Art Blog

The Painted Photograph

Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography: 5 May to 19 November 2006

David Bierk Petrified Tree, California 1989 Oil on photographs on canvas 133.4 x 91.4 cm Collection of Elizabeth Bierk Photo: Michael Cullen, Trent Photographics

This exhibition presents the beautiful works of David Bierk, Sarah Nind, and Jaclyn Shoub that mix photography and painting. Their use of both media expresses contemporary concerns about the relationship between ideas of nature and culture, originality and appropriation, and tradition and modernity. Sarah Nind understands the photograph as an accurate, albeit static, reproduction of reality, one that must be augmented in order to convey ideas of a more spiritual nature. In the work of Jaclyn Shoub, painterly processes provide a way to intervene with imagery in order to create a more personal statement about the subject matter. The anxiety and sense of loss linked to technology is explored in the work of David Bierk. By incorporating direct references to art history and painting, Bierk offers the viewer a sense of tradition and lasting cultural values. The photograph, as a modern technology and image-making device, therefore, is in direct dialogue with its pictorial antecedents. ...

http://cmcp.gallery.ca

The Photography of David Barker Maltby

J M Barnickle Art Gallery (West Gallery): April 13 to May 11, 2006

"Tent City" (1999-2000)

TORONTO - Images of squeegee kids and the homeless as seen through the lens of Toronto photojournalist David Barker Maltby will be on view in the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery from April 13 to May 11, 2006.
Toronto-born Maltby, who died of meningitis at age 38 in 2001, often lived with the people he photographed. He also came to know their plight while working as a photographer for such organizations as the city’s Street Health and Anishnawbe Health.
"David was a social documentary photographer in the classic definition of the word," co-curator Susan Maltby said of her brother, who began his photographic career as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto. ...

http://www.utoronto.ca

home! abroad. home again!

Thorvaldsens Museum: April 12 to June 25 2006

Rome’s famous historical sights, the Coliseum, the Forum, Monte Pincio and the Pantheon have fascinated artists and tourists over the ages. As a result, Bertel Thorvaldsen, who lived in Rome for many years, acquired an extensive collection of paintings with motifs from the city executed by the leading artists of the time. The collection is on permanent exhibition on the 1st floor in Thorvaldsens Museum, where the artist Søren Lose has now created a photographic installation. With the exhibition home! abroad. home again! he creates an interplay between Thorvaldsen’s collection of paintings and the contemporary art of his own day. ...

http://www.thorvaldsensmuseum.dk

Beauty in the Rocks

McPherson Library Gallery: Apr. 11, 2006 - May. 4, 2006

The Maltwood Art Museum and Gallery is pleased to present an exhibit of 30 photographs by David Baird with accompanying poetry. Dr. Baird has traveled the world in search of stirring images of the “big places,” such as the Rockies, and the “small places,” like macro-images of fossils. “Beauty in the Rocks” is comprised of select images from his years of world ravel as a record of his research. This exhibit combines his photographs shot in Canadian National Parks, juxtaposing nature with humanity’s presence in it, and including accompanying poetry. ...

http://www.maltwood.uvic.ca

Dana Novak - Frozen Passage

Kamloops Art Gallery: April 9 to May 28, 2006

Artist Dana Novak, who recently relocated to Vancouver after many years living, working and studying in Kamloops, is well known for her sensuous photographs of water, ice, and other natural elements. Frozen Passage is a photo-based installation about ice in which Novak explores the Canadian landscape and culture in relation to her own perspectives developed during her formative years in the Czech Republic. ...

http://www.kag.bc.ca

Eduardo Masferré: A Philippine Arcadia

Brandts: 8. april 2006 - 11. juni 2006

Eduardo Masferré: A Philippine Arcadia

http://uk.brandts.dk

Henrik Saxgren: WAR AND LOVE – about the immigration in the Nordic countries

Finnish Museum of Photography: 6.4. - 28.5.2006

The Danish photographer Henrik Saxgren has interviewed and photographed immigrants in Scandinavia. He met people of more than 200 different nationalities. The pictures and stories in the exhibition reveal that the most common reasons for migration are war and love – and sometimes both. ...

http://www.fmp.fi

Photographic Discoveries: Recent Acquisitions

National Gallery of Art: March 26 - July 30, 2006

In the last few years the National Gallery of Art has significantly expanded its holdings of both 19th- and 20th-century European and American photographs. Presenting approximately 70 works by such celebrated photographers as William Henry Fox Talbot, Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Brassaï, this exhibition highlights significant new acquisitions of photographs made during the first century of the medium's history, from the early 1840s to the 1940s. ...

http://www.nga.gov

The Concerned Photographer

The Art Institute of Chicago: March 18-June 11, 2006

Susan Meiselas. Marketplace in Diriamba, Nicaragua, 1978. National Endowment for the Arts Museum Purchase Grant. © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos.

“The concerned photographer finds much in the present unacceptable which he tries to alter. Our goal is simply to let the world also know why it is unacceptable.” --Cornell Capa (b. 1918), photographer

Drawn entirely from the collection of the Art Institute, The Concerned Photographer considers how socially motivated and widely circulated photographs are intended to move, inspire, and impact their viewers. This exhibition showcases work by Margaret Bourke-White, Bruce Davidson, Walker Evans, Lewis Hine, Susan Meiselas, and Sebastião Salgado, among others. Together, these photographers confronted issues ranging from child labor to the Great Depression, from the Civil Rights movement to gold mining. ...

http://www.artic.edu

Tracks - recent photographs by Robert Christie

Eastern Front Gallery: March 8 to 19, 2006

A quick glance around Robert Christie’s upcoming exhibition Tracks, at Eastern Front Gallery and you may think he’s a good abstract painter, working in the tradition of Robert Rauchenberg and Graham Gilmore. But look at the images themselves and you will slowly realize they are photographs of freight trains. ...

http://www.easternfrontgallery.com

William Wegman: New & Improved

Sperone Westwater - New York: 2 March 2006

William Wegman Skylark, 1979 ink and/or gouache on silver gelatin print 7 1/2 x 9 7/8 inches 19.1 x 25.1 cm 12 5/8 x 14 3/16 inches (frame) 32.1 x 36.1 cm SW 06053

Wegman has been altering photographs through drawing since the 1970s. Interested in issues of perception and identity, Wegman used wordplay and simple line drawings to turn black and white photographs into simultaneously humorous and strange images/documents that destabilize the familiar and reveal life’s essential oddity. Some later works on paper incorporate postcards and greeting cards and the viewer is never quite sure where the printed image ends and Wegman’s drawing begins. Always present in Wegman’s work is a smart, gently subversive humor that adds dimension and a kind of metamorphosis to what first appears to be an uncomplicated visual statement. ...

http://www.speronewestwater.com

Tom Hunter: Living in Hell and Other Stories

The National Gallery: 7 December 2005 - 12 March 2006

Tom Hunter, 'Living in Hell', 2004. Courtesy the artist and Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

Tom Hunter's new work for this exhibition takes as its subject the lives of the ordinary residents of Hackney, as reported in local newspapers. These often startling stories are told in carefully staged photographs derived from Renaissance paintings. Hunter's reputation has been established with a series of engaging, puzzling and provocative photographic reworkings of paintings from the past. ...

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk

Speaking with Hands. Photographs from The Buhl Collection

Guggenheim-Bilbao: 25 November, 2005 - March, 2006

On view at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao from 25 November, Speaking with Hands. Photographs from The Buhl Collection is an exhibition of nearly 170 photographs devoted to the subject of hands. The Buhl Collection demonstrates the prevalence of the hand as a photographic theme, a result, in part, of photography's easy ability to capture fragments and detail, as well as ephemeral movements. The works are drawn from the extensive collection of well-known philanthropist Henry M. Buhl, who, after 30 years as an investment broker, gave up his job and set up in New York's SoHo to concentrate on photography. An active participant in many art institutions, Henry M. Buhl is also a Member of the Photography Committee of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and his own Foundation awards a two-year grant for excellence in photography. Henry Buhl has also received the highest public recognition for his social commitment as founder and leader of the Partnership organization, which works to return dropouts and the underprivileged to mainstream society through a highly successful vocational training program. ...

http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es

From Darkroom to Digital: Photographic Variations

The Art Institute of Chicago: November 19, 2005–February 26, 2006

Although photographs are inherently reproducible, photographers have long maintained that the final print is unique. Ansel Adams likened the negative to a musical score, and the print to its orchestrated performance. Pictorialist photographers at the turn of the century labored over their hand-crafted images, making each resulting object as unrepeatable as a painting. Selections of cropping, enlargement and scale, and different photographic processes also contribute to different effects, even from the very same negative. Now, with improvements in digital technology, artists have the opportunity to revisit older images and transform them into something entirely new. ...

http://www.artic.edu

Nicholas Nixon: The Brown Sisters

National Gallery of Art: November 13, 2005 - February 20, 2006

Each year since 1975, Boston-based photographer Nicholas Nixon (b. 1947) has made one black-and-white photograph of his wife, Beverly (Bebe) Brown, and her three sisters. Using a large eight-by-ten-inch view camera positioned at eye level, he always photographs the women in the same order from left to right: Heather, Mimi, Bebe, and Laurie. Although he makes multiple exposures, Nixon selects only one photograph to represent the women each year. ...

http://www.nga.gov

Black Rock

Nevada Museum of Art: November 12, 2005 - February 12, 2006

Peter Goin, Intersecting automobile tracks, 1998.

Black Rock is an exhibition of photographs and maps by Peter Goin, Professor of Art and Paul F. Starrs, Professor of Geography, both from the University of Nevada, Reno. The works featured in this exhibit are from the book Black Rock, published by the University of Nevada Press and co-authored by Goin and Starrs. Goin’s photographs boldly detail the subtle atmosphere of the region and are complemented by Starrs numerous original and historical maps and text. Goin and Starrs present a Black Rock that goes beyond the desert and the annual Burning Man event. ...

http://www.nevadaart.org

On the Scene: Jessica Rowe, Jason Salavon, Brian Ulrich

The Art Institute of Chicago: November 12, 2005-January 28, 2006

Jason Salavon. The Top Grossing Film of All Time 1 x 1, 2000. David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation Purchase Fund Jason Salavon, courtesy Peter Miller Gallery.

Drawing on the dynamic photography scene in Chicago, this exhibition focuses on work by three younger talents: Jessica Rowe, Jason Salavon, and Brian Ulrich. Jessica Rowe photographs spaces in our homes where we display the objects, photos, and memorabilia that we want others to see: old portraits atop a dresser, statues on a mantel, or cherished book collections. Over the past year, in a series called Remnant, she has turned this attention to even more intimate objects—clothing. Her poignant still lifes of clothing once worn by women she has known who are now deceased invite us to conjure the missing figures, even the personalities, of the wearers. ...

http://www.artic.edu

Irving Penn: Platinum Prints

National Gallery of Art: June 19 - October 2, 2005

Since the early 1960s, American photographer Irving Penn (born 1917) has made a limited number of platinum prints of his most celebrated photographs. This exhibition will present some 95 platinum prints given by Penn to the National Gallery of Art in 2002. Featured will be many of Penn's best works, including his portraits of Pablo Picasso, David Smith, Saul Steinberg, and Marcel Duchamp; studies of indigenous peoples in New Guinea and Peru; provocative still lifes; and influential fashion studies. ...

http://www.nga.gov

All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: May 24, 2005–August 21, 2005

Roger Fenton (1819–1869) was the most celebrated and influential photographer in England during the golden age of the medium in the 1850s. This major loan exhibition unites 90 of Fenton’s finest works from American and European collections, representing his achievement in every genre: Romantic landscapes, intimate portraits of the royal family, stunning architectural views of England’s ruined abbeys and castles, moving reportage of the Crimean War, enchanting orientalist tableaux, and lush still lifes. Following its appearance at the Metropolitan Museum, the exhibition will travel to Tate Britain, London. ...

http://www.metmuseum.org

Margaret Michaelis - Love, loss and photography

National Gallery of Australia: 7 May – 14 August 2005

Encounter (Shona Dunlop and Hilary Napier in “Seastudy”)' c.1947 gelatin silver photography Collection of the National Gallery of Australia

Like numerous other émigrés forced into exile during the 1930s, Austrian-born photographer Margaret Michaelis (nee Gross) arrived in Australia with very few possessions. However, she did manage to bring examples of the photographic work she had produced in Europe during the 1920s and 30s, as well as some personal items. The latter included a bundle of love letters from her first husband, Rudolf Michaelis, whom she had married in Berlin in 1933 and divorced in Barcelona four years later. Margaret Michaelis kept these photographs and letters with her throughout her life; the year after her death in 1985 they were donated to the National Gallery of Australia and are now part of the extensive Margaret Michaelis-Sachs archive. The exhibition Margaret Michaelis: Love, loss and photography is based on that archive and adopts a deliberately personal tone, weaving together aspects of Michaelis’s professional and personal lives. ...

http://www.nga.gov.au