Gerhard Richter's Overpainted Photographs

For over 20 years, Gerhard Richter has been uniting painting and photography with an ongoing series simply titled Overpainted Photographs. I recently had the chance to sit down with the monograph, published by Hatje Cantz in February, and was taken aback by the sheer volume of work contained within. Some of my favorite of Richter's painted photographs are those in which the texture of the paint mimics, or even extracts, the texture in the photograph. As Jeff Ladd of the 5B4 blog points out:

"For many photographers the image has no surface. The illusion of photography in providing a window into which we perceive literal description and dimension by Richter's hand is now disrupted due to the addition of paint. Often a tense relationship, the results run the gamut of the surreal to the beautiful to the disturbed. It is all the more surprising that each in its perceived completeness was in essence accomplished by chance and trial and error."


4. März 92 (Piz Tremoggia) (From "Overpainted Photographs")
© Gerhard Richter


9.1.89 (From "Overpainted Photographs")
© Gerhard Richter


12.4.92 (From "Overpainted Photographs")
© Gerhard Richter


23.2.96 (From "Overpainted Photographs")
© Gerhard Richter


8.2.92 (From "Overpainted Photographs")
© Gerhard Richter

Victor Burgin's Office At Night

Conceptual artist Victor Burgin's series Office At Night, inspired by the iconic Edward Hopper painting of the same name, explores the politics of gender relations in a decidedly patriarchal society. In an essay written by Burgin entitled "The Separateness of Things", the artist discusses the impetus behind the series and shares some of his thoughts on the politics of Hopper. In the catalog which accompanied the Office At Night exhibition, Burgin wrote this about Hopper's Office At Night:



"Office at Night may be read as an expression of the general political problem of the organization of Desire within the Law, and in terms of the particular problem of the organization of sexuality within capitalism – the organization of sexuality for capitalism. Patriarchy has traditionally consigned women to supportive roles in the running of the economy, subject to the authority of men. The ‘secretary/boss’ couple in Hopper’s painting is at once a picture of a particular, albeit fictional, couple and an emblem, ‘iconogram’, serving to metonymically represent all such couples – all such links in the chains of organization of the (re)production of wealth. Such coupling for reproduction must of course contain its sexual imperative. The family functions to contain, restrain, this imperative in so far as it is directed towards the reproduction of subjects for the workplace. The erotic supplement to the biological imperative cannot however be contained in the family. It spills into the place of work, where it threatens to subvert the orders of rationalized production. [Hopper’s] painting, clearly, may represent such a moment of potential erotic disruption in appealing to such preconstructed meanings, items of the popular pre-conscious, as are filed under, for example, ‘working late at the office’. At the same time the painting stabilizes the situation by providing a moral solution to the problem of the unruly and dangerous supplement. That the morality is patriarchal goes without saying."

Burgin then had this to say in regard to his own work:

"My point of departure for the photographic work I made in 1986 was the position of the woman in Hopper’s painting. The woman in the painting is there to be looked at, an object of sexual curiosity.

My aim was to transform the role of the woman from object of curiosity to that of subject of curiosity – to transform showing into knowing, exhibitionism into epistemophilia. In an interview recorded at the time of my ICA exhibition, I described my own Office at Night in the following terms:

The office in Hopper’s painting is a very enclosed space. Most of the elements in my piece are derived from elements within that space. The fantasy is that the woman explores the space of Hopper’s painting, appropriates that space for herself. The pictograms [are] added as a counterpoint, in a sort of ‘möbius strip’ action – in that the pictograms refer to the inside of the office, wrapping around that enclosed space, but at the same time are continuous, in formal and thematic terms, with what’s happening outside the office. I thought of the ubiquitousness of that sort of symbol system in the contemporary environment: Walk/Don’t Walk; Stop; No Entrance; Passport Control. It’s the very index of the omnipresence of control, authority. For me, the pictograms serve as a sort of analogue of the universe surrounding the office."

All photographs from the series Office At Night

All Images © Victor Burgin

Joel Sternfeld's Oxbow Archive

Joel Sternfeld's new exhibition Oxbow Archive opens this Saturday, September 6 at Luhring Augustine in Chelsea. This new body of work (done in and around my hometown of Northampton, Massachusetts) examines seasonal passage in an age of vast climate change. The images from Oxbow Archive are both geographically and contextually rooted in art history, specifically in the tradition of 19th century American landscape painting. The notorious Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole made one of his most famous paintings in the same location that Sternfeld has been photographing. View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm — The Oxbow, 1836 presents a bucolic, somewhat idealistic vision of nature's perfection. However, as it states in the press release for Sternfeld's upcoming exhibition:

"This work represents a departure from archetypal photographic depictions of nature; grandiloquent mountain views and dramatized skies are eschewed, as are ideal specimens of flora. Anthropomorphization of "perfect form in nature" does not occur; the geometric is not valorized. The photographs are not meant to be metaphoric equivalents of anything else. Rather, the images present themselves without pretense as a systematic index of seasonal progression."



Oxbow Archive
Luhring Augustine
531 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
September 6 - October 4

This exhibition coincides with the publication of Oxbow Archive, which will be avialable soon through Steidl.

From Top To Bottom:

Joel Sternfeld, March 13, 2006, 
The East Meadows, Northampton, Massachusetts, 2006

Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm — The Oxbow, 1836

Works © The Artists

Antonio López García

I had a chance to see the Antonio López García exhibtion at the Museum of Fine Arts yesterday. For anyone unfamiliar with his work, López García is a wonderful, psuedo-photo-realist painter from Spain. I say psuedo because from a distance in paintings truly do resemble photographs, however, as you approach them the artist's hand becomes increasingly visible. He mostly paints the commonplace spaces that pervade his life, doing so with a palpable and haunting beauty. In an essay entitled The Timeless Realism of Antonio López García, Jason Edward Kaufman observed:

"Though García is devoted to the mundane--he depicts humble people, buildings, plants, and cluttered interiors--his meticulousness is exhilarating. In his hands, starkly lit studies of his studio or bathroom beguile like rare jewels. The red brick wall in his backyard becomes a subject of tremendous interest. His extraordinary deftness prolongs our attention to these quotidian prospects, disrupting our perceptual complacency and directing us to reexamine forms, often leading us to experience their beauty."

Antonio López García
Museum Of Fine Arts
Foster and Rabb Galleries
465 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA
Through July 27th










From Top To Bottom:

The Dinner, 1971–80

Home of Antonio López Torres, 1972-75

View of Madrid from Capitán Haya, 1987–94

Sink and Mirror, 1967

All Work © Antonio López García

Mass Art MFA Thesis Exhibition (Part 1)

The first installment of the Mass Art MFA Thesis Exhibitions opened today. I had a chance to view the show this afternoon and there is some really interesting work spanning across media such as film, photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and collage. The artists included are:

Stephanie Costello, Dave Olsen, Guhapriya Ranganathan, Owen Rundquist, Guillermo Srodek-Hart, Catherine Stack, T.F. Tolhurst and Michael Zachary.

The exhibition will be up from:

Tuesday April 15- Thursday April 24
Opening Reception: Thursday April 17 from 6-8pm

Sandra and David Bakalar Gallery and Stephen D. Paine Gallery
621 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA 02115

Untitled

Image © T.F. Tolhurst

War Stories

Mass Art's Bakalar Gallery is currently hosting an exhibition entitled War Stories. The exhibit brings together the photographs of Nina Berman, the paintings of Jenny Holzer and the American premiere of a 10 channel video installation entitled 9 Scripts from a Nation at War by a collective of artists. The work represented in the show reflects contemporary views on the politics, consequences and ideologies of war. The press release for the show asserts:

Among the most powerful and important statements of this war have been images; from the satellite shots of supposed WMD facilities to the digital snapshots of Abu Ghraib. Stand-alone images, though compelling, are still incomplete. The potential for misinterpretation of this highly charged imagery is a given based on each viewer’s subjectivity.

For anyone interested in viewing the exhibit, the pertinent details are as follows:

War Stories
Sandra & David Bakalar Gallery
621 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA

February 11–March 12






From Top to Bottom:

Jenny Holzer, 001996 (Light Purple Black), 2007

Nina Berman, Sgt. Joseph Mosner

Nina Berman, Pfc. Adam Zaremba

All Images © the Artists

Sean Micka at Judi Rotenberg

For anyone in the Boston area this Thursday, painter Sean Micka is having an opening at the Judi Rotenberg Gallery on Newbury Street. Sean will be exhibiting work from his new series After Images, which I unfortunately haven't had a chance to see yet. Sean has been using Encyclopedia reference photographs as inspiration for his paintings, creating work that reinforces the close and specific relationship between these two mediums.

Sean Micka's After Images

Judi Rotenberg Gallery
130 Newbury Street
Boston, MA

January 10- February 2

Opening Reception:
Thursday, January 10th from 6-8]

Image © Sean Micka