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.

AIPAD 2016: MAX DE ESTEBAN

Defined by the Accident, 2013

Series Title: Proposition Four – Heads Will Roll

Number of artworks at AIPAD: 1

Edition: 5 + 1AP

Size: 45” x 35” image on 49” x 39” sheet

Medium: Archival Pigment Print

Year: 2013

The Proposition Four: Heads Will Roll series examines the non-stop, daily flood of images that impact peoples' thoughts, memories, desires, dreams – even the very concept of reality. At a time of accelerated technological change, Max de Esteban layers and flattens multiple images into a final image, utilizing digital tools to present a cacophony of information, that is at once dense with information yet visually legible.

"Part of what de Esteban is doing here is unpacking the structural foundations of what a photograph has historically been and how it has functioned, and rebuilding those assumptions from the ground up with a different kind of digital existence in mind. Instead of photography being rooted in documentation, or inspiration, or some definition of “truth”, de Esteban is putting re-interpretation and re-translation at the forefront of the digital now, with a distinct and deliberate emphasis on the re-. What the source files meant in their original or archival context isn’t important – it’s how they have been reassembled to generate an evolved harmony (or dissonance) of new allusions, references, hints, and perceived memories".—Loring Knoblauch, Collector Daily. 

This series is the subject of the monograph, 'Heads Will Roll', published by Hatze Cantz in 2014, and was featured in a solo exhibition at the Klompching Gallery in September 2015. The photographs are currently exhibited at the FotoFest 2016 Biennale in Houston. 

Additional Edition: 25” x 19” image on 28” x 22” sheet, 5+1AP. 

Max de Esteban holds graduate degrees from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya and Stanford University, as well as a PhD from the Universitat Ramon Llull. He is a former Fulbright Scholar, and his photographs have been exhibited throughout Europe. Collections holding his work includes the Deutsches Technik Museum (Berlin). He lives and works in Barcelona, Spain.

SPOTLIGHT: MAX DE ESTEBAN

FotoFest 2016 Biennial Catalogue Image: courtesy FotoFest

Proposition Four: Heads Will Roll, exhibited at the gallery in September - October 2015, is to be exhibited at the FotoFest 2016 Biennial. The photographic series, by gallery artist Max de Esteban, was selected by Pavel Banka, Editor-in-Chief, Fotograf (Prague, Czech Republic) for the Discoveries of the Meeting Place exhibition. The exhibition is located at the Winter Street Studios, March 12–April 24, 2016. For additional details of the exhibition, follow this LINK.

We are delighted that FotoFest has also selected Facelessness—from the series—for the cover of the 2016 festival catalogue (above).

Together with Max de Esteban, we have donated one of the editions of this wonderful photograph to the FotoFest Benefit Print Auction, taking place on March 21st. If you are in Houston on this date, we recommend the auction and encourage you to attend. Follow this LINK for the online preview of the auction lots on offer.

The series is available as follows: 

45"x35" image on 49"x39" sheet, Edition: 5+1AP

25"x19" image on 28"x22" sheet, Edition: 5+1AP

Please contact the gallery for additional information, including availability and current pricing. 

EXHIBITION CLOSING

Max de Esteban: Heads Will Roll will be closing on Friday, October 30th at 6pm. If you have not visited the gallery to view the exhibition yet, we would urge you to do so. The photographs have been well received by the press and gallery visitors alike. 

The photographs are available for purchase as follows:

Edition: 5 + 1AP in each size

Size: 25” x 19” image on 28” x 22” sheet & 45” x 35” image on 49” x 39” sheet

Medium: Archival Pigment Print

Above: Defined By Catastrophe (detail on the right)

COLLECTOR DAILY REVIEW

Max de Esteban, Heads Will Roll (at) Klompching

Loring Knoblauch, October 21, 2015

(extract)

JTF (just the facts): A total of 9 large scale color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the single room gallery space. All of the works are archival pigment prints, made in 2013. The prints come in two sizes: 49×39 (in editions of 5+1AP) and 28×22 (in editions of 5+1AP); there are 8 large prints and 1 small print on view, drawn from a total of 24 images in the series. A monograph of this body of work was published by Hatje Cantz in 2014 (here).

Comments/Context: Part of what de Esteban is doing here is unpacking the structural foundations of what a photograph has historically been and how it has functioned, and rebuilding those assumptions from the ground up with a different kind of digital existence in mind. Instead of photography being rooted in documentation, or inspiration, or some definition of “truth”, de Esteban is putting re-interpretation and re-translation at the forefront of the digital now, with a distinct and deliberate emphasis on the re-. What the source files meant in their original or archival context isn’t important – it’s how they have been reassembled to generate an evolved harmony (or dissonance) of new allusions, references, hints, and perceived memories.

While de Esteban’s chosen mood is full of ominous foreboding edging toward catastrophe (there’s even some last ditch sex as the bombs are falling from the sky), that personal cultural pessimism isn’t the important analytical vector here. What’s more telling is de Esteban’s crisp definitional argument about what digital photography is now, what tasks it employs and requires, and what outcomes it can generate. He’s staked out the ground for a different kind of photographer/artist – not one who uses a camera to see the world, but one who reinterprets digital imagery from a thousand sources and synthesizes it into a new kind of visual expression that resonates with our current image saturated existence. Others have done and continue to do this too of course, but de Esteban’s mind set seems particularly structured toward consciously breaking with the past.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The large 49×39 prints are $5500 each, while the smaller 28×22 prints are $2500 each. De Esteban’s work has little secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

Visit the complete Collector Daily review HERE

WALL STREET JOURNAL REVIEW

On Photography by William Meyers, October 16, 2015

A Technological Construct Of Totality (2013) © Max de Esteban

Max de Esteban, born in Barcelona in 1959 and educated at Stanford University, is a peculiarly protean artist: His first major body of work consisted of highly stylized portraits of disaffected European youths, his second of cyanotype-like X-rays of midcentury electronic appliances. And now we have "Heads Will Roll", his Photoshopped collages of apocalypse. Photoshop can be used to alter the digital files of individual images and to merge images in fanciful combinations. It is easy to do, but hard to do well; the trick is to create a collage with portents of meaning–and yet do it without being too literal, like a rebus. Using bits and pieces drawn mostly from pop culture–movies, the Internet, magazines and newspapers–Mr. de Esteban does this. The nine works at Klompching are dreamlike intimations of catastrophe. 

The largest element of "A Technological Construct of Totality" (2013) is a human body bound with heavy ropes and seemingly suspended. It is not clear if the body is that of a man or a woman, and it is rendered in a pale green. The background color is a brownish red; a woman's head stares out at us from the bottom of the image without apparently noticing the green figure, and other body parts in varying scales are also incorporated. 

The main element of "Defined by Catastrophe" (2013) is the silhouette of a car set at an impossible incline against a burst of yellow; the background is a pale blue figured with negative and positive portraits of someone in a Chairman Mao uniform.

Visit the Wall Street Journal article here.  

MAX DE ESTEBAN: ARTIST TALK

SVA MPS Digital Photography i3 Lecture Series
September 15, 2015

HEADS WILL ROLL: "MUST-SEE EXHIBITION"

We are delighted to have MAX DE ESTEBAN – HEADS WILL ROLL,  selected by The ArtSlant Team as one of its "North America's Must-See Exhibitions This Fall".

See the full list here.

PHOTOGRAPH MAGAZINE

Max de Esteban Featured on the cover of Photograph Magazine
Feature Article by Lyle Rexer

Extract from 'About The Cover'.

"Like a fault line in the surface of appearances, photo collage opens up in periods of social stress and political obfuscation ... Where earlier 20th-century collage artists like Hannah Höch deliberately let the seams between her images show in order to represent the rawness of colliding elements in a chaotic society, contemporary artists such as Max de Esteban, whose photograph Facelessness is on our cover, often layer images to mimic the experience of digital immersion – in combinations of imagery that is sourceless, familiar, and immediate ... In the exhibition Heads Will Roll at Klompching Gallery in DUMBO (September 12-October 30), the Barcelona-born de Esteban approaches the pessimism of one of his intellectual heroes, the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran ... People become a faceless audience for fantasies, propaganda, distortion and marketing. Like Cioran in his aphoristic philosophizing, de Esteban, in his images, invites us at least to flirt with the temptation to exist, if only by showing us the many ways we have developed to evade that responsibility".—Lyle Rexer

Read the article in full here.

SAVE THE DATE

MAX DE ESTEBAN — HEADS WILL ROLL
Artist Reception: Saturday, September 12, 6pm–8pm

Heads Will Roll is the fourth and final installment of de Esteban’s challenging and provocative Propositions series—a long term and rigorous investigation of society’s embracement of technologies, in particular, the dawn of the bio-cybernetic era.

To construct the artworks in Heads Will Roll, de Esteban has mined a mass media that generates an incessant stream of imagery of war, violence, and disasters 24/7 into our homes, offices, public and private spaces. De Esteban merges and juxtaposes images, texts and found objects, to produce photomontages that present a cacophony of information that is at once dense with information yet visually legible. 

The resulting artworks are stunningly rich, visually beautiful constructions, that at the same time reveal a world where violence, imagined or real, is always looming. The intention of the artist, is for the viewer to be left almost totally out of balance, in a state of anxiety and unease. 

“Our world is increasingly filled with imagery from the internet, advertising, movies, social media, selfies, smartphone cameras, surveillance, propaganda, media, art, books, magazines ... It causes us to question our own sense of what is real, what is imagined, what is fiction, what is a lie ... So, what better medium than photography (or cinema or the internet itself) to explore this archaeology of images?” —Max de Esteban

The exhibition will feature eight large-scale, lushly colored photographs, carefully curated from the larger body of work, consisting of twenty-four photographs. This will be the second solo exhibition at the Klompching Gallery by Max de Esteban, and follows the preview of the artworks at the prestigious AIPAD (Association of International Photography Art Dealers) Photography Show in April 2015.

Accompanying the exhibition will be the monograph Heads Will Roll (Hatje Cantz, 2015), containing insightful essays by the esteemed curator Carles Guerra and author Bill Kouwenhoven. Additionally, de Esteban’s new monograph, Propositions (La Fabrica)—which charts the entire four parts of the series—will also be launched during the exhibition, prior to its official release in October 2015.

Max de Esteban (b. 1959) is a Fulbright Alumni, who holds a PhD from the Universitat Ramon Llull in Catalunya and a Masters from Stanford University. His work has been featured at the Deutsches Technikmuseum (Berlin), Rencontres Internationales at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and Darmstädter Tage der Fotografie, among others. He is the recipient of the National Award of Professional Photography in Spain and the Jury’s Special Award in Fotofestiwal, Poland. His artworks are held in several notable collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museu de Arte Modena do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil; and the Deutsches Technikmuseum. De Esteban’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions worldwide, and featured widely in the press and media. His monograph Heads Will Roll, was recently selected as a photo-book of the year by LensCulture. Max de Esteban lives and works in Barcelona, Spain, and is represented in the United States by Klompching Gallery.

AIPAD 2015: MAX DE ESTEBAN

Esteban's overall photographic practice explores socio-political concepts within visual structures of serialization and repetition. At the 2015 AIPAD Photo Show, we will present Proposition One: Only The Ephemeral and Proposition Four: Heads Will Roll. 

PO7, 2011 from Proposition One: Only The Ephemeral

Series Title: Proposition One: Only The Ephemeral

Number of artworks at AIPAD: 4

Edition: 5 + 1AP in each size

Size: 20.7” x 27.6” & 39.4” x 52.5”

Medium: Archival Pigment Print

Year: 2011

With this series, Max de Esteban turns his camera toward recent cutting-edge technology—utilized in the creation and communication of art—that is now considered obsolete. Through a time-consuming and meticulous process, he dis-assembles apparatus such as film projectors, 35mm film cameras, VHS tape players and record players. Piece-by-piece, the parts are painted white, the machines are then reassembled and photographed at different stages of being re-built. The photographed layers are themselves assembled into a single image, resulting in x-ray-like photographs that are reminiscent of architectural cyanotypes.

The precision inherent in the photographs bring to mind the idea of a technological taxidermy that removes nostalgia, yet performs the role of memento mori for machines that have become obsolete and may soon be forgotten.

This work can be found in several private and public collections. Most recently, the Deutsches Technik Museum in Berlin acquired 15 photographs from the series for its collection. 

Transforming the Labyrinth, 2013

from Proposition Four: Heads Will Roll

Series Title: Proposition Four: Heads Will Roll

Number of artworks at AIPAD: 1

Edition: 5 + 1AP in each size

Size: 25” x 19” image on 28” x 22” sheet & 45” x 35” image on 49” x 39” sheet

Medium: Archival Pigment Print

Year: 2013

The Proposition Four: Heads Will Roll series examines the non-stop, daily flood of images that impact peoples' thoughts, memories, desires, dreams – even the very concept of reality. At a time of accelerated technological change, Max de Esteban layers and flattens multiple images into a final image, utilizing digital tools to present a cacophony of information that is at once dense with information yet visually legible. 

This series is the subject of the monograph, 'Heads Will Roll', published by Hatze Cantz in 2014, and will be featured in a solo exhibition at the Klompching Gallery in September 2015.

Max de Esteban holds graduate degrees from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya and Stanford University, as well as a PhD from the Universitat Ramon Llull. He is a former Fulbright Scholar, and his photographs have been exhibited throughout Europe. He lives and works in Barcelona, Spain.

ACQUISITION by DEUTSCHES TECHNIK MUSEUM

We are delighted to share the news that the Deutsches Technik Museum in Berlin, has acquired fifteen photographs from the Proposition One: Only The Ephemeral series, by Max de Esteban. 

The portfolio of photographs can be viewed in-person at our gallery. Please make an appointment beforehand. A number of the photographs are close to selling out. Therefore, if you do have an interest in acquiring an image or two from this series, we would highly recommend doing so before they become unavailable.  The photographs are available as follows:

20.7" x 27.6", Edition: 5+1AP

39.4" x 52.5", Edition: 5+1AP 

Archival Pigment Prints on Hahnemühle Cotton Rag

Previous blog posts about the artworks of Max de Esteban can be found here.

PO9, 2011 © Max de Esteban

MAX DE ESTEBAN: Darmstäder Tage der Fotografie

Proposition One: Only The Ephemeral
Design House, Darmstädt,  25–27 April, 2014

We are pleased to announce, that Max de Esteban will be exhibiting at the 2014 Darmstädt Days of Photography Festival.

The series, Proposition One: Only the Ephermeral, will be shown at the Design House, as part of the main exhibition, which has a curatorial theme of Reflection – Aesthetic References.

This series has been hugely popular with our gallery visitors and clients alike. It was first shown at the gallery, as a solo show in Fall 2011 and has continued to resonate, through being regularly exhibited throughout Europe since that time. 

To learn more about the Darmstäder Festival, visit their website here. 

To revisit this series of photographs, visit our website here. 

PO5, 2011 © Max de Esteban

MAX DE ESTEBAN: BOOKLETS

We are pleased to make available these limited edition booklets, by gallery artist Max de Esteban. Published by Spicer House Editions, each booklet is offered in an edition of 100, designed by Arnauld Bayle and printed by The Private Space (Barcelona). 

Proposition One: Only The Ephemeral

Edition 100   $25

10.75" x 7.5" | Pages: 20 | Photographs: 17

Proposition Three: Touch Me Not

Edition 100   $25

10.75" x 7.5" | Pages: 20 | Photographs: 17

MAX DE ESTEBAN: BLINK

Max de Esteban is featured in Issue #29 of BLINK Magazine, with the Vertige series of photographs, which were introduced at the 2013 AIPAD Photo Show.  The series is not yet available to view on the gallery website, but will be uploaded very soon.

The large-scale, highly-detailed photographs feature portraits, behind which is written excerpts from Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran's 1964 La Cute dans Le Temps.

Artist Statement:

"Since the events after 9-11 the powers of economic globalization and the two greatest monotheist religions have taken over the world’s ideological leadership. The world that abandoned modernity as its meta-history was an easy prey to nihilism or dogma. It is in the context of the secular struggle between civilization and barbarism that we should consider current events. The civilized is insecure and skeptic, contradictions being both his greatness and weakness. In contrast the barbarian is slave to a belief felt with integral and exclusive passion and driven by totalitarian ambitions.This elegy is in essence a vindication of doubt as a crucial ethical value. Unsurprisingly deprecated today, it is the prime source of tolerance, progress, creativity and civilization. Doubt is arguably the origin of rebellion against darkness".—Max de Esteban

MAX DE ESTEBAN: STAGING GROUND

'Proposition One: Only The Ephemeral', featured in Staging Ground

Graphic courtesy of Staging Ground

PO14, 2011 © Max de Esteban

Max de Esteban is featured in Issue #2 of Staging Ground, showcasing his Proposition One: Only The Ephemeral series. 

“The series of images have an x-ray, mortuary quality; as forensic testimonies of a past existence; vestiges of their inner structure can be clearly identified while others fade or have disappeared as in decomposing organic bodies. By eliminating the objects' individual peculiarities, each photograph becomes a generic symbol of decay and death. While sophisticated and state-of-the-art not long ago, these tools evoke today a sense of fragility, archaism and trauma."–Max de Esteban.

See the complete series of photographs on the gallery website. 

MAX DE ESTEBAN: FEST FOTO 2013

Fest Foto in Porto Alegre, Brazil
October 8, 2013–May 12, 2014

Max de Esteban will be exhibiting photographs from his Proposition One and Proposition Three series at the Fest Foto in Brazil. His work will be shown in the Dialogos Internacionais section of the festival.

Proposition One was shown at the Klompching Gallery in October–December 2011, while Proposition Three was debuted at the AIPAD Photo Fair in March 2013.

At Once Sacrilegious and Sacred, 2012 © Max de Esteban

from the Proposition Three series

For further information about the Fest Foto, visit the website HERE.

Please note: we are currently updating the gallery website with more of Max de Esteban's work.

MAX DE ESTEBAN EXHIBITS IN STUTTGART

Gallery artist, Max de Esteban's solo exhibition, at the Uno Art Space in Stuttgart, opened last night and continues through to September 28, 2013.

The show features his highly acclaimed Proposition One: Only The Ephemeral series, which we exhibited at the gallery in the Fall of 2011, and was showcased by the gallery at the AIPAD 2013 Photo Show. The series was also nominated for the prestigious Welde Kunstpreis (Germany, 2013).

PO5, 2011 ©Max de Esteban

Video Interview (2011) ©Euromaxx

Take a look at a previous blogpost about the series here.

The entire photographic series can be viewed on our website here.

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.

MFAH Acquisition

Max de Esteban

We are delighted to announce that the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, has acquired PO5 by Max de Esteban. The acquisition was made possible through the Museum's Photo Forum Patron Group.

PO5 (2011) ©Max de Esteban

The photograph forms part of the Proposition One: Only The Ephemeral series, which was exhibited at the gallery as a solo exhibition in October – December 2011. We wrote a SPOTLIGHT blog post about Max de Esteban in October 2011, which you can revisit here.

The complete series can be viewed online, with the photographs available as follows:

20.7” x 27.6”, Edition of 5 + 1AP
39.4” x 52.5”, Edition of 5 + 1AP