calendario eventi  :: 

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9/3/2007

Two exhibitions

M+B, Los Angeles

Bill Jacobson
New Year's day

M+B is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of work by New York-based photographer Bill Jacobson. Jacobson is well known for work that negates--through the application of a defocused lens--the specificity of photographic vision, suggesting instead the immateriality of the physical world.

The exhibition, composed of six large urban landscapes and three smaller figurative works, all of which were taken between 2000 and 2003, show Jacobson to be a rich and subtle colorist. His dreamy and timeless photographs present the city more as we emotionally experience it, rather than as it appears to the eye. Through these images, Jacobson depicts the transient and fluxuating experience of our anonymous passage through life, filled with forgotten moments and chance encounters, as well as the universal connectedness of humanity. According to the artist, 'they are about remembering and the limitations of memory".

Both landscapes and figures share a feeling of stillness, and a somber tonal quality in which there is an equality between darkness and light. Consistent with Jacobson's earlier work, these photographs suggest a time of quiet introspection in which we reconcile the ending of a particular moment in life, and the rebirth of another. Not unlike Walter Benjamin's flaneur , they evoke an existential journey through the world, of looking outward while simultaneously looking inward.

Bill Jacobson was born in 1955 in Norwich, Connecticut. He received his undergraduate degree from Brown University, and his MFA from the San Francisco Institute of Art. Since 1980, Jacobson has exhibited extensively in both group and one-person shows in museums and galleries throughout the US and Europe. His work is included in numerous collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Armand Hammer Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and London's Victoria and Albert Museum. This is Jacobson's first exhibition at M+B.
Available at the gallery is a monograph entitled Bill Jacobson Photographs, published in 2005 by Hatje Cantz, Stuttgart, and includes an essay by the noted photographic historian Eugenia Parry.

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Joseph Szabo
Teenage

M+B is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of work by renowned photographer Joseph Szabo in Los Angeles. As a high school teacher on Long Island, New York for more than two decades, Szabo used his rare gift for capturing the spirit of his students at Malverne High School perched precariously between puberty and adulthood--no longer children, but not quite adults. For 25 years he recorded their sensitivity, pretensions, passions and confusion in this series of extraordinary images. Taken in the seventies and eighties, these photographs represent a remarkable evocation of that period, and yet there remains something timeless and compelling about Szabo's portrait of the almost grown.

The backdrops for Szabo's photographs are hallways, classrooms and the parking lots of High School. Some of his subjects are sweetly self-conscious, whilst others are self-assured beyond their years. Szabo captures the pathological significance of clothes, the stylistic necessity of cigarettes, the heavy mascara, the convertibles, the longing, the blossoming sexuality, the confusion and the time spent just doing nothing. Szabo has no agenda, and the fine line between intimacy and exploitation that other photographers sometimes approach is simply not in evidence.

Szabo's first book Almost Grown published in 1978 by Harmony House was acclaimed by the American Library association. The book faded somewhat into obscurity until it became a cult classic amongst a generation of young British and American fashion photographers and film directors, including Sophia Coppola and Cameron Crowe. In 2003, Greybull Press re-made and expanded his earlier book as Teenage , which is a poignant chronicle of Szabo's work spanning two decades and includes an introduction by Crowe.
Joseph Szabo was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1944. He studied photography at the Pratt Institute where he received his MFA. He taught photography at Malverne High School in Long Island, New York from 1972 to 1999, and he continues to teach at the International Centre of Photography, New York. Szabo is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Visual Arts Fellowship, and his work resides in some of the most important public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Yale University, New Haven, CT; the International Center of Photography, New York; and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; among others. He currently lives in Amityville, New York with his wife Nancy. This is Szabo's first exhibit at M+B.

Image: Joseph Szabo

Opening 10 march 2007

M+B
612 North Almont Drive - Los Angeles

stampa

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