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25/2/2011

Philip Pearlstein and James Casebere

Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris

Philip Pearlstein
New Works

Now aged 86, the master of contemporary realism Philip Pearlstein has chosen Galerie Daniel Templon to show a collection of a dozen canvases painted over the last three years.

The artist has been building on his very own brand of figurative work, focused on painting life-size nudes, since the early 1960s. During a period marked by the flowering of Abstract Expressionism and birth of Pop Art, he represented “this other America” (E. Lucie-Smith), opening up a third artistic path that he is still exploring today.

His nude women and men, draped over pieces of furniture or on patterned rugs, frozen in the stark light, appear primarily as still lifes. Taking a different approach from the traditional idealizing tradition and the photorealism of his friend and contemporary Chuck Close, Philip Pearlstein’s work is rooted in perception, thus incorporating all the optical distortions introduced by the eye of the painter.

Starting in the 1980s, the artist-as-collector began to introduce folk art and crafts objects into his paintings. Elements such as puppets, kimonos, weathervanes, birdcages and model boats turn the studio into a real cabinet of curiosities. But Philip Pearstein’s motives remain purely visual: he refuses to give meaning to his studio scenes or play with the symbols hidden in his detailed imagery.

In 2010, the painter continues to put his approach to the test with dazzling compositions where human models, abstract motifs and enigmatic objects are juxtaposed. These complex structural arrangements bring him closer to Mondrian, a painter he particularly admires.

Philip Pearlstein is also a master of the art of framing and cutting. Pairs of legs or torsos seen from above or below reveal his taste for classical-style fragments and for the eye of the cinema camera. His pieces may be impossible to reduce to mere interpretation, but they know how to “generously reward the eye” (Robert Storr).

Born in 1924 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Philip Pearlstein lives and works in New York.

He trained at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where Andy Warhol was a fellow student, then the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. Throughout his career, the artist has held teaching and art critic posts at a variety of institutions including Yale University, the Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College.

New York’s Brooklyn Museum held a retrospective of his work in 1983. His art was recently exhibited at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey (2009). His paintings are featured in over sixty public American collections, including at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and The National Gallery of Art (Washington), as well as at Tate Britain (London), the Berlin Nationalgalerie, Museum Ludwig (Cologne) and Museu Colecção Berardo (Lisbon).

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James Casebere
House

Galerie Daniel Templon is pleased to announce an exhibition at Impasse Beaubourg of the new series House from photographer James Casebere, on show for the first time in Europe.

The House series, possibly his most ambitious project to date, consists of a set of colour photographs recreating an ideal suburb. This imaginary space is the fruit of the artist’s impressions of Dutchess County in the USA. It took two years of work to create the giant model photographed in the studio.

Comfortable coloured houses spread across rolling green hills where we see the passing of the day. In a new move, James Casebere occasionally introduces a human presence into his images, although often no more than the trace left by someone’s passage: a light filtering from the windows, an abandoned lawnmower. Lying somewhere between “just abandoned” and “about to be inhabited”, the architecture he describes is caught in the moment of “the uncanny” (A. Vidler).

James Casebere reflects on his own fascination with houses, seen as the symbol of the American community utopia. His work comments in poetic fashion on the subprime crisis. The illusion conjured up by his photographs mirrors the delusion of an untenable system based on a credit-fuelled life. By directing our thoughts to a world made up of toy-sized models, the artist reveals the fragility of the American dream of property and prosperity.

James Casebere’s work reflects his love of architecture and the language of film. Twenty-five years ago, his work established him at the forefront of artists working with staged photography, the best known of them being Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson. Exhibited for the first time at the Whitney Museum Biennial in New York in early 2010, the images in the House series were much talked of on the American artistic scene. They take the artist a step further in his quest to cultivate the ambiguity of photography and of human geography. His work, with all its political content, was last seen in France at the Galerie Templon. His 2005 exhibition explored the relationship between West and “Orient”. On his return to France in 2008, his inspiration came from rumours of secret American prisons abroad.

Born in 1953, James Casebere lives and works in New York. Recent projects have included taking part in The Pictures Generation exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum in 2009 as well as Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Videoperformance at the Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum in 2010, also in New York.

His work is featured by several institutions, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum and Metropolitan Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Modern in London.

Image: James Casebere . Lanscape #1, 2010
Digital color photograph on Dibond
112,5 x 160 cm (44 1/4 x 63 in..)

Galerie Daniel Templon
30 rue Beabourg 75003 Paris
Hors: mon-sat 10-7pm

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