Laurie Reid, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco - New Work

Laurie Reid: New Work

Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco

September 6 - October 20, 2001

The STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY presents the exhibition of new works on paper by LAURIE REID.

Laurie Reid's quietly powerful and elegant paintings are meditations on beauty and abstraction, metaphor and process.  Laurie Reid has a unique approach to making watercolors.  Unlike traditional watercolorists, Reid embraces the sculptural effects created by the buckling and puckering of barely pigmented water on white sheets of paper.  The results invite the viewer to be slowly swept up and taken by the lines and curves on the paper.

Those familiar with Laurie Reid's work may be surprised to learn that she used to paint traditional watercolors of still lifes.  Her interest shifted away from representation as subject matter towards line and the effects of water on paper.  Reid explores the ways in which water, atmosphere, gravity, paper and pigment intersect and how they interact with one another.

LAURIE REID (b. 1964, Minneapolis, MN) was included in the "2000 Biennial Exhibition" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.  She was a 1998 SECA Art Award recipient (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) and as a result was given an exhibition at SFMOMA.  She was one of ten artists selected for the "1999 Biennial" at the Orange County Museum of Art.  Laurie Reid's work made its first appearance in New York in 1996 at The Drawing Center.  She will be included in "Marked: Bay Area Drawings" at Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Galley at Hunter College in September 2001.  Laurie Reid's work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Berkeley Art Museum among others.

STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.wirtzgallery.com

Todd Hido, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco - New Photographs

Todd Hido: New Photographs

Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco

July 7 - September 1, 2001

The STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY presents an exhibition of new photographs by TODD HIDO.

Todd Hido's exterior scenes reflect the artist's interest in the themes of home, family, and memory. His photographs, taken at night, depict anonymous suburban dwellings with their windows glowing in the soft darkness. Using only available light and long exposures, he creates highly detailed and richly saturated images. Throughout these color images there is an unsettling feeling of isolation and unease. Hido captures a haunting suburbia through the absence of people and the careful modulation of light and color. They allude to imagined domestic narratives taking place inside which rely on the viewer to complete. Hido is not passing judgements on these domestic scenes but rather acts as a detached voyeur.

Todd Hido's first book, "House Hunting", an over-sized color monograph combining both his exterior night shots and interior images of foreclosed homes, was recently published by Nazraeli Press. 

TODD HIDO (b.1968, Kent, OH) received his M.F.A. with High Distinction from California College of Arts and Crafts in 1996 and his B.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University. His work was recently included in "Immodest Gazes" at the Fundacio "la Caixa" in Barcelona and "Of the Moment: Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Todd Hido will be exhibiting this Fall at Julie Saul Gallery in New York, and at Inman Gallery in Houston.

STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.wirtzgallery.com

Masahisa Fukase: The Unpublished Works, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco

Masahisa Fukase 

The Unpublished Works 

Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco 

May 30 - June 30, 2001

The STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY presents an exhibition of unpublished photographs by Japanese photographer, MASAHISA FUKASE.

The negatives from which this current body of work was produced were recently discovered at a country home where Masahisa Fukase spent time away from the pressures of Tokyo. These eclectic images, never exhibited before, represent a playfulness rarely found in this artist's work.

Masahisa Fukase is considered to be both a legend and an enigma in his native Japan. For a culture that is traditionally reluctant to expose emotion in public, the expressionistic character of Fukase's work was, in part, the result of the development of the generation that evolved after WWII.

Masahisa Fukase was born in 1934, growing up in a decade of the first Japanese children in which mannered self-control was not the ideal civic behavior. This new perspective, coupled with the effects of war, exploded into the avant-garde art scene in Tokyo. Inelegant printing techniques emerged and the manic style of photography that Fukase shared with his contemporaries, among them Eikoh Hosoe, Daidoh Moriyama, and Shomei Tomatsu, reflected the "reaction to a world turned upside down."

Masahisa Fukase's work was included in the important 1986 exhibition Black Sun: The Eyes of Four, which traveled from The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England, to The Philadelphia Museum of Art. This show brought Masahisa Fukase's work, as well as the other three contemporary Japanese photographers, to the attention of the American art world. He recently exhibited at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, France as well as the Foundation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris.

STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.wirtzgallery.com

Raymond Saunders, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco - Paintings & Works on Paper

Raymond Saunders 

Paintings & Works on Paper

Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco 

April 19 - May 26, 2001

The STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY presents an exhibition of new work by RAYMOND SAUNDERS.

Raymond Saunders' masterfully constructed assemblages have a fresh and spontaneous quality that juxtaposes words and images from world culture with his personal artistic interests and preoccupations. Saunders' keen sense of composition, form, and texture is balanced by his erudite use of color. His surfaces are spattered with expressionistic swaths of paint, richly colored, with delicately drawn figures, or inscribed with chalked words, names, and numbers. Saunders often uses materials from daily life such as handbills, comics, signs, old doors, which he has culled from his frequent travels. There is an abundance of invented and appropriated imagery and iconography which reference race, war, family, religion, poverty, wealth, people, and places amongst other subject matter. His powerful painting and fluid, spirited compositions combine to give the works a dense and engrossing narrative power.

One cannot analyze Raymond Saunders' works without the ability to move within the ebb and flow of his evolving and ever-changing aesthetic. Saunders merges an improvisational, intuitive element in his paintings with a carefully conceptualized component that draws the viewer in.

RAYMOND SAUNDERS (b.1934, Pittsburgh, PA) studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania, earning a B.F.A. at Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1960. In 1961, he received a M.F.A. from California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. He has received such awards as the Prix de Rome, 1964-1966, and National Endowment for the Arts Award in 1977 and 1984, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976. Raymond Saunders has had solo exhibitions at The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, Seattle Art Museum, Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA, Hunter College, New York, amongst others. His work is included in such museum collections as The Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.wirtzgallery.com

Catherine Wagner: Selections, 1980-2000, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco

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

Deborah Oropallo: Material Handling, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco

Deborah Oropallo: Material Handling

Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco

January 3 - February 24, 2001

The STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY presents an exhibition of new work by DEBORAH OROPALLO.

Colorful, life-size industrial containers and equipment fill the canvases of Deborah Oropallo's new series of paintings. Stacked metal drums and buckets with words such as "SALVAGE" painted across them are found at a chemical storage facility near to where Oropallo resides. There is an inherent contrast within the objects' unexpected beauty and structure, and the unknown substances which they contain. The underlying tension of elements of safety and survival combined with the formal aesthetic is a theme found in much of Deborah Oropallo's current and past work.

Deborah Oropallo uses a process in these paintings that she has not previously employed. She has taken digital photographs from which large Iris prints have been made, and then silkscreened over them to create textural, layered surfaces. She also uses silkscreening as a literal strategy to partially veil her imagery and offer the viewer a distanced glimpse through a screen. Unlike the previous body of work, the 2-dimensional objects in these canvases have profound volume and depth. Oropallo has a remarkable ability of transforming ordinary objects into visually resonant abstractions.

DEBORAH OROPALLO (b.1954, Hackensack, NJ) will have a traveling survey exhibition opening at the San Jose Museum of Art in October 2001, accompanied by a 120-page catalogue with essay by Jeff Kelley. Her work is currently featured in San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Celebrating Modern Art: The Anderson Collection.  Deborah Oropallo received her M.A. and B.F.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work has been included in the 1989 Whitney Biennial, as well as the Corcoran Gallery of Art's 1993 Biennial Exhibition.

STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.wirtzgallery.com

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

Kathryn Spence, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco - New Works

Kathryn Spence: New Works

Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco

October 5 - November 11, 2000

The STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY presents an exhibition of new works by KATHRYN SPENCE.

Kathryn Spence's work explores the relationship between our emotional and physical comfort and the way it relates to our surroundings. Spence's pieces and installations involve the piling, layering, and thus transformation of previously used and cast off materials and encourages us to look at these pieces made from trash, mud, string etc. in a new context.

For this exhibition, Kathryn Spence has created installations that suggest the transformative aspects of sorting, organizing and cleaning. The new installation plays with aspects of scale and the relationship between the real and the made, the specific and the arbitrary, the concrete and the abstract. Amongst the exhibited works will be small squirrels and piles made from various cloths and materials, as well as birds, sparrows and robins made out of street trash, wire and string. In recent past exhibitions, Spence made Mud Animals that were literally coated with layers of dirt from her garden and appeared to be dejected and leaden. The effect is one that elicits both pathos and a sense of humanity. Her created objects are made to look both vulnerable and fragile by her use of ephemeral materials.

KATHRYN SPENCE (b.1963, Stuttgart, Germany) received her M.F.A. from Mills College in 1993. She has participated in such recent exhibitions as "Of the Moment: Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection", at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, "Skin-Deep: Surface and Appearance in Contemporary Art", at The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, The 1999 Biennial Exhibition at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach and "Present Tense: Nine Artists in the Nineties" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Kathryn Spence had her first solo museum exhibition at The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in 1999, and will have a solo show at The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in Spring 2001.

STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.wirtzgallery.com

Kathrin Van Dyke & Nancy Rexroth, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco - New Paintings & Iowa. Photographs (1970-1976)

Kathrin Van Dyke: New Paintings

Nancy Rexroth: Iowa. Photographs (1970-1976)

Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco

September 6 - 30, 2000

The STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY presents exhibitions of photographs by NANCY REXROTH and new paintings by KATHRYN VAN DYKE.

In the main gallery, are exhibited the intimate, vintage black & white photographs from Nancy Rexroth's series, IOWA. Rexroth used a "Diana" camera (a plastic toy camera) for this six-year long project. These selenium and gold toned prints are vignettes that unlock the Midwestern atmospheres of her childhood. Nancy Rexroth discovered the Iowa of the past in the Ohio of the present where she currently resides. Her photographs are subjective and autobiographical, finding children in the act of flying, old white houses that wave and shutter, and her mother.

NANCY REXROTH (b.1946, Washington, D.C.) has had numerous solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Her photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institution, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, among others. Rexroth was represented by Light Gallery in New York during the 70's and 80's.

In the small gallery, new, richly textured paintings by KATHRYN VAN DYKE are exhibited. Van Dyke was the recent recipient of the SECA Art Award (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art, an auxiliary of SFMOMA) and will have an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in February 2001.

Kathryn Van Dyke's interests lie in structure, texture, form, and color. She seeks contradictory spaces and multiple perspectives. For instance, she has painted a number of works using metallic paint resulting in the surface shifting and changing according to the viewer's perspective. Her juxtapositions create situations and forms that are unstable, ephemeral. In her painting she looks for a kind of disorientation, followed by a reorientation into a place that we have never seen but that is familiar to us.

KATHRYN VAN DYKE (b.1957, Wisconsin) received her M.F.A. from Yale School of Art in 1993. Her work has been in numerous shows including the "1997 Bay Area Now show" at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and more recently at The Lab and Four Walls.

STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.wirtzgallery.com