Upcoming Exhibition: Christian Vogt

Dominique/Painting, 2002

Rick Wester Fine Art is very pleased to announce the gallery's first exhibition of work by Christian Vogt, marking the Swiss photographer's return to New York after almost 25 years. Well known in his home country and throughout Europe, Vogt has had a successful career working as an editorial photographer and on commission. He forged his reputation in the 1970s and 80s with a reductive and elegant yet subversive approach to the formal aspects of photography.

Forever the visual jester, his vision is a combination of formal complexity and unusual treatments of classic subjects resulting in surprising and satisfying juxtapositions, creating a pictorial narrative that spreads from picture to picture.

The Flaxen Diary is one such fictional narrative, seemingly distilled from a memoir of adventures and acquaintances observed. The images are as diverse as a Magritte-like cloud suspended over Kauai and an unidentifiable woman in a skin-tight leopard skin pantsuit. She lounges in a perfect living room, disturbed only by a pool of dried candle wax defacing the sculptural glass table before her. Color plays an enormous role in Vogt's photographic inventions, being at once serene and subtle yet strikingly on point in bending reality. Surreal twists are employed throughout The Flaxen Diary, as in the indelible image of a nude swimmer floating in midair, which is really a pool that becomes a turquoise sky over a dense foreboding forest as the image is presented upside down. It is a sly statement of the artist's seditious intent: to overturn photography's most basic function to document the world as it is. Christian Vogt simply sees the world differently than the rest of us. He is quite satisfied to be a catalyst, acting as a reminder that seeing is not a passive act.

Tree's Own is among the artist's most recently completed work. A series of ten enameled metal plates reproducing black and white pen and ink drawings reduced and abstracted from photographs, the set is intended to be mounted to trees outdoors, as visual path markers. The images, simply graphic and totemic in nature are in this age of GPS an appeal to a layer of collective memory, more Hansel and Gretel than Google Maps.

Rick Wester Fine Art is a gallery of mid-career and emerging photographic artists whose collective vision has expanded the lexicon of contemporary photography in unique ways. We also offer a wide variety of secondary market pictures.

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10-6pm, Saturday 11-6pm. For further information and images, please contact Daryl Cooper at +1 (212) 255-5560 or rwfa@rickwesterfineart.com.

Upcoming Exhibition: Laurie Lambrecht

Rick Wester Fine Art is very pleased to announce Laurie Lambrecht in Roy Lichtenstein's Studio: The First and The Unseen, an exhibition of photographs created while the photographer worked as a studio assistant to the Pop Art master. Included are many of the first prints made of images featured in her soon to be released monograph, In Roy Lichtenstein's Studio (Monacelli, 2011). These are the prints she showed Lichtenstein during her tenure with him. Also shown are images not included in the book, which have never before been shown in public.

From 1990-1992, Lambrecht, a photographer from Eastern Long Island worked as an assistant for Lichtenstein in his Southampton studio. Inspired by the environment of the studio, Lambrecht used her unfettered access to document the artist's intricate creative process for 3 years. The photographs create a visual diary composed of vivid and engaging views culled from hundreds of images taken during her tenure. The photographer was in the presence of the painter as he worked daily on two major series, Reflections, and The Interiors. Lambrecht portrays him as completely absorbed, oblivious to the camera, composing, painting and stepping back to study the results, at times creating a trompe l'oeil effect. Her art is found in allowing him to do his, unaffected by her presence, as if invisible.

During this period Lichtenstein and Lambrecht gathered material in preparation for the 1993 Guggenheim Museum exhibition Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective. As a result there are numerous rare glimpses into the artist's creative practice as seen through the scrapbooks and sketchbooks documenting Lichtenstein's entire career. The most recognizable sources of Lichtenstein's art, the Ben-Day dot stencils, clippings from newspapers and the comic books that forged the artist's public image contribute to the photographer's extended portrait of the artist.

Inside Roy Lichtenstein's Studio (Monacelli, 2011) will be released October 18, 2011. RWFA will host a booksigning on Saturday, October 22, 2011, 2-4 pm.

Laurie Lambrecht will lecture about her time at Roy Lichtenstein's Studio at the 92nd Street Y in Tribeca on Tuesday, November 1 at 12 pm. For more info and to buy tickets go to www.92y.org.

Praise for Laurie Lambrecht in The New York Times

RWFA will feature Laurie's work this fall with Laurie Lambrecht in Roy Lichtenstein's Studio: The First and The Unseen. The New York Times profiles Laurie Lambrecht in the June 17th issue.

The New York Times
Inside the Studio of a Pop Art Icon
by Karin Lipson

Gordon M. Grant for The New York TimesAs a photographer, Laurie Lambrecht often travels to exotic or glamorous places, like Marrakesh or Beijing or Portofino, Italy. But a few years ago, she also began a different kind of journey, revisiting a cache of photographs of the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein that she had taken in the early 1990s and, for the most part, had not looked at since.

The photographs, stored as negatives in binders (most recently, in a closet), reflect the period from 1990 to 1992, when Ms. Lambrecht served several stints as an assistant to Mr. Lichtenstein in New York and Southampton. During that time, she was given access to his artistic process as well as the opportunity to capture it on camera.

"Many people photographed him; but they weren't around long enough, day in and day out, for the nuances," Ms. Lambrecht, 55, said recently in her studio here, across a stretch of lawn from her cedar-shingled house. In recent years, she said, "I've realized what a unique situation I had."
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Continue reading the article online by clicking here.

You can pre-order Laurie Lambrecht's upcoming monograph, Inside Roy Lichtenstein's Studio, published by Monacelli Press and scheduled to be released in October.

Sandi Haber Fifield reviewed in The New Yorker

The New Yorker
June 8, 2011

The color photographs that Haber Fifield took at American family farms in the past two years are ingratiatingly modest — much like the farms themselves, some of which don't appear to be much bigger than several suburban back yards. There are a few broad vistas of planted fields and orchards, but most of the pictures are closer looks at garden plots, greenhouse debris, and tools at the ready. Although these are straightforward, unpretentious documents, Haber Fifield never seems like a disinterested observer. The sense of cozy familiarity in her photographs makes even a hardened urbanite feel right at home. Through April 16.
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Sandi Haber Fifield's Between Planting and Picking is on view at Rick Wester Fine Art until Saturday, April 16, 2011. To buy her recently released monograph Between Planting and Picking click here. 

Jeff Mermelstein reviewed in The New Yorker

The New Yorker
June 13, 2011

Mermelstein brings a photojournalist's eye and a fine sense of the absurd to behind-the-scenes photographs made during the fall Fashion Weeks in New York, Milan, and Paris in 2010. Done on assignment for New York, the work doesn't look quite so brilliant off the printed page, but it's still sharp and entertaining. Mermelstein, a stranger in this strange land, sees the fashion tribe as made up of exotic creatures, primped and pawed by unseen handlers. Hair provides a subtheme, with pictures of a dressing table piled high with glossy extensions, a blond mane catching the runway lights, and a wild, reddish thatch that could only belong to Grace Coddington.
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Jeff was also highlighted in The New Yorker's Photo Booth Blog, check it out here.