re-title.com
17 November 2011
  Photography Film & Video 
BRANCOLINI GRIMALDI, London
YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY, New York
LUIS DE JESUS, Los Angeles
TANJA POL GALERIE, Munich
BAUKUNST GALERIE, Cologne
 

 
BRANCOLINI GRIMALDI, London
 
 
Massimo Vitali, Las Catedrales Waves, 2011
 
Massimo Vitali
Las Catedrales Waves, 2011
180 x 300 cm, C-print, Edition of 6
Courtesy of Brancolini Grimaldi, London
 
 
MASSIMO VITALI : NEW WORK
 
18 November 2011 – 28 January 2012
Press/Private View: Thursday 17 November, 7pm – 9pm
 
Massimo Vitali will unveil a striking new collection of photographs in his first UK solo exhibition since 1997 on 18 November at Brancolini Grimaldi.
 
Vitali has become one of the most celebrated contemporary photographers worldwide, renowned for his large colour prints depicting the crowded beaches and shorelines of the Mediterranean Sea. However, this new series focuses on the natural – rocks, cliffs, waterfalls, caves and quarries. Holidaymakers have been reduced to mere dots, hovering uncomfortably on the shore, or taking shelter in the shadow of monumental natural landmarks. Seen from such a distance, these crowds mimic colonies of mammals – huddles of seals or penguins - washed up on the rocks. The power of nature comes to the fore – in one image people are literally replaced by crashing waves as the tide moves in. Everything is now in flux and the old certainties have been washed away. Our frailty in the face of such power is thrown into focus and we are forced to confront our mortality and our inability to resist the forces of nature.
 
Vitali started his series of large format photographs at a specific moment in Italian history: 1994, the year in which Berlusconi came to power. He has said of this moment, “I wanted to look into the faces of the people that voted for Berlusconi and see if I could understand why. My photography comes from absolute matter-of-fact situations, but also from a deep curiosity that I possess for people, for what they do and how they think.” For Vitali, the beach was a place where the mundane and everyday merges with natural beauty, and where he could confront Italians in a place of vulnerability. The images reflect a sense of freedom, even hedonism, but also a sense of conformity and even banality. In the background, industrial buildings such as factories and warehouses loom, a reminder that the escape to nature is temporary and artificial.
 
Over the last 15 years, the subtle shift in Vitali’s work from crowds to sparsely populated landscapes, seems an attempt to understand how we can avoid colonising that which makes our environment meaningful and balanced, and an almost Romantic vision of the sublime power of nature.
 
Vitali was born in Como, Italy, in 1944. After studying photography at the London School of Printing he worked as a photojournalist in the early sixties and enjoyed a career in cinematography for television and cinema in the 1980s. His training in cinematography had a major influence on the way he approached photography when he returned to it in the mid 90s, particularly in the high level of technical precision he demanded in his image-making. After working with large format photography in 1993, Vitali commenced his series of Italian beach panoramas in 1995, coinciding with a period of dramatic political change in Italy. Since then he had major solo exhibitions around the world and his prints are included in various major international collections. Massimo Vitali currently lives and works in Lucca, Italy, and in Berlin, Germany.
 
Brancolini Grimaldi opened a new gallery in London in April 2011, expanding on its existing galleries in Rome and Florence. The gallery is dedicated to showcasing innovative artists who merge photography with other media such as performance, installation and video art. By introducing a more conceptual context to photography, it aims to redefine the future of the medium and the way it is displayed. Isabella Brancollini opened one of the first the first contemporary art galleries in Florence in 2002 showing a mixed programme of photography, painting, installation and video art. Camilla Grimaldi, who previously worked at Christie’s and White Cube, joined forces with Isabella in 2005 when the gallery became Brancolini Grimaldi Arte Contemporanea, opening a second space in the heart of Rome. They continue to run galleries in both Rome and London.
 
 
BRANCOLINI GRIMALDI
43 - 44 Albemarle Street
London W1S 4JJ
T: +44 (0)20 7493 5721
 
 
 
 

 
YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY, New York
 
 
Sharon Core, 1665, 2011
 
Sharon Core
1665, 2011
22 1/4 x 18 1/4 inches
Archival pigment print
Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York
 
 
SHARON CORE: 1606-1907
 
Until December 23, 2011
 
The Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present 1606-1907,an exhibition of new works by Sharon Core exploring the subject of floral still-life painting. Similar to the artist’s earlier work, the seriesexamines the relationship of representational painting to the medium of photography. But rather than focusing on a specific artist or time period, as in the previous Thiebaud and Early American works, the new series references a pictorial convention within painting as a whole.  The artist’s sources range from the style of early Flemishpainters, such as Bosschaert and Jan Brueghel, to the Modernists Odilon Redon and Fantin-Latour.
 
The work engages time in both a sense of history and temporality. Flowers are the most temporal of objects: fragile, changeable, and short-lived, a flower’s bloom opens, bends, fades and falls according to degrees of light, temperature, water, and weather. It assumes its character from its atmosphere.  As a subject for art, however, flowers have been portrayed for centuries by artists of all stripes and have an established permanence in the lexicon of art history.
 
It is between these polarities of transience and permanence that the current work is situated. With an eye towards the flower in its natural state and as well as the styles of representation that attempt to order, organize, celebrate, and lament a fleeting symbol of beauty throughout history, Core hasthoroughly explored the nature of the painted bouquet.
 
In order for a photograph to be made, the subject must exist in real time and space. Unlike a painting, nothing can be idealized or imagined. As in previous work, Core made a detailed study of the manipulation of props: paint, light, and in this case, flowers. She cultivated specific types of flowers – brokenviral tulips, opium poppies, heirloom roses – and worked with them and their vagaries.
 
Sharon Core was born in New Orleans in 1965. She holds a BFA in painting from the University of Georgia and an MFA in Photography from Yale University. Her work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Guggenheim Museum,J. Paul Getty Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, Princeton Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, and Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, among others.
 
 
YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor
New York, NY 10011
T: 1 646-230-9610
 
 
 
 

 
LUIS DE JESUS, Los Angeles
 
 
Zackary Drucker and Amos Mac, "Distance is where the heart is, home is where you hang your heart, #5", 2011
 
Zackary Drucker and Amos Mac
"Distance is where the heart is, home is where you hang your heart, #5", 2011
Archival digital pigment print, edition of five, 24 x 36 in / 60.9 x 91.4 cm
Courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
 
 
ZACKARY DRUCKER and AMOS MAC
Distance is where the heart is, home is where you hang your heart
 
December 10, 2010 - January 21, 2012
Artists Reception: Saturday, December 10, 6-9 PM
 
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is thrilled to announce an exhibition of new photographs by ZACKARY DRUCKER and AMOS MAC, titled “Distance is where the heart is, home is where you hang your heart”, opening Saturday, December 10, 2011, through January 15, 2012.
 
“Distance is where the heart is, home is where you hang your heart” is an intimate collaboration between two near-strangers - Zackary Drucker, the LA-based photographer, video and performance artist, and Amos Mac - the creator and publisher of Original Plumbing. Executed over a long, snowed-in Christmas weekend at Drucker's childhood home in Syracuse, New York, the images combine elements of personal history, performance documentation, and exhibitionism. The resulting intervention is also an experiment in cross-identity representation; a dialogue between Mac, a trans man, and Drucker, a trans woman. The exhibition marks the official release of this unique suite of 22 limited-edition photographs, a number of which appear in the first issue of Mac’s new publication, Translady Fanzine.
 
Keeping normative culture on the periphery, “Distance is where the heart is, home is where you hang your heart” explores the relationship between spectacle and voyeur as uniquely removed from the trappings of representational asymmetry. Veering between classically sleek fashion editorials to the sexed-up fetishism of Pierre Molinere, the site-specific body works of Ana Mendieta, and the transgressive body-as-target performances of Chris Burden, the photo essay imagines a stratagem where difference is grated into a fine dust settling over the ruins of normativity. Devoid of traditional male-female power dynamics, Mac and Drucker’s mutual bond and kinship as trans people results in a visual free-for-all that plays with sexuality, female subjection, power, wealth, vulnerability, victimization, family, comfort, safety, secrets - a perfect balance of voyeur and aesthete.
 
Drawing from feminist and queer theoretical discourse, Zackary Drucker’s work addresses sexual exploitation, transgender representation, and drag performance in order to explore relationships that facilitate queer/counter-cultural lineage. Interested in obliterating language obstacles, pulverizing identity disorders and revealing dark subconscious layers of outsider agency, her work reinvents and redistributes traditionally-held binary formulas and power relationships between spectacle and voyeur, dominator and subjugated, and the domesticated and exoticized.
 
Zackary Drucker earned an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2007 and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2005.  She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in venues including the 54th Venice Biennale (Swiss Off-Site Pavilion); Curtat Tunnel, Lausanne, Switzerland; L.u.c.c.a. Museum of Contemporary Art, Lucca, IT; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; REDCAT and LACE, Los Angeles; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Deitch Projects and Leo Koenig Inc. Projekte, New York; Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles; and Jerome Zodo, Milan; among others.
 
Amos Mac is the creator, editor in chief, photographer and publisher of Original Plumbing, a celebrated female-to-male trans quarterly that was named Best Zine of 2010 in the San Francisco Bay Guardian's yearly readers' poll. Mac's voyeuristic, snap-shot styled photographs have been exhibited at galleries and events internationally, and his work has been published extensively in magazines, books, newspapers, and ad campaigns. Amos Mac holds a BS in Liberal Arts from The New School in New York City, where he lives and works.
 
 
LUIS DE JESUS Los Angeles
2685 S. La Cienega Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90034
T: +1 310-838-6000
E: gallery @ luisdejesus.com
Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-6pm
 
 
 
 

 
TANJA POL GALERIE, Munich
 
 
Wolfgang Burat, Robert Smith, The Cure, Cologne, 1980
 
Wolfgang Burat
Robert Smith, The Cure, Cologne, 1980
b/w silvergelatine print, baryt, vintage
30,5 x 40,5 cm
Courtesy of Tanja Pol Galerie Munich
 
 
WOLFGANG BURAT
NO TEARS. PHOTOS 1980 – 1990
 
Until December 23
 
Tanja Pol Galerie is pleased to present NO TEARS. PHOTOS 1980 – 1990, a solo show by Wolfgang Burat. Born in 1955 in Osnabrueck, Germany, Wolfgang Burat now lives and works in Cologne.
 
In 1980 Burat was a co-founder of the renowned legendary music magazine SPEX, and over the following decade (1980-90), he photographed musicians, bands, artists, concerts, backstage situations and fans for the magazine. NO TEARS presents a selection of unique vintage prints. It comprises intimate portraits of musicians such as Freddy Mercury, Martyn Ware/Heaven 17, David Byrne/Talking Heads, Nikki Sudden, Afrika Bambaataa, Paul Weller, Robert Smith/The Cure, Linton Kwesi Johnson, David Thomas/Pere Ubu, Kraftwerk or Archie Shepp.
 
Burat's photographic gaze set the visual impact of this important magazine, and his oeuvre depicts a scene that is of utmost importance for many contemporary (visual) artists, for social and music history, pop theory and art history.
 
Tanja Pol Galerie represents the Wolfgang Burat Archive, which consists of around 2000 vintage prints, mostly on PE and baryt paper, and mostly unique.
 
 
TANJA POL GALERIE
Ludwigstrasse 7
80539 Munich
T: +49 89 18946486
 
 
 
 

 
BAUKUNST GALERIE, Cologne
 
 
M+M, Videostill from Monday, 2011
 
M+M
Videostill from Monday, 2011
2 channel Videoinstallation
16 mm on HD, synchronised
Color, sound, ca. 3 min.
 
 
M + M
Sunday Monday
 
18 November, 2011 - 13 January, 2012
Opening Thursday, the 17th of november 2011 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
 
Introduction:
Dr. Sabine Maria Schmidt
curator and Author, Dusseldorf
 
"Sunday Monday" is the third great solo exhibition at the Baukunst Galerie with the artist duo M+M (Marc Weis and Martin De Mattia). The two video installations “Sonntag” and “Montag” initiate a “seven-day-series”; they are shown together with asymmetric montages.
 
The project “seven-days” is based on the idea of a movie-series and corresponds to key scenes and dialogues of well-known cult movies which are re-interpreted by the artists. Every day of the week is dedicated to a movie, which is presented as a 2-channel film installation.
 
Christoph Luser is the protagonist in every film, while the other roles will be played by changing actors. Luser can be regarded as a guiding line within the whole series, which is characterized through changes and variations.
 
"Monday" uses the equally entitled scene in Standley Kubriks movie “The Shining” (1980). Through specific close-ups and ascending tenseness in the dialogues the seemingly everyday scenes are being increasingly perceived as alarming. A father-daughter scene is contrasting a husband-wife projection. “Sonntag” refers to the opening scene of Jean Godard´s “Le Mépris” (1963) and portraits a bored couple in bed. The projection of a father with his daughter in the same situations constitutes a counterpoint. By using two identical scenes with different combinations, the work seeks to address questions of mens´ complex role in the family. In doing so, it explores the possibilities and limitations of male identity. In both double-stagings the analogue rhythm of language and image emerges a strange and awkward atmosphere for the audience. The content of the other scene affects automatically the increasing tenseness and will be transferred to the man or the women or the child. This scene has to be interpreted by the beholder. Violence, incest or paedophilia can not be excluded. However, these cannot be ruled out in second thinking and associating. By keeping the situation and the „loop“ open, space and time are intangible and are lost in discontinuity.
 
Photographies from the nascent movies “Samstag” (“Saturday Night Fever”) and “Donnerstag” (“Franziskus”) which are assembled asymmetrical by two film stills are going to be exhibited. The character of a collage can not be seen on first sight. A closer look identifies where the film stills are assembled. Furthermore, there are montages on display of “Sonntag” and “Montag” as well as from the 4-channel installation “Schlagende Wetter”, which was produced for the exhibition project EMSCHERKUNST.2010. The expression “Schlagende Wetter” comes from the mining terminology and is designated to the explosive reaction of air and mine gas. Here it is seen as a metaphor for interpersonal tensions.
 
The subject of psychological density and emotions are changing permanently – They can be found in all works of the exhibition.
 
The recent photo works (250 x 130 cm and 120 x 160 cm) have monumental formats, which resembles dream sequences. They get closer to the events through a new display and production format of expression, which did not exist in earlier works. Thereby M+M include the beholder emotionally in film and photography. Dealing with the subject of time is an important aspect. On the one hand it is shown in the video installations as a successive process. On the other hand it is presented in the montages as “time-pictures” of simultaneity.
 
In 2006 M+M gained a three month “artists in residence“ -scholarship at the Villa Aurora, Los Angeles. This had been preceded by an USA-scholarship of the Bavarian State in 2002, a scholarship of the Villa Massimo in Rome and a grant through the Bavarian Council in 1997. Furthermore, in 2008 M+M received a visiting professorship at the Behrens School of Architecture in Düsseldorf, in 2001-02 a teaching position at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Zurich and one year before a visiting professorship at the Academy of Arts in Munich. The works of the artist duo were already presented in several major national and international exhibitions, amongst others in the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, the ZKM Karlsruhe, Folkwang Museum Essen, the Pergamon Museum Berlin, the Sprengelmuseum Hannover, the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Museum Ludwig Cologne and the Musée d’Art Contemporain Montreal.
 
 
BAUKUNST GALERIE
Theodor-Heuss-Ring 7
D – 50668 Cologne
T: +49-(0)221-771 33 35
 
 
 
 
 re-title.com 
BM Box 5163
London
WC1N 3XX
United Kingdom
+44 (0) 870 922 0438