The 35th AIPAD Photography Show New York is upon us this week/end. Snapping where angels fear to pixel and flutter can be fun: PHOTOS of last night's opening reception. Some video interviews to come...
If you missed AIPAD then all is not lost in meditating upon the ‘screen’ and visual capture forever in our lives. Adam Lindemann’s gallery Venus Over Manhattan brings to our attention Peter Saul: From Pop to Punk. Arguably (though Saul admitted himself at the show’s opening INEVITABLY), if he hadn’t found a dealer/gallerist as supportive as Allan Frumkin he too would have ended up under the unseen artistic piles of rubble. Interesting to note that while Warhol was reducing and multiplying everyday imagery Saul was maximalising (in incredible detail) the cartoonish nature of American existence.
In a parallel world Italian Fabio Mauri began in the 50s and 60s an expose way ahead of his time and our current ubiquitous proliferation of screens obsessions. Hauser and Wirth is garnering (or did it always;) a reputation for presenting shows that really ARE of modern museum quality (only you can buy this work).
I was not new is the first New York show of Mauri: he is being highlighted in three locations at this year’s Venice Biennale by director Okwui Enwezor. Mauri’s back story is fascinating: though not Jewish he was unable to cope with the after-life of the holocaust and ended up in a psychiatric hospital. (I asked but no-one seemed to know if indeed he had made work whilst there). His father represented Pirandello’s estate and Mauri fell in love with an actress performing in Six Characters in Search of an Author whilst in South America. His ideas about projected images and broken screens were way ahead of his time (and indeed his Italian social realist contemporary film makers-even Fellini).
It’s maybe not so easy to view this show with our blinded contemporary vision. Yet when you can it stays ever ever so eerie and prescient.
Peter Saul at the Venus Over Manhattan opening (© 2015- Andrew Lucre)
