CURRENT EXHIBITION

WE SHOW HERE, DECEMBER 1 – 24, 2016

Cara Barer  Elaine Duigenan  Odette England  Max de Esteban  Cornelia Hediger

Matthew-Robert Hughes  Doug Keyes  Sarah Lynch  Robert Moran

Jim Naughten  Helen Sear  Vojtech V. Slama  Frederic Weber

During the month of December, and leading up to the Christmas and New Year holidays, we are exhibiting a wonderfully diverse selection of contemporary photographs. Each of the artworks are small to medium-sized, framed and ready to be taken away. The perfect 'gift of art'. 

If you don't see what you're looking for on the gallery walls, let us know! We'll dive into the gallery inventory and help you to find the perfect artwork. 

The gallery has artworks ranging in values from $300 through to $68,000. So, whatever your budget, we're pretty certain we have you covered.

Each Saturday, we'll also be offering some special sales, on both artworks and photobooks. These offers will be limited to those specific days, and collectors will be alerted via the Gallery Newsletter. If you're not on our mailing list, you can SIGN UP HERE.

CURRENT EXHIBITION: PRESS

DOUG KEYES: PORTRAIT, March 5 – April 11 2015

Chuck Close, 2014 © Doug Keyes

"The Style that Keyes uses in his work originated from his Collective Memory series in which he used multiple exposures to collate the contents of art books into singular images. The continuation of this process has led to a collection of images, which detail the work of other artists, from Frida Kahlo, Alex Kats and Steve McCurry. Condensing the history of contempoary portraiture down into just a few images, he certainly progresses our undertstanding of whether portraiture can ever truly capture the truth to a person. Instead, he asks if portraiture can capture even a single truth of the sitters."—Daniel Meads, GUP.

Read the full article on the GUP website.

"The old adage, "one thing leads to another" applies to artist Doug Keyes' latest project, "Portrait." The complex, multi-layering of a single image was a process he used in his "Collective Memory" series ... With "Portrait", Keyes creates entirely new faces from otherwise recognizable and iconic images."

Read the full article with slide show on PDN Photo of the Day website.

"I get excited when someone sees my work and they just "get it". No explanation, just an intuitive response based on their history."—Doug Keyes.

Read a short interview with Doug Keyes on the Dumbo Life & Style website.

UPCOMING EXHIBITION: DOUG KEYES

We are delighted to announce an exhibition of new photographs by Doug Keyes. Portrait is Keyes’ third body of work, and his second solo show at the gallery.

The genesis for this series was the Chuck Close catalog, that Keyes photographed in 1998 for the widely applauded Collective Memory series. With this image, multiple exposures resulted in two portraits that represented Close’s body of work. Keyes now continues this focus on portraits made by other artists and documentarians.

Sourcing images from books and the internet, and often inspired by portraits experienced in person, Keyes selects images that collectively create an overall representation of each artist’s portraiture work. The resulting photographs reshape the work of such iconic names as Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Martin Schoeller and Frida Kahlo. At times, his work conjures up more than the purely visual, such as with Nick Cave (2014), which pierces the viewer with a cacophony of suggested sound and movement, gloriously melded together. 

Beyond the subject of the portrait itself, Keyes is most interested in the cognitive impression left after seeing the work. Keyes’ work proposes that the brain creates collections of layered images over time, not individual snapshots of moments like a camera. When we think of a person it’s not a static, flat impression. We live in time and space, always moving, always inputting new data. And this data is never objective, it’s not a collection of precisely copied information; it’s as imperfect as our memory.

This series continues the artist's sophisticated use of multiple exposure; an artistic paradigm that he has steadfastly cultivated over the course of some twenty years. Keyes is a perceptive, quietly intelligent fine artist, whose transformative artworks exhibit a confident authorship, are conceptually rigorous and present an accomplished and well-defined aesthetic. 

Doug Keyes is an American artist currently living and working in Seattle. Collections holding his work include the Akron Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Microsoft, Fidelity Investments, Berkeley Art Museum and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston amongst others. He is the recipient of several awards including the Ned Behnke Artist Fellowship, Juror’s Choice Award from CENTER and more recently the PONCHO Merit Award. Keyes’ photographs have been exhibited at numerous venues across Northern America. In 2008, Collective Memory was published by Decode Books.

The Curious Case of Khan and Keyes

They Called Her Styrene – Ed Ruscha (2001) ©Doug Keyes

We received and email this afternoon, from Mario M. Muller,  an artist, curator and dealer. He's also the writer of a blog with the wonderful monika – Truffle Hunting. It's not about food, but the analogy is wonderfully perceptive, as it relates to his cultural/critical textual meanderings through and across the highly subjective and contentious terrain of the artworld.

Anyhow, back to the email. Mr Muller contacted the gallery to alert us to a text he had published on February 28th, 2013. Apparently he alerted us to it last month, but alas that message ended up in some spam/junk folder (goodness knows what else might be lurking there). Today's message dropped into our In Box, exactly as it should have done.  It's an interesting and well written piece that examines the photographs of Idris Khan and Doug Keyes, amongst other things.

Here is the opening paragraph to the text that he wrote:

The Curious Case of Khan and Keyes, by Mario M. Fuller

"Admittedly it sounds like a law firm: Khan and Keys, perhaps a firm specializing in intellectual property. But Idris Khan and Doug Keyes are both photographers, fine artists practicing their craft in a landscape of financial inequities, ephemeral reputations and absurdly subjective barometers of value and success. And as is so often the case in this murky world, scale and context often drown out resonant artistic investigation. " –Mario M. Muller

You can read the full text on his blog by clicking here.

And ... you may know our mantra: see it • love it • buy it

The work of Doug Keyes can be viewed online here, and to see the actual artworks, contact the gallery to arrange a time to view the pieces we have in the inventory.

For your Valentine ....

We believe the gift of art is perfect for the one you love. Below are some rather fabulous artworks that we think suit the theme of romance. With only two days left until Valentine's Day ... we've only selected artworks that are mounted, framed and ready to hang.

 The Invention of Drawing (2008) ©Antony Crossfield

66" x 48" Ed. 3+1 | 36.5" x 26.5" Ed. 7+1

This photograph, by the British artist Antony Crossfield, was partly inspired by one of the many tales in art history regarding the invention of drawing. The narrative spoke of two lovers, about to be separated by war. The young woman, not certain if she would see her soldier-love again, traced out the outline of his shadow onto a wall with charcoal, as it was cast by the firelight. In this way, she intended to keep her memory of his image alive. Crossfield works with this story in this artwork from the  Foreign Body series. It's an amazingly accomplished photograph that draws upon many renditions of the narrative throughout art history. His authorship and artistry brings a truly romantic narrative right up to date, by working with contemporary social references and photographic practice.

 The Irony Tower – Andrew Solomon (2010) ©Doug Keyes

17" x 21" x 1.5" Ed. 6

In 2010, the celebrated author Andrew Solomon – currently in the midst of rave reviews for his most recent book Far From The Tree – visited the gallery to view the work of Doug Keyes. The visit resulted in Mr. Solomon commissioning Doug Keyes to make two artworks inspired by his books, Noonday Demon and The Irony Tower. Our love for books, literature and photography come together in this beautifully crafted artwork. 

"In this electronic age, it's easy to become sentimental about the book as object, and if such nostalgia afflicts some readers, it more deeply moves writers; there is an almost inexpressible satisfaction to the physical heft of a book, a joy attached to holding it aloft and saying, "This, this is what I have done with my life."  Doug Keyes celebrates that physicality, but never at the expense of the books' content.  A book is already metaphoric; it is a collection of dimensional shapes that correlate to spoken language.  In Keyes's hands, the material and the essential content seem to merge; these images encapsulate the very essence of the author's vision and intent.  To have one's own art transformed by his art is to feel truly and deeply seen.  The images are beautiful, and full of meaning, and the beauty is part of their meaning.  No one has ever done a more satisfying portrait of me than these two photos". – Andrew Solomon  

 Lowlands 1 (2010) ©Martin Bogren

16" x 16" Ed. 6

Each summer, the gallery stages an exhibition called FRESH. Photographs are selected from an open call and co-curated by Darren Ching and a guest curator – in 2012 we collaborated with the collector, Fred Bidwell. One of the artists selected was Martin Bogren and this photograph, a personal documentation of Bogren's home village, has continued to capture our imagination. The nostalgia, the romance and the mystery is simply captivating.

Mesmory (2010) ©Lisa M. Robinson

32" x 40" Ed. 10+2

This contemplative and engaging photograph forms part of Lisa M. Robinson's Oceana series, with which she explores the 'rythms of natural time'. She invokes through the artwork, a visceral response that extends beyond the visual and becomes almost physical. We can imagine sitting on a bench, cozied up in the chilled air, sitting together and watching the ocean ...

"Water and the atmosphere are forever shifting, changing in both subtle and dramatic ways ... I am viewing the physical world itself with an understanding of internal trsnformations and visible signs of upheaval". – Lisa M. Robinson

PO4 (2011) ©Max de Esteban

20.7" x 27.6" Ed. 5+1 | 39.4" 52.5" Ed. 5+1

 

One of the most romantic things to receive is a piece of prose, a love letter, or simply a note with a discreet message of admiration. This is a wonderful photograph from Max de Esteban's series, Proposition One: Only The Ephemeral .  We've chosen it as a perfect valentine's gift because it conjures up those memories of tranforming a blank piece of paper, into somethng so much more. The artwork itself is an expertly crafted photograph of an object, once so widely used for written creativity – now obsolete but the romance of it still coveted.