Catherine Wagner
Selections: 1980 - 2000
Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco
February 28 - April 14, 2001
The STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY announces it is now representing the work of CATHERINE WAGNER. This is her first exhibition with the gallery.
This 20-year survey exhibition features a cross-section of photographs from Catherine Wagner's oeuvre, beginning with those taken of the George Moscone Convention Center Site in 1980, up to her present photographs taken with medical imaging devices. The underlying theme throughout Wagner's work is decoding the times in which we live by using models such as construction sites, classrooms, homes, and science. Making a comment on change, Catherine Wagner captured the vast construction site of Moscone Center, planted between high rises, with the steel skeleton of a colossal arch girded by wooden beams. She presented a kind of archaeology in reverse, a harbinger of eventual ruin. Catherine Wagner uses the photograph as a catalyst for the transformation of ideas and information.
Among the series on exhibit is American Classroom. The classroom is shown as a model and a repository of our collective conscience. Andy Grundberg wrote about Catherine Wagner's work in The New York Times, "…as a result the classrooms seem like archeological sites that, if studied long and hard enough, might yield the keys to understanding our civilization." These classroom studies prompted Wagner's interest in our human culture revealed through science. Also exhibited are selections from Catherine Wagner's series Art & Science: Investigating Matter in which she examines the construction of contemporary culture through science.
Catherine Wagner's work is characterized by firmly ensconced compositions, crisply defined forms, meticulous attention to detail and seemingly infinite tonal gradations. Her photographs are devoid of human presence although they are fraught with the traces of human acts and passages. Each of the series represented in this survey was an independent travelling museum exhibition.
CATHERINE WAGNER will have a solo exhibition, "Cross Sections", at The San Jose Museum of Art in November 2001. Her work is in several public collections including: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Modern Art, NY, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art.
STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY
49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108
www.wirtzgallery.com
