Marco Breuer, Hanno Otten, Heinz Hajek-Halke: Cameraless Photographs 1950 – 2004 at Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta

Marco Breuer, Hanno Otten, Heinz Hajek-Halke: Cameraless Photographs 1950 – 2004
Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta
September 18 – October 30, 2004

Marcia Wood Gallery presents an exhibition of photographs made without a camera by three German photographers well known for their work in this particular aspect of the medium. Each artist uses the form to make direct abstracted images that recall the most radical experiments by the Surrealists and Bauhaus artists, among others. This exhibition brings together the work of two contemporary German photographers, Hanno Otten and Marco Breuer, with vintage prints by Heinz Hajek-Halke, a leading practitioner of cameraless work in Germany from the wartime era through the 1950s and 60s. Although cameraless work has been increasingly prevalent among contemporary photographers, this exhibition will examine how the continued celebration of abstract photography in postwar Germany has affected the work of these younger artists.

HEINZ HAJEK-HALKE (1898-1983) was very active in the development of experimental photography in Germany from the 1920s until his death in 1983. Although he studied art in both classical and experimental venues, Heinz Hajek-Halke spent most of his professional and artistic career in photography. Picture editor, press photographer and graphic designer, he also made important experimental photocollages and photographs inspired by film, abstract art, and biological forms that were reproduced in several photographic journals. In the 1950s, he taught photography and actively exhibited in important exhibitions, including Otto Steinert’s Subjective Photography. In 1957, he published a book on his techniques for cameraless photography.

HANNO OTTEN (born 1954) has been photographing since the 1980s. His early work included black and white abstractions, but for many years, color has been at the heart of his art. He has been making color studies, in sculpture and straight photographic prints since the 1990s. The more recent photograms, large abstract compositions of rectangular forms in panorama format, are the purest form of color study. By manipulating large blocks of pure color and geometric form in his ever more complex compositions, Hanno Otten reconsiders basic tenets of modernism, allowing color and light to suggest musical themes or monumental architecture. Hanno Otten has exhibited widely in Europe and in New York. He lives in London and Cologne.

MARCO BREUER (born 1966) has several degrees in photography and has made cameraless photographs since the early 1990s. His current images result from direct physical contact with the photographic paper itself and record performance-like rituals in the darkroom. In his abstract images of striated patterns from the Tilt and Pan series, based on film techniques, Marco Breuer embraces experimental practice in the spirit of his mid 19th century forbearers. He teaches in the MFA program at Bard College. He has published and exhibited widely in the United States and Germany and is represented in widely represented museum collections. Marco Breuer currently lives in upstate New York.

This exhibition has been curated/organized by LISA KURZNER for Marcia Wood Gallery. Lisa Kurzner is a freelance curator and critic who recently relocated to Atlanta from Europe. She organized Under Different Circumstances at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center last winter. Previously she was the Newhall Curatorial Fellow in the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Photography, and has worked with several international agencies supporting contemporary art.

MARCIA WOOD GALLERY
263 Walker Street, Atlanta, GA 30313
www.marciawoodgallery.com

Juan Perdiguero, Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta - Canes

Juan Perdiguero: Canes
Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta
July 16 - August 14, 2004

Marcia Wood Gallery presents it’s first solo exhibition with Spanish artist, Juan Perdiguero. A Madrid native, Juan Perdiguero earned degrees in painting and art conservation in Spain and S.U.N.Y., Buffalo, NY, where he currently lives and works. He has lived in the U.S. and exhibited internationally for the past fourteen years. He had a solo exhibition in 2002 at the Atlanta College of Art Gallery.

The word “Can” is the Spanish zoological/ scientific name for dog (perro); “Canes” is the plural form and means dogs. As the title suggests, Juan Perdiguero’s paintings of mixed media on photo emulsion are renderings of dogs, primarily greyhounds. Larger than life size silhouette’s race around the gallery walls with a startling intensity. The animal’s form is cut out of the picture plane and mounted directly onto the gallery walls which unleashes the image from the traditional ground and creates a vivid frozen moment of action as the dogs seem on the verge of leaping off the wall and into the room. In translating his training and regard for Baroque painting into a contemporary practice of mixed media the artist adheres to the appreciable importance of the dramatic rendering of motion in Baroque art. As well, Baroque works are the opposite of minimal and often considered productions in themselves. Perdiguero has derived a complex process that relies heavily on chiaroscuro to define the 3-dimensional quality of the dogs. Using photographs of hounds, he draws the dogs’ contours on acetate and makes cutouts onto which he collages images of flowers, lichen and other organic material he has photographed. Each patch, a wide range of vibrating color, size, and depth is placed to describe the precise form of a dog in action. He then covers the image with etching ink and linseed oil which is then carefully wiped off - reductively drawing the dogs features. The resulting chiaroscuro effect defines the dogs musculature and features by pulling out the darks and using the underlying photographs that are uncovered as the lights.

Juan Perdiguero is interested in the duality of the dog’s animal nature and the human qualities that we project onto them as well as the instinctive, subconscious animal qualities that are a part of human psychology. The artist states, “The energy in this new work is shifting. The greyhounds are part of a larger universe of images where emotions are diverse, isolation and alienation coexist with nostalgia and with curiosity always threatened by a sense of vulnerability…they speak about the animalistic side so much a part of their nature (the one they project onto us so we acknowledge the inner animal that lives in us) but also of a subtle human quality ( the one we project on to them).”

MARCIA WOOD GALLERY
263 Walker Street, Atlanta, GA 30313
www.marciawoodgallery.com

Joanne Mattera, Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta - New Paintings

Joanne Mattera: New Paintings
Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta
March 5 – April 17, 2004

In her second solo show at the Marcia Wood Gallery, New York artist Joanne Mattera offers the newest paintings from her Uttar series. Inspired by the brilliant palette of illuminated manuscripts and Persian miniatures, Joanne Mattera works in a vein that is succulent in hue while reductive in image. She describes her work as “lush minimalism.” Indeed, it is the color—luminous, dense and optically invigorating—that charges an orderly geometric field.

Key to the color is her medium: encaustic—pigmented wax—which has a refulgence and materiality like no other paint. The reductive component is assembled via a simple vocabulary of blocks or stripes. “I begin each new painting with a selected palette, typically saturated colors mitigated by the translucency of the wax, and a specific geometric element. Beyond that, there is no direct plan,” says Joanne Mattera. Her method is to repeat the chosen element, to stack it, crowd it, layer it into a dense aggregate, often scraping into the surface of the wax to release colors previously laid down.

The Uttar series, begun in late 2000, consists of some 240 paintings that range from 12 by 12 inches to over 48 by 48 inches. As with serial work, each painting provides both a capitulation of its predecessors as well as a suggestion of the ones to come. “There’s a lot of visual cross referencing,” Joanne Mattera acknowledges. Followers of her work will recognize familiar elements, such as the three-by-five-block grid and the packed columns or rows of stripes. At the same time, anyone new to her work will find much to discover, for each new painting, with its particular combination of color and geometry, offers a unique visual experience as well as a conceptual entry into the series.

The midsize paintings in this exhibition, while revisiting some of Joanne Mattera’s familiar themes, offer yet a new one: a broad horizontal stack shot vertically with translucent swipes of color. The cross-layered image references both the rigor of the grid as well as the richness of a textile. Joanne Mattera states, “These new paintings are a little more lush, a little less minimal.”

Joanne Mattera is a nationally acknowledged master of encaustic, and her book, The Art of Encaustic Painting: Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax (Watson-Guptill, 2001), has become the standard reference on the subject.

MARCIA WOOD GALLERY
263 Walker Street, Atlanta, GA 30313
www.marciawoodgallery.com