calendario eventi  :: 

X

20/1/2006

Two exhibitions

Gagosian Gallery, New York

Alec Soth

Niagara

Jan 21 - Feb 25, 2006

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Alec Soth. "Niagara" will be the first exhibition of Alec Soth's latest body of work, following his acclaimed series Sleeping by the Mississippi. Soth's photography is firmly rooted in the tradition of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Stephen Shore. His depiction of the everyday confronts the ideals romanticized by American society; independence, freedom, religious devotion and individual expression. Through his 8 x 10 camera lens, Soth captures the extraordinary by exposing and utilizing the vernacular of the ordinary.

"Niagara" both reinforces and undermines modern myths, focusing on true love, sexuality and the promise of "happily ever after." Throughout "Niagara" Soth emphasizes various motifs associated with romance, ranging from newlywed bliss to heart-broken agony, the innocent and sacred to the perverse. His subjects include coupled nudes, individual and familial portraits, hand-written letters, motels and other staples of love and love lost in all its manifestations.

Steidl Press will publish "Niagara," a book of this series including essays by Richard Ford and Philip Brookman, in March 2006. It will be Steidl's second publication of Soth's photography, following "Sleeping by the Mississippi" in 2004. Selected works from "Niagara" will also be included in a group exhibition entitled Click Double Click at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, opening in February 2006.

Alec Soth is currently short-listed for the highly prestigious Deutsche Borse Photography Prize. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

Opening reception for the artist: Saturday, January 21st, from 6 - 8pm

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Ghada Amer

Breathe into me

Jan 21 - Feb 25, 2006

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Egyptian-born artist Ghada Amer. Born 1963 in Cairo, Amer grew up in the politically charged period that followed the Six-Day War, and in 1974 moved to France with her family. Amer now lives and works in New York. This is the first exhibition of her work at Gagosian Gallery in New York.

Through her paintings, drawings, sculptures and gardens, Ghada Amer has confronted the fundamental notions of feminine vs. masculine, East vs. West, and high art vs. craft for over a decade. She is best known for her use of the great symbols of feminist ire: embroidery as "woman's work," hardcore pornography, and religious fundamentalism. Moreover, Amer's work explores themes of love, sex and untenable desire. In her most recent paintings she both celebrates and challenges adolescent fantasies of love and sex using the visual language of fairytales and glossy pornographic images.

Sexual imagery has always remained a mirage in Amer's work. The figures in Amer's paintings urgently offer themselves to the viewer, with open mouths and legs, yet their hypnotic repetition, the broken line of stitching and their truncated bodies render them ungraspable. The shameless display of the bodies becomes an apparition, appearing and disappearing through matted tufts of thread; the viewer must work to unravel the image, experiencing a combined sense of pleasure and frustration.

For this exhibition, Amer also explores these themes on a newly monumental scale. Two works from 2005, measuring 9 x 12 feet, "The Big Black Kansas City Painting RFGA" and "Knotty But Nice," further push her visual relationship with the machismo of Abstract Expressionism. From a distance Amer's paintings resemble those of Abstract Expressionism, as the canvases are often painted with bold blocks and drips of color, but upon closer inspection, the delicate embroidery reveals itself.

Although Amer has a history of using language in her sculpture and installation projects, this exhibition will feature paintings that, for the first time, solely represent text. In these works Amer has embroidered the definitions of "desire," "pain," "torment," "longing" and "absence," with one word presented on each canvas. As an iconoclastic counterpart to her sexually explicit paintings, Amer continually asks that we contemplate the persistence, relevance, and especially the beauty of these words.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany this exhibition

Image: Alec Soth, The Seneca, 2005, Chromogenic print, 24 x 30 inches (61 x 76.2 cm), ed. of 10, 32 x 40 inches (81.3 x 101.6 cm), ed. of 7

Gagosian Gallery
555 West 24th Street - New York

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