Roland Fischer @ Von Lintel Gallery

This Thursday, May 22nd, marks the opening of Roland Fischer’s exhibition at Von Lintel Gallery. The show will feature photographs from a number of Roland’s series, including Facades and Chinese Pool Portraits. The exhibition runs from May 22 through June 28, 2008.

The Von Lintel Gallery sent out the following press release for the exhibition:

Von Lintel Galley is pleased to present an exhibition of new photographs by German photographer Roland Fischer.

Including outstanding new additions to his Facades series and striking Chinese Pool Portraits, an offshoot of his well-received Los Angeles Portraits series, the works in this show exemplify the
new territory Fischer continues to explore in his unflagging examination of the formal aspects of photography.

Whether photographing buildings for his Facades, or people for his Pool Portraits, Fischer focuses
our attention directly on a specific entity. In the case of the buildings, Fischer fills the frame of his viewfinder with their facades, stripping them of the distracting visual cacophony that normally
surrounds them. Isolated so, their vivid colors and dramatic geometries demonstrate a striking formalism and visual punch that call to mind a photographic version of modernist abstract painting. Fischer’s human subjects are also visually isolated, with only their heads and shoulders visible above the un-modulated blue of a still, indoor pool. De-contextualizing them this way, and portraying them with crystalline clarity, Fischer pointedly concentrates the viewer’s awareness of the individuality of the building or person. Each picture is imbued with the feeling that it holds captive the spirit of its subject, and thus, his photographs transcend mere documentation and border on the sublime.

Born in 1958, Munich based photographer Roland Fischer is a key figure in contemporary German
photography. Photo Technik International named him one of Germany’s top ten photographers alongside Demand, Gursky, Ruff, and Struth. His work has been the subject of many national and international exhibitions and is included in numerous public collections, such as at the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich; Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp; Saarland Museum, Saarbrücken and the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Grand Rapids.

For more information, please visit www.vonlintel.com.

New Durham Press prints @ Marty Walker Gallery

Tonight marks the opening of Recent Prints by Polly Apfelbaum, Roland Fischer, Beatriz Milhazes, James Nares and Alison Elizabeth Taylor at Marty Walker Gallery in Dallas, Texas. All of the prints in the show are recent projects completed at Durham Press, and for Roland Fischer’s Facades on Paper III, James Nares’ GO and Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s Idylls, this is the first time they will have ever been exhibited outside of the print fairs. The show runs from March 29th to May 3rd, 2008 with an opening reception tonight, March 29th, from 5-8 pm. For more information, please visit www.martywalkergallery.com and click on “Current Exhibition.”

The Marty Walker Gallery website features the following press release for the show:

Marty Walker Gallery presents recent prints from Durham Press. Celebrating its 20th anniversary, Durham Press has earned a reputation for impeccable quality among artists, dealers and curators worldwide. A fine art print publisher based in a turn-of-the century schoolhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the Press has published and produced over one hundred limited edition contemporary prints with influential artists from around the world. Its projects have been placed with major museums and contemporary art collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Press is a member of the IFPDA. This exhibition features extraordinary new prints by Polly Apfelbaum, Roland Fischer, Beatriz Milhazes, James Nares, and Alison Elizabeth Taylor.

Polly Apfelbaum’s new multicolor wood-block prints recall the artist’s marker on silk-rayon velvet wall pieces, part Josef Albers, part Gene Davis, with the same pop sensibility that informed her flower series. The woodblock monoprint in the exhibit consists of a composition of stripes featuring a spectrum of up to eighty colors. Apfelbaum’s ubiquitous stripes simultaneously address color theory, fashion, pop culture, and rhythm, revealing themselves as both cliché yet iconic. Apfelbaum’s work is included in numerous museum collections, including the Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, and Magasin 3 Stockholm, Sweden.

Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes embraces motifs that might become kitschy in less skilled hands. Heavily influenced by both the botanical gardens outside her studio and her sister’s dance company, the flirtatious colors and festive patterns are steeped in carnivalesque rhythms and landscape of her native Brazil. Milhazes has exhibited extensively, showing at the 2006 Shanghai Biennial and the 2004 Venice Biennale. Milhazes has work included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanzawa, Japan, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sophia Madrid, Spain.

For James Nares, painting is a sort of ritual process. A finished work, comprised of a single “perfect” brushstroke, in some ways relates to Asian calligraphy. However, unlike working with ink on paper, open to the caprices of chance, Nares reworks canvases over and over until a precise gesture appears capturing the perfect brush stroke. Born in England, Nares has worked and lived in New York since 1974. Nares work is included in many collections, including Albright Knox Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

German photographer Roland Fischer photographs sections of buildings’ façades in such a way as to flatten their geometry and create two-dimensional abstract compositions that are simple and starkly beautiful. Closely cropped buildings allude to both abstract painting and portraiture, purposefully concealing the context and size of large buildings in order emphasize their unique decorative and geometric patterns. Work by Fischer is included in collections, such as the Margulies Family Collection, Merrill Lynch London, Microsoft, and Museo Municipal de Arte Contemporáneo de Madrid, among others.

And in the OTHER GALLERY, recent Columbia graduate, Alison Elizabeth Taylor masterfully works ambiguous scenes of small-town adolescent angst in a suite of screenprints published by Durham Press making their exhibition debut at Marty Walker Gallery. In this suite, Taylor continues to portray suburban small-town scenes of mischief, boredom, and awkwardness, among barren landscapes and tacky interiors. Taylor’s narratives are sharp social critiques displaying the banal and the abject in her dystopic vision of modern life. Taylor’s mundane landscapes are executed in the antiquated medium of marquetry (wood veneer inlay), for a solo exhibit at James Cohan Gallery, May 22 -June 21st, 2008.

Roland Fischer @ Walter Storms Galerie, Munich

Friend and Durham Press artist, Roland Fischer, is currently showing his Chinese Pool Portraits at the Walter Storms Galerie in Munich, Germany.

The press release from the show states, “With the Chinese Pool Portraits Roland Fischer modifies his internationally successful series from the 1990s, Los Angeles Portraits. Photographed in Beijing and Shanghai the shown women (and few men) come from all parts of China. Now the busts of the portrayed surrounded by the blue monochrome surface of the water, are not taken up any more exclusively en face. The postures of the head and postures vary, the looks are directed inside or visionary in the distance. The persons in the Chinese Pool Portraits seem isolated individuals, without tips to social standing or occupation. Where Asians are similar, otherwise, from western view, Fischer succeeds in introducing individual personalities to the viewer. The Chinese Pool Portraits represent in her totality the energy and the unconditional, powerful wish of the young generation of proud and forward striving people with absolute self-confidence. We had an exciting première with the Chinese Pool Portraits in a one man show on the new art fair “ShContemporary” in Shanghai. Enlarged with new motives we show the work group now for the first time in Munich.”

The week after Polly finished up at the Press, Roland Fischer (and his assistant Matthias) flew in to continue working on Roland’s third portfolio of Facades on Paper. The Facades are “portraits” (as Roland calls them) of architectural exteriors, and, through the screenprinting process, the formal, geometric quality of Roland’s photographs is elevated, resulting in images that evoke abstract painting and minimalist photography in equal measure. In the image below, JP and Roland are discussing the proofs of the eight facades to be included in the new portfolio.

While Roland was out at the Press, he had a bit of downtime, and he spent a great deal of it talking to friends in China using his Skype internet calling system. Through the webcam feature, they were able to see what was going on at the Press and Roland could see what was going on in their location. At lunch time, the crew at the Press tends to gather under the tree out back (the one Roland is sitting under in the photo below), and, if Roland was in the middle of a call at lunchtime, he would set the computer up on the table and his friend in China would have lunch with all of us.