RWFA ARTISTS IN THE NEWS - GREAT START TO 2013

We are very pleased to share the following reviews for our artists:

 

Paola FERRARIO: Signs & Remains is reviewed in the January 7, 2013 issue of The New Yorker

and in Art In America

and in Photograph Magazine 

The exhibition is now extended to February 2, 2013.

Alyse ROSNER: Her exhibition of large scale paintings at Artspace, New Haven is reviewed in Art New England

 

Laurie LAMBRECHT: China, 2009 was reviewed in the December 2012 issue of ARTNews

NOW ON VIEW: PAOLA FERRARIO: SIGNS & REMAINS

 

November 16 – January 12, 2013 (NOW EXTENDED THROUGH FEBRUARY 2, 2013)

Everyone has a camera today. Pencils and paper, once the tools used to jot down reminders and memories have been supplanted by the cellphone camera. Language is evolving from the written word to the impromptu snapshot. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook reach hundreds, thousands, millions, in a flash. The work of Paola Ferrario trades our conceit for the formal expectations of art photographs for a uniquely personal impression of the world. Her pictures are an intensely quixotic and obsessive catalogue of discarded, distended details painstakingly gathered like orphans amidst a crowd of clearer appeal. It is the quietude in her pictures that make them so compelling. If we expect things to happen in photographs then her pictures will disappoint. Her surgical distillation of any occurrence makes them reverberate with the suggested rhythms of an unseen world, the ghostly shadows of what passed by. To imply action she strings sister images together based on their own oddities, their own uniqueness. Ferrario’s photographs celebrate the cry of the anonymous, the stance of one against a mob. They are as selfless as pictures can be without fading away. Paola Ferrario’s subjects belong to no one and everyone, and are found everywhere. Beyond her sly humor, there is the melancholic pang of abandonment, the trash and detritus of post-modern, pre-apocalyptic culture, the signs and remains of which appear to anyone willing to look.

511 West 25th Street, Suite 205
(212) 255-5560
Gallery hours:
Tuesday - Friday 10:00 - 6:00; Saturday 11:00 - 6:00

Upcoming Exhibition: Laurie LAMBRECHT: China, 2009

September 20 – November 3, 2012

Rick Wester Fine Art opens the fall season with a survey of Laurie Lambrecht’s photographs from China created in 2009. Well known for her artists’ portrait studies, these Asian works are revelatory, but they shouldn’t be. Long attuned to landscape imagery, Ms. Lambrecht photographed at the edge of Lake Zurich, Switzerland, from 2004 to 2008 resulting in the autumnal Lake Trees, a series of images seemingly predicting the Asian work. The chance coincidence of the first comprehensive exhibition of paintings by Luo Ping at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that October led to an affinity with the painter’s sparse and graphically bold portrayal of space. China, 2009 is the result of a Western photographer’s lifelong devotion to nature and art and her distinct talent for melding history with her own eye. As intrepid a body of work as her extended portrait of Roy Lichtenstein from twenty years earlier, they retain the delicate descriptions of Lake Trees while being bold statements of form and color. China, 2009 further defines Ms. Lambrecht as an inventive imagemaker capable of reimagining the world through her own distinct vision.

Joni Sternbach

Kassia #5, (10.02.11), 2010

Rick Wester Fine Art is very pleased to announce our first exhibition of photographs by Joni Sternbach, selected from her series SurfLand, a project started in 2006 and punctuated by the PhotoLucida publication of the same name in 2009. SurfLand, Revisited, 2006-2011 is its first showing in New York City and brings together images from the monograph with more recent works.

Sternbach has dedicated much of the past six years making portraits of surfers and their community employing the archaic, elaborate and fascinating wet-plate collodion process commonly known as tintype. Redolent of the Civil War era when the process was first developed, the images are ghostly and vibrant, ancient and modern, sturdy yet precious. Produced directly on the plates themselves, they are unique objects, adding to the aura of rarity they exude. Her subjects pose with their boards, taking on a totemic, primal tool-like quality, as if their lives are supremely reliant on them.

With their atmosphere of beach and sun and the laid back lifestyle of her subjects, it is tempting to mistake SurfLand for a strange brand of snapshot. Yet it is precisely in the ease with which Sternbach collects her evidence and in the abundance of detail that her vision is found. Perhaps taking her cue from the surfers she befriends, the images from SurfLand belie the exact balance, skill and daring it takes to effortlessly ride the wave of photographic invention.

SurfLand has been exhibited broadly in museums and university galleries, most recently at the Southeast Museum of Photography. While the trade edition of Surfland is no longer available from the publisher, a limited number of copies, including slipcased, limited edition copies signed by the photographer will be be available at the gallery.

Prices, images and information available by request to Daryl Cooper at +1 (212) 255-5560 or rwfa@rickwesterfineart.com.

Rick Wester Fine Art at AIPAD NEW YORK

Rick Wester Fine Art will be exhibiting at the annual AIPAD (Association of International Photography Art Dealers) Photography Show from March 28 - April 1, 2012 at Booth 206 at the Park Avenue Armory. Tickets are available at the official website.

RWFA will present works by Avedon, Brandt, Callahan, Evans, Fifield, Gowin, Harper, Lambrecht, Meatyard, Michals, Penn, Schles, Serrano, Sherman, Shore, Sternbach, Vogt, and Winogrand.

Booksignings will be held at our booth (206) on Saturday, March 31. At 1pm, Ken Schles will sign Oculus (Noorderlicht, 2011) and at 3pm, Laurie Lambrecht will sign Roy Lichtenstein In His Studio (Monacelli, 2011).