SET FIRE TO THE STARS
2014-11-03An aspiring poet in 1950s New York has his ordered world shaken when he embarks on a week-long retreat to save his hell raising hero, Dylan Thomas.
In theatres November 7th, 2014
TweetJEFF ELROD – ESP
2014-11-03An American abstract painter, Jeff Elrod employs both digital and manual processes in the different stages of his work to create paintings related to the computer aesthetics and imagery, representing since the early 1990’s a new singular position in abstract painting.
“I am a formalist painter. It’s always about the form, the composition. My task is to get the painting off the screen and onto the canvas (…) I’m very comfortable with the screen (…) for me, it’s a very natural way to draw. The space is a screen instead of a window”
J.E.
The title of the exhibition, ESP, can be read in some of the paintings. These three letters likely stand for “Extra Sensory Perception”. Using the computer instead of the hand during the first stages of the creative process, Elrod allows himself to engage his subconscious mind as “a digital breed of automatic writing”. ESP could also be the diminutive of EL ESPECTRO, the spectre, and also the title of a song by the Texan punk rock band Scratch Acid.
Each painting in the exhibition is a dense and ambiguous surface to look at, always concerned with the relationship between the human and the machine, and their reciprocal mimesis.
Exhibition runs through to November 23rd, 2014
Galerie Max Hetzler
57, rue du Temple
75004 Paris
France
ANTON PERICH – ELECTRIC PAINTINGS 1978 – 2014
2014-11-03Anton Perich arrived on the New York art scene in 1970, as a photographer and pioneering videographer. “I got a still camera and went shooting every night,” he said, and his images – including those he published in Night, the magazine he founded in 1978 – captured the personalities and happenings of this wild moment in the city’s history. Seeking to collapse the gap between this tumultuous, creative reality and the sanitized world presented on the mainstream television of the day, Perich started shooting with a Sony Portapak video recorder. He transformed the craze and excess, the low-res soap operatic dramas of real people, into what we now recognize as reality TV.
Perich’s experimentation led him to create large-scale paintings, some that “reproduced” his iconic photographic images and some that were abstractions, electric noise, painting fields of color and lines fed by him into the machine. While his portraits reveal the ghost of an image, his uncropped abstract canvasses shift the focus of attention from the rich finished surfaces to the edges of the painting where the picture-writing process is laid bare. Machines are made to be perfect. In mechanically or electronically created contemporary artworks glitch/mistake/imperfection is often re-introduced into the outcome as if to humanize the tool.
The early paintings were made on raw canvas with acrylic or oil paint. In some places the paint gently permeates the canvas; in others the layers of paint have built up to a rich, voluptuous, and intense surface.
Opposite – Idol, 1978
Exhibition runs through to November 22nd, 2014
Postmasters Gallery
54 Franklin Street
New York
NY 10013
ANDREAS SCHULZE – TRAFFIC JAM
2014-11-03Andreas Schulze has turned his focus to a single modern design typology: the automobile. On each of the gallery’s three walls hangs a series of starkly colored, larger-than-life paintings of cars. Schulze, who is perhaps best known for immersive, spatially transformative installations, both acknowledges and destabilizes our existing pictorial understandings of quotidian objects.
In the way that a child’s drawing posits a car as the mere sum of its visible parts – a misshapen assemblage of windshields, wheels and windows – so do these works evince little concern for actual automotive design. The paintings’ essential wrongness, paired with their grandiose scale and impassive presentation, effects a Brechtian alienation. These are not depictions of automobiles; rather, they are pictures of pictures, explorations of the rough, indelible images that fundamentally inform our perception of these highly aestheticized machines.
The artist’s painterly act, like functional design, relies on cultural pre-conceptions and expectations. Imagination, invention and beauty occur within a semi-rigid template – a car painting must contain certain elements in order to be recognizable as such. Within this framework, these works accomplish the extraordinary: the self-imposed limitations serve not as a means to snide self-commentary, but as a gateway to an uncompromised artistic purity.
Exhibition runs from November 23rd to December 21st, 2014
Team (gallery, inc.)
47 Wooster Street
New York
NY 10013
MICHAEL PUTLAND
2014-11-03Michael Putland: A Life in Music – 50 Years on the Road spans five decades of musical heroes and genres, the exhibition features unguarded portraiture of the off-duty performer – John Lennon sits cross-legged in his socks. Elsewhere, bands looking for their first front cover stare down the camera with a studied sneer, imagining their faces on bedroom walls; The Clash glare from a New York dockyard – not looking quite as fearless as Tina Turner onstage in ’73.
“It has been a fantastic ride through an incredible period of music history, which combined my two great loves … music and photography. Little did I appreciate, when my Uncle Alan encouraged my photography back in the 1950s, that this would lead me to photographing nearly all of my heroes … and thrilled to be still finding new ones. A great never ending journey.”
Michael Putland
From the editorial work for Disc and Music Echo, Sounds, Smash Hits and Q magazine amongst others, to the 1973 tour with The Rolling Stones that led to a long-standing relationship working with the band, Michael has also shot prodigiously for major record labels including CBS, Warner, Elektra, Polydor, Columbia Records and EMI. Relocating to New York in 1977, it was here that Michael founded the photo agency Retna.
Opposite – Gene Simmons of Kiss, backstage in dressing room, New York, February 1977
Exhibition runs through to November 22nd, 2014
Getty Images Gallery
46 Eastcastle Street
London
W1W 8DX
EDWARD STEICHEN – THE CONDÉ NAST YEARS 1923–1937
2014-11-03This is the UK premiere of Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, The Condé Nast Years 1923-1937 which includes over 200 vintage prints, many on public display for the first time since the 1930s.
Brought together especially for this exhibition, they mark the period when Steichen was working for Condé Nast on its two most prestigious publications, Vogue and Vanity Fair. The exhibition offers a rare opportunity, not just to witness a key period in history, but also to gain insight into Steichen’s distinctive approach towards portraiture and fashion photography.
Steichen was already an internationally celebrated painter and photographer when in 1923 he was offered the lucrative and high profile position of chief photographer at Condé Nast. During his tenure, Steichen was said to have been the best known and highest paid photographer in the world and is universally credited with being the father of modern fashion photography
For the next fifteen years Steichen would take full advantage of the resources and prestige conferred by his role to produce an oeuvre of unequalled brilliance. He put his exceptional talents to work defining the culture of his time, photographing iconic figures in politics, literature, journalism, dance, theatre and above all, the world of haute-couture fashion.
Opposite – Model Marion Morehouse in a bouffant dress and actress Helen Lyons in a long sleeve dress by Kargère; masks by the illustrator W.T. Benda, 1926
Exhibition runs through to January 18th, 2015
The Photographers’ Gallery
16 – 18 Ramillies Street
London
W1F 7LW
thephotographersgallery.org.uk
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