The exhibition is comprised of approximately twenty unique photographs made with the large-format (24×20”) polaroid camera. The unwieldy camera rarely leaves the Polaroid studio yet for these two projects it was relocated to Wegman’s cabin in Maine alongside Fay and her progeny.

In addition to Fairy Tales, the exhibition will debut Wegman’s recent project Letters, Numbers, and Punctuation. In this portfolio Fay and three of her compatriots acrobatically form all 26 letters of the alphabet as well as ten numerals and eight punctuation marks. Wegman’s formalist foundation and odd sense of the serene come together in this entirely new canine-gothic hieroglyph.

William Wegman was born in 1943 in Massachusetts. He is internationally recognized as a painter and a videographer as well as a photographer. A retrospective of Wegman’s works originated in 1990 at the Kunsthalle in Lucerne and has traveled to more than a dozen museums in Europe and the United States.

This exhibition is concurrent with Victorian Secrets: Anonymous Photo Collages from the Nineteenth Century and Andrew Bush: Envelopes.

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This exhibition is concurrent with William Wegman: Fairy Tales and Andrew Bush: Envelopes.

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One of photography’s greatest pioneers, Edward Weston played a major role in shaping our perception of reality. The strength of his vision spanned fads and eras of the art world. Through his lifetime body of work, which includes indelible images of nudes, peppers, rock and shells, clouds, and landscapes, Weston awakened his viewers to the sensuous qualities of organic forms, and provided them with visual metaphors for the world’s most elemental natural forces. The subtleties of tone and the sculptural formal design of his works have become the standards by which much later photographic practice has been measured. Ansel Adams wrote “Weston is, in the real sense, one of the few creative artists of today. He has recreated the matter-forms and forces of nature; he has made these forms eloquent of the fundamental unity of the world. His work illuminates man’s inner journey toward perfection of the spirit.”

The exhibition is comprised of thirty-five photographs spanning Weston’s entire photographic career. Approximately half of the photographs on view will be on loan from museums and important private collections. Several exquisite early platinum prints will be included. The Source from 1921 exemplifies this early work. Here the nude torso seems to be entirely delineated by rays of mystical light before Weston’s lens.

Master prints of Weston’s classic studies of peppers and shells will be on view, including the quintessential Pepper No. 30 as well as the iconic Bedpan of 1930, in which the most mundane bedside tool is made to suggest Brancusi’s Bird In Space or a great ballet dancer standing on point.

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Taken in overcast skies or in the hazy sunlight of industrial zones, these seemingly artless photographs belie the elaborate processes and decisions involved in creating them — elevating the camera on scaffolds or ladders, waiting for clouds to block the sun, enlisting the cooperation of plant foremen and security guards to remove all signs of human life from the scene. The resulting images are presented as either individual 24×20” black and white prints or as part of a typology comprised of varying numbers of photographs presented in a grid-like format. Included in the present exhibition will be typologies dealing with coal mine tipples of Pennsylvania (this piece comes directly from its recent exhibition in “Photography in Contemporary German Art” at the Guggenheim Museum, Soho); spherical and cylindrical gas tanks; and industrial facades.

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While Witkin’s subject matter has frequently been gleaned from a darker side of the real world, his most recent pictures show a more mature artist at work. Still working with skeletons, cadavers and individuals who may have one time been labeled “freaks,” the current exhibition evidences a more direct approach to his subjects, and a refined ability to weave a pictorialist tale.

Still Life, Marseilles, 1992, is a reinterpretation of Dutch vanitas painting in which Witkin employs a severed head as a flower vase. In Three Kinds of Women, Mexico, 1992, the artist directly references Seurat’s Les Poseurs,  while making an entirely Latin translation. He has replaced Seurat’s La Grande Jatte with a pseudo Rivera mural; Seurat’s drawing studies with Mexican retablos, and the three French models with less modest Latin women. Satiro, Mexico, 1992 is a rare instance in which Witkin photographed outside the studio walls. Here Witkin photographs an armless dwarf accompanied by his faithful canine companion in a bucolic setting beneath a tree, the satyr’s magnificent goat-like thighs dominating the picture. In virtually all of his pictures Witkin gives us glimpses of the unknown as he has “seen” it. He is neither a stylist nor a modernist. Witkin connects with the past both in manners and philosophy to create a new iconography that relates to contemporary social behavior and the need he sees for revitalized spiritual content in art.

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