Steve Kahn @ Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York - The Hollywood Suites

Steve Kahn: The Hollywood Suites
Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York 
February 1 - March 17, 2018

STEVE KAHN

The Hollywood Suites Triptych #4, 1976

© Steve Kahn - Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Howard Greenberg Gallery Dedicates this Exhibition to Steve Kahn who sadly passed away on February 1, 2018. 

Juxtaposing nudes and seascapes with architectural interiors, The Hollywood Suites, STEVE KAHN’s enigmatic series of photographs made between 1974 and 1978, is on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery. The series will be the subject of an upcoming exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco opening on September 29, 2018. Steve Kahn is part of a generation of photographers that emerged in Los Angeles in the 1970s, including Robert Heinecken and Lewis Baltz, who deconstructed the medium with a conceptual and abstract approach. 

The Hollywood Suites has been seen in solo exhibitions on the West Coast and in Europe and included in group exhibitions such as The Altered Photograph at P.S. 1 in New York in 1979. The exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery represents the first time the series is on view in a solo show in New York, and is the artist’s first exhibition with the Gallery. A book on the series was published by Nazraeli Press in 2014.

Steve Kahn created this body of work in rent-by-the-day rooms of an old tenement building in a run-down section of Hollywood, California. Looking to create work that spoke to containment and isolation, Steve Kahn began photographing professional bondage models using a Polaroid camera. Later, in his studio, he would copy the Polaroids with 35 mm film, documenting the events he had orchestrated, and initiating a formal process of reproductions and generations. As  SteveKahn notes, “These were situations entered into without a plan, full of anxiety, in the hope of producing some document of the experience that was explicit, visually powerful, yet went beyond what it was.”

STEVE KAHN

The Hollywood Suites (Nudes) #06, 1974-75

© Steve Kahn - Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

STEVE KAHN

The Hollywood Suites (Bound Doors) #5, 1976

© Steve Kahn - Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

One day, the model didn’t show up, and Steve Kahn found that he could explore the same provocative and haunting issues by photographing the room itself. This led to stark images of the walls, windows, mirrors, doors and hallways, which evolved into studies of defined space that became abstract in triptychs and quadrants. Except for certain interventions – adding graphic elements to a few doors with tape, rope, and black yarn – rarely did he manipulate the rooms.

As Steve Kahn wrote, “All of this work was process oriented, having started off as pull-and-peel Polaroids. The work was concerned with formal issues including generations, re-iterations, sequences, and multiple image presentations.” Ultimately Kahn notes, “I took the space apart and reconstructed it. I ended up creating an existential situation for myself.”

STEVE KAHN

Steve Kahn was born in Los Angeles in 1943 and took up photography at an early age, shooting assignments for a local newspaper while still in grade school. In 1968, he took to the streets as a young photojournalist working as a stringer for Time and Newsweek. In 1973, Stasis, a monograph of 22 images, was self-published, marking his departure from traditional photographic concerns. This body of work and other projects that followed reflected his interest in drawing, architecture, and abstraction.

In 1986, Steve Kahn moved to New York to pursue a career as a commercial photographer. During the next 25 years he produced several bodies of personal work including Chemical Plants, 1989, a photo essay shot in petrochemical facilities; Subway Portraits, 2002-03, a response to 9/11; and Brooklyn Shadows, 2006-08, images of barren trees projected onto the raw, urban canvas of concrete and asphalt. Steve Kahn’s books published by Nazraeli Press include The Hollywood Suites 1974-1976 in 2014 and Corridors in 2015. Chemical Plants will to be published in 2019.

HOWARD GREENBERG GALLERY

41 East 57th Street, Suite 1406, New York, NY 10022

www.howardgreenberg.com

Steve Kahn, Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolia

Steve Kahn: The Hollywood Suites
Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolia 
November 10, 2012 - January 5, 2013

Joseph Bellows Gallery presents the first San Diego solo exhibition of Steve Kahn’s critically acclaimed photographs from the 1970s. These pictures, collectively titled "The Hollywood Suites,” were all made in run-down apartments. Alternately provocative and haunting, they were the subject of solo exhibitions on the West Coast and in Europe during that decade and included in noted group exhibitions such as “Exposing: Photographic Definitions” at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in 1976 and “The Altered Photograph” at P.S. 1 in New York in 1979.

The series divides into two groups of pictures. "The Hollywood Suites (nudes)” features sexually charged pictures of young women, often partially clad and sometimes cropped. In “The Hollywood Suites (mirrors, windows and doors),” he concentrated on architectural interiors, making arresting use of windows and doors. The images themselves are grainy and offer an unnaturally sharp contrast between darks and lights. Select examples feature doorways embellished with geometric patterns done in twine.

Of the series, STEVE KAHN comments:

The explorations presented in this portfolio followed a year's work with porno industry models in run-down apartments in the old Hollywood district of Los Angeles. On one occasion, the model didn't show up, and I found that I could investigate the same issues by photographing the room itself - without the models. This discovery led to the next body of work: "The Hollywood Suites (mirrors, windows and doors)". These were studies of the room - exploring the contained through explorations of the container itself. How one takes on the nature of the other...

 It was clear that in the previous work I had been creating existential encounters with the models, confronting my own complex responses to a very loaded situation. By removing the extreme content, I could focus on other, more generic issues. It was time to investigate the immediate environment for the ideas it embodied. What could I learn from the walls and their portals, about the inside and out...?

Steve Kahn, who was born in 1943, was part of an important generation of Los Angeles photographers that included Robert Heinecken, Ilene Segalove and Jerry McMillan, among others. They brought a conceptual and collage approach to the picture. Many were chronicled in the important exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum, Proof: Los Angeles and the Photograph: 1960-1980 and Kahn is also included the 2011 book, L.A. Rising: SoCal Artists Before 1980.

“I've been concentrating on this time period and how it relates to what was going on in Los Angeles at the time,” says Joseph Bellows. “I like the gritty, abstract quality of this work."

Steve Kahn achieved this look in his “Hollywood Suites” by making the original pictures with black and white Polaroid prints, copied onto a grainy 35 mm film and then printed on silver gelatin coated paper. All prints in this forthcoming exhibition were printed in the seventies.

A native of Los Angeles, Steve Kahn worked as a photographer in Los Angeles from 1968 to 1985, after earning a B.A. at Reed College in Oregon. He moved to New York in 1986 and has enjoyed a career as a prominent commercial photographer, with a number of high profile companies as clients. In 1999, Rizzoli published his book “Soho NY,” which documented the area’s historic architecture and its artistic community. 

He was the recipient of a Young Talent Purchase Award from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1979 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship a year later. Kahn is represented in many collections; they include: the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Dallas Museum of Art. He has taught at the California Institute of the Arts and, more recently, at Pratt Institute in New York.

JOSEPH BELLOWS GALLERY
www.josephbellows.com