CURRENT EXHIBITION: PRESS

Our current exhibition, Richard Tuschman: Once Upon A Time In Kazimierz, opened to the public with an opening reception on March 3rd, so well attended that there was barely standing room in the gallery. We have enjoyed a steady flow of visitors to the gallery since, with the 12 artworks on display being enthusiastically received.

The photographs from this series are available as follows, and because the work is newly released, all photographs are currently at the first pricing tier. 

18"x24", Edition 5+1AP

24"x36", Edition 5+1AP

43"x63", Edition 2+1AP

The exhibition continues through to April 9th. If you are a collector interested in acquiring this work for your collection, we'll be happy to provide a private viewing by appointment. 

We're delighted, also, that this new series of photographs has been applauded by the press, some of which we would like to share below. 

SLATE, Behold Photo Blog

By David Rosenberg

'Imagining Life in 1930's Poland Through Dioramas and Photography'

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TIMES, Art Pages

By David Sim

'Beautiful Photographs Depict A Fictional Jewish Family Living In Poland Before The Holocaust'

ELIZABETH AVEDON JOURNAL

By Elizabeth Avedon

'Richard Tuschman: Once Upon A Time In Kazimierz at Klompching Gallery'

LENSCRATCH

By Aline Smithson

'Richard Tuschman: Once Upon A Time In Kazimierz'

PDN, Photo Of The Day Blog

By Rebecca Robertson

'Once Upon A Time In Krakow'

AMERICAN PHOTO

By Peter Kolonia

'Picturing Life in a Jewish Neighborhood in pre-Holocaust Poland'

L'OEIL DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE

By Editorial Staff

'Richard Tuschman: Once Upon A Time In Kazimierz'

MUSEE MAGAZINE

By Editorial Staff

'Richard Tuschman at Klompching Gallery'

GUP MAGAZINE

By Rachel Morón

'The Painter Holding A Camera: An Interview With Richard Tuschman'

CRAVE ONLINE

By Miss Rosen

'Interview: Darren Ching on Richard Tuschman's Once Upon A Time In Kazimierz'

THE CREATORS PROJECT

By Andrew Nunes

'Journey to 1930's Poland in Photographic Dioramas'

CURRENT EXHIBITION — PRESS

We are delighted to share some of the reviews and other press that our current exhibition has attracted. Click on the logos to read/view the reviews and features. 

Be sure to visit the gallery in person before February 27th, to fully appreciate this outstanding series of photographs. We should also mention that Shavasana has been incredibly popular with collectors, and is now close to selling out. 

Images L-R: Wildflowers 2, Shavasana

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.  

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.

HELEN SEAR: EXQUISITE MASTERY

Venice Biennale Review – Pippa Koszerek for Artist Newsletter

"Helen Sear’s sumptuous photographic prints and films, in the Wales in Venice exhibition, reveal layers and depth lent by the physical materiality of these sculpturally displayed pieces. Her exquisite mastery of the manipulated image creates abstracted experiences of nature that can be profound.

But of course they would be – Sear is technically and conceptually rigorous, often returning to film and photograph works anew many times over. Time, space and renewal are central elements within her practice.

Stack, 2015 © Helen Sear

This is a deeply sensory exhibition, subtly curated to sit within the architecture of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice church. There is a kind of ritual and ceremony, an enchantment propelled by the rhythm of the flickering spliced edit of company of trees.

The repetitious sounds of birdsong and chainsaw follow the viewer into the Sacrista where birds feed, dart and return in altar and the ground swells and expands as we look down onto the beginning and end of things, at what could be a marble basin but is in fact a video-manipulated pool of water reflecting trees high above.

Moving through this exhibition is a captivating and magical experience. stacks, a huge photographic piece which lines the entirety of one wall, is a life-size confrontation of farmed logs. Composed of multiple images printed on aluminium and stacked along the wall, this black and white piece cleverly refracts and retains colour and light, ever changing as the viewer walks past, creating an effect not dissimilar to that experienced in nature itself.

Sear’s final work subtly references Mantegna’s third painting of Saint Sebastian, using it as a spatial guide onto which she places her own imagery and meaning. The vivid colour of the rape seed, the red arrows piercing canvas and air rather than flesh, along with the clever layering of perspective and material, suggest an untouchable reality. Sear’s contemplative and exhilarating exhibition is a visual revelation".–Pippa Koszerek

This review is quoted from a more expansive piece, published on the Artist Newsletter website 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.

PUALA McCARTNEY: Winter Magic

More Press for "A Field Guide To Snow and Ice"
Exhibition continues to March 29th, 2014

"Ms McCartney creates pictures of snow and ice, or what looks like snow and ice, and presents them as modest-format prints".—William Meyers, March 2014.

Read the full review on the Wall Street Journal website.

"While not the factual discourse implied by its title, Paula McCartney’s “Field Guide to Snow and Ice” explores the photographic illusions of snow and ice".—Ed Barnas, March 2014.

Read the full review on The New York Photo Review website.

"This guide includes images of frozen waterfalls and stalagmites, snowfalls and wildflowers, as well as other icy forms in order to explore and reinterpret natural structures and the way they can reference multiple ideas on both micro and macro levels".—Paula McCartney.

Read the full feature on the Landscape Stories website.

Ice Floe #5, 2008 © Paula McCartney

View the series on the gallery website here.

PAULA McCARTNEY: Photograph Magazine

McCartney's exhibition, A Field Guide to Snow and Ice, has been extended to March 29th. If you've not had a chance to view the work in person, we highly recommend making a visit to the gallery. Here's an excerpt from the most recent review.

Black Ice #1 and #2 (Diptych), 2011 © Paula McCartney

"All photographers invariably walk the line between truth and fiction, but few as imaginatively as Paula McCartney. the Minneapolis-based photographer's seasonably appropriate exhibition at Klompching Gallery, A Field Guide to Snow and Ice, is evidence of that".—Jordan G. Teicher.

Read the full review at photograph.

PAULA McCARTNEY: THE NEW YORKER

"For the past several years, the Minneapolis-based photographer Paula McCartney has exploited extreme weather to dazzling effect, capturing detailed portraits of natural winter elements, from frozen waterfalls to ice stalagmites to snow flurries, which have been skewed or exaggerated by rising and falling temperatures. About winter, McCartney says, “I categorize by pattern, shape, and line rather than merely by substance.” Her new series, “A Field Guide to Snow and Ice,” is on view at Klompching Gallery through February 15, 2014".—The New Yorker.

View the slide show on The New Yorker. 

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. 

ODETTE ENGLAND: AMERICAN PHOTO

Thrice Upon a Time featured in American Photo

Text by Lori Fredrickson

While darkroom experimentation is largely a thing of the past, the longing to connect with a physical aspect of picture- making remains, especially for photographers working with natural subjects. Their resulting photos broaden the exploration of elemental phenomena, and engage more personal ties to land, material, and memory.

Mum #4 (Right Foot), 2012 © Odette England

For Australia-based Odette England’s project Thrice Upon a Time, working with the material of the landscape was literally tied to the land itself. England focused on the terrain of her childhood home, a 200-acre farm in the small settlement of Ponde in South Australia, by a two-step process: a 2005 journey (before conceiving the project) to capture the location on film, and a 2010 return by her parents, who re-trod the area with the processed negatives attached to the soles of their shoes.

For England, the concept of having the film “work the land” related to how her parents physically worked the land when she was a child, before the threat of financial troubles forced her family to leave in 1989. “Living on a farm not only ties you to a specific economy, but also to seasonal rhythms,” she says. “The farm has changed hands four or five times since then, and with each passing year and new owner, I can’t help but feel that the farm dies a small death.”

Ultimately, she says, photographing the farm wouldn’t have made sense without a material connection—what had been lacking in her memory was that physical relationship. “It was an urgent thing to understand this particular patch of dirt,” England says. “It was the material that made me.”

Read the full article HERE.

SIMON ROBERTS: BOOK REVIEW

Weston-Super-Mare-Grand, 2011 © Simon Roberts

PIERDOM
Review by Sean O'Hagan, The Observer, August 31, 2013

"Pierdom is another instalment in Simon Roberts' ongoing visual documentation of modern England. He has photographed every British Pier using a 4x5 plate camera, which has also captured the landscape from which they extend, the sea around them and the sky above them". 

"This is a much cooler and detached approach than, say, Martin Parr's seaside photographs, and shares a certain similarity of style with John Davies's documentary photographs of British landscapes. Here and there, though, there are hints of John Hinde's postcard vision of Britain as one big unreal leisure theme park, especially in Roberts' wonderful diptych of Walton-on-the-Naze pier". 

" ... a very beautiful book from a master of stillness, light and landscape".

Read the full review HERE.

Pierdom (Dewi Lewis, 2013)

Hardback

160 pages, 81 color plates

$55USD

ISBN: 978-1-907893-40-7

PIERDOM will be exhibited at Klompching Gallery this Fall:
Simon Roberts — Pierdom: November 7–December 21, 2013.
Artist Reception: Thursday, November 7, 6pm–8pm.

Le Monde Features Jim Naughten

The French publication, Le Monde, has profiled Jim Naughten's Hereros series in a ten-page feaure, which also appears online here. If you have not visited the gallery to see this remarkable exhibition, we urge you to do so before it closes on Saturday, May 4th, 6pm.

All above page spreads ©Le Monde

Interview: Le Journal de la Photographie

A week or so before the AIPAD Photo Show, we were interviewed by Stephanie de Rouge for Le Journal de la Photographie. This forms part of a series that Stephanie is completing, focusing on photography art dealers in New York City. We were delighted to spend time with her. Part of the interview included a photo-shoot and selecting one photograph from our collection that has special meaning to us.

The complete interview can be read here.

Wall Street Journal Reviews Jim Naughten

 Jim Naughten: Conflict and Costume – William Meyers

April 5, 2013 

The emphasis in Jim Naughten's 2012 photos of the Herero people of Namibia is on their clothing, which is adopted from that of their former colonial occupiers and has elements relating to their own pastoral heritage. Their land was claimed by Germany from 1884 until the end of World War I; when they rebelled, the Germans waged a war of extermination against them. As many as 85% of the Herero were killed; some in combat, many by being driven into the desert and deprived of water, others in extermination camps.

The Herero women wear gowns modeled after the Victorian outfits their people first encountered more than 100 years ago. They have brightly colored full skirts that fall to the ground, leg-of-mutton sleeves and unique headgear of the same material made to stick out like cattle horns. Mr. Naughten (b. 1968) photographed them outdoors with the white sand of the desert and clear blue skies as backdrops, and used a low vantage point to draw attention to their dignified postures. The men wear ersatz military uniforms made from bits of this and that; there are faux insignia, epaulettes, captain's caps (including one made out of cardboard) and simulated greaves. A cadet wears a plaid kilt and bonnet, maybe in reference to the British who succeeded the Germans. In one dramatic image, two dozen Herero women in long red skirts, full black blouses, and their unique red headgear parade across the desert.

 
—Mr. Meyers writes on photography for The Wall Street Journal. 
See his work at williammeyersphotography.com.

Simon Roberts' Best Shot

Screen grab from The Guardian website. ©The Guardian

Gallery artist, Simon Roberts, is interviewed by Sarah Phillips for The Guardian. The interview is part of newspaper's insightful My Best Shot series, in which photographers talk about a specifc photograph they've made.

"The print is 2m across, so when it's exhibited, you can see all the other details – such as the mini versions of Stonehenge, the Magna Carta, Nelson's column and Big Ben decorating each jump. All these elements come together to provide a theatrical presentation of the history of Britain. The image itself looks painterly and unreal, like an extreme digital composition, while overhead there's a sinister black blob: an eye-in-the-sky TV camera reminding us that this whole event is actually a stage set.".–Simon Roberts

The interview in The Guardian can be read in full here.

If you're in London, Simon Roberts' photograph is currently on show in the well received  exhibition, Landmark: The Fields of Photogpraphy, which we posted about here. Reviews of the exhibition, including mentions of Simon Roberts, have appeared in the Financial Times and The Independent.

Jim Naughten – Interviews & Acquisitions

Our artist, Jim Naughten – in case you haven't noticed – has been kept very busy this past few weeks, having been booked solidly for interviews with a range of different publicatons. We were fortunate to be able to squeeze in an interview for At Length magazine, just prior to the opening of Conflict and Costume, here at the gallery. You can read the interview here.

The Morning News have also just published an interview, including a slide show of photographs. This interview can be read here.

If you haven't had an opportunity to view the exhibition, there's plenty of time. The show runs through to May 4, 2013. Sales of the photographs have been 'robust', so if you have an interest in acquiring artworks from this new series, we recommend you talk to us very soon, as the prices increase as the editions sell.

Herero Women in Patchwork Dresses (2012) ©Jim Naughten

PORTRAITS

20" x 24", Edition of 10 + 2 AP's

41" x 50", Edition of 3 + 2 AP's

PANORAMAS

14" x 30", Edition of 10 + 2 AP's

24" x 50", Edition of 5 + 2 AP's

We're also delighted to have on display in our viewing room, a selection of photographs from the Re-enactors series, which formed Jim Naughten's first monograph, published by Hotshoe in 2009, and his first solo exhibition at the gallery in 2010.

Civilian with Black Fox Fur (2008) ©Jim Naughten

 

 PORTRAITS & VEHICLES

17 5/8" x 23 3/4", Edition of 10 + 2 AP's

PANORAMAS (Battle Scenes)

21.5" x 59 1/8, Edition of 5 + 2 AP's