January 13 - February 21, 2009

Mireille Mosler, Ltd is pleased to announce My Amsterdam, a selection of black and white vintage prints, color photographs and film by the Dutch artist Ed van der Elsken (1925-1990), chronicling post-war Amsterdam. The concept of this show was first conceived in 2005 by the British photographer Martin Parr for Foam, Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam.

Ed van der Elsken was one of the most influential figures in postwar Dutch photography. He is inextricably linked with Amsterdam, his place-of-birth where he photographed and filmed throughout his life. Van der Elsken captured every aspect of Amsterdam from the 1950s on. Working primarily with natural light, his objective was to show things as they are, without disrupting any integrity or mainstreaming his subjects. His openness to accident and the unexpected is indicative of the artist's lust for life and lends empathy to the strange and tender encounters captured. The quixotic technique often resulted in textures ranging from hard grains to soft blurs, playing upon the pictures' surface in a manner that elevated the atmosphere beyond the confines of its factual content. The unconventional technique and the gritty snapshot-like quality of Van der Elsken's work have been of great importance in the development of contemporary photography.

Heavily influenced by Weegee and stylistically in-step with Brassai's shadowed city streets, Nan Goldin's sexual curiosity, Diane Arbus's eye for the bizarre and Robert Frank's recognition of cultural identity, Van der Elsken explored seedy city underbellies and rugged backwoods with complete surrender to his environment. As a brazen populist and champion of the underdog, he traveled the world, observing idiosyncrasies with a combination of intimacy and drama. Most often, his subject was his beloved, "pre-renovation" Amsterdam, though the underground nightclubs of Jazz-era Paris, and the culturally foreign countries he visited did not go unnoticed. In 1956, Van der Elsken published his first b/w photo-book Love on the left bank, capturing the life of artists in Saint-Germain de Pres in Paris and many of the color photographs in My Amsterdam were originally published in Eye Love You (1977) and Hallo! (1978).

Since 1960, Van der Elsken has been making movies. As part of My Amsterdam, the 16mm b/w film Fietsen (Cycling) (1965, 6 minutes), will be continuously shown. In this experimental film, Van der Elsken observes cyclists in Amsterdam, moving over the bridges on the canals. During the exhibition, a separate film program will be announced.

The Ed van der Elsken Estate is represented by Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

 

Image:
Ed van der Elsken, Beethovenstraat, 1967
Color photograph
15 3/4 by 23 1/2 inches (40 by 60 cm), 20 by 24 inches (51 by 61 cm.) paper size
Courtesy of Mireille Mosler, Ltd. and Ed van der Elsken/NFM Rotterdam

 

 

Mireille Mosler, Ltd.
35 East 67th Street
New York, NY 10065
+1 212.249.4195

 

 

 

 

 

 

January 15 - February 21, 2009
reception: January 15, 6-8 PM

The exhibition explores vulnerability and means of communication in a volatile digitalized world through the prism of a darkroom. The term darkroom is most commonly associated with a workplace in which film and photographic paper are developed to make photographic prints. Nevertheless, the same term is also used to describe a darkened room, sometimes located in a nightclub, bathhouse, or sex club, (aka backroom) where sexual activity takes place.

Darkrooms are losing their relevance in our digital times, when sex and image producing can be found and made easily through the Internet and simple and popular electronic devices. Chat rooms and digital cameras - omnipresent in mobile phones - are providing almost everyone in the western world a chance to have quick and easy sex just as it allows the possibility to make quick and easy pictures and films.

While the effects of employing digital means for sex - and for art - is yet to be fully understood, the current exhibition offers an intimate peek into the work of a young generation of artists, mostly men, giving account of themselves and their surroundings, even when it seems at first gloomy, self-centered or overly narrow. Vulnerability, obsession and sexuality are reconstructed and perceived from the hidden, voyeuristic and secluded area of a darkroom, prompting reflection and a second look at what many would consider indecent. It calls upon an investigation of the darkroom as a structure that is private and lonely while being also a space for experimentation, communication and intimacy.

Daneyal Mahmood Gallery
511 West 25th Street 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001
+1 212 675 2966

 

 

 

 

 

 

January 15 - February 14, 2009

Opening reception: Thursday, January 15, 6 - 9 PM

Priska C. Juschka Fine Art is pleased to present a selection of photographs by David Haxton. This exhibition spans from two early works, both dated from 1980, marking his second inclusion in the Whitney Biennial (1981), to the present day. In his 2005 - 2008 work, Haxton continues his concept of making photographs that utilize the basic elements of photography.

 

In 1975, Haxton's photography, made of sculpted remnants of his film sets, first became autonomous. Since 1986, Haxton has created his photographs independently by restricting himself to raw materials and subject matter as immaterial as space and light in his studio.

By referring to primary materials such as photographic backdrop paper and light stands, his process bears a performative character. He uses elementary studio props, and stages the process of the picture-taking for the viewer: "A large format camera is placed in a dark studio. Photographic backdrop paper is arranged and cut, lights are placed in the space and the film is exposed." (D. Haxton)

The result is a recorded moment of this act of staging, literally a mise-en-scène. "The slashes and cuts in paper are a record of a performance for the camera." (D. Haxton)

This is Haxton's first solo exhibition since 1986.

David Haxton was born in 1943 and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana. He currently lives in Winter Park, Florida where he works as a professor of Photography at the University of Central Florida. Haxton's photographs are represented in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, New York, The Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the National Gallery of Australia and the Polaroid Collection. His photographs and films were chosen for the Whitney Biennials of 1979, 1981, 1983 and at the Museum of Modern Art in 1978 as part of the museum's CINEPROBE program.

Noted exhibitions of photography include: This is Not a Photograph, Ringling Art Museum, Sarasota, Florida, 1987; The Immaterials, Museum Beauborg, Paris, France, 1986; Color as Form, International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, 1982; Recent Color, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1982; The New Color, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, 1981; the International Center of Photography, New York, New York, 1980; and Ils se Disent Peintres, Ils se Disent Photographes at the Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris, France, 1980. Haxton's works have been published in The Polaroid Book (Taschen), 2005; and Art and Photography by David Campany (Phaidon), 2003.

 

 

 

 

Priska C. Juschka Fine Art
547 West 27th Street
2nd Floor
New York, NY 10001
+1 212-244-4320

 

 

 

 

 

GONZALO LEBRIJA
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN YOU AND ME
 
January 17 - February 14 
 
For his third exhibition at I-20, Gonzalo Lebrija will have a project in Los Angeles as part of a one-month gallery swap between I-20 and Mesler & Hug.  Lebrija's exhibition will be presented at Mesler & Hug, 510 Bernard Street, in the Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles.
 
The exhibition, entitled The Distance Between You and Me, comprises four simultaneous black-and-white 16-mm film installations.  The works capture the artist running away from the camera in Joshua Tree, Death Valley, and Yosemite, California.
 
In each film, the artist first appears from behind the camera only to quickly recede into the distance.  He advances away from the viewer as fast as he can, his speed and agility determinant on the terrain.  The final films and images depend on how far he goes and the many subtle variations in the daylight and scenery surrounding him as he speeds away.  In each setting, Lebrija assumes a different role or relationship to the terrain, be it a determined runner, or a fixed object melted into his surroundings, akin to a rock or a tree.   In these deserted settings, Lebrija makes the flight from the viewer seem like a natural instinct or reflex and possible metaphor for the inherent friction between oneself and reality.  As a visual experience, the simultaneous films offer nuances of light and landscape with hints of truth about distance, the psychological impact of which all depends on how fast he can get away from you.
 
Gonzalo Lebrija will participate in the Videonale 12 at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, in April 2009.  The artist had solo exhibitions in Mexico City at the Museo de Arte Carillo Gil, and the Museo experimental Eco; and his works have been exhibited in the Jumex Collection in that city. Group shows include the Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany; the National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland; the Cervantes Institute, New York; and a solo show at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK. He had solo shows in 2008 at Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris, and Travesio Quatro, Madrid.
 
Lebrija was born in Mexico City in 1972.  He was educated at the Instituto Technológico de Estudios Superiores de Occidente ITESO in Guadalajara, and was the co-founder of Oficina para Proyectos De Arte (OPA), a leading exhibition space in that city.  Lebrija lives and works in Guadalajara. 
 
A hardcover catalogue on the artist is being published this spring by Other Criteria in London.

 

Image:
Gonzalo Lebrija
The Distance Between You and Me
Courtesy of I-20, New York

 

MESLER&HUG
510 Bernard St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012
+1 323 221 0016

 

 

 

 

Opening: Friday, January 16, 6-8 p.m.
Exhibition period: January 17 - February 21 2009

Galerie Peter Kilchmann is looking forward to announcing the third solo exhibition by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles (*1963 in Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico). Alongside her canvases, a selection of photographs and objects will also be on display.

Violence, homicide and death are the focus of Teresa Margolles' artistic and political discourse. She forges an aesthetics that is related to death on the one hand and to the lifeless body in its different stages and with all its sociocultural implications on the other.

In her meticulous research, Margolles and a group of friends seeks out the crime scenes of the acts of violence to collect traces from the ground in situ using linens. Here, Margolles is interested in the aspect of abstraction and the representation of physicality. Narration and testimony form the centre of her work. The "colour" used in the "pictures" displayed in the exhibition is predominantly human blood. It stems from the victims of violent acts who were killed as a result of the ongoing conflicts between the drugs mafia, rival gangs and executing authorities of the Mexican Government.

Margolles' linens are not only the picture itself, but their material content and significance turn them into symbols and carriers of symbols. Margolles considers these pieces of cloth as a means of communication, as vehicles that serve to transport meanings on a double level: The material being an actual carrier of absorbed blood and other bodily secretions as well as a conveyor of history and histories. Margolles' art is deeply political and sociocritical, telling of a society in which violence has become the norm and where indolence, a lack of solidarity, recklessness and egoism are constantly increasing. (Original text: Hartwig Knack, 2008)

Teresa Margolles' solo exhibition "En Lugar de los Hechos - An Stelle der Tatsachen" (In Lieu of the Facts) will be on display until 15th February 2008 in Factory, Kunsthalle Krems. Further works will be shown within the group exhibition, "7 + 1 Project Rooms", in MARCO, Vigo, also until the 15th February 2009. Also in Hamburg's Galerie der Gegenwart in the exhibition "MAN SON 1969. Vom Schrecken der Situation" (About the Horror of the Situation) from 31st January until 26th April 2009.

Furthermore, the artist is going to carry out a project for Creative Time in New York during the summer.

 

 

WILLIE DOHERTY
Three Potential Endings

January 17 - February 21 2009

Three Potential Endings is the title of the forth coming solo exhibition of Willie Doherty (born 1959 and currently living in Derry, Northern Ireland) and at the same time the name of his new film, which will be shown on the occasion of his exhibition for the first time. This will be the artist's sixth exhibition in our gallery.

Three Potential Endings was shot on location in Dublin during the summer of 2008.

The work is structured around three open-ended sequences involving a businessman who finds himself outside of the familiar surroundings of the office. The work does not provide any explanation or rationale but rather places the man in direct confrontation with the architectural spaces where he finds himself. The work presents a figure besieged with the possibility of failure and uncertainty.

The three sequences are simultaneously fragmented and connected by a fourth sequence that shows the man pacing around a small, confined space. It is unclear whether he is lost in thought and deep in concentration or whether he is confused and oblivious to his surroundings.

The figure appears to be both contained by the parameters of each space yet free to leave. The resolution of any possible narrative recedes and the focus of work shifts to an awareness of the vulnerability of the body in space.

Three Potential Endings extends the concerns of previous works, such as Closure, 2005 and Passage, 2006. Like these works Three Potential Endings developed out of an investigation into the spatial and socio/political conditions of specific urban locations and deploys the intervention of the human figure to explore the dynamics of these spaces. (Willie Doherty, December 2008)

In addition to the film, a series of photographs will be on display.

For the past 15 years, Doherty's representations of the political situation in Northern Ireland have made him one of the most consistently interesting and affecting artist. In 2007, his first retrospective with video installations took place in the German-speaking area of the Kunstverein Hamburg and Lenbachhaus Munich. An extensive catalogue about these exhibitions has been published in German and English by Hatje Cantz Verlag and is also available through the gallery.

In the second space of the gallery will be simultaneously the opening of new works by Teresa Margolles.

Galerie Peter Kilchmann
Limmatstrasse 270
8005 Zurich
Switzerland
+41 44 278 10 10

 

 

 

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