 Untitled #44, 2003 Chromogenic print, 20 x 24 inches Victor Schrager Composition As Explanation Edwynn Houk Gallery is pleased to present our third installation of work by Victor Schrager. The exhibition, entitled "Composition as Explanation", consists of color still lifes in various sizes. Over the past twenty years, books have been both subject and backdrop in Victor Schrager's photographs. Most recently, they served as the isolating element behind flowers and plants in his platinum Botany series, a meditation on nature and culture. In his latest series Schrager has focused on the book itself, now using its color and shape in a purely aestheticized context. Pages are not revealed, titles are not seen: the ultimate symbol of intellectual investigation has been reduced to form. In these partially abstracted images, luminous planes meet sometimes sharp, descriptive edges. There is a mild and appealing irony in this dissolution of the predictably solid into vaporous fields of color. But it is precisely those same seductive colors and surfaces that belie the layers of meaning. Like Weston's pepper "nudes" or Stieglitz's cloud "equivalents", Schrager's books have attained a level of transformation. They must be read simultaneously as everyday object and sublime image. A Harvard graduate, Victor Schrager (b. 1950) is a recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and of a MacDowell Colony Resident Fellowship. His work has been featured in numerous one person and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Japan over the past twenty years. His photographs are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Center for Creative Photography, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Polaroid International Collection, The International Center of Photography, The San Francisco Museum of Art, and various private collections. Exhibition: January 22 - February 28, 2004 Gallery hours: Tue-Sat 11am - 6pm Edwynn Houk Gallery 745 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street USA- New York, NY 10151 Telephone +1 212 750.7070 Fax +1 212 688.4848 Email info@houkgallery.com www.houkgallery.com |
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