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JESSICA BACKHAUS I WANTED TO SEE THE WORLD September 9 – October 30, 2010 Laurence Miller Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in the United States of Berlin-based photographer Jessica Backhaus. This mid-career survey features fifty images selected from her four published monographs. In Fall 2005 her first book, Jesus and the Cherries, was published by Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg. This book was a portrait of a Polish village virtually frozen in time, where religious iconography and the new refrigerator shared equal importance in the living room. Fall 2008 brought two new books, also from Kehrer Verlag: What Still Remains, a series on the objects we leave behind and the stories they tell about us, and a second book, One Day in November, a visual homage to Jessica's long-time friend and mentor, Gisèle Freund, who would have become 100 years old that December. Her most recent book, I Wanted to See the World, will be published on the occasion of her show in New York. The book features forty photographs taken in Venice and Burano, Italy, in which the play of light and color on the rippling waters of the canals create marvelous, sensuous, and playful abstractions. The foremost quality imbued in all of Backhaus's work is a powerful sense of color. Everything she records comes to life and invites the viewer to enter her luscious world, whether it be a jar of cherries, a hot-pink plastic ribbon tied repeatedly on a pole, raindrops on a car window, or dancing reflections on water. Jessica Backhaus has exhibited widely in Europe, including: the Martin Gropius-Bau, Berlin; The Photographers Gallery, London; Fotohof, Salzburg, Austria; and the National Portrait Gallery, London. Peter Bialobrzeski, Paradise Now #18, 2008 PAST (PRESENT) FUTURE II July 8 - August 19, 2010 Opening July 8 Laurence Miller Gallery will feature highlights from our previous exhibition season, along with a preview of the season to come. One of New York City's greatest treasures is the sheer number of galleries showing art, and trying to see everything they have to offer is one of her greatest frustrations. In addition, museums, non-profits, teaching institutions and graduate shows compete for visibility, making it easy to miss even the most highly-publicized shows. For this reason, we have chosen to dedicate a portion of the summer schedule to the best of our shows that were wonderfully conceived and received, and a preview of those that are on the horizon. Highlights from upcoming shows include water imagery from Jessica Backhaus's series I Wanted to See the World; a selection of images from Ojos Privados (Private Eyes), Laurence Miller's private collection; and images by Bruce Wrighton in anticipation of his upcoming exhibition and monograph. Highlights of the season gone by will include: color and black-and-white photographs by Helen Levitt from her acclaimed Memorial Tribute show, along with First Proofs from the equally acclaimed New York Photographs city-wide initiative; a new landscape by Peter Bialobrzeski from his series Paradise Now, referencing our Abstracted Landscape show; extraordinary Metzkers from the AutoMagic show, along with an important and newly-acquired Nude Composite from 1966 also by Metzker; an image from Stephane Couturier's extraordinary Barcelona Parallel series; a rare Maggie Taylor Girl with a Bee Dress; exhilarating images from the major debut of Denis Darzacq's Hyper series; and of course the wildly popular Philippe Halsman's JUMP In this age of so little time to see so much, the Past (Present) Future shows give us the opportunity to continue to keep our artists in the public eye, reward viewers who did not catch things the first time around, and offer a preview of extraordinary things to come. View exhibition EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE: Animal Locomotion July 8 - August 19, 2010 From July 8 through August 19, Laurence Miller Gallery will present a selection of original collotypes by Eadweard Muybridge that are among the most significant precursors to contemporary motion pictures. As both detailed scientific study and whimsical artistic expression, popular with 20^th century artists and horse lovers as well, these animal and human motion studies appear as fresh today as when first published in Philadelphia in 1887. No wonder artists as diverse as Sol Lewitt, Edgar Degas, and Francis Bacon have been enthralled by this groundbreaking work. Among the animals featured in this exhibition will be a vulture, a camel, a horse and rider, a cat, a donkey, and a mastiff. Among the humans recorded will be boxers, fencers, a contortionist, a woman spilling water, a hand in motion, a naked man performing ballet. All in all, the show is a reminder of why so many people remain enthralled by Muybridge’s studies and continue to be inspired and influenced by him. Major holdings of these collotypes are in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., The George Eastman House in Rochester, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, which is featuring a major retrospective of Muybridge through the summer. View exhibition BARBARA BLONDEAU: Permutations June 3 - July 1, 2010 Barbara Blondeau: Permutations is a long-awaited sequel to our first Blondeau show in 1984, among the very first exhibitions held at Laurence Miller Gallery. Our first exhibition centered on her time/motion panoramic prints, which she made from 1968-1972. This was a series stimulated by an accident, when her camera’s shutter froze in the open position, and the resulting roll of exposed film produced one continuous negative. Barbara immediately began to explore the possiblities from this accident, and produced an important group of elongated prints in which the entire roll of film was treated as a single image. Encouraged by her close friend Ray Metzker, both graduates from the Institute of Design in Chicago, Barbara experimented with many techniques and approaches until her death from cancer in 1974. Permutations will feature three series. Her 1968-72 time/motion panoramas; her gritty 1970 street scenes printed as large positive images on orthochromatic film, presented over silver and gold backgrounds; and her “Black Border Series” from 1974, in which her awareness of her imminent death is inescapable. We are grateful to the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, which houses her archive, for making these duplicate prints available to the gallery and to our clients. View exhibition JAN DZIACZKOWSKI "Keine Grenze"/ No Borders June 3 - July 1, 2010 In his small scale collages, Polish artist Jan Dziaczkowski (b.1983, Warsaw) imagines what the great cities and capitals of Western Europe would look like if the Iron Curtain had been drawn in Spain or Portugal rather than along the Elbe. Armed with a razor, scissors, glue and a fanciful imagination, Dziaczkowski creates fantastic urbanscapes from postcards designed for tourists onto which he has inserted images of socialist buildings. In choosing iconic, elegant and classical examples of Western architecture to contrast with the rigid and unyielding socialist architecture, he sends a loud message for artistic and political freedom in a small and quiet picture. Jan Dziaczkowski graduated from The Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, in 2007. View exhibition Laurence Miller Interview: Tendencias del Mercado del Arte, May 2010 Laurence Miller's interview (pdf)

Artist Updates 5/24/10

Jessica Backhaus will have her first U.S. one-person show at Laurence Miller Gallery this coming September and October, 2010. She will also be included in the exhibition Frozen in Tension at the Alexander Tutsek Foundation, Munich, Germany. On view through January 2011.

Helen Levitt's classic New York photographs may be seen in various museum shows this year. Currently, she is included in the exhibition Street Seen, at the Milwaukee Museum of Art through April 25. Her later color photographs are featured in the show, Starburst: Color Photography 1970-1980 at the Cincinnati Art Museum through May 9th. Beginning May 7th, she will be a part of the MoMA group exhibition, Pictures By Women: A History of Modern Photography running through March 21, 2011.

Ray K. Metzker and David Plowden will be included in the group exhibition Chicago Cabinet: Views from the Street at the Art Institute of Chicago. On view from October 16, 2010 through January 16, 2011.

Art Fairs

Paris Photo November 18 - 21, 2010 more information

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