Nailya Alexander Gallery

Underground: Russian Photography 1970-1989, 01/25- 03/24, 2012

Thu, 01/05/2012

Nailya Alexander Gallery is pleased to announce “Underground: Russian Photography 1970s-1980s,” an exhibition of some forty vintage gelatin silver prints by Boris Smelov (1951, Leningrad -1998, St. Petersburg), Boris Mikhailov (b. 1938, Kharkov), Yuri Rybchinsky (b. 1935, Brdiansk), Alexander Lapin (b. 1945, Moscow), Nikolai Bakharev (b. 1946, Novokuznetsk), Gennady Bodrov (1958, Solntsy -1999, Kursk), Vladimir Kuprianov (1954-2011, Moscow), Igor Moukhin (b. 1961, Moscow), Andrey Chezhin (b. 1960, Leningrad), and Alexey Titarenko (b. 1962, Leningrad). The exhibition will run from January 25 through March 24, 2012 at the Fuller Building, 41 East 57^th Street, Suite 704. Gallery hours are 11am-6pm, Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment.

During the Khrushchev’s cultural thaw, nonconformist art and literary movements, involving such figures and activities as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Josef Brodsky and samizdat, had a great impact on the evolution of Russian photography in the 1970s, and laid the foundation for a new generation of photographers during glasnost and perestroika in the 1980s. Photographers in the exhibition challenged the government-prescribed optimistic style of socialist realism by photographing forbidden topics, and like other unofficial artists, they risked personal safety in pursuit for individual expression and freedom. In the 1970s, Boris Mikhailov, a pioneer of Russian conceptual photography, used the medium to reflect skepticism about both approved photography and the false realities it presented. By hand-coloring black-and-white prints in the Sots Art series, Mikhailov skillfully exploited the well-known inventory of socialist realist clichés. In 1971 Boris Smelov’s exhibition was cancelled due to censorship and accusation over the mystical and obscure quality of his cityscapes.

During the pompous climate of the Brezhnev era of stagnation, Yuri Rybchinsky photographed with gritty realism a forced labor colony for young people (1978) exposing the painful aspects of its society. Nikolai Bakharev’s posed group portraits of families, friends or lovers, most of them barely dressed and taken either at a park picnic or at apartments, exploring the underlying morals of a Soviet province, while Vladimir Kuprianov took anonymous portraits from the provinces and printed them on crumpled paper in his “Mid-Russian Landscape” series (1988).

More generally, Alexander Lapin and Gennady Bodrov documented the deterioration of the Soviet system, poverty, and alienation. Alexey Titarenko’s photomontages from “Nomenklatura of Signs” (1986-1989) critiqued the Communist regime as an oppressive system that converted citizens into mere signs. Using his body as model, Andrey Chezhin’s “Black Square” series (1988) is both a self-portrait and homage to Malevich. By contrast, Igor Moukhin chose the emerging generation of Moskovites as his subject in his famous “Young People” (1985-1989) series. Taken together, the photographs in the exhibition chronicle an exciting time of change and signaled the end of the Soviet empire.

Nikolai Bakharev photographs are also on view at “Three post war European Photographers: Nikolai Bakharev, Gerard Fieret, and Miroslav Tichy” exhibition at the Julie Saul Gallery (February 2–March 17, 2012). For more information please contact the gallery at info@nailyaalexandergallery.com

The Wall Street Journal Review, December 3, 2012

Fri, 12/16/2011

By WILLIAM MEYERS

Light of Modernity in Buenos Aires (1929-1954)
Nailya Alexander Gallery
41 E. 57th St., Suite 704
(212) 315-2211
Through Jan. 11

Of the six photographers representing Argentinian modernism at Nailya Alexander, five were born abroad: Annemarie Heinrich and Grete Stern in Germany, Anatole Saderman in Russia, Juan Di Sandro in Italy, and Sameer Makarius in Egypt to a German mother. The sixth, native-born Horacio Coppola, studied photography at the Bauhaus in Germany. Their European sensibilities were appreciated in the small artistic community of Buenos Aires, but all did commercial work to survive. Mr. Di Sandro, who never considered himself an artist, was Argentina's first important photojournalist; he worked for the newspaper La Nación from 1914 until the military dictatorship in 1976. The seven pictures on display by him include two shots of spectacular fires, three dramatic scenes of the fountains and lights of Buenos Aires at night, and "Vigil on the Night Before the Passing of Eva Peron" (1952), with a huge crowd holding candles and venerating her beaming image.

Ms. Stern was famous before she left Germany in 1935 as half of ringl+pit, an innovative commercial studio. Her work at Nailya Alexander includes four of the 150 "dream" pictures she took between 1948 and 1952 to illustrate a column entitled "Psychoanalysis Will Help You" that ran in the woman's magazine Idilio. The surreal photomontages are based on letters women sent to the magazine, and they retain their sense of phantasmagoria and threat; they're funny, but you're afraid to laugh. Mr. Coppola was in London in 1934 and three of his street scenes are being shown; graffiti written on a wall with chalk ("Mr. Nobody" is repeated twice), a busker with a wind-up record player, and men's clothes hanging in the breeze outside a shop. Mr. Saderman'sfive simple, elegant studies of flora—the four stalks of "Flia Amarilidaceas, Fruit" (1934), shot against a black background, or the extravagant "Caesalpina Gillesi Yellow Bird of Paradise, Flower," (1934), shot against white—remind us that modernists such as Imogen Cunningham and Manuel Alvarez Bravo also did studies of plants.

In addition to the fashion work and portraits she did to support herself, Ms. Heinrichexperimented with surreal images and double-exposures. Her "Self-portrait With Children" (1947), is a tour de force shot in a reflecting globe that puts her son's face improbably on top, distorts her daughter crouched in the rear, and shows the purposeful Ms. Heinrich manning the camera placed dead-center. Mr. Makarius grew up in Egypt, Germany and Hungary, where he studied painting and sculpture. Once he settled permanently in Argentina in 1953, he organizedForum , a group dedicated to promoting photography as an art. His varied pictures include a Bauhaus inspired industrial scene, patrons in the elegant balconies of a theater, and browsers in a discount bookstore. By century's end, these artists' pioneering work was not only recognized but also appreciated, and they were honored in their adopted land.

Light of Modernity in Buenos Aires, 1929-1954

Mon, 10/10/2011

October 18, 2011- January 11, 2012

Nailya Alexander Gallery is pleased to present “Light of Modernity in Buenos Aries, 1929-1954,”an exhibition of 42 gelatin silver prints by Annemarie Heinrich (Germany, 1912 – Argentina, 2005), Grete Stern (Germany 1904-Argentina, 1999), Horacio Coppola (Argentina, 1906), Anatole Saderman (Russia, 1904-Argentina, 1993), Juan Di Sandro (Italy, 1898-Argentina, 1988), and Sameer Makarius (Egypt, 1924-Argentina, 2009). The exhibition will run from October 18 through January 11, 2012 at The Fuller Building, 41 East 57^th Street, Suite 704. The opening reception will be held on October 18 from 6 to 8pm. Gallery hours are 11am-6pm, Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment.

Modern photography emerged in Argentina between the 1930s and the early 1950s with the arrival of European artists. After emigrating from Berlin in 1926, Annemarie Heinrich initially worked as an assistant photographer, and in 1930, opened her own studio in Buenos Aires. Her world was theater, entertainment, cinema, and culture. Honing a version of glamour portraiture, Heinrich experimented with fragmentation and multiple exposures (Caprices Anita Grim, 1938) as well as the metaphors and optical games of surrealist inheritance (Self-portrait with Children, 1947).

Horacio Coppola practiced photography and film in the 1920s. Following a short stay in London in 1932, he studied at the Bauhaus in Berlin. There he met and later married Grete Stern. The two studied with Walter Peterhans, who had a great influence on both of them. With the rise of Nazism, the couple moved to Buenos Aires (1935), and started a photography and advertising studio. Due to their European experience, Coppola and Stern were instrumental in the modernization of local photography. On view will be photomontages of Stern’s most famous series Sueños (Dreams) made for the weekly psychology magazine Idilio between 1948 and 1952.

In 1936, the Asociación Amigos del Arte exhibited photographs of vegetable species, which Anatole Saderman, unaware about the work of Karl Blossfeldt, produced for the publication Wonders of Our Indigenous Plants in 1934, under the direction of the botanist Ilse von Rentzell. After the Bolshevik Revolution the Saderman family left Russia for Poland and then moved to Germany, eventually settling in Buenos Aires in 1930.

Anatole was a member of La Carpeta de los 10 (Archive of Ten), active between 1952 and 1959. The group was famous for prolific photographic production and critical discourse. It also included Annemarie Heinrich and Juan Di Sandro who came to Argentina in 1910 from Italy. Di Sandro was the first noteworthy photojournalist in the country, and worked for the newspaper La Nación from 1914 to the military dictatorship of 1976. Sameer Makarius called his style “subjective documentalism.” He lived in Germany and Hungary before moving to Argentina in 1953, and became the leader of the Forum. This association sought to reflect the way of life with pristine clarity and truthfulness, with experimentation placed within the limits of documentary ethics.

All six photographers in the exhibition were innovators and are considered to be founders of Argentina’s modern photography. For more information please contact the gallery at info@nailyaalexandergallery.com

Lori Grinker in The New Yorker, October 3, 2011

Sat, 10/08/2011

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN: ART

LORI GRINKER

On a search for relatives from Lithuania, scattered since the late eighteen-hundreds, Grinker travelled there—and to the Ukraine, South Africa, and the U.S.—to photograph the places they settled and their descendants. Evidence of a specific diaspora, her project also considers the larger dispersal of European Jews before and after the Holocaust by focussing as much on locales as on people. Next to the dish rack on a kitchen counter in the Ukraine, a portrait of Lenin speaks to the persistence of dogma; in Chicago, a dresser topped by framed photographs hints at the strength of family ties. Always a sensitive observer, Grinker suggests those ties connect not just one family but many. Through Oct. 15.

Lori Grinker: Distant Relations

Thu, 08/25/2011

Nailya Alexander Gallery is pleased to present “Lori Grinker: Distant Relations,” an exhibition of 19 intimate color photographs. Taken in Lithuania (2002), South Africa (2005), Ukraine (2008), and the US (2011) the works create an impressionistic map of her family’s migration since its dispersal in the late 1800s from Western Lithuania. The exhibition will run from September 7 through October 15, 2011 at The Fuller Building, 41 East 57^th Street, Suite 704. The opening reception for the artist will be held on September 13 from 6 to 8pm. Gallery hours are 11am-6pm, Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment. Using medium format color film, Grinker chronicles her family’s diaspora with landscapes, portraiture, and interiors. Concentrating more on particular environments than people and practices, her landscapes and interiors focus on the atmosphere of the place. These fragmentary images stir the viewer’s memory and emotions and trigger wonder about our journey in life. Dr. Roy Richard Grinker, Lori’s cousin and a professor of Anthropology at The George Washington University, calls these carefully composed images “an absent presence,” and George Slade, former curator at the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University speaks about them “constructing moments in which absence is a salient property and memory seems to be in the process of taking hold.” Grinker embeds philosophical questions within quotidian events, endowing personal stories with broader meanings of other peoples’ cultural identity, geographic belonging and life-world rootedness. The present show is only the first chapter of Grinker’s search. Future work will take place in Argentina, Israel, the United Kingdom and Germany, reconnecting the family and forging links between past and present.

Lori Grinker began her career while a student at Parsons School of Design, documenting the rise of a thirteen-year old future heavyweight championship boxer, Mike Tyson. She joined Contact Press Images in 1988. Author of two books, The Invisible Thread, A Portrait of Jewish American Women (JPS, 1989 - 6 editions) and AFTERWAR; Veterans from a World in Conflict (de-MO, 2005), a fifteen-year project documenting the physical and psychological wounds of frontline war veterans in the last century. The latter garnered international awards and grants, including a Hasselblad Foundation grant; the Ernst Haas award; a New York Foundation for the Arts grant; Project Competition, Center, Santa Fe, and a W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Fellowship. Her photographs have been featured in major magazines around the world, and are held in many collections including the International Center of Photography, New York; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Jewish Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam; San Francisco MOMA.

Jane Hilton: Dead Eagle Trail, May 25-July 8, 2011

Tue, 05/24/2011

Nailya Alexander Gallery is pleased to present “Jane Hilton: Dead Eagle Trail,” the artist’s most recent project (2006-2010) about American cowboys and their way of life in the twenty-first century. This will be Jane Hilton’s first solo exhibition in New York, featuring twenty color photographs, all taken by a 4 x 5 inch camera. The exhibition will run from May 26 through July 8, 2011 at 41 E 57th Street, Suite 704. Gallery hours are 11am-6pm, Tuesday through Saturday. The opening reception for the artist and book signing will be held on May 25th from 6 to 8pm.

Jane Hilton (b. 1965), a London based photographer and filmmaker, has been captivated by a cowboy lifestyle since her childhood in suburban England, when she watched Westerns on the television. An opportunity to work on various projects in the US for the last two decades ignited her passion to explore American culture. On one of her assignments she learned about a seventeen-year-old cowboy, Jeremiah Karsten, who traveled from his native Alaska to Mexico on horseback for two years, earning a living by breaking wild horses or by taking stints on ranches. Jeremiah’s journey inspired Hilton to learn more about one of the most romantic American archetypes, the spirit of a cowboy and his life in immense spaces of natural beauty.

Both the book and the exhibition are entitled “Dead Eagle Trail” in reference to Hilton’s discovery of a dead Golden Eagle on the road in Nevada in 2006. This sacred bird for Native Americans became an omen of her journey. Hilton traveled through Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, documenting and witnessing both older and younger generation of cowboys against a backdrop of decline as ranches have been gradually succumbing to developers or disappearing. Hilton chose not to portray cowboys in the traditional way, on horseback, but rather in their homes (sometimes even bedrooms), surrounded by their collections of artifacts and memorabilia. Hilton’s cowboys, dignified and strong, cherish their legacy and freedom. Her portrait of Pate Meinzer, cowboy from Benjamin, Texas received a Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize and was displayed at the National Portrait Gallery in London (November, 2010 – February, 2011).

Among Hilton’s previous photography projects are “God Bless America” (1994-2002), “All Lit Up” (1999-2000), “The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment” (2007), “Silent Order” (2007). She made “Love for Sale,” a series of ten documentaries on legalized prostitution in Nevada for the BBC. In the artist’s words her work in America “has had an underlying theme about the American Dream and the different aspects of American culture geared towards it. Whether documenting deer hunters, people getting married in Las Vegas and the wedding culture, or legalized brothels. It’s all about what these people aspire to and the fact that they promote the idea that, ‘you can do anything in life’.” Hilton’s photographs are regularly published in The Sunday Times Magazine and The Telegraph Magazine.

"A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now" exhibition at J. Paul Getty Museum

Sat, 05/07/2011

Nailya Alexander Gallery is pleased to announce Alexey Titarenko's participation in A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum , May 17 – October 2, 2011.

A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now looks at three critical periods in Cuba’s history as witnessed by photographers. The exhibition unites Walker Evan’s views from the 1930s with those of Cubans who participated in the 1959 revolution and contemporary foreign artists exploring the island nation since the end of Soviet support in the 1990s. Together the works span reportage, portraiture, landscape, and street photography, demonstrating a diverse international range of perspectives. In addition to Evans, the exhibition includes photographers such as Virginia Beahan, Raúl Corrales, Alex Harris, Alberto Korda, Osvaldo Salas, and Alexey Titarenko.

Pentti Sammallahti in ARTnews, April 2011

Fri, 04/08/2011

PENTTI SAMMALLAHTI

The 51 beautiful, sometimes wry images here were carefully framed small, fleeting moments either in the human milieu – often represented by domesticated animals – or in the natural world. In some photos the arenas interacted, as in pictures of light-colored horses set against dramatic landscapes, and a herd of sheep aglow at dusk. In others, including one showing the spots on a Dalmatian and those on a birch tree trunk, they mimicked each other. There were also images of creatures in nature.

Some of the most striking pictures seemed to suggest Nordic fairy tales. A panoramic shot from the Solovetsky Islands in Russia shows onion-domed buildings lining a snowy road, along which a dog walks with a leather bag in its mouth while a fluffy cat looks on. The urge to invent a story is almost irresistible. In another panorama from Solovki, a dog sits proudly on the seat of a ski-equipped motorcycle, its dark silhouette forming a pyramid with three dogs below.

The show also included seductive shots of animals in exotic locations. There were moody flamingos in Namibia, a dog napping on a cow in India, and a monkey riding on a goat in Nepal. There were also more familiar scenes of swans mixing with ducks in England, pigeons in Nice, France, and a puppy in a window in Greece. Particularly compelling were the statuesque cats keeping watch over strings of dried fish in Iceland.

But Sammallahti’s photographs are at their best and most soulful when the subject is subtle. In a gorgeously printed panorama, also from Solovki, a dark figure walks along a snow-covered road; drifts cover buildings to the left, and houses to the right disappear into a gray, misty, sunset that suggests a colorless Turner. In the distance, at the precise center of the frame, stands a tiny black dog.

-Rebecca Robertson

Max Penson: Photography between Revolution and Tradition

Tue, 03/15/2011

Nailya Alexander Gallery and Forum of Culture and Arts of Uzbekistan Foundation are pleased to present “Max Penson: Photography between Revolution and Tradition” featuring 48 vintage gelatin silver prints from the artist’s family estate and several private collections. The exhibition will run from April 5 through May 13, 2011 at 41 E 57^th Street, Suite 704. Gallery hours are 11am-6pm, Tuesday through Saturday.

Max Penson was born in 1893 in the small town of Velizh near Vitebsk, the birthplace of Marc Chagall. Penson managed to finish four classes of the local school before moving to Vilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania) where he studied at the art school of the Antokolsky Society. To escape WWI and Jewish pogroms, the young artist fled to exotic Central Asia, and settled in Kokand, Uzbekistan. There, he helped found an art-production labor-school under the authority of the Kokand Revolutionary Committee. In addition to being the principal of the school, Penson taught draftsmanship and painting to 350 Uzbek students. In appreciation of his work in Kokand, the district of Fergana awarded him with a camera, a gift that led to his giving up a career in education to follow his new passion for photography. He moved to Tashkent in 1923 and was employed by Central Asia’s largest newspaper, Pravda Vostoka (Truth of the East) in 1925.

The best photojournalists from Moscow like Arkady Shaikhet, Max Alpert and Georgy Zelma traveled to Uzbekistan to cover the modernization effort: formation of collective farms, irrigation of arid lands for cotton growing, development of the paper industry and silk production, liberation of women, and the education of children. Penson recorded these historical changes alongside with other photographers and contributed regularly to TASS (Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union).

Penson created a unique visual chronicle, an epic poem in photographic form of the radical transformation of life and colossal engineering projects in the region. His images show men digging vast irrigation canals, attending literacy classes, women rid off their traditional horsehair veils to wear contemporary clothes and pursuing new professions, as telephone operators or tractor drivers. In 1937 Penson was part of the World Fair in Paris, winning an award for his "Uzbek Madonna," a portrait of a young woman unveiled and publicly nursing her child. Penson’s photographs reflect both an awareness of the Modernist aesthetic used by European artists and an idealization of a new Soviet life. In 1934 Alexander Rodchenko used Penson’s images in the album Uzbekistan in 10 Years. In 1939, Penson contributed 300 photographs for an exhibition celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Also, in 1939, Penson, among other photographers, documented the construction of the two-hundred-and-seventy-kilometers-long Grand Fergana Canal, which was built by hand by 160,000 people in only forty-five days and was one of the most remarkable achievements of the Soviet Union. The images of the construction conjure a pharaonic impression, as enormous numbers of peasants are called to work under the heat of the sun by karnai (musical elongated horns). During this period Penson met Sergei Eisenstein who was at the time shooting a film about the Grand Fergana Canal (the film was never finished). Later in Soviet Photo (1940) Eisenstein wrote, "There cannot be many masters left who choose a specific terrain for their work, dedicate themselves to it completely and make it an integrated part of their personal destiny… It is, for instance, virtually impossible to speak about the city of Fergana without mentioning the omnipresent Penson who traveled all over Uzbekistan with his camera. His unparalleled photo archives contain material that enables us to trace a period in the republic's history year by year... His whole artistic development is tied up with this wonderful republic."

Accused of being influenced by Western aesthetics, Penson fell out of official favor. In 1948 rising anti-Semitism forced him to leave his job at Pravda Vostoka after working there for 25 years. He died in 1959 as a result of depression and illness.

This exhibition has been made possible thanks to the knowledge and generous support of Max Penson’s grandson Maxime Penson. We are also grateful for the valuable support of Forum of Culture and Arts of Uzbekistan Foundation’s Representative Office in New York. The Fund Forum, a non-governmental association promoting and reviving Uzbek culture, works to disseminate unbiased information about Uzbekistan’s unique culture, rich historical legacy, diversity and contemporary life throughout the world.

Pentti Sammallahti WSJ Review, January 29

Tue, 02/01/2011

Pentti Sammallahti is considered a national treasure by his countrymen, and is currently the subject of a 400-picture retrospective at the Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki. The 51 pictures at Alexander justify the Finns' estimation. Mr. Sammallahti (born 1950) has an uncanny affinity for animals, and nearly every image in this exhibition has at least one animal in it. There are plenty of dogs, horses and sheep, a few monkeys, a rabbit, a frog and birds of several species. The creatures in the pictures are archaic remnants of Northern sagas and fairly tales, but simultaneously just corporeal fauna, frisking in the snow, feeding in the meadows or perched on telephone wires. They are couriers between two realms.

Mr. Sammallahti's photographs are small, some as little as 3.5 inches by 4.3 inches, and they are exquisitely printed. He is a master of infinite shades of gray, and frequently uses gold or selenium toning to subtle effect. The compositions, like the best of Scandinavian design, are spare and elegant. Snow, ice and somber mists figure in many of the works. The delicate beauty of Mr. Sammallahti's images is complemented by a delicate folkish humor, usually provided by the animals. See, for instance, "Helsinki, Finland, 1973," in which one of the two ice floes in a river is occupied by a pair of ducks serenely indifferent to the apparent cold.

By Mr. William Meyers

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