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303 GALLERY, New York

Florian Maier-Aichen
100-Mile photograph, 2014
c-print
99 x 78 1/2 inches
edition of 6
Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery, New York
 
 
FLORIAN MAIER-AICHEN
 
June 5 - July 25, 2014
 
303 Gallery is pleased to present our fourth exhibition of new photographs by Florian Maier-Aichen.
 
Navigating the fraught terrain where photography and painting intersect and collapse into one another, Maier-Aichen's newest works incorporate strategies from both media while persistently crossing back and forth along their borders. In a series of untitled abstractions that at first glance appear to contain absolutely no tangible photographic information, Maier-Aichen employs a process akin to now obsolete traditional cel animation. The foregrounds of these images feature gestural strokes and splashes in alternating positive and negative iterations, originally created by spontaneously pouring acrylic paint directly onto paper rolls. Output onto transparent film, these foreground components are then physically sandwiched together with painted backgrounds and photographed on an enormous copystand. This hybridization, on one hand steeped in the process-based darkroom tinkering of photograms and another referencing technological interventions into painting, creates a type of image that would never be possible via traditional painting or photography alone. Though decidedly photographic in nature (what could be more direct than photographing something on a copystand?), the oscillation between image and object is replete with the painterly allure of chance and chaos, so often scrubbed free from current modes of clinical and forced photographic production.
 
Also included in this exhibition are more traditional landscape photographs. Though the photographs are quite straight, they also toy with notions of the painterly, as in an aerial image of Los Angeles with its saturated infrared hues and seemingly impossible expanses of depth, drawing on the imaginative possibilities of maps and the abstraction of landscape. An image of Andermatt in the Swiss Alps is a type of 19th century recreation using tricolor photography to mimic a similar image by Eduard Spelterini, who photographed the Swiss landscape from a customized hot-air balloon. The landscape has hardly changed in 150 years, as Switzerland itself is highly reliant on its own clichés and pristine maintenance of the landscape for tourist purposes. Maier-Aichen, in an interview in 2013, has said, "Photography is everywhere at every moment and has gone from mysterious to fake to simulative. Photography as an opaque medium of process, thought and craftsmanship is obsolete." Seeking to work around this bleak situation via strategies that hark back to photography's relationship to Pictorialism and German Romanticism, Maier-Aichen has arrived at methods that are reverential of photography's history, while also pointing to new possibilities for the photographic image. Turning the idea of photography as a tool to imitate painting on its head, Maier-Aichen works in reverse to re-establish the mysteries of photography itself.
 
Florian Maier-Aichen was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1973 and studied photography in Germany and the U.S. Recent solo exhibitions include the Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid (2008) and the Museum of Contemporary Art at Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles (2007). Group exhibitions include "Night in Day" (2014), Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Artist's Museum (2010) MOCA, Los Angeles; 'The Smithson Effect' (2011), Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City; 'Natural History' (2012) Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Maier-Aichen lives and works in Cologne, Germany and Los Angeles, California.
 
 
303 GALLERY
507 W 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
T: +1 (212) 255 - 1121
 
303 GALLERY
 
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Belfast Exposed Photography

Edson Chagas
Found Not Taken, Luanda, 2013
© the artist
Image courtesy of A Palazzo Gallery
 
 
EDSON CHAGAS
FOUND NOT TAKEN
 
6 June to 3 August 2014
 
Found Not Taken is an ongoing series of photographs of objects found on the streets of Luanda, Angola, Newport, Wales and London, UK; cities where the artist has lived and worked. The project stems from Chagas’ interest in cities and what they tell us about contemporary consumer habits. The artist is particularly concerned about increased patterns of consumerism in his hometown. Since the end of the civil war in 2002, Angola’s economy has become the fastest growing in Africa and the sudden influx of wealth is rapidly transforming its capital, Luanda.
 
Found Not Taken is a catalogue of unwanted, abandoned things, which highlights the excess of a growing consumer culture, but it is not purely a documentary project. Sometimes the artist repositions objects to produce new compositional arrangements. These found objects are recycled into a new relationship with their environment and into the realm of discourse and ideas. Chagas’ work is a subtle, often playful intervention. The aesthetic is minimal, almost abstract - with simple forms and the surface texture of the city rendered in great detail. At the same time, the relationship between object and context is central to the meaning of the work, and the new compositions that he creates - both in the actual city and in the form of an image - suggest other possible narratives and different ways of reading and experiencing the city.
 
Edson Chagas lives and works in Luanda, Angola. After completing a degree in Photojournalism at the London College of Communication, he studied Documentary Photography at the University of Wales in Newport. His work was presented in the first pavilion of Angola at the 55th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia in 2013, which won the prestigious Golden Lion Award for the Best National Participation.Other exhibition highlights include participation in the 2nd Luanda Triennial, Angola, 2010; SP-Arte 2011, São Paulo, Brazil; the MABAXA project in Luanda, Angola and RAVY - Rencontre d’Arts Visuels, in Yaoundé, Cameroon, both in 2012. In 2011 he also took part in a workshop in Ethiopia, invited by the German organisation GIZ - Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, which culminated in various exhibitions, in 2012 at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn, Germany, the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa and later in Angola. Chagas combines his artistic work with the job of image editor for the Angolan newspaper Expansão.
 
 
Belfast Exposed Photography
The Exchange Place
23 Donegall Street
Belfast BT1 2FF
T: 44 028 90 23 09 65
 
Belfast Exposed Photography
 
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Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich

THOMAS RUFF
phg.03_II, 2014
c-print
edition of 4 + 1 AP, ed. 2/4
framed 239 x 184 cm (94 1/8 x 72 1/2 in.)
signed, dated and numbered verso
Courtesy of the artist and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
 
 
THOMAS RUFF
NEW WORK
 
June 14 through August 2, 2014
 
Thomas Ruff, born in Zell am Harmersbach, Germany, in 1958, is internationally renowned as one of the foremost living artist in the field of photography and the application of similar new artistic techniques. His work is exhibited worldwide, with recent shows at the Vienna Kunsthalle, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Haus der Kunst in Munich and the S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Belgium. The Mai 36 Gallery has been presenting his work on a regular basis since 1988.
 
For the current exhibition of two photographic series, Thomas Ruff has once again adopted new techniques: on the one hand, digitally produced colour photograms, and on the other, digitally processed vintage photographs with the aesthetic appearance of negatives.
 
Photograms are black and white photographic images created by placing objects directly onto light-sensitive material and exposing it to light, resulting in the objects being rendered as forms in light and shadow. It is actually an old technique, used by such notable artists as Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray and Arthur Siegel, for instance, and was especially popular at the Bauhaus in the 1920s.
Thomas Ruff now builds these objects digitally using a 3D software programme, which allows him to manipulate and arrange them entirely according to his own aesthetic criteria and, above all, in colour. Fully dedicated to the innovative potential of digital image processing, he conveys a new visual aesthetic of sumptuously colourful surfaces - compositionally freewheeling images using highly sophisticated, cutting-edge technology.
 
Another of Thomas Ruff’s interests is the possibility of inverting images - in other words, producing negatives of them. For this, he uses existing historical images and negatives. This creates an entirely different effect, expressing an emphasis and concentration on compositional aspects. The new group of works he has been creating since this year, titled Negatives, is represented in our exhibition by the series neg◊lal, which is being shown to the public for the very first time. For this series, Ruff digitally reworked old technical shots of aeronautic industry prototypes being tested in the wind canal, manipulating light and shadow and altering the original sepia tone to transform them into shimmering blue images with an altogether unfamiliar and distinctive aesthetic.
 
Throughout his oeuvre, Thomas Ruff repeatedly addresses the traditions of photography. His Portraits, Interiors and Nudes, to mention just three of his legendary series, have gained iconic status. At the Mai 36 Gallery, he once again presents his take on the history of photography in the form of high-tech and highly artificial reinterpretations. (Text: Axel Jablonski)
 
 
Mai 36 Galerie
Rämistrasse 37
CH-8001 Zurich
Switzerland
T: +41 44 261 68 80
 
Mai 36 Galerie
 
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Taka Ishii Gallery Photography/Film, Tokyo

Eikoh Hosoe
"Kamaitachi" #8, 1965 / late 1960s - early 1970s
Vintage gelatin silver print
© Eikoh Hosoe
 
 
EIKOH HOSOE
KAMAITACHI
 
June 7 - July 5, 2014
 
Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film is pleased to present “Kamaitachi,” a solo exhibition of works by Eikoh Hosoe, from June 7th to July 5th. The exhibition will include 28 images from Hosoe’s highly acclaimed “Kamaitachi” series, some of which are previously unseen.
 
“Kamaitachi” has traditionally been depicted as a weasel specter with sharp kama (sickle) in place of each arm. It also refers to the phenomenon of skin being cut, touched by the vortex-carring small whirlwind, as if struck by the sickle blade of the specter. Hosoe began shooting his “Kamaitachi” series in 1965, which takes the Butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata as its subject. Hosoe shot the series initially in Hijikata’s hometown Akita, then later in Shibamata and Sugamo in Tokyo, as if to trace the photographer’s own postwar trajectory. The series was published as a book in 1969. It overlaid the image of the Kamaitachi on Hijikata, who was searching for his origins within his hometown. It was also a way for Hosoe to come to terms with his own experiences of wartime evacuation in Yamagata, which he had nearly forgotten at the time. In an interview, he commented, “Where will the wartime experience of evacuation, postwar ruins and experience of living in Tokyo, and the current economic prosperity and peace all go?” 1 Hosoe explained that through the medium of Hijikata’s body, who shares the blood and culture in the Northeast, “I ‘documented’ my ‘memories’.” 2 The resulting works, spun out of the relation between photographer and subject, have a highly narrative quality.
 
In the village, he played with children, was laughed at by farmers along the roadside, shat in the middle of a field, attacked a bride, kidnapped a baby, and ran through the rural landscape. Almost all the shooting was done guerrilla style in a flash. This was something that could only be achieved through photography. No other medium - film, television, painting, or novel - could have been used in its place. At that moment, I was certain of the superiority of photography.
 
Eikoh Hosoe, “Foreword” in Kamaitachi 2
 
Eikoh Hosoe was born in 1933 in Yamagata Prefecture. In 1951, he won the top prize for students at the Fujifilm-sponsored “Fuji Photo Contest.” In 1952, after entering the Tokyo Junior College of Photography (currently Tokyo Polytechnic University), he formed a connection with the renowned artist Ei-Q, who organized Demokrato, an avant-garde artist’s group. Through this relationship, Hosoe cemented his individualistic way of thinking, which challenged common conceptions of art.  In 1957, he participated in the exhibit “The Eyes of Ten,” organized by photography critic Tatsuo Fukushima. This exhibit led Hosoe to meet photographers Kikuji Kawada, Akira Sato, Akira Tanno, Shomei Tomatsu and Ikko Narahara, and together they formed the independent photo agency VIVO. This agency positioned itself against the then-popular “Realism Photography Movement,” and instead developed more “personal” or “subjective” modes of photographic expression. Hosoe has an esteemed reputation both at home and abroad: among his awards include The Medal with Purple Ribbon (1998), The Royal Photographic Society (England) Special 150th Anniversary Medal Award (2003), The Order of the Rising Sun (2007), the Mainichi Art Award (2008) and a designation as a Person of Cultural Merit by the Ministry of Education in 2010.
 
Notes
1] “Hosoe Eikoh ni kiku” (interview to Eikoh Hosoe), The Photo Image, vol.1, 1969
2] Eikoh Hosoe, “Kamaitachi,” Shashin Hosoe Eikoh no sekai (Eikoh Hosoe Photographs, 1951 - 1988), Shashin Hosoe Eikoh no sekaiten jikko iinkai, 1988
 
 
Taka Ishii Gallery Photography/Film, Tokyo
AXIS Building 2F, 5-17-1
Roppongi, Minato-ku
106-0032 Tokyo
Japan
T: +81 3-5646-6050
 
Taka Ishii Gallery
 
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James Hopkins '123'

James Hopkins
123
 


James Hopkins
123
2014
250 x 200 x 120 cm
Stainless steel and paint
 
 
James Hopkins Studio presents the launch of 123, a major new sculpture commission unveiled at Florentinum, Prague, Czech Republic.
 
The majority of Hopkins’ practice is concerned with the role of judgment in connection to the process of vision. He optically adapts the familiar in order to create sculptural interventions, which momentarily knock the viewer’s perception off-kilter.
 
His most recent sculpture ‘123’, is based on ascending and descending numbers, which play on the notion of fixing illusions through the isolation of the observer’s viewpoint. The numerals have been stretched, sculpted and carved in opposing directions, switching meaning when looked at from different angles. This permanent free-standing sculpture is a continuation of his interest in the ambiguity of the image and other scenarios which deceive the eye. The inherent visual trickery of ‘123’ confirms the visual puzzle and optical conundrum as Hopkins primary field of operation.
 
‘I consider perspective and the rendering of space in art to be the crux of artistic techniques and think that the most important link in the armoury of illusionistic art is the trick of perspective. I am most interested in how certain sculptures are capable of simultaneously representing several different visual interpretations. I find it most intriguing how our visual perception of such sculptures can switch between two or more alternatives and what the subsequent effect of perceiving a changing space of representation has upon our senses. When looking at my sculptures the viewer is made aware that each viewpoint holds something entirely different from the next. This confirms that no one viewpoint when looking at sculpture can be any more reliable than the next’.
 
James Hopkins
 
‘Hopkins's sophisticated visual illusions are engaging, but his best works also hint at the epistemological uprooting that follows from the discovery that sight, our most relied-upon sense in the gallery, can be untrustworthy. Few contemporary artworks consciously remind us of this fact; Hopkins links it to an examination of his objects' intrinsic characteristics, and, occasionally, to a meditation on the emotional fallout of this and other fundamental instabilities’.
 
Brian Sholis, Artforum
 
‘His highly focused practice has consistently addressed the perceptual aspects of the relationship between artwork and viewer. Producing objects, installations and public works that in their level of fabrication approximate processes of high-end mass production, Hopkins fuses the surface logic of the commodity with that of a fairground mise-en-scene. Arrangements of elements are carefully constructed to create slippages in perception, wherein the viewer’s confidence in what is seen shifts as their physical location in relation to the work changes. This “trickery” is employed in a manner that reflects on philosophical and psychological traditions related to the connectivity between vision, language and thought’.
 
Richard Birkett, Artists Space, New York
 
‘These variations on an anamorphic theme interpellate the viewer, and perhaps generate the same wonder and perplexity that the artist describes on first encountering the potter’s wheel. Shapes continually change, bounding and defining a central point in what Hopkins calls an ‘elastic band reality’.
 
Darian Leader
 
 
For further information contact: [email protected]
 
Links:
 
https://vimeo.com/74627782
 
www.jameshopkinsworks.com