Adrian Piper, Paula Cooper Gallery, NYC - Work From The Color Wheel Series

Adrian Piper

Work From The Color Wheel Series

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

November 30, 2000 – January 6, 2001

The Paula Cooper Gallery presents an exhibition of new work by Adrian Piper. This work is on view at 521 West 21st Street.

Entitled The Color Wheel Series, First Adhyasa: Annomayakosha, this exhibition is the first segment in a series of five installments. The color wheel refers to a device by the same name used for the display of the Pantone Matching System®, an international “color language” employed in printing and publishing. Upon completion of the project, all 1,010 Pantone Colors will be distributed among a total of 335 images in print, reproduction, or website form.

Adrian Piper integrates the spectrum of the Pantone System with tenets of Hindu Vedantic philosophy in order to examine color as an “illusory superimposition,” or adhyasa. According to Vedanta, ultimate reality is concealed beneath five koshas, layers of illusion which must be peeled away in order to attain self-knowledge.

The show consists of 24 light-jet photographic prints measuring approximately 56 by 36 inches each. Arced at their tops, these prints resemble Eastern mandalas, featuring the Hindu god Shiva inside a Fire Wheel, an excerpt of a Vedantic text in Sanskrit, and three human figures, or “Acting Heads” who “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” (a recurring motif in Piper’s work). Directly below Shiva’s wheel is a Target Wheel aimed at the central figure of the “Acting Head” paradigm.

In a systematic fashion, the skin color of each Acting Head varies throughout the series, following a procedure whereby each of the three Heads is assigned one specific Pantone Color. As a result, each print is unique, with no Pantone Color repeated more than once.

Adrian Piper thus establishes a specific methodology through which the viewer can investigate the subjective, constructed nature of color. The imagery of Eastern philosophy and religion operates not only on a formal level but also as a conceptual device to reveal the superimposition on the self of illusions such as caste, color, and status.

PAULA COOPER GALLERY

521 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10001

www.paulacoopergallery.com

A Growing Presence: Art by African Americans at PAFA - Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

A Growing Presence: Art by African Americans 

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia 

November 22, 2000 - February 25, 2001 

This exhibition examines the Academy's historical commitment to collecting the work-paintings, sculptures, and graphics-of African American artists. By focusing on the earliest and latest of such acquisitions, the exhibition provides a measure of the growing presence of art by African Americans in the Academy's permanent collection.

A sculpture by Richmond Barthé and a painting by Horace Pippin (both acquired in 1943) were the first such pieces to enter the collection and are two of three historical works on display that provide a starting point for this review of the Academy's collecting practice. The most recent acquisitions include a group of five objects generously given by Harold A. and Ann R. Sorgenti during the fall of 1999. This cache, which includes works by Romare Bearden, Beverly Buchanan, and Faith Ringgold, is the first body of work to be officially accessioned into the collection as part of the newly established Harold A. and Ann R. Sorgenti Collection of Contemporary African American Art.

African American artists have made valuable contributions to the history of art in the United States since the country's formation. However, not until the protests of the late 1960s, when African Americans-as well as women, Latinos, and other disenfranchised groups-protested their exclusion by establishment museums, did the art world begin to take seriously African American artistic accomplishment. Boasting the largest number of paintings by Pippin of any public collection, and a promised gift of more than fifty works by important contemporary figures such as Benny Andrews, Sam Gilliam, Jacob Lawrence, Howardena Pindell, Betye Saar, and Raymond Saunders, the Academy is, and has long been, an important proponent of African American art. This special installation coincides with the nation's annual February celebration of Black History Month. 

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Broad and Cherry Streets, Philadelphia, PA 19102

www.pafa.org

Women and Modernity: In and Around German Expressionism, LACMA, Los Angeles - Selections from the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies and Los Angeles Public and Private Collections

Women and Modernity: In and Around German Expressionism—Selections from the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies and Los Angeles Public and Private Collections

LACMA, Los Angeles

November 24, 2000 – April 8, 2001

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Women and Modernity: In and Around German Expressionism—Selections from the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies and Los Angeles Public and Private Collections, an exhibition that explores the changing role of women at the turn of the last century through approximately 70 works including painting, sculpture, woodcuts, lithographs, and drawings. This exhibition examines the shift in German Expressionist art as women left the cocoon of private residences, salons, and balls and emerged on the streets of the modern city, where many now held jobs and pursued careers.

The exhibition is divided into four main sections: 

The first focus of the exhibition is The Modern City, which portrays women in the burgeoning new metropolises. This changing role is seen in Two Women (1911–1912 ) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (Germany, 1880–1938). The subjects of this painting have angled forms that reflect the jagged shapes of the city around them, lending an unsettling note to a commonplace outing. Women in the city were also portrayed as spectators or performers in the theater, as in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner' s woodcuts Theaterloge (Theater box, 1909) and Tänzerin mit gehobenem Rock (Dancer with lifted skirt, 1910).

The second section, Nudes, demonstrates how nature and women were rendered using new styles and approaches. Representative of the Brücke artists’ collective style is the color woodcut by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Bathers Tossing Reeds (1910), as well as works created by Erich Heckel and Max Pechstein between 1910 and 1912. These portrayals of women surrounded by nature feature different poses than those of earlier depictions and stand in sharp contrast to the urban women in section one. Works in this section also show how the artists studied and imitated the nudes of Old Masters, which often emphasized the beauty of the female form. In works such as Untitled (Seated woman) (1914) by Egon Schiele (Austria, 1890–1918), the female body is portrayed as beautiful. This section also includes two erotic etchings of disrobing women by Lene Schneider Kainer, an artist largely forgotten by history.

The third section is Photographic Portraits. Faces in German Expressionist prints are often reduced to minimal features, the face of a nude often delineated only by its contours. Photographic portraits in this section provide the missing features and facial expressions and they further explore the differences between women as subjects and women as artists. For example, Lotte Jacobi’s Self-portrait (c. 1930) is a record of a woman who proudly presents herself as a professional photographer. Her hand holds the camera release; the cable visibly connects her to the tool of her trade.

The last section, Women Portray Women, focuses on the works of three women artists: Gabriele Münter (Germany, 1877–1962), Käthe Kollwitz (Germany, 1867–1945), and Paula Modersohn-Becker (Germany, 1876–1907). Although these artists encountered various degrees of success in their time, each participated in and uniquely inflected the artistic vocabularies of modernity.

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036

www.lacma.org

Ulrike Palmbach, Michael Kenna, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco - Inertia, an installation & Other Works - Recent Works

Ulrike Palmbach: Inertia, an installation & Other Works 

Michael Kenna: Recent Works 

Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco

November 15 - December 23, 2000

The STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY presents exhibitions of new work by ULRIKE PALMBACH and recent photographs by MICHAEL KENNA.

In the main gallery is exhibited the work of German-born artist, ULRIKE PALMBACH. The objects that Palmbach creates exist at the intersection of the familiar and the strange, the humorous and the tragic, the promising and the ominous. Palmbach zeroes in on ordinary daily peculiarities by using mundane raw materials such as felt blankets and twine in an extra-ordinary way.

"Inertia" is a large installation comprised of an abundance of felt objects that appear to have been left by a receded river current. Made from layers of blankets, the elements are uniformly rounded, as if worn by incessant spinning and tumbling. Their immobility evokes a yearning for the motion which shaped them, yet also defines their place at rest.

ULRIKE PALMBACH (b.1963, Stuttgart, Germany) received her B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1989. Her work has been included in several exhibitions including the "1997 Bay Area Now show" at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.

In the small gallery are photographs by MICHAEL KENNA. Kenna's signature style is capturing simple beauty with black & white photography by combining formal aesthetics with elements of drama and a sense of stillness and isolation. While his photographs are quiet and meditative, they are equally rebellious. Michael Kenna presents an intelligent interpretation and presentation of nature juxtaposed with the man-made.

This exhibition also features Michael Kenna's recent photographs taken in such places as Easter Island, Russia, France, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Also included are recently printed images of cooling towers in England.

MICHAEL KENNA (b.1953, Widnes, Lancashire, England) will have a solo exhibition, "Night Work", opening this winter at the Friends of Photography. A book of the same name was recently published by Nazraeli Press in conjunction with this exhibition. Michael Kenna's photographs are in many museum collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Denver Art Museum.

STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.wirtzgallery.com

Leica Camera AG Calendar 2001

Leica Camera AG has printed an impressive black-and-white wall calendar entitled 'My point of View' for the year 2001. The high-quality prints feature the work of six internationally successful Leica photographers, who have each chosen two of their favorite photos expressing personal points of view. The range of subjects is wide, extending from journalistic photos of Siberia and the Kosovo to nude photography and portraits of world-famous models. A tribute to the photographic artists who use their Leica camera with virtuosic creativity. Owners of this special calendar will be able to share their enjoyment of it as all the pictures reappear on the last page of the calendar as detachable postcards. The calendar is 43 x 59 cm in size, and is available at Leica stockists. The following photographers have contributed to the 2001 calendar: Bryan Adams Bryan Adams' photographic career began 3 years ago when he had the idea of taking the photos for his CD covers himself. Today he photographs famous celebrities from Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell to Tina Turner for magazines like Vogue, Marie Claire or MAX. Adams works in natural light and adapts to the particular situation, turning stars into people. Claudine Doury ...began taking photographs in 1989. Her first highly acclaimed piece of work was a report on the nurses' strike in Paris. Since the early Nineties she has focused on Russia and its people, receiving the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 1999 for her photographic essay on nomads in Siberia. She is a member of the VU agency and lives - unless she's away on a project - in Paris. Claus Bjorn Larsen ...Born in 1963, Larsen is the shooting star among contemporary press photographers. Having worked for the renowned Danish daily newspaper Berlingske Tidende since 1996, he recently caused an international stir with his reports on the Kosovo. He won several awards for his sensitive pictures in 1999, including a first prize of World Press Photo, the Visa d'Or and the Fuji European Award. Maik Scharfscheer ...Born in 1964, Maik Scharfscheer lives in Wetzlar. Apart from his main activity as industrial photographer (customers include Renault, Nike, Davidhoff und Sony) he also works on subjects of his own choice. He took his close-ups while staying in Marrakesch: without a lot of technical equipment, but with feeling for the people he was photographing. Striking portraits in black-and-white. Pall Stefansson ...studied photography in Sweden and now lives in Iceland as a freelance photographer. He works regularly for newspapers such as the Iceland Review or the ship magazine Atlantica. He is also interested in landscapes. Stefansson takes photos in both color and black-and-white. He has called his latest cycle "Earth/Fire/Water/Air". A tribute to the elemental powers of nature. Adolf Zika ...was born in 1972. He lives and works as a freelance photographer in Prague, specializing in fashion and beauty. He takes photographs for Versace and Hermés or Playboy. Most of all, Zika likes working in a natural environment. His pictures radiate joie de vivre and are the expression of a more natural treatment of the human body and eroticism. His choice of black-and-white film is also quite in keeping with the modern trend. Last update: 08-2009

Julius Shulman & Richard Neutra, Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York - Modernism Defined

Modernism Defined: Julius Shulman & Richard Neutra
Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York
November 11, 2000 - January 6, 2001

Yancey Richardson Gallery announces the opening exhibition at their new Chelsea gallery, "Modernism Defined: Julius Shulman & Richard Neutra". The exhibition is comprised of an extensive selection of vintage photographs of important structures by Richard Neutra, one of the most highly acclaimed architects of the 20th century. Julius Shulman, widely recognized as one of the most important photographers of modernist architecture, took his first architectural image of a Neutra building in 1936. Neutra's enthusiastic response to the photographs helped launch Julius Shulman's career and the two continued to work together for the remainder of Richard Neutra's life. Julius Shulman ultimately photographed 90% of what Richard Neutra built and is credited with interpreting and exporting the ideas of modernism to the rest of the world through his images.

The exhibition celebrates Julius Shulman's 90th birthday and coincides with the release by Taschen of Richard Neutra - Complete Works, a definitive volume on Neutra's work in a large-scale limited edition book, illustrated primarily with Julius Shulman's images. Also this fall, Taschen is publishing Modernism Rediscovered, a book of Julius Shulman's photographs of the work of lesser-known but important modernist architects. 

Concurrent with this exhibition of Julius Shulman's Neutra photographs, Donzella, a gallery of 20th century design, features an exhibition of Julius Shulman's photographs of the interiors of Paul Laszlo, a recently rediscoverd mid-century California designer. Donzella is located at 17 White Street in New York City.

YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
www.yanceyrichardson.com

Spencer Tunick, I-20 Gallery, New York - Reaction Zone

Spencer Tunick: Reaction Zone

I-20 Gallery, New York

November 9 – December 16, 2000

Spencer Tunick's exhibition Reaction Zone is the artist first show at I-20 since 1998. This show  comprises an installation of recent images taken in New York, Los Angeles, and the cities of Basel and Vienna.

Spencer Tunick's performances encompass dozens, hundreds or thousands of volunteers; and his photographs are records of these events. Without their clothing the individuals are like vessels. Most often grouped together and lying prone, the bodies are organisms that extend into and upon the landscape like a new substance. These grouped masses – which do not underscore sexuality – become abstract narratives that challenge or reconfigure one's views of nudity and privacy. The work also refers to the complex issue of presenting art in permanent or temporary public spaces.

Spencer Tunick's body of work may come to help define or at least clarify the social, political and legal issues surrounding art in the public sphere. Since 1994 Tunick has tried to work in New York without interference or imprisonment. After his fifth arrest in April 1999, the artist filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against New York City. In May 2000 Tunick won this First Amendment case in the Second U.S. District Court. On June 3, in response to the city's appeal made to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the court at large, the United States Supreme Court refused to rule in favor of the city, allowing the artist to organize his work on New York City streets.

Social Static, a black and white video made in collaboration with New York-based artist Chris Habib and with an original score composed and performed by Sonic Youth, will be shown in the East Room during the exhibition.

An exhibition catalogue (No.14), with an essay by Lisa Liebmann, was published for the exhibition.

In 2001 Spencer Tunick will organize an indoor performance for Site Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico. He will also participate in the first Valencia Biennial in Spain; and will organize a large performance in St. Petersburg, Russia, during the White Nights in June. His performances include the Vienna Kunsthalle 1999, and Statements at Art 30 Basel 1999. Tunick has had exhibitions at Art and Public, Geneva; the Magazine 4, Bregenz, Austria; and Perspectives at FIAC 2000, Paris. He will have fall shows at the Joao Graca Gallery, Lisbon, and the Hales Gallery, London. His works were recently acquired by the Dakis Joannou Foundation Collection in Athens, Greece.

Spencer Tunick has been documenting the live figure in public since 1992. Since 1994 he has made 45 group performances in the United States and Europe. Spencer Tunick was born in Middletown, New York, in 1967. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

I-20 GALLERY

529 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.i-20.com

Peter Saul: Heads 1986 - 2000, Nolan Eckman Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Heads 1986 - 2000
Nolan/Eckman Gallery, New York
November 3 – December 9, 2000

Peter Saul’s ruthlessly comic and politically incorrect drawings and paintings begin at the neck and continue maniacally upward, closely documenting quite alarming distortions. As the artist Carroll Dunham notes in his introduction to the show’s accompanying catalogue, “Saul’s visual thermostat is set high—the threshold of his pictorial circuits must blow the fuses of many contemporary eyeballs.”

Peter Saul’s lovingly constructed fantasies slalom through a course of Zap Comix, Pop art, Cubism, and Surrealism. After all, this is an artist whose stated aim is to reconcile de Kooning with Mad magazine. 

Peter Saul was born in 1934. He has recently returned to the New York area after nearly twenty years of living in Austin, Texas. This is his second show at Nolan/Eckman Gallery. 

Peter Saul, Heads 1986 - 2000

Edited by David Nolan

Interview with Peter Saul by Carroll Dunham

68 pages, softcover, 20 color ill., 8.25 x 9 inches

Published by Nolan/Eckman Gallery, 2000.

NOLAN/ECKMAN GALLERY
560 Broadway, New York, NY 10012
www.nolaneckman.com

Updated: 15.07.2019

Robert Arneson, Nelson Gallery, UC Davis - Alice Street Revisited

Robert Arneson: Alice Street Revisited
Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis
November 12 – December 15, 2000

Robert Arneson’s body of "Alice Street" works on view at The Richard L. Nelson Gallery, UC Davis, includes the monumental sculpture The Palace at 9 a.m., two large paintings Alice Blue and Alice House Billboard: Corner of L Street and Alice, as well as numerous drawings, studies and sketches. Each work uses as its point of departure the image of the artist’s former track house, located at the corner of Alice and L streets in Davis, California where Robert Arneson resided in the years between 1962 – 1976. Ranging in tone from reverent to ironic, the "Alice Street" works are as art-historically and socially probing, as they are engaged with the particulars of place and time from which they emerge. They challenge art-historical conventions and presciently foreshadow later art movements, in which the house as a symbol of the "American Dream" is thoroughly deconstructed as an American icon.

Robert Arneson’s interest in playing with perspective and the house icon achieves perhaps its most complex exploration in the monumental sculpture, The Palace at 9 a.m., which he made in 1974 as a remake of his original "Alice House" sculpture Big Alice, 1967. However, The Palace at 9 a.m, became a much more elaborated version of its original, and its title is thought to be a play on Giacometti’s surrealist dreamscape The Palace at 4 a.m.

The intentionally child-like, direct, and vernacular handling of the clay in The Palace at 9 a.m., with its scatological and primal allusions, heightens both the playful and serious impact of the piece. Exaggeration of perspective, both through Robert Arneson’s placement of the piece at a calculated height, and also more noticeably through the angles of the roof-line and street sign, achieve a cartoon-like presence for the work that Robert Arneson poignantly pits against its primal references to mark-making and shelter. Shrubs, bushes, trees, dog tracks, dog excrement, wood chips, piles of garbage, the family van, a basketball hoop, and other evidence of habitation, are all sculpted expressively as part of the great model. The house and its surroundings are marked with drippy, washy vivid pinks, greens, blues, and yellows, achieving both a true sense of likeness to the house, and a cartoon-like aura. The artist’s actual handprint appears across a front window as a "mark of the self", a haptic signature, not unlike the prehistoric hand prints found in caves as evidence of those who once inhabited a particular site. With this handprint, and other marks ranging from footprints to patterned imprints, Robert Arneson reconnects the enterprise of sculpture with the ritual of the quotidian, replacing the sculpted bust on the pedestal with an archeological investigation of domestic space and time.

Robert Arneson’s polemic humor continues in works such as Fort Alice, which go even further in their mockery of the enterprise of homeownership and domestic life. But Robert Arneson’s irony and humor is tempered with equal doses of self-investigation, and even with an overt display of affection for his own house, its life, and certainly the enterprise of art-making to which he turned over both his house and his life energy. Alice Blue, plays with associations of the color blue with royalty and divinity, linking them to ideas of the track home, the American dream, the nuclear family, and the content and meaning of art and art history while Alice House Billboard: Corner of Alice and L, created between 1967-68, carries forward Robert Arneson’s challenge to the painted canvas and its conventions, through its play with perspective and its unraveling of the idea of the house and the framed painting as icons of civility. Trapezoidal in shape, the billboard-like painting presents a view of 1303 Alice complete with a sunny blue sky, family van parked in the driveway, and a rainbow which traces the entire eave of the roof. The rainbow, with its references to both the 1960’s counterculture and to the myth of the "American Dream" as a "Somewhere over the Rainbow," functions as a comic double-entendre, rooting the painting in the culture of its time.

Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection
1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616
Room 124, Art Building, University of California, Davis
www.nelsongallery.ucdavis.edu

Tony Tuckson, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra - Painting Forever

Painting Forever: Tony Tuckson

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

4 November 2000 — 4 February 2001

Painting Forever: Tony Tuckson displays in depth the most beautiful and representative paintings and drawings by Australia’s greatest abstract expressionist artist TONY TUCKSON. This is the first major survey exhibition of Tony Tuckson’s work since 1976 and offers a unique opportunity to both discover and reassess one of Australia’s most important twentieth century artists.

The exhibition charts the progression of Tony Tuckson as an artist, from prominent student of naturalist watercolours and post war murals to pre-eminent abstract expressionist. The exhibition explores one of the defining features of 20th century art-the journey towards abstraction. His life’s work is a journey of emotional, intellectual and aesthetic discovery. Painting Forever seeks to balance Tony Tuckson’s most radical, extreme and beautiful late paintings and drawings with early paintings and contextual material to reveal how he became and remained an abstract expressionist artist.

Tony Tuckson’s paintings were usually produced alongside numerous drawings and painted works on paper (including sketchbooks). The exhibition uses this pattern of production as the formal structure of the display. The earliest oil paintings, drawings and watercolours are selectively displayed in a dense ‘domestic’ hang – including art school studies, unframed serial drawings, unstretched experimental oil paintings, family studies, nudes and early nightclub scenes. This domestic hang reiterates both the subject matter of family, service comrades and friends, and the situation in which the works were made.

From this point forward the exhibition alternates groups of ever more abstracted paintings with the best works from Tony Tuckson’s drawn oeuvre. Early 1950s tentative abstraction – led by the radical gouache drawings on newspaper are interspersed with the last of the formal oil paintings. Expressive ‘divisionist’ paintings on composition board open up into a powerful group of the scratchy, delicate masterpieces of the early 1960s. These in turn lead to a great group of red, black and white paintings, including some of his most extreme and compelling gouache-collage drawings.

The exhibition concludes with a whole gallery space devoted to the 1970s ‘veil’ paintings and attenuated charcoal drawings. This display contains some of Tony Tuckson’s greatest and most expressive works of art, including the late diptych’s and previously un-exhibited drawings. The exhibition closes with the great autobiographical masterpieces Grey 1973 and White sketch 1973. It is hoped that the artists many self-portraits (both drawn and painted) provide the binding motif for visitors to the exhibition.

Painting Forever: Tony Tuckson seeks to establish a new audience for this wonderful artist as well as nurturing existing fans. It appeals to younger viewers, through making a virtue of Tony Tuckson’s most radical and expressive works, and by providing a very clear and straightforward contextual insight into the artist and his work.

The national tour of Painting Forever:Tony Tuckson exhibition will commence in late February 2001 following the display in Canberra.

Curator: Tim Fisher

NATIONAL GALLERY OF AUSTRALIA - NGA

Parkes Place, Parkes, Canberra ACT 2600

nga.gov.au

James Herbert, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center - Paintings, Films, Videos and Stills

James Herbert

Paintings, Films, Videos and Stills

Atlanta Contemporary Art Center

November 4 - December 30, 2000

Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (The Contemporary) presents a comprehensive, retrospective exhibition of James Herbert’s paintings, films, videos and stills. This exhibition, organized by Teresa Bramlette, marks the first occasion upon which the entire oeuvre of James Herbert’s work has been presented in one space at one time.

James Herbert has worked in Athens, GA since the 1960s. An accomplished painter and filmmaker, he has been awarded numerous grants in both mediums. He has been honored with film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, where this fall he will premiere his new film Jumbo Aqua. His paintings are large in scale and reflect both his abstract expressionistic roots and his interest in the outsider art prominent in the southeast. Herbert’s films are sensual and poetic depicting dream-like sequences by using various illusory effects--shooting, rephotographing footage, slowing projection speeds, and reversing motion.

James Herbert has been an influential teacher for several generations of young painters. He has not shown a group of his paintings in this area since a solo exhibition at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, in the late 1970s. His films, shown primarily within the context of independent film festivals, are also rarely screened for southern audiences.

Although this exhibition should in no way be considered a retrospective, it is important to recognize James Herbert’s contributions and his accomplishments at this point in his career. It is also interesting to examine the dual nature of his practice—the painting and the filmmaking.

For many years, James Herbert utilized the process of re-photography in his films. He studied each frame of his original footage, editing and then refilming the selected frames to make the final presentation. This deconstruction of the initial film works provocatively, suggesting in its barely perceptible disjunctiveness, a dream-like state. Centered on a concept of beauty as personified by the human body, the work is unquestionably voyeuristic. In contrast to his more distanced stance as a filmmaker, James Herbert’s paintings are direct, with the paint sometimes applied by his hands and other less traditional tools. Where the films are quiet, the paintings are loud. Where the films are fragile and romantic, the paintings are aggressive. To be able to compare and contrast the two will be an exciting and perhaps once-in-lifetime opportunity.

A catalogue accompanies the show with texts by Donald Kuspit, Felicia Feaster, Teresa Bramlette, Genevieve McGillicuddy and Donald Keyes (who also selected the film stills on view).

ATLANTA CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER

535 Means Street NW, Atlanta, Georgia, 30318

thecontemporary.org