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8/9/2015

Two Exhibition

Galerie Edwynn Houk, Zurich

Ilse Bing: An Avant-Garde Vision

Galerie Edwynn Houk is pleased to present a selection of rare vintage prints by the photographer Ilse Bing (U.S., born Germany, 1899-1998). The exhibition ‘Ilse Bing: An Avant-Garde Vision’, which opens in the Zurich gallery on September the 9th, 2015, features some of her most iconic works from a renowned ten year period in Paris. Other important images from her beginnings in Frankfurt and her travels to Switzerland and Holland are also on display. The selected works illustrate her photographic range and central topics: the modern city life, the cultural milieu of Paris, the still life, dance and the self-portrait.

Ilse Bing was born into a middle-class Jewish family in the city of Frankfurt. As a child, her education was rich in music and art and in the 1920s she started a degree in mathematics and physics but soon changed to art history. She bought a Voigtländer camera in 1924 in order to illustrate her doctoral thesis and began to teach herself photography, her first serious artistic explorations being conducted with this camera. The beautiful warm-toned silver gelatin print entitled Self-Portrait (in Mirror Cabinet), from 1925 and featured in this exhibition, is one of her earliest successful images and shows Ilse Bing and her camera in the reflection of a bedroom mirror.

In 1929 she bought the then revolutionary 35mm hand-held Leica camera that enabled her to capture fast-moving events and she was soon nicknamed ‘the Queen of Leica’. She moved to Paris in 1930 and quickly became a celebrated and successful photographer and part of the avant-garde Parisian art scene. She was a key figure of the modernist movement along with her contemporaries Man Ray, László Moholy- Nagy and Henri-Cartier Bresson. The rise of modernity in the Paris of that period simultaneously saw the growing emancipation of women and allowed artists like Ilse Bing to express a new-found freedom and self-expression in their art. The freedom and ease of movement that she found with the Leica allowed her to experiment and create images that featured signature trademarks of the ‘New Vision’ style of photography such as the use of uncommon perspectives, bird’s eye views and fragmentary close-ups.

Ilse Bing was very much aware of the different art movements specific to that time, such as Surrealism, Constructivism and the Bauhaus, yet she developed her own artistic style by representing the world through poetic images of movement and abstraction as well as works that blend naturalism with a geometric formalism. Her famous images of the cancan dancers in the Moulin Rouge for example, that are featured in this exhibition, show enthralling depictions of the dancers and their flowing movements, the Leica allowing Bing to dramatically capture a sensation of their dynamism and speed. These works attracted the attention of the critic Emmanuel Sougez and firmly established her future career as an artist. Her fame spread to New York when the art dealer Julien Levy began collecting her work and she was included in his famous “Modern European Photography: Twenty Photographers” exhibition in 1932.

Ilse Bing’s photographs are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and most leading institutions in the United States, Europe and Japan. Bing was the first recipient of the Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement awarded by the National Arts Club (Gramercy Park).

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Danny Lyon: Conversations with the Dead | Vintage Prints

Edwynn Houk Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of rare, vintage photographs by Danny Lyon from his groundbreaking series, Conversations with the Dead. In 1967-68 Lyon spent over fourteen months inside Texas prisons, photographing and befriending inmates. Drawn from his own archive, many of the works on view are the first prints made and used to edit and lay out the first publication of his seminal book, Conversations with the Dead: Photographs of Prison Life with the Letters and Drawings of Billy McCune #122054 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971). The exhibition coincides with Phaidon’s publication of the facsimile edition of the original 1971 book.

Danny Lyon is known for photographing outsiders as an advocate of social justice and human rights. As the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s, he was active in the Civil Rights movement as a participant and a photojournalist. By the mid-1960s he joined the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle club and spent two years riding with and photographing bikeriders. In 1967, recognizing the inequities of the correctional system, Lyon drove from his home state of New York to Huntsville, Texas to undertake what many consider to be his most powerful body of work. With full access granted by the director of the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC), Lyon visited seven different prisons that housed general populations (The Walls and Ramsey), as well as youths (Ferguson), women (Goree), the elderly and mentally ill (Wynne), those new to the system (Diagnostic) and those deemed most dangerous (Ellis). The photographs detail the day-to-day life of the convicts, including highly-regimented meals, brutal work conditions and dehumanizing ‘shakedowns.’ In his own words he sought to “make this picture of imprisonment as distressing as it is in reality.” The images are often harrowing, sometimes poignant, but always beautiful and compelling. Lyon’s empathetic lens reveals the humanity of the prisoners in the face of a system that is anything but human. His photographs of women in the Texas prison system will be shown now for the first time.

During his time working inside the TDC, Lyon befriended many inmates, some of whom worked in the print shop of the Walls Unit in Huntsville. With their help, he published a small portfolio of the work titled “Born to Lose,” which was produced in the print shop. Many of the vintage prints exhibited here were printed by Lyon in Texas at the time, or the following year in Manhattan as he prepared for the publication of the 1971 book. While the work intimately explores the state of prisons two generations ago, Lyon’s prison photographs continue to grow in relevance and resonate deeply in the world today.

Danny Lyon is a self-taught photographer, writer and filmmaker. He has published numerous books, including The Bikeriders, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan and The Seventh Dog. An active blogger, his writing appears on dektol.wordpress.com. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation in both filmmaking and photography. Lyon has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Menil Collection and the de Young Museum in San Francisco, among others. In 2011 he received the Missouri Honor Medal in Journalism. This fall he will receive the Lucie Award for Achievement in Documentary Photography. Lyon lives and works in New Mexico.

Image: Danny Lyon, Main entrance to The Walls, Texas, 1968

Opening: 9 September 2015

Galerie Edwynn Houk
Stockerstrasse 33, Zurich
Tue - Fri 11am to 6pm, Sat 11am to 5pm

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