action, or the lack of action. And I kept analyzing, why could this not be successful – it’s a beautiful vignette, it’s beautifully lit… And I realized that there was no indication that I was shooting through a window. Then one sunny day the light was raking across the windows of the neighbors’ and it hit every particle of dirt and dust on the glass, thereby diffusing the scene behind it into, almost, a painterly scene. It broke up the surface and I realized that if I broke up, if I focused on the dirt then this would be the secret that I was looking for. This would also be a way of flattening the planes. I didn’t want dimension. I wanted it to appear that all this action was projected on a ¼” plane of some sort.

Arne Svenson, Neighbors 3. Image © Arne Svenson. Courtesy the artist and Julie Saul Gallery

The long lens helped with that because that kind of foreshortens and then focusing on the glass further reduced the depth of the action, so it appeared as if it was happening as though it was imbued in the glass. To me it was like photographing stained glass. It was almost that…. I shudder to say a religious experience, but it was an experience that gave everybody, and especially The Workers’ – all my subjects grandeur and respect, I think is the term I am looking for because it suddenly became bigger than a photo.

This video and transcript © galleryIntell. Artwork © Arne Svenson and courtesy of the artist and Julie Saul Gallery.

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There is so much force condensed inside Charles McGill’s large scale Tondos, on view at Pavel Zoubok Gallery in Chelsea, that you can’t help but be mesmerized by these frieze-like sculptures. The tondos (from the Italian rotondo – round), totems and smaller free-standing sculptures are created by re-assembling golf bags that have been torn, cut apart, pulled in all directions, collaged and made to comply with the artist’s will.

Charles McGill, Skull, 2014

And there are so many layers of contradictions contained within these sculptures. There are surfaces that appear to be soft and pliable, but are neither and as soon as you make that discovery, you see stiff plastic tubing crushed into submission, zippers glaring in cold indifference, screws, nails, brads and other metals piercing the leather in the most violent ways. Expectations of calm dictated by the circular, halo-like shape of McGill’s tondos instead reveal hurricanes brewing inside each one. So much so, that these sculptures are still vibrating with the artist’s determination of making the materials conform to his will.

‘Target 51’, ‘Territories’, ‘Little Indian’, ‘White (Tondo)’, ‘Scull’, ‘Goat, Bull, Rooster, Horse’, (don’t you just love the titles?) along with every other work in this exhibition, were born without studies, without plans, without the slightest notion of their final states. For Charles McGill the process is fundamentally intuitive. There is a need to create and because of this need he allows the materials to guide him, but theirs is not a passive relationship. A “tug-of-war” is how he described it when we sat down to discuss the exhibition and his creative process.

Video interview transcript:

Charles McGill: I don’t think there is real symbolism for me with the circle, however, there is a compositional challenge within a circle that I’ve always kind of been interested in.

Michelangelo Buonarotti, Taddei Tondo, 1505

The first one I did was the white tondo and I didn’t really know what to think about it, and I sent it to a friend of mine in California, Joe Lewis, who is an artist also and he sent me back a Michelangelo tondo, which was strikingly similar to the one I had just made. And it really blew my mind and gave me an affirmation that this was probably a good direction to go in.

I’ve been working with the golf bag material for several years. It’s a material that seems to not want to cooperate with my intentions for it. So in that process there is a lot of tug-of-war. A lot of wrestling, a lot of stress and emotions spent. In that process comes something that I don’t expect as a result. But when I am finished, I am, most of the times, happy with the results I have achieved.

Taking a vessel, if you will, and an object that is meant for leisure and the kind of emotion I spend with that material is the exact opposite of the emotion you would carry out on to the golf course.

The fact that these golf bags are manufactured to be durable, to have longevity, to stay together and not come apart, those elements of that material are the thing that kind of a catalyst for me. If they came apart easier, I don’t know that I would get the same work.

The inspiration

Charles McGill, Little Indian, 2014 Reconfigured golf bags

Certainly, Philip Guston. I wouldn’t say he is a direct influence, but it’s certainly hard not to make that connection if you have a hooded figure, so I do look at him from time to time. And of course Michelangelo and Nancy Grossman. I can’t say enough about her work. I’ve never been that familiar with her work in terms of a studied relationship with it, until very recently. I’m almost kind of ashamed to say that, but as I look at her work, the kinship with the way she worked with leather and or vinyl, and the way she incorporated zippers, and the way she manipulated the material to do what she wanted it to do, I really identify with that process.

I don’t remember the name of the piece, it might have been during a Google search, when a piece popped up. A vertical piece that I have never really seen from [John] Chamberlain popped up and it made a stunningly immediate influence or, impact I should say. I didn’t want to look at it too long, I didn’t want to sear into my brain, but I was aware of its impact and I thought, I understand what he is doing there with that material and I want to know if I can “translate” that with my own materials.

The process

I let it sit for a couple of weeks and. I got a piece of wood and I just said, I’m going to make an attempt to visit that place. Because I really understood the language and having never seen that piece before I wanted to know, can I converse in that language? I started and I made “Corset ”, which I love.

Charles McGill, Target 51, 2015 Reconfigured golf bags

Target 51 is probably the most personal piece in the show. It’s about my father dying at age 51. He died at 51 when I was 30, so for the last 21 years I have been kind of aware of this age out in front of me.  This “target age” in front of me that I wanted to get to. …. When he died I automatically thought and continued to think for the next 21 years that maybe something will strike me down at age 50 – 51 and I wouldn’t live that long. So when I had my birthday in January, I made it to age 51.

The physicality of actually making the work really is the over-riding characteristic of the work, I think.  If the materials were easier to handle, I don’t know that I would get the same result. A lot of what happens in the work is the direct result of how frustrating it is to work with the material.

I have to say, I rarely know what’s next. Working with this golf bag, or working with this material for the last 15 years, at each stage I thought, ok, that’s it, I’ve exhausted it, I can’t really do anything more with this material. At each stage something else revealed itself, so in a sense I’ve kind of let the material guide me as to where it might want to go next. At the same time I’m coercing it to do what I want it to do. It’s a tug-of-war, it’s a wrestling match. I really would not have it any other way. As frustrating as it can be to make the work, those are my ideal conditions. I don’t want serenity.

This video interview © galleryIntell. Images featured in this interview © Charles McGill, Nancy Grossman. Courtesy the artist and Pavel Zoubok Gallery.

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— Francine Prose, Terry Winters Prints 1999 – 2014

The unanticipated way in which an artist thinks about music…

These new silkscreens by the American artist Terry Winters were the focus of Two Palms booth at The Armory Show this year. The 12 large scale vertical prints with a restricted palette of black, silver and white were inspired by Georgy Ligeti’s 1961 composition Atmospheres.

The title of the series comes from a 1961 symphonic work by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti that exemplifies his concept of ‘supersaturated polyphony.’ What this signified for Ligeti was a canonic structure so intensive that it resists penetration, as he once observed, “like a densely woven cobweb.”*

More on artists and music: Jorinde Voigt at David Nolan Gallery

The artist’s prints from 1999 – 2014 are currently the subject of a solo exhibition at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne and an in-depth exhibition catalogue from Prestel Publishing that contains a forward by Sharon Corwin, Carolyn Muzzy Director ad Chief Curator at Colby College Museum of Art and Michael Semff, Senior Director at Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München as well as articles by Francine Prose and Michael Semff. In the book you will find 70 images and a great deal of information about the various subjects, techniques, narratives and in prints featured in the Munich exhibition.

Video interview transcript

Evelyn Day Lasry, Founder Two Palms Gallery: This is a new set of 12 large-scale silkscreens by the American artist Terry Winters. These are newly published pieces from 2014 – 2015 and they are a part of an exhibition in Munich right now.

The show is Terry Winters: Prints 1999 – 2014 and this series here are his newest prints and they are at the start of that exhibition in Munich. The images are inspired by Hungarian composer György Ligeti, and the complexity of the image relates to the density of the music. Think of them as cobwebs and multi-layered images.

Terry Winters, Atmospheres, 2014. Set of 12 silkscreens

He brought his sketchbooks to his studio, the printmaking studio to inspire him.

Terry Winters, Atmospheres 8. A portfolio of 12 screenprints on Lanaquarelle paper. Image: 58 1/2 x 44 inches

The first step is painting on a large piece of Mylar, the scale of this piece of paper and he would use an oil stick or a paintbrush to paint an image on the Mylar. That first image went into the silkscreen exposure room, was shot onto a screen with photosensitive emulsion and then that became the first layer on the paper. Once it’s printed he may decide to build up that layer and print that one screen multiple times, but then he takes another piece of Mylar and based on the image on the paper makes a new layer to this image. So this is a call-and-response process.

This piece behind me, Atmospheres 8, went through the press 38 times, so it’s a multi-layered process that’s built along the way. His oil on canvas pieces are beautiful, colorful abstractions, he is also known as a colorist and because his pieces are so complex, he wanted to get rid of the color. There are 3 colors: black, white and metallic gray.

The artist is also inspired by images from nature, molecular structures, close up images of cobwebs or honeycombs or pollen. That can explain some of the imagery you see in these prints.

Artwork featured in this article:

A portfolio of 12 screenprints
on Lanaquarelle paper.
Image: 58 1/2 x 44 inches
148.6 x 11.8cm
Edition of 20
Proofs: 5 AP’s, 4 PP’s, 1 BAT

* Terry Winters Prints 1999 – 2014, Page 104.

This video and article © galleryIntell. Images © Terry Winters. Courtesy Two Palms.

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Watch interview on Tom Butler at Charlie Smith London

She had been tracing the lines on her own body for her previous body of work, so it was only a matter of time before the correlation became apparent. She realized that just like blood vessels carry information through the body, so do roads and rivers depicted on those road maps. The symbolism and similarities were too obvious to her not to explore the medium further.

We talked to Nikki during her solo booth exhibition at the 2015 installation of VOLTA New York fair where she was represented by the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery.

Here is the transcript of the video interview:

Untitled (Childhood Portrait), 47″X27″, Hand cut road map, 2011

Nikki Rosato: Prior to doing the work with the road map I was working on a series where I was re-drawing every line on the surface of my body. Fingerprints, footprints, the wrinkles around my eyes and in the midst of that project I stumbled across a box of used road maps. When looking at the maps I instantly had an inspirational moment when I saw something very human within the lines of the road map itself. The rivers and the roadways mimic the lines that not only cover the surface of our bodies but also our internal makings. Such as veins and arteries – the things that make us alive and human. And the map is mapping out these places, these locations are also very much alive, just as we are alive.

PROCESS

What I do, is I basically dissect the roadmap for only the lines, so I’ll use a tiny exact-o blade and cut away piece by piece all of the land masses, leaving only the roads and rivers behind. In the end it’s kind of creates this delicate lacy structure. And the people that I’m representing in these pieces are the places that are very important to these people specifically.

Nikki Rosato, Untitled Self-Portrait cut roadmap

So, when I use myself as a model, for example, in this work, I am using a place that is important to myself – part of my own history, my own journey. A place that has an impact on who I am as a person today. So this one, for example, is of NYC and NY in general, where I was born, so it’s an important part of my story, and my journey.

Couple: Boston, MA, 11″X14″, Hand cut road map, 2009

I also work with friends, family members to create individual portraits. I’ll talk to them, interview them as to which place best represents who they are as a person. I’ll take their photo and then make their portrait out of that place. So, for example, San Francisco, where this girl was born, or Brooklyn, NY. Detroit, MI – it’s often the places, where people have started and began their life journey.

Images featured in this article:

Nathan: Buffalo, NY, 10.5″X6.5″, Hand cut road map, 2009

Untitled (Self-Portrait), 20″X16″, Hand cut road map, 2010

Kim: Boston, MA, 20″X16″, Hand cut road map, 2013

Jennifer: Chicago, IL, 20″X16″, Hand cut road map, 2013

Untitled (Connections), 13″X8″, Hand cut road map, 2012

Couple: Boston, MA, 11″X14″, Hand cut road map, 2009

Untitled (Connections), 16″X10″, Hand cut road map, 2012

Untitled (Mouth to Mouth), 11″X8″, Hand cut road map, 2014

This video and article © galleryIntell. Images © Nikki Rosato and courtesy of the artist and Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans.

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Interview transcript:

Zavier Ellis, Director Charlie Smith London: Tom is a British artist who started at Chelsea and The Slade and is currently living in Maine in the US. What’s interesting about Tom’s work is he is collecting antique Victorian photographs. They were known as cabinet cards, which was actually an evolution, or a development from carde de visite.  Then in the mid to late 19th century, the growing middle classes would use these portraits of themselves really as visiting cards.

He is very interested in the original sitter, so he instinctively choses what he feels what he works with. Beyond that, he works in gouache. So really the interesting thing is that he is bridging 150 years of visual culture here, starting with the photographic image – going into contemporary painting. Interestingly he also studied sculpture for his M.A., so you also get sculptural elements coming into the work. For example with this piece here, where you can see that he is really engaging with the spatial sense of the piece. He is taking us through the surface and beyond.

Tom works with different motifs. You can see that sometimes he’ll work with flowers, sometimes with these linear abstract patterns, hair, these are exploding geometric clouds and then these pieces are auras.
One of Tom’s main intentions is to talk about revealing and concealing, so within this work  there are some subjects that are completely covered in a motif. For example this piece here – Bradley. And then in others, particularly more recently he started to reveal the subject. Previously, most often they were completely covered in paint.  This piece here, for example, that features the exploding geometric cloud, is much more abut the revealing of the personality of the sitter. I think we also need to think of Tom’s work in psychoanalytical terms. You know, the cabinet cards were contemporaneous to Sigmund Freud, the development of his ideas behind psychoanalysis  so we also have this sense of the revealing of the unconscious. The it, the monster, the grotesque, that within us, which generally is concealed. Tom really is, in a way is interested in revealing visually that sense of the unconscious. And at the same time you also had Victorian freak shows, so all of these run alongside each other.

This video interview and article © galleryIntell. Images © Tom Butler, courtesy of the artist and Charlie Smith London.

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The artist has recently wrapped his first solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky’s Clinton street exhibition space Boesky East in New York.

Serge Alain Nitegeka. Armory Show installation. Photo © Kristina Nazarevskaia

Interview transcript:

SYMBOLISM

Serge Alain Nitegeka: Second-hand crates have a history of moving things across borders. Essentially, when I started working I was drawing myself in the nude on the sides of the crates. That translated to dealing with narratives of human trafficking. I found the crates to be very convenient to use … it allowed me to explore illegitimate travel of people from A to B. I was able to talk about slavery, I was able to talk about human trafficking, to talk about the illegitimate travel across borders, and that’s where the crates came in.

THE AUDIENCE

I thought of the idea of starting to use materials and sculpture that explore a narrative that would be inclusive of the viewer’s experience. And I ended up developing an idea of the sculpture that would have to be fulfilled or completed by the viewer. The viewer has to be IN THE space, the viewer has to interact, the viewer has to negotiate their way. The viewer has to feel like they are made to move in a particular way, essentially fulfilling, or talking about forced migration. I make an installation from a site-specific point of view. It’s a one off and it’s adapted to the space. Refugees and asylum seekers – they have to improvise, they have to find means and things in the environment they can use that will enable them to do what they want or what they have to do to survive.

DEFINITION OF SPACE

I’m very interested in geometry – the idea that lines have to add up, they have to make sense. How can the space inform the lines that I am going to take.. .The way I work with installation…as a kind of self-generated sculpture in a sense that one line informs the other. Coupled with the fact that it has to be structurally safe, so there has to be some structural decisions that are being made when, for example one piece has to be added on or the first piece has to be supported. So that carries on until something emerges. When I start working, I have no idea how it’s gonna look like, I don’t have a sketch. I just have the materials, I have the space and that’s kind of how I work…

This article and video © galleryIntell.

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on view September 11 – October 11, 2014

This solo exhibition at Morgan Lehman Gallery in Chelsea draws attention to the challenges of sustaining environments for some of New York’s native species. Paul Villinski, the artist who has been working with the image of the butterfly for the last couple of decades, this time uses his signature image in conjunction with several live species of this most celebrated insect. Working together with one of the leading Lepidopterists, Dr. Rudi Mattoni, together they were able to construct a special system, a butterfly machine as it became to be known, that allowed breeding generations of butterflies in a controlled studio environment.

Paul Villinksi – Paradigm at Morgan Lehman Gallery. Image © Kristina Nazarevskaia

From the gallery:

“The exhibition’s principle sculpture, Self-Portrait, is a life-size figure fabricated from slender steel rods, clothed in fine nylon mesh. Each day, a handful of native butterflies bred by the artist will occupy the enclosed interior volume of the figure. Over the course of the day, the butterflies discover openings in the mesh and exit, causing the figure to slowly exhale its living occupants. The exhibition also includes a series of three circular forms made with the artist’s signature medium of discarded cans, meticulously hand-cut in the forms of over thirty distinct butterfly species – all either endangered or extinct.”

Paul Villinski – Paradigm at Morgan Lehman Gallery. Image © Kristina Nazarevskaia

What inspired you to build the butterfly machine?

Paul Villinski: I’ve been working with butterfly imagery in my work for about two decades now and I employed it in a primarily symbolic fashion. I was essentially interested in the symbolism and metaphors the butterflies represent. Several years ago I was introduced by a curator to Dr. Rudi Mattoni, Ph.D., who is a leading lepidopterist in the United States and he and I became fast friends. He started to teach me about the actual butterfly biology About that time I started thinking about creating an art work that would employ live butterflies and an image of a human figure, filled with actual living butterflies struck me. So I started to move in that direction. Rather than simply purchasing butterflies that have ben bred by someone else it became very interesting to me to think about breeding butterflies in the studio, particularly, butterflies that are native to New York State, and butterflies which we caught ourselves.

Dr. Mattoni and I began to forage in the neighborhoods of New York City, including my own neighborhood. I caught my very first butterfly under his tutelage. We brought these butterflies back and set up a very rudimentary system for rearing butterflies in the studio.

Butterfly pupa. Paul Villinski – Paradigm at Morgan Lehman Gallery. Image by Simon Campbell

Metamorphosis

Is the metaphor of transformation evident in other aspects of your work, if so, how?

Paul Villinski: My work has been involved with transformation for many, many years. In the simplest terms I’ve been involved in working with found materials – generally things that have been found on the streets of my neighborhood and that have no apparent value. And in the last decade or so, quite a bit of work done with aluminum cans. These cans are crushed by traffic passing over them. They really have no value at all. My task has really been to take these worthless, cast-off materials and transform them into something that has particular meaning, has this kind of resonance and has some aesthetic quality. That’s one of the reasons the image of the butterfly has been important to me over the years. The butterfly itself is a symbol of transformation and rebirth. And it’s really the universal symbol for metamorphosis and transformation. My practice of transforming materials in the studio, and the symbolism of the butterfly have held hands very nicely.

Paul Villinski – Paradigm at Morgan Lehman Gallery. Image © Kristina Nazarevskaia

Butterflies and the environment

How does this project speak to the environmental issues that plague the butterflies? Do parallels exist between the butterflies’ issues and our own? Does damage to the environment affect us in similar ways?

Paul Villinski:

Paul Villinski: What I hope to suggest with this self-portrait figure sculpture, which contains live butterflies and releases those live butterflies, exhales live butterflies during the course of the day. What I am hoping to suggest there is there is really no separation between homo sapiens and the rest of the natural world. We are all one.  There is no difference between what happens to the flora and fauna on the planet and what happens to us. Ultimately, what happens to the butterflies will be our fate as well.

Paul Villinski – Paradigm at Morgan Lehman Gallery. Image © Kristina Nazarevskaia

Science + Art = Awareness

Dr. Rudi Mattoni, Ph. D: The most troublesome feature that we face today is the deterioration of the environment. Scientific efforts have failed to communicate this problem to the public. [Paul and I] got together and collaborated on how to use the now-living butterflies as a vehicle for touching some part of the public consciousness and morality. At the beginning of the Paleolithic Era there was only one insect that was depicted in the cave paintings – it was the butterfly! It’s interesting to have this connotation of this great beauty of the butterfly that’s touched, somehow, the human soul, or the intuition or whatever you may want to call it and this is the issue I would like to see exploited, because we have to do something to change the current situation.

Challenges of artificial environments

Do you see this endeavor shaping future projects?

Paul Villinski: One of the big take-aways for me with the butterfly machine is that it’s incredibly hard to recreate a natural system in a human environment. We basically have spent a tremendous amount of time and effort trying to create a bio system that could support a handful of species of butterflies. The minute you remove both, the host plants and the butterflies from their natural environment, where they are surrounded by a kind of bio diversity that we can’t really even describe, they fail to flourish and they wind up being subject to all kinds of problems.  It has proven to be far more difficult than I ever imagined it would be.

The butterfly machine ultimately represents to me a kind of dystopian vision of that world could be like, if we continue down this path of climate change and habitat destruction. We could, conceivably, wind up in a place where the only butterflies we see are reared in controlled environments. That they only way my four-year-old child is going to see a butterfly when he is my age is in a controlled environment, by going to some zoological display where butterflies have been reared artificially. I want to raise these kinds of concerns as an artist.

Paul Villinski – Paradigm at Morgan Lehman Gallery. Image © Kristina Nazarevskaia

The Butterfly

Paul Villinski: My work with the image was largely symbolic and then, over time my interest has really expanded to include the actual biology and the creatures themselves. And on Dr. Mattoni’s suggestions I went to the Peruvian Amazon last summer for a neo-tropical Lepidoptera field course. An astonishing experience – it was led by five of the top lepidopterists in the world. We flew to Lima, then flew to Iquitos, which is a city of a million people that doesn’t have a road connecting it to any other major city. Then we went up the Amazon for four hours in a boat, stepped off the boat, walked into a jungle into a research center and took a very extensive 100-hour class on butterflies and moths. Over the last two and a half year I’ve become very deeply involved in witnessing the life cycles of these species of butterflies that we are rearing now and this is part of what I want to try and share in this exhibition.

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