Stephen Shore @ Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles

Stephen Shore
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles 
June 19 - August 30, 2019

One of the most important and influential photographers of the last half-century, Stephen Shore has produced an expansive body of work that has to a significant degree shaped our vision of the American experience from the 1960s to today. In 1971, at age twenty-four, he was the first living photographer in forty years to receive a solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and he was a key figure in the recognition of color photography as an artistic medium beginning in the 1970s. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers presents the first solo exhibition of Stephen Shore’s work in Los Angeles since 2005, when his major traveling exhibition The Biographical Landscape opened at the Hammer Museum. On view at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, are three of the artist’s photographic series spanning the years 1969 to the present, each of which reveal his ability to project an approachable, casual aesthetic that is infused nonetheless with subtlety, complexity, and a quiet, affecting power. 

Throughout his career, Stephen Shore has used a variety of cameras and has always been open to new technologies. The acquisition in 2017 of the revolutionary Hasselblad X1D camera has enabled the artist to make images which match and even surpass the resolution of more traditional tools. Shore’s experimentations with this new apparatus have resulted in the series Details (2017–ongoing), which serves as the cornerstone of the present exhibition. Shot in locations where the artist regularly spends time, including New York City, upstate New York, Montana and London, these photographs highlight his remarkable eye for textural contrasts and poignant compositions, even when picturing the most mundane of subjects. Natural and human-made elements come into intimate contact with one another across the series, as in bird’s eye scenes of scattered leaves on asphalt sharing space with Dunkin’ Donuts bags, cigarette butts, and bottle tops; or a frontal view of ancient murals carved onto mottled, sediment-laden rock. In these pictures, Stephen Shore manages to hold in careful balance the sense of a photograph as a transparent index of the world and, at the same time, an artful combination of light, line and color. 

Offering a lens onto the origins of Stephen Shore’s intuitive pictorial approach is another of Stephen Shore’s series, and one of his earliest: Los Angeles, California, February 4, 1969. Created almost exactly fifty years ago, and in the same city as this exhibition, it marks a moment in which Shore was testing new ways of structuring his pictures. Intrigued by both the focus on popular culture he had witnessed while spending time in Andy Warhol’s Factory (1965–68), as well as the conceptual frameworks that artists in other media were building into their work in the late 1960s, the young photographer took advantage of a trip to Los Angeles to create a new kind of photographic project. He established several constraints, including that he would shoot mainly from the back seat of a car and that he would keep every picture he took, in the order in which he took them. The result is a stream-of-consciousness view of one day in LA, presented in consecutive groupings of twelve photographs. Iconic features, such as Standard Oil stations, palm trees, and billboards, intermingle with fleeting impressions of cloud-streaked skies, pedestrians and traffic. In addition, multiple views of the same scene, set side-by-side, offer an unparalleled glimpse into the development of Shore’s snapshot aesthetic and deepening consideration of vernacular subjects. 

Finally, the exhibition includes a selection of works from the artist’s landmark series, American Surfaces (1972–73), taken as he traveled around the United States in his mid-twenties. Part visual diary, part elegy to a disappearing localized America, these photographs of commonplace objects and situations revel in textures, patterning and heavily saturated hues: green pearlescent Formica, the dimpled glass of a phone booth window, tessellated arrays of pink gradated tiles behind a man in a bright avocado-colored shirt. The “Surfaces” in the title refers literally to this textural aspect of the series, yet it also calls to mind the surface of the photograph itself, and the visual conventions and systems of thought through which we understand photographic images. 

Many of these concerns are still present, albeit in different ways, in Stephen Shore’s more recent Details. He has described his picture-making process as “a complex, ongoing, spontaneous interaction of observation, understanding, imagination, and intention” (Shore, The Nature of Photographs, p. 132), and together these series make clear his persistent focus and attention to everyday subjects that feel at once prosaic and extraordinary. Shore’s photographs urge us, in turn, to look more deeply and meaningfully at the world around us, and to find beauty among its arrangements and peculiarities. 

STEPHEN SHORE (born 1947, New York City) lives in Tivoli, New York, and since 1982 has been Director of the Photography Program at Bard College. A major retrospective of his work was on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017-18). Further selected solo exhibitions include those at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, and C/O Berlin (2016), Les Rencontres d'Arles (2015), Fundacion Mapfre, Madrid (2014), Aspen Art Museum (2011), Der Rote Bulli: Stephen Shore and the New Düsseldorf Photography, NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf (2010), International Center of Photography, New York (2007), Sprengel Museum, Hannover (1995), Art Institute of Chicago (1984), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1977), and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1971). Recent group exhibitions include those at Luma Foundation, Arles (2018), Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2017), Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2017), Vancouver Art Gallery (2016), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2016), George Eastman House, Rochester (2015), Tate Modern, London (2014), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014), and Barbican Art Centre, London (2014). The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Stephen Shore was recently honored as the 2019 Photo London Master of Photography. 

SPRÜTH MAGERS LOS ANGELES
5900 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036
spruethmagers.com

Axel Kasseböhmer @ Sprüth Magers, Berlin

Axel Kasseböhmer
Sprüth Magers, Berlin
Through April 7, 2018

The new exhibition in Sprüth Magers’ Berlin gallery offers a retrospective look at the work of Axel Kasseböhmer, who passed away last year after a long illness. Though Kasseböhmer consciously pivoted away from various painting trends throughout his lifetime, his work impacted the 1980s Cologne art scene and played a key role in the development of West German painting. He leaves behind a vast, influential body of work characterized by a radical, conceptual approach to painting. 

This spotlight exhibition of Axel Kasseböhmer’s oeuvre is the second show taking over the whole Berlin gallery. Many paintings in the exhibition have long been inaccessible to the public. The show’s main focus is the Walchensee (Lake Walchen) series created during the last years of his life—a never-before-seen body of work and the brilliant finale to a singular, lifelong exploration of painting as a medium. 

Axel Kasseböhmer made a name for himself in the late 1970s while still a student at the Art Academy in Dusseldorf, where he studied under Gerhard Richter and Joseph Beuys. His breakthrough came with a series of enigmatic oil paintings featuring enlarged details from historical paintings, elevating them to a motif in their own right through a play of perception and proportion. At a time when art history was less and less the standard measure in contemporary art, Kasseböhmer—who regularly skipped school as a teenager so that he could visit art museums instead—returned to the classical repertoire. While some motifs in this body of work are fairly easy to trace (his 1985 Picasso-homage Stierschädel [“Bull Skull”] for example), most leave the viewer uncertain as to their origins. Häuser (“Houses,” 1980) for instance, draws on an insignificant architectural detail from a Fra Angelico crucifixion painting. Grünes Kleid mit Rot (“Green Dress with Red,” 1979) inflates a vaguely-familiar excerpt from Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait to a full image motif; the large-scale work Stoff 1 (“Fabric 1,”1981) quotes the folds of a dress in a saint portrait by Francisco de Zurbarán while Landschaft mit Architektur (“Landscape with Architecture,” 1981) cites an arbitrary painting snippet from a neoclassical allegory by Nicolas Poussin. In most cases, Axel Kasseböhmer never saw the original paintings, which hang in the Louvre, the National Gallery or the Prado. Instead, he painted from color reproductions printed in books and catalogues. His works are testament to an incomparable trust in the persuasive power of historical paintings, yet they also have a completely autonomous, sensual and auratic quality of their own. 

Axel Kasseböhmer once said that he ended his quotation-series when it started to be subsumed under the term postmodernism. From that time forward, he concentrated mostly on genres of painting that have been little more than an art historical footnote since Modernism: still life and landscapes, again and again. Kasseböhmer used various styles and methods to systematically probe the possibilities of painting, something that becomes particularly evident in his series of tree, city and marine landscapes from the 1980s and 1990s. His development of original content and a signature formal language was accompanied not only by an increased exploration of the painterly craft, but also with a progressive seriality in which he “played through” this language in an almost musical way. One example is his Meereslandschaften (Seascapes), for which Axel Kasseböhmer used oil paint that was so diluted that it took on a water-like transparency, allowing the paintings to oscillate between naturalism and abstraction. The gestural forms in his Landschaft gelb, grün (“Landscape Yellow, Green”) series, for which he focused on only two shades, point to both environmental themes and the destruction of art. Axel Kasseböhmer’s decided renunciation of irony struck a distinct contrast to many of his contemporary Cologne painter colleagues and their ideas about the end of painting. His pictures confidently counter a time when anything could be made into a mediatized picture and any facet of painting could be conceptually “destroyed.” Instead they try to show the viewer what only painting can do. 

The Walchensee series of large-scale paintings, created in the years before Axel Kasseböhmer’s death after a series of smaller Walchensee landscapes, brings many strands of his lifelong exploration of painting together. He knew that Lovis Corinth’s last landscapes were also created just before his death by a lake in the Alpine foothills of Bavaria. Like Corinth, Axel Kasseböhmer was pursuing a private project in his two Walchensee series: recalling the religious tradition of meditation images, he appears to be confronting his grave illness and immanent death. 

The stylistic elements of these works are in some instances art-historically coded and reminiscent of Corinth, Matisse, Munch or contemporary artists such as Richter, Polke and Lichtenstein. Some draw on experimental painting techniques. The oil paint on these paintings is frequently scratched, combed, dabbed or painted on canvas. Sometimes Kasseböhmer uses the paint in a way that makes it shine; other times, he gives it a matte finish. In some cases it seems virtually transparent; in other instances, it is applied so thick that an orange peel-like texture appears on the surface. The result is a panorama that playfully captures the landscape around Lake Walchen, but also the history of landscape painting and the associated idea of a “landscape of the soul.” These paintings seem both obsolete and exceedingly contemporary at the same time. 

The salient feature of the Walchensee works is their resistance. The images are characterized by a psychological energy that deeply believes in the painting tradition—an energy that also comes through in Axel Kasseböhmer’s last two self-portraits, which are painterly variations of a photograph and can also be seen in the exhibition. In some ways, Kasseböhmer’s entire oeuvre can be understood as an attempt to save the pictorial space of painting and bring it intact—with all its rich knowledge base, technical interplays and entire depth of meaning—into the present day. Axel Kasseböhmer was always aware that this attempt was doomed to failure from the outset. His work is based on the belief that it is nevertheless important to continue trying. It is an oeuvre that sees in painting a model of hope and a lifeline—expressing the conviction that painting can be so much more than life. 

Axel Kasseböhmer (1952-2017) lived and worked in Munich. His works have been shown in institutions including Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Guggenheim Museum, New York; ICA, Boston; Kunsthalle, St. Gallen; Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf; Kunstverein München; Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Axel Kasseböhmer’s paintings are in various collections including MoMA, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt and Pinakotheken, Munich.

Sprüth Magers 
Oranienburger Straße 18, 10178 Berlin
www.spruethmagers.com

Anthony McCall @ Sprüth Magers, London

Anthony McCall
Sprüth Magers, London
February 22 - March 31, 2018

Sprüth Magers presents a solo exhibition by British born, New York based, Anthony McCall, to coincide with a major survey of his work at The Hepworth Wakefield. On view in the lower galleries is the solid-light work Meeting You Halfway II (2009), as well as a selection of large-scale silver gelatin photographs from Smoke Screen (2017)—an entirely new series that marks a departure in the artist’s practice. 

Anthony McCall began his career in the UK making landscape performances and performative film and photographic works, before moving to New York in 1973. The same year, he initiated the solid light series with his seminal Line Describing a Cone, in which a volumetric form composed of projected light slowly evolves in three-dimensional space. He became associated with the London Filmmakers Cooperative in the 1970s and showed work there including the five hour solid-light installation Long Film for Four Projectors. 

After a long hiatus, Anthony McCall returned to his solid light works in the early 2000s, and began a new series. He moved to digital animation which enabled him to animate more complex interactions, and he used haze machines to ensure the visibility of his projected forms. He began making vertical as well as horizontally oriented installations. These immersive, sensory installations could be said to occupy the liminal spaces between sculpture, cinema and drawing. 

In the basement gallery, Meeting You Halfway II (2009) projects two identical partial ellipses, that expand and contract at different speeds, angles and proportions from each other. Occasionally the forms and mobile planes of light align perfectly, but only ever for a fraction of a second. Visitors are encouraged to actively manipulate the changing light constellation by physically passing through it, thereby navigating the shifting environment within the exhibition space. The dialogic nature of Meeting You Halfway II is characteristic of the immersive and participatory conditions that are so celebrated in Anthony McCall’s oeuvre. 

On view in the lower-ground space are five photographs from Anthony McCall’s newest series, Smoke Screen (2017). These photographic studies are meditations on the “smoke” that has been central to Anthony McCall’s practice during the near-fifty years since he developed Landscape for Fire (1972-1974) and started the solid light series of the 1970s. Until now, this crucial component of the artist’s practice has not been explored formally in isolation. Smoke Screen had its roots in Swell (2015), an installation that Anthony McCall made for the Nevada Art Museum. The forms within the photographic series, though close to one another, reveal the striking evolution of the smoke’s drift, capturing its mesmerizing meteorological effect in two-dimensional form. Unlike many of Anthony McCall’s earlier graphic series, Smoke Screen is non-sequential and each image is autonomous. Two further works from the series, as well as a number of solid light works, are on view in Anthony McCall: Solid Light Works at The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, from 16th February to 3rd June 2018. 

Anthony McCall (b. 1946, London) lives and works in New York city. He was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in 2008. Solo shows include Nevada Museum of Art, Reno (2016), Lac Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano (2015), Sean Kelly Gallery, New York (2015), Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam (2014), Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Hamburg (2013), Les Abattoirs, Toulouse (2013), Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen (2013), Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louise, Missouri (2013), Galerie Martine Aboucaya, Paris (2013), Project Room, New York (2012), Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne (2012), Tate Modern, London (2012), MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2011). Group shows include Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2016), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016), Neon Foundation, Athens (2016), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2015), Museum of Contemporary Art, Sidney (2015), Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz (2014), Hayward Gallery, London (2013), The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles (2012), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2009). 

Sprüth Magers, London
7A Grafton Street, London, W1S 4EJ
www.spruethmagers.com

Robert Irwin @ Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles

Robert Irwin
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles 
Through April 21, 2018 

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Robert Irwin’s work, both to the art history of his native Southern California and across contemporary art more broadly. In the late 1960s, he shifted focus from creating traditional art objects to producing sculptures and installations that explore perception and the very conditions of art viewing. Irwin has continued to push the boundaries of artistic practice into the twenty-first century through installations precisely conditioned to the sites they occupy, both inside and outside the walls of cultural institutions. It is with great pleasure that Sprüth Magers announces its first exhibition with the artist, several years in the making, on view at the Los Angeles gallery. It is the first large-scale presentation of Irwin's work in Los Angeles since 2011. 

In keeping with Robert Irwin’s experimental approach to light, space, and the phenomenological experience of the viewer, the artist has produced an immersive installation comprising an arrangement of scrims that responds directly to the architectural layout and visual qualities of Sprüth Magers’ modernist interior. As he wrote in Artforum in 2016, “The scrim is a great material; it both is there and it’s not.” Irwin has used scrim since the early 1970s as a means to alter viewers’ experience of their environment; by stretching it to create new interior walls and pathways, he deploys a simple material to shift space in radical ways. 

At Sprüth Magers, the gallery’s interior walls have been removed, exposing the large windows that surround the 5,000-square-foot exhibition space for the first time since the gallery opened in 2016. Inside this glass box, slender pillars are placed along the building’s architectural grid and around its central load- bearing column. Robert Irwin’s semitransparent white scrim connects several of the pillars to form impenetrable, but see-through, chambers that reach to the ceiling. If Robert Irwin’s scrims are understood as a vertical axis, a series of black squares cuts through them along a horizontal one, via tinted squares on the gallery’s windows, square spray-painted atop the scrims, and a row of square black paintings lining one remaining gallery wall. These recurring shapes create visual sight lines that link interior and exterior, moving from the nuances Robert Irwin’s site-conditioned installation to the bustle of cars and pedestrians moving along Wilshire Boulevard, visible through the tinted glass. Viewers moving through this layered space, from different angles and at different times of day, have distinctly attuned experiences. 

On the gallery’s second level, several of the dynamics at play on the floor below are inverted. Newly constructed walls block out most of the room’s windows, and surrounding a central wall of black scrim, four of Irwin’s fluorescent light sculptures emanate shades of reds, pale greens and yellows, and soft whites. Irwin constructs these works using rows of vertical neon tubes, tinting them using theatrical gels, electrical tape and spray paint, and lining their colors into symmetrical patterns. The artist’s evocative titles (Faust and Misty Miss Christy, for example, the latter named for singer June Christy) add an additional hint of narrative potential to the sculptures’ otherwise minimalist, industrial forms. 

Visible only in natural light, during daylight hours, the exhibition at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, will highlight Robert Irwin’s long-standing investigations into the subtle, yet significant ways in which the spaces we navigate affect our understanding of and relationship to the world around us. 

ROBERT IRWIN (b. 1928, Long Beach, California) has been working at the forefront of modern and contemporary art for the last six decades. Major solo exhibitions include All the Rules Will Change at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2016), Primaries and Secondaries at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2007), and a large-scale retrospective organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, that traveled to the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Reina Sofía, Madrid (1993-1995). Since the early 1970s, Irwin has created site-conditioned installations at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and La Jolla; and the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, among many others. The artist has also designed major architectural and environmental installations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Dia:Beacon, and the Getty Center. The recipient of numerous awards, including the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture (2009), a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (1984), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1976), Robert Irwin lives in San Diego. 

The exhibition Robert Irwin: Site Determined is on view concurrently at the University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach, through April 15, 2018. 

Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles
5900 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036
www.spruethmagers.com