Spencer Finch @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - "One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige)" Exhibition

Spencer Finch

One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige)

James Cohan Gallery, New York

September 5 - October 4, 2025

SPENCER FINCH

One Hundred Famous Views of New York City 

(After Hiroshige), 2025 (detail)

42 watercolors on paper

9 1/4 x 14 1/4 in (each) / 23.5 x 36.2 cm (each)

© Spencer Finch, courtesy of James Cohan Gallery

James Cohan presents One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige), an exhibition of new work by SPENCER FINCH, on view at the gallery’s 52 Walker Street location. This is Finch’s sixth solo exhibition with James Cohan. 

For this exhibition, Spencer Finch presents four major installations, highlighting the artist’s fluency across media. Using watercolor, LED light tubes, stained glass, and concrete bricks, the artist explores different facets of Japanese aesthetics while furthering his ongoing investigations into color, perception, and close observation of nature. Finch’s engagement with Japan spans nearly fifty years, beginning with his first visit as a teenager. He began his artistic journey working with a potter outside Kyoto as an exchange student in college, and although the influence of Japanese visual culture has always been present in his work, this is the first exhibition fully dedicated to its impact on his practice. 

The title work in the exhibition is a conceptual and technical tour de force, a series of 42 watercolors in which Spencer Finch uses Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo as a palimpsest for exploring the strange beauty of New York City. Spencer Finch began by overlaying a map of Hiroshige’s 19th-century Edo (now Tokyo) locations over a map of New York City and its outskirts at the same scale. Focusing on the first 42 prints, which represent spring, he visited and photographed each of those locations between March and June of this year. The sites documented range from a junkyard in New Jersey to an iconic view of the Statue of Liberty and the Staten Island Ferry.

Spencer Finch next extracted forms from the original Ukiyoe prints—from the famous Sleeping Dragon Plum tree to the classic hanging bolts of fabric—and used these as templates to reveal elements of photographs from the corresponding New York locations. He then painted watercolors of these images in the same format as the original prints. One sees Hiroshige’s historic Edo and Finch’s New York City simultaneously, the images of Gotham peeking through the cut-out shapes of Edo. As a body of work, this installation represents both a love letter to New York and a cross-cultural dialogue spanning centuries, as Finch reimagines the contemporary urban landscape through the lens of Hiroshige’s iconic woodblock prints. 

The exacting verisimilitude of these watercolors is unusual in Finch’s oeuvre, but it recalls the artist’s formative art school venture of copying Monet paintings in extreme detail in the RISD Museum, an experience he later described as “my first brush with the Stockholm syndrome.” The New York City views are fragmented through the Japanese prints but together reveal the wonderful visual variety of the city and form an elliptical tribute to the artist’s adopted hometown. The scrutiny inherent to this laborious process revealed new details about a deeply familiar place. As the artist notes, “Before I worked on this project, I never knew that New York’s bridges were all painted different colors or how graffiti artists achieve a 3-D effect. And the shade of orange of the Staten Island Ferry: very peculiar!”

Alongside this installation of works on paper, Spencer Finch debuts a series of four light-based Haiku works. Like their verse analogs, these wall-hung LED sculptures capture a fleeting seasonal moment, distilling it into a poetic image. Presented vertically in the format of Japanese writing, each work consists of 15 distinct color filters arranged in the 5/7/5 pattern of traditional haiku syllabic structure. These four works, each representing a moment in nature from one of the seasons, are chromatically and spectrally precise, re-creating the specific color of light that the artist measured in situ, and using colored filters to achieve the spectral results. Thus, the first in the group, Haiku (First Snow, Woods, Winter), 2025, emanates cool winter light which is generated by filters of light blue and violet, gray, pale yellow, and dull green. The difference in the seasonal light is palpable as the spring light becomes warmer, the summer light is completely full spectrum, and the autumn light, representing falling oak leaves in the sky, moves again towards cooler blue.

A monumental stained glass installation is displayed in the six tall windows of the front gallery. Moonlight (Reflected in a Pond), 2025, shifts the exterior sunlight to the color of moonlight reflected in a pond in Finch’s native New England, which he measured using a colorimeter. The yellowish green light creates an other-worldly environment which references the Japanese tradition of moon-viewing to honor the autumn moon. By using the sun to create moonlight, Spencer Finch uses the traditional material of hand-blown stained glass to modern conceptual effect. The rectilinear arrangement of panels in the windows contrasts with the watery ripples and imperfections of the glass to create a light and space condition which feels both contemporary and ancient.

Installed in the same gallery is a new site-specific sculptural work, Fourteen Stones, 2025, inspired by Ryoan-ji, the 15th-century Zen garden in Kyoto. Spencer Finch drew upon his visits to the garden, when his quest for quiet contemplation of the fifteen stones was interrupted by hordes of visiting school children counting to fourteen, the number of stones that are visible from any location along the viewing platform. Using this perceptual idiosyncrasy as a jumping off point to explore the subjectivity of vision, Spencer Finch created 26 “stones” out of piles of common concrete bricks, each crudely mimicking one of the Ryoan-ji stones. Spencer Finch has arranged the stones so that from each of the four corners of the gallery only fourteen are visible. Using the vocabulary of minimalism to naturalistic effect, the artist creates an altered meditative environment in which he claims, “if you squint and stand on one leg, they really look like ancient stones bathed in moonlight.” 

One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige) continues Finch’s interest in the limits of perception, and the relativity of human experience. These new works embrace science and poetry in equal measure, communicating experiences of the world that are both universal and intimately subjective.

ARTIST SPENCER FINCH

Spencer Finch was born in 1962 in New Haven, CT, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, Hamilton College, and Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, and has exhibited extensively in the US and internationally since the early 1990s. Recent major projects include Bring me a sunset in a teacup, a two-wall commission for Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2023); Orion, permanently installed at the San Francisco Airport, CA (2020); Moon Dust (Apollo 17), Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2019); Fifteen Stones (Ryoanji), International Pavilion at the Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona, Spain (2018); Lost Man Creek, Public Art Fund, Brooklyn, NY (2016-2018); Trying To Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning, 9/11 Memorial Museum, New York, NY (2014), and A Certain Slant of Light, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY (2014). Significant recent solo exhibitions include the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT (2018-2019); MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2017); Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL (2017); Seattle Art Museum, WA (2017), and Turner Contemporary, Margate, United Kingdom (2014); Spencer Finch was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, the 2008 Turin Triennale and the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). His work can be found in many public collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Kemper Museum of Art, St Louis, MO; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Morgan Library, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

JAMES COHAN

52 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.jamescohan.com

Spencer Finch exhibition, James Cohan Gallery New York - Fathom

SPENCER FINCH

Spencer Finch, Fathom

James Cohan Gallery, New York

May 2 - June 15, 2013

To “fathom” is to comprehend the essence of something colossal or ineffable by translating it into terms we can grasp. For more than twenty years, SPENCER FINCH’s practice addresses such a need to capture and frame experience. In site-specific installation as well as drawing and sculpture, Spencer Finch has combined scientific calibration and calculation with a romantic’s engagement with nature and faith in the limitless rewards of observation.

A fathom is also a unit of measurement approximately six feet in length that is used to measure the depth of water, and a key reference point for the exhibition. After learning about Henry David Thoreau’s 1846 survey of Walden Pond, in which the famed polymath performed soundings to determine the lake’s depth at 102 feet and debunk a popular myth that it was bottomless, Spencer Finch received permission from the Walden Pond State Reservation to take a boat on the lake and perform that seminal survey for the second time. Dropping rope into the pond, as Thoreau had, while also employing an electronic depth meter — combining old and new technology — Spencer Finch further measured longitude and latitude as well as color-matching the water at each sounding point.

The resulting work is a 120-foot long rope – the rope Spencer Finch used in the soundings, and the artist's description of the depth of Walden Pond. It serves as the physical record of the findings as well as an armature: paper tags for each of the approximately 700 soundings appear along the rope at their equivalent measure of depth along with their exact coordinates and a swatch of matched color, applied in watercolor. Neither entirely documentation nor sculpture, the long line may best be considered a drawing of Walden Pond.

The main gallery will include several other works delving into the idea of delineation, from continuous-line drawings of encircling vultures observed by the artist in Spain to abstract renderings of meteorological models used to predict weather patterns. Other new and recent works on view for the first time in New York address themes as varied as the color of the light on Mars, the breeze through Emily Dickinson’s bedroom window and the attempt to render wind through chalk pastel drawings of the movement of the curtains at Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s famous pavilion in Barcelona.

SPENCER FINCH (b. 1962, New Haven, Connecticut) exhibitions and commissions on Wanafoto Blogzine: Spencer Finch installation Following Nature, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN (through August 25, 2013); Spencer Finch, I'll tell you how the Sun rose, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, Sweden (2012); Spencer Finch, Lori Hersberger, Martin Oppel: Weather Report, Ecole Régionale des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, France (2010); Spencer Finch, Amabilis Insania, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin (2010);  Spencer Finch, In Praise of Shadows, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin (2007-2008)... 

Next exhibition at James Cohan Gallery, New York: Shi Zhiying, June - July, 2013

James Cohan Gallery New York
www.jamescohan.com

Spencer Finch: Installation, Following Nature, IMA, Indianapolis

Spencer Finch: Installation Following Nature
IMA - Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA 
Through August 25, 2013

Indianapolis Museum of Art Commissioned Spencer Finch for Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion Series.  Installation features suspended glass panels inspired by Claude Monet’s Giverny water garden

Brooklyn-based artist SPENCER FINCH  (b. 1962 in New Haven, Conn.) create a new installation as part of the IMA’s Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion series of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Spencer Finch’s expansive new installation, Following Nature, is composed of an array of nearly 200 panels of glass suspended from the Pavilion’s ceiling, as a reinterpretation of Claude Monet’s iconic water garden in Giverny, France. Following Nature is on display since February 1 through  August 25, 2013. 

Inspired by a recent visit to Giverny, Spencer Finch has looked to the representation of water as a shaping influence for Following Nature, in particular Monet’s use of the water garden as a kind of laboratory for optical effects. Monet has served as an inspiration for Spencer Finch for more than 20 years, and the IMA’s installation is his second exploration of the garden in Giverny, following the 2012 exhibition of his work Painting Air at the Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design. Unlike Claude Monet’s representations of the garden through the two-dimensional medium of paint on canvas, Finch’s all-encompassing installation radically reinterprets this well-known site. The work comprise numerous glass panels of varying reflectivity, surrounded by a multi-hued field of translucent vinyl applied to the pavilion’s existing windows. Spencer Finch sourced the colors for the window vinyl from his photographs of the gardens, color samples taken on site, and pigment colors used by Monet.

The installation’s title is drawn from a letter written by Claude Monet to his friend Gustave Geffroy in 1889, in which Monet states, “In light of changes [in the weather] I am following nature without being able to grasp her, and then there is the river that shrinks, swells again, green one day, then yellow, sometimes almost dry, and which tomorrow will be a torrent, after the terrible rain that is falling at the moment.” Correspondingly, Spencer Finch’s Following Nature embody the garden as an evolving, spatial and optical experience rather than as a single moment in time. As light shifts across the work’s glass panels and the pavilion’s tinted windows, viewers are immersed in a sensory environment of changing kaleidoscopic reflections. The installation’s use of the pavilion’s windows also unite Spencer Finch’s impression of the Giverny gardens with the IMA’s own landscape and will obscure the division between inside and outside. 

”Only Spencer Finch—one of contemporary art’s foremost creative minds—could transport a viewer from Indianapolis in February to Monet’s garden in Giverny at the peak of summer,” said Sarah Urist Green, curator of contemporary art. 

Following Nature is part of the Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion series launched in February 2007 and made possible by a $2.5 million grant from the Indianapolis-based Efroymson Family Fund. The works are installed on a rotating basis with a new commission from a different artist approximately every six months. Artists who have previously exhibited in the space include Alyson Shotz, William Lamson, Orly Genger, Julianne Swartz, and Tony Feher, among others. 

IMA - Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, USA

Museum's website: www.imamuseum.org

You can read previous posts about other Spencer Finch's exhibition by clicking on the tag "Spencer Finch" below.

Spencer Finch, I'll tell you how the Sun rose at Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm

Spencer Finch, I'll tell you how the Sun rose
Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm
August 23 - September 30, 2012

In SPENCER FINCH’s exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake in Stockholm the artist presents a group of recorded observations from the natural world. Often combining Conceptual and Impressionist practices Spencer Finch reflects on the tautologous nature of seeing, the limits of visual perception and the fallibility of recollection. Sometimes his works originate from his own individual perceptions, of light, color, darkness for example, while his methodology is often scientific in its precision. However, all his work is strongly anchored in often-poetic references to literature, philosophy, mythologies and even historic observations from the scientific cannon.

This exhibition partly comprises a group of works dealing with atmospheric phenomena and relating to the landscape. A highly industrialized and urban waterway is recalled via Impressionist images of water lilies, sunsets and seascapes in a color study of the Gowanus canal (which passes the artist’s studio in Brooklyn) using the amalgamated hues from picture postcards of works by Claude Monet. The breeze as recorded passing through the bedroom window at Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst, MA, is evoked in exactness with the use of a table fan. In an eclectic variety of media and themes Spencer Finch also takes on cloud formations, moon shadows and stone wall formations.

A second group of works embodies a more formal character. The lightbox Yellow Square reveals the spectral breakdown of the color yellow. A red, green and blue grid of squares emits yellow light on the reflecting walls. This work is accompanied by a series of 15 collages arranged using colored paper and filters. The series is based on Wittgenstein's Remarks on Color in which the philosopher reflects on Goethe's attempt to clarify the use of language about color.

NORDENHAKE Stockholm
Gallery's website: www.nordenhake.com

Spencer Finch, Lori Hersberger, Martin Oppel – Exposition à l’ERBA de Rouen

Spencer Finch, Lori Hersberger, Martin Oppel: Weather Report

Ecole Régionale des Beaux-Arts de Rouen

Commissariat général  : François Lasgi, Directeur de l’ERBA de Rouen 

Commissariat de l’exposition  : Catherine Schwartz, artiste et bibliothécaire de l’ERBA, et Jean-Paul Berrenger, artiste et professeur à l’ERBA

Jusqu'au 26 septembre 2010

  MARTIN OPPEL, Miami Nice, 2004
  Papier, peinture, encadrement - 34,5 x 41 cm, unique
  Courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris & Miami

« Il n’y a pas au monde deux yeux identiques comme organe et comme faculté » Jules Laforgue (1)

Si l’homme se saisit dans le temps, il se saisit aussi en partie dans le temps qu’il fait (et qu’il fait, en règle générale, durant très peu de temps). Weather Reports, au travers de trois artistes aux recherches distinctes, se propose d’explorer les formes contemporaines de la conquête de la lumière solaire, de la matière atmosphérique ou de la qualité du vent. Là, la couleur d’une gélatine, d’un faisceau lumineux ou d’une grappe de ballons, un arc de ventilateurs semblent contenir littéralement la couleur du ciel et la fraîcheur d’un instant, autant d’éléments qui conditionnent esthétiquement encore aujourd’hui, et pourquoi en serait-il autrement, la forme des œuvres. Cette quête sensible, qui explosa au XIXe siècle, est celle d’artistes d’aujourd’hui, qu’ils fassent explicitement référence à l’Impressionnisme ou qu’ils en soient plus éloignés, voire inconsciemment les héritiers.

L’Impression, soleil levant de Claude Monet est un face à face solitaire avec l’astre et les nuées, la main du peintre tendant à « voir » et à faire voir à nouveau le ciel et ce qui en constitue la perception. C’est également une œuvre devenue l’emblème de cette quête impossible. Comment, en effet, rentrer accompagné par le temps lui même ? Qu’elle soit romanesque, picturale ou plus généralement plastique, c’est un effort héroïque qu’il faut fournir pour déterminer la forme qui le ramènera à la vie.

A l’impression, on peut préférer ici la notion de rapport (le terme anglo-saxon “report”, faisant référence, dans le titre de l’exposition, au bulletin météorologique, induit également la notion d’explosion)  : rapporter, emmener avec soi littéralement le ciel et, quand c’est impossible (le plus souvent), en faire un constat à multiples facettes, en restituer un point pour l’ensemble, s’y appuyer pour reconstruire une vision du monde plus large encore… Mais aussi en faire un compte-rendu, dans une langue qui n’est pas celle de l’événement, remettant à plus tard le contact immédiat avec les éléments. Un report, donc, entre la trivialité d’un instant et la lutte presque émouvante pour le reconstituer.

Le temps de l’exécution de l’œuvre, et c’était déjà l’un des enjeux de l’Impressionnisme, induit un temps de lecture, d’impression, et de retour supérieur à la sensation elle-même, aussi intense soit-elle. Et pour intense qu’elle est, en tant qu’excitation solitaire à transformer en expérience collective, irrémédiablement insatisfaisante. « De sorte qu’en définitive, même en ne restant que quinze minutes devant un paysage, l’œuvre ne sera jamais l’équivalent de la réalité fugitive, mais le compte-rendu d’une certaine sensibilité optique sans identique à un moment qui ne se reproduira plus identique chez cet individu, sous l’excitation d’un paysage à un moment de sa vie lumineuse qui n’aura plus l’état identique de ce moment » (1). Le plein air n’est plus le lieu de l’expérience, il est à la fois le guide d’une pensée et la matière même de cette pensée.

A la différence des artistes de la fin du XIXe siècle, les trois artistes présentés dans le cadre de cette exposition prennent en compte, de manière humoristique, distanciée ou fulgurante, le caractère impossible de cette tâche. Ils se mesurent au monde dans ce qu’il a d’immatériel en une lutte visiblement inéquitable (Spencer Finch), de manière directe et figurée (Martin Oppel) ou par le biais d’une citation acérée et abyssale (Lori Hersberger).

A première vue, le travail de SPENCER FINCH semble tout entier consacré à la restitution de perceptions et de sentiments éprouvés face au spectacle de la lumière céleste, de la forme d’un nuage, des variations d’un couchant. Mais la forme même des œuvres (qui ne représentent jamais véritablement « l’objet » lui-même), leur titre (dont le vocabulaire emprunte directement aux titres des Impressionnistes et de Claude Monet plus précisément), disent bien qu’il s’agit-là de tentatives  : les limites de la reconstitution sont le point d’équilibre de l’œuvre. Ses aspects scientifques (les différentes pièces fonctionnent aussi sur la mesure lumineuse, les relevés) induisent une disparition partielle du sujet ému (l’artiste) pour mieux mettre en œuvre l’impossible échange (je vois/tu vois). Nous pourrions donc uniquement partager les éléments de langage et leur incomplète transmission alors même que la sensation détermine nos existences quotidiennes toutes entières. 

Les peintures de MARTIN OPPEL, tout comme les peintures impressionnistes, sont des peintures d’après la photographie. Elles semblent restituer d’intenses et particulières émotions lumineuses (spots inondant une scène rock, « multidiffusion » et disparition des rayons solaires dans la flore équatoriale, reflets du couchant dans des immeubles vitrés) dont il est difficile de savoir si elles ont été expérimentées ou documentées (voire trouvées). Ses paysages lumineux scrutent précisément la manière dont la lumière inonde la « scène » du monde à la manière du reflet éblouissant au cœur d’un simple feu de camp. Mais il faut les resituer dans une œuvre plus large, constitué de signes étranges, qui brouillent les frontières entre l’objet contemporain et l’histoire des formes. 

Le travail de LORI HERSBERGER, héritier presque sanglant des œuvres de James Turrel ou de Steven Parrino, ouvre dans cet ensemble une voie vers des espaces plus durs. Ses œuvres les plus récentes mettent en évidence la valeur esthétique de l’artifice poussé dans ses plus lointains retranchements. Des états du temps il ne reste dans ses peintures, ses sculptures et plus particulièrement dans ses installations, qu’une structure, un programme, des éléments minimum y référant (un titre, un arc, un dégradé évocateur) qui soutiennent une recherche esthétique à la fois catégorique et énergique, moins violente qu’absolue. 

(1) Jules Laforgue. « L’Art impressionniste », Œuvres complètes, Mélanges posthumes. Paris, Éd. du Mercure de France, 1903

Cette exposition est réalisée avec le concours de la Direction régionale des affaires culturelles de Haute-Normandie, et avec la précieuse collaboration des galeries Yvon Lambert (Paris), Emmanuel Perrotin (Paris & Miami) et Thaddaeus Ropac (Paris).

Spencer Finch, Lori Hersberger, Martin Oppel
Weather Reports

Ecole Régionale des Beaux-Arts de Rouen 17 juin-26 septembre 2010

Spencer Finch, Amabilis Insania - Nordenhake, Berlin

Spencer Finch, Amabilis Insania
Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin
April 30 - June 5, 2010

Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin presents an exhibition by US artist SPENCER FINCH (born in 1962, lives in New York). The artist conceived new drawings, photographs and a light installation but also a sound installation and a sculpture. Themes uniting the diverse works in the show are the complexities and pleasures of apprehending sensations. Most of the works deal with misperceptions or misapprehensions. They are treated not necessarily as failure but as pleasurable moments hinting at a seeing prior to recognition and rationalisation.

The seduction of misperception is suggested in a group of photographs: in reality representations of cherry blossoms in a pond, they appear as delicate images of clouds in the sky bringing to mind Alfred Stieglitz’ series of abstract photographs “Equivalence”. In another work, the white concrete sculpture sitting directly on the gallery floor recalls a pile of snow. A similar irritation of our perception evokes the sound installation.

The artist maps the limits of his own field of vision in a drawing that compares far peripheral and central vision, but it also contrasts linguistic and visual descriptions of colour. Spencer Finch recorded the colour of a car rushing by on a highway once it appeared in his field of vision and painted his colour impression with pigments on paper. Like a researcher, he adds a written account of the vehicle's actual colour and form. The central vision differs from the perception in peripheral areas of the eye in respect to colour and form and proves it as erroneous.

The uncertainty of perception — that there is more to reality than our bodily senses could register — is implied in the series of eight drawings after false-colour images. The colourful oil pastels look entirely abstract but are in fact truly representational as they render thermograms of the light falling through the window in the artist’s studio over the course of one day.

Spencer Finch is known for a multi-layered artistic practice in which he explores the mechanism and mysteries of perception. Many of his poetic and witty works aim at preserving the memory of a sensorial experience, be it a pile of snow or moonlight in Venice. He bases his unconventional and meticulous representations on extended research and rigorous measurement while his art acknowledges the difference and distance of all representation and reinforces the beauty of the fleeting nature of the observed world.

Spencer Finch's artworks were previously presented in Berlin by Galerie Nordenhake in two exhibitions Spencer Finch: In Praise of Shadows (2007-2008) and Spencer Finch: Prussian Blue (2005).

NORDENHAKE
Gallery's website: www.nordenhake.com

Spencer Finch: Light,Time, Chemistry exhibit at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

Spencer Finch: Light,Time, Chemistry
Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago
March 27 - May 2, 2009

Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago presents Light, Time, Chemistry, an exhibition of photo-based work by SPENCER FINCH. In this exhibition, Spencer Finch references both phenomenology and the psychology of perception, capturing and re-contextualizing fleeting and ephemeral elements from our surroundings. Among the many works exhibited is Periscope, a photographic device composed of mirrors and ventilation ducts that extends from inside the gallery to the outside and allows visitors to view the changing sky. The periscope was used to expose a cyanotype directly on the wall of the gallery, creating a hazy blue image from a two-day exposure of the Chicago sky. 

Also on display is Spencer Finch’s installation Shadow, Sculpture of Centaur, Tuileries (after Atget), a component of a larger body of work entitled Shadows (After Atget). In this work, Spencer Finch captures the ephemeral phenomenon of shadows, focusing specifically on re-creating light from locations of Eugene Atget’s photographs of Paris. Employing a fluorescent tube lamp covered with colored filters of Isaac Newton’s spectrum, the light functions as a reverse prism, emitting the very polychrome grey light of the Parisian shadows photographed by Eugène Atget almost one hundred years ago.

Fog is a re-occurring subject in Finch’s practice, and Thank You, Fog reflects his interest in the ‘anti-image.’ Executed by Spencer Finch in Sonoma County California, Thank You, Fog is comprised of 60 photographs that were shot from a static camera at one minute intervals as a fog moved over the densely wooded landscape. Like a veil drawn across the landscape, the fog both reveals and conceals, frustrating our desire to capture an accurate image. The title of this artwork is borrowed from poet W.H. Auden’s final book.

Rhona Hoffman Gallery previously presented two exhibitions of Spencer Finch art work: Spencer Finch: H2O (2006) and Spencer Finch: Here and There (2001).

RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY, CHICAGO, IL, USA
Gallery's website: www.rhoffmangallery.com

Spencer Finch, In Praise of Shadows at Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin

Spencer Finch, In Praise of Shadows
Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin
December 1, 2007 - January 26, 2008

Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin presents an exhibition with new works by american artist SPENCER FINCH: In Praise of Shadows. Shadows are an always present element of Spencer Finch’s artistic exploration of the psychological and physiological aspects of perception and its limits. His current show at MASS MoCA exemplifies the wide range of ideas and visual modes with which Spencer Finch approaches the paradoxical nature of light and colour. The show “In Praise of Shadows”, however, is specifically devoted to the complex world of shadows. The title derives from Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s short 1933 treatise, a meditation on the aesthetics of shadows in Japanese culture, threatened by the omnipresence of electric light: “Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty”, Tanazaki states. Spencer Finch’s exhibition can be seen as a small visual anthology of shadows. A drawing from 1995 is exhibited alongside new watercolours, photographs, light installations, and smaller experimental installations that explore the diverse aspects of shadows.

One of the narrow walls alongside the large gallery window is painted in a monochrome grey colour, transporting the viewer to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s house in Weimar. The grey is an accurate chromatic replica of the colour of the shadow cast on a November day in the house where Goethe wrote his “Theory of Colour“ (1810), and where he most likely performed his experiments on coloured shadows. Goethe defined colour as the result of a dynamic interplay between light and darkness. Although Goethe’s theory was rejected in favour of Newton’s purely physical explanation, Goethe’s observations laid the groundwork for colour psychology.

A sequence of 12 photographs captures the transient shadows cast by a lemon tree over the course of a day. The artist travelled to Spain and took the photos at equal intervals from dawn till dusk to record the revolution of the sun around the tree. The work is inspired by a poem about a barren orange tree, written by Federico García Lorca, which adds a melancholic tone to the delicate photographic renderings and points to the long tradition of ascribing shadows deeper psychological meanings. Lorca’s orange tree invokes a woodcutter to cut away his shadow because it can’t stand the torment of seeing itself in its fruitless silhouette. 

Eugène Atget, master of the photographic conservation of old Paris, is honoured in a light installation in the second room of the gallery. Spencer Finch uses colour filters and fluorescent lights to re-create the exact darkness of the shadows cast in the Parisian alleyways that were photographed by Eugène Atget around 100 years ago. 

What remains constant in Spencer Finch’s work is that he merges dry, scientific methods of measurement and documentation with his subjective creative expression, here demonstrating that shadows are far more than regions of darkness where light is blocked. Rather, they are optical shapes that beckon towards a subjective sublime, reflecting the human condition of never being able to completely know what exists in nature, waiting in the shadows for a stroke of lightning.

NORDENHAKE Berlin, Germany
Gallery's website: www.nordenhake.com

Spencer Finch: H2O, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

Spencer Finch: H2O
Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago
April 28 - June 3, 2006

Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago presents H2O the second solo exhibition at the gallery of works by New York-based artist SPENCER FINCH. This exhibition is focused on Spencer Finch’s investigation of a substance everyone uses in one way or another every single day—Water. This new body of work includes a molecular light structure based on the chemical make-up of water; an 8 foot by 20 foot fluorescent light box replicating light created by the mist over Niagara Falls which Finch measured on a recent trip; photographs comprising a taxonomy of clouds; and works on paper documenting the evaporation of water and the melting of snowflakes. 

This investigation is part of a larger exploration of perception, color, and representation that has become central to Finch’s artistic practice. Through various mediums Spencer Finch, a constant traveler and scholar of history, confronts the difficulties of “true” representation. Visiting historical and emotionally loaded places like Los Alamos, New Mexico; the city of Troy; Loch Ness; Cape Canaveral; and Tombstone, Arizona, he makes works that take into account the role that memory and association play on perception. The results are often beautiful, playful, and humorous, but always conceptually rigorous. 

SPENCER FINCH earned his MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. His work has been exhibited extensively, including solo exhibitions at Portikus in Frankfurt, Germany, Artpace in San Antonio, Texas, and at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, and numerous group exhibitions including the 2004 Whitney Biennale at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He collaborated with choreographer William Forsythe on the lighting for Three Atmospheric Studies, performed in Frankfurt and Dresden in April 2005. The first exhibition of Spencer Finch at Rhona Hoffman Gallery was Spencer Finch: Here and There (2001)

RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY, Chicago
www.rhoffmangallery.com

Spencer Finch, Prussian Blue - Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin

Spencer Finch, Prussian Blue
Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin
March 5 - April 9, 2005

Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin presents its first solo exhibition with the American artist SPENCER FINCH. For a viewer acquainted to Spencer Finch's work this exhibition reveal well-known and recurrent themes. We have references to philosophical phenomenology and psychology of perception: What does it actually mean to experience a colour? What is seeing? How do we communicate experiences? How can a sensual stimulus trig an existential reconstruction of a cultural context - as in the case of the famous Madeleine in Marcel Proust's Recherche? And how can such a context be shared? Spencer Finch has worked consistently with these questions during his career as an artist. "Prussian Blue" is yet another step in the development of a deeply personal "Cultural Colour Doctrine" that involves such disparate phenomena as the pink colour of Jacqueline Kennedy's hat the day her husband, the President, was shot, or the tone of the ceiling above the sofa in Sigmund Freud's examination room, and the shade of blue in the sky over the place where the first atomic bomb was developed in the desert of Los Alamos in 1945.

For his first solo exhibition in Berlin, Spencer Finch delves into Prussian blue, the pigment that was the first artificial pigment, and invented in this very city by Heinrich Diesbach some 300 years ago. Suddenly blue was for the first time available as an affordable colour, both commercially and artistically. Its use quickly spread to textiles and it was notably used to dye the uniforms of the Prussian army. In the 19th century it showed itself useful for the early photographical pioneers and was used for cyanotypes or blueprints.

Prussian Blue, 2005 is a three-dimensional model of the molecular structure of said pigment, executed using standard light bulbs in different sizes. As all Spencer Finch's works, the chandelier is representational. This is in fact what the pigment looks like on the molecular level.

In Self Portrait as Crazy Horse, 1995-2005, a large site specific cyanotype photograph made directly on the wall, Spencer Finch again connects to the use of Prussian blue but also to the German fascination with Indians as manifested in the huge success of Karl May's stories. Using the whole gallery space and its large windows as a camera and a gesso-primed, and photosensitised wall as the "film", he spends a day in front of the wall, using the time from sunrise to sunset as exposure time. The final result is a cyanotype made directly on the wall that shows himself as the famous Indian chief. The cyanotype process uses the same components as the ones found in Prussian blue and gives an image traced in white on a blue background. In the work, which hovers between, painting, photography and performance, the artist seems to appear as a white shadow on the wall. Or is it only your imagination? Crazy Horse was a Lakota warrior and mystic who successfully lead an uprising that culminated in the battle of Little Big Horn, also known as Custer's Last Stand. However, even if occupying a place in our collective memory, and even if coming from an era when photography already played a significant role in defining historical key figures and places, Crazy Horse never allowed anyone to take his picture, "Why would you wish to shorten my life by taking from me my shadow?"

The main work that Spencer Finch has made especially for the exhibition is an installation called Two Examples of Molecular Orbital Theory (Prussian Blue) 2005. Blue light is seen coming from two large door openings leading in to large light-filled rooms. Both appear blue, but the colour is achieved by different means. Again the artist questions what we see but also shows faith in representing the unattainable - be it the colour of Jackie's pillbox hat or the elusive position of electrons in a molecule. Similar ideas come back in a series of water-colours, Study for a Transparent Language, Index of Prussian Blue (35 watercolour drawings), 2005, that catalogues alphabetically 35 different names for the pigment, ranging from American Blue to Williamson's Blue. But again, does anyone know what blue is?

This is Spencer Finch's first solo exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake. In 2003 he participated in the gallery's exhibition on painting, "Pale Fire", with the light installation New York Boogie Woogie, 2003, (the light at Times Square on the night of April 27, 2003).

NORDENHAKE Berlin
www.nordenhake.com

Spencer Finch: Here and There, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

Spencer Finch: Here and There
Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago
February 16 - March 23, 2001

New York artist SPENCER FINCH explores the borders of representation in his exhibition Here and There at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago. Utilizing a wide range of materials and techniques – from sculpture and installation to painting and drawing – Spencer Finch creates work that addresses the ways in which subjectivity, memory and language inform the act of seeing. 

Many of the works included in this exhibit study the effects that light and memory have on perception. The enchanting and poetic work titled Blue (sky over Los Alamos, New Mexico, 5/5/00, morning effect), an installation of light bulb molecules precisely matching the cobalt, titanium oxide, and ultramarine sky over Los Alamos, is on view in the small gallery. Mounted to the ceiling in complex arrangements the piece probes some of the great mysteries of the universe: color, light, gravity, time, and space as Spencer Finch explores the gaps between objectivity and subjectivity as well as his fascination with science and its limits.

SPENCER FINCH currently lives and works in NYC. He has had several recent solo exhibitions including Up, Postmasters Gallery, New York (2000); Bildhuset, Stockholm (1999); Wandering lost upon the mountains of our choice, Postmasters Gallery, New York (1998); Galerie Andreas Brandstrom, Stockholm (1998); Periscope, Artnode, Stockholm (1997).

RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY
www.rhoffmangallery.com