A detail from Marco Breuer’s Untitled (C-498), 2004, made with scratched chromogenic paper.
COURTESY VON LINTEL GALLERY, NEW YORK
In pictures of ethereal specks and kaleidoscopic explosions of color, photographers are embracing abstraction
by Eric Bryant (excerpt from artnewsonline.com)
In Marco Breuer’s recent photographs, black specks dance across a white surface, leaving faint trails that mark the passage of time. Sensuous blocks of yellow glow like crystals lit from within, and drippy parallel lines that seem to sit on top of the paper call to mind Action Painting. Made without camera or film, these lush, textured works, collected in Breuer’s 2007 book Early Recordings, defy our basic notions of what photography can be. Breuer achieves his effects by burning photographic papers, scraping their emulsions, and experimenting with chemical formulas that were popular in the 19th century.
Breuer is one of a wave of photographers now gaining recognition for work that abandons recognizable subject matter. “Abstraction goes back to the very beginnings of photography and has come back in different revivals,” says Roxana Marcoci, photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “There were the New Vision people in the 1920s and another group in the 1960s, and it is here again right now.”
The range of work recently on view testifies to the current strength of abstract photography. Last fall, a miniretrospective of Breuer’s explorations of light-sensitive materials was featured at Von Lintel Gallery, and Eileen Quinlan’s disorienting close-ups of spaces fractured by mirrors and light were showing on the other side of Manhattan at Miguel Abreu Gallery. This winter Walead Beshty exhibited his folded-paper photograms in lurid colors at China Art Objects Galleries in Los Angeles, while Alison Rossiter’s foggy prints made on unexposed photographic paper were on view in “The Death of Photography” at Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto. And when the Whitney Biennial opens this month, it will include photograms of screens that appear digital by James Welling, one of Beshty’s teachers at UCLA and an influence on a whole generation of photographers looking at abstraction. [Read more…]
