Friday, September 5, 2008

Exhibition

Last night a one man show of the sequences of Michel Szulc Krzyzanowski opened in the Robert Mann Gallery, 210 eleventh Avenue in New York.
The exhibition can be visited from September 4th to October 18th 2008.


Robert Mann Gallery in New York opens the fall exhibition season with a suite of vintage photographic works by Dutch conceptual artist Michel Szulc-Krzyzanowski. Living out of a trailer in Baja California, Mexico, Szulc-Krzyzanowski engaged in a rigorous study of possibilities opened by combining multiple frames of images into sequences. David Travis, former curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, writing about Szulc-Krzyzanowski's Sequences in 1984 explains,

"We can imagine him to be a magician, who plays tricks on our perceptions with his photographic sleights of hand in order to loosen the strict conventions of our imagination and in the end entertains us. But even in his play he uses the appearance of simultaneity to make the illusion work".

Greatly ahead of his time, Szulc-Krzyzanowski began his sequences in the early 1970s. Embracing the potential for multiple frames to be read together, he deployed a variety of conceptual strategies in these works: alternately invoking the passage or apparent suspension of time. Szulc-Krzyzanowski consistently plays off the structural basis of the frame; particular sequences seem to ignore the parameters of individual exposures—a paradoxical conceit as the printing displays the edges of each negative. In such instances the Sequences are decidedly non-cinematic in their embrace of flatness and simultaneity. While these descriptions might imply otherwise, change is a constant in the Sequences, most often illusively describing movement by maintaining single elements as a constant visual referent—sometimes a part of the artist's body, an object in the foreground or the distant horizon line.

The meaningful thrust of the Sequences derives from their exploration of perception and reception. But they also exhibit a playful inquisitiveness that aligns Szulc-Krzyzanowski with contemporaries such as John Baldessari. Szulc-Krzyzanowski's work represents a process of discovery. In perceiving his images, we cannot help be aware of the performance inherent in their production. We can imagine the artist—the camera almost an extension of his body—on the beach, interrogating perceptual and aesthetic boundaries. Again, in David Travis's words, "It is not so much an experience during time that [Szulc-Krzyzanowski] presents, but rather a conceptual experience concerning time."

Michel Szulc-Krzyzanowski was born in 1949 in Oosterhout, The Netherlands. His work has been exhibited internationally since the early 1970s and is included in numerous major public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Stedelijk Museum.

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For more information about the exhibition of sequences of Michel Szulc Krzyzanowski, click on:

http://www.robertmann.com/exhibitions/current.html




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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's too bad this exhibit announcement didn't include a warning to the uninformed art patrons, that this artist hates everything about the USA, but he will glady take profits from the evil USA.

Anonymous said...

Congratulations.

Pretty amazing that this awful country that you hate not only does not run you out of the country for your published vitriol against her, but provides an exhibition to help further your career.

Just shows the wonder and beauty of the United States and why MOST Americans love her: she gives everyone and anyone the freedom to say whatever they want against her and she STILL offers to all many opportunities to advance personally, academically, and vocationally.

The reason more and more Americans are against Obama the more they find out about him is because he and his party threaten to remove many of our freedoms from us.

Best wishes with your exhibition.