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Nicholas Hughes: Contemplating Landscape, September 7 - October 30, 2010

Thu, 09/02/2010

  

Nailya Alexander Gallery is pleased to present “Nicholas Hughes: Contemplating Landscape.”  Opening on September 7, the show of fifteen, medium to large format color photographs runs through October 30, 2010 at 41 E 57th Street, Suite 704. This will be Hughes’s first show in New York, and a reception for the artist will be held on September 14 from 5:30 to 7:30pm.

British artist Nicholas Hughes (b. 1963) works in series analogous to verses in poetry. Each series expresses a concern for the environment while alluding to universal Romantic themes. Each seeks to capture the frail residue of contemporary wilderness through abstract imagery. In contemplating the relationship between man and nature, Hughes examines the space between the world that people inhabit and that nature claims as its own: “The demands of industry and the vanity of human ownership have squeezed out the parameters of the rural idyll – leaving maybe only the illusions of space available through the constructions of the camera.”

In his Edge (2002-2006) and In Darkness Visible (2005-2007) series, Hughes explores a sense of wonderment before nature and its transformative powers. The overburdened mind is offered an escape valve through wondrous sea vistas or a resurrected primordial forest of central London parkland. In his recent Field (2007-2009) he has taken his constructed observations to a more challenging level: “… it no longer seems necessary to cross the globe in search of the new, the exotic and the undiscovered. Instead it is the seemingly new world on our doorstep that demands exploration and contemplation.” The entire series was made in the vicinity of Hughes’s home in Cornwall. The artist feels that environmental awareness has heightened our sensibility towards the beautiful and sublime in local landscape. His contemplation is by no means only a perpetuation of a Romantic, however, for he sees the notion of the natural world as forever vast and mysterious quickly evaporating. By focusing on boundaries and surfaces, he acknowledges the limits humanity has imposed on the natural world and considers the future for both. Hughes uses a large format field camera to produce highly detailed 4 x 5 inches negatives; the traditional camera design also provides more freedom in creating a composition.

Hughes’s work has been gaining increasing international recognition through "The Histories of Photography" exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (2010), a solo show at the Photographers’ Gallery in London (2007), and being part of "Earth" at Houston Fotofest (2006) as well as in "Landscape," the 5th International Photo Festival in Seoul, South Korea (2005). His work will be a part of "Something that I’ll Really Never See: Contemporary Photography from the Victoria & Albert Museum," which opens in November 2010 at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai.

ArtHamptons, July 8-11

Fri, 07/02/2010

July 9-11, 2010

July 8, 2010 - Opening Preview Party
benefits LongHouse Reserve

Sayre Park
Bridgehampton, NY

Nailya Alexander Gallery is pleased to announce participation in ArtHamptons July 8-11, 2010.  This opportunity gives us great pleasure in showcasing the works of our gallery artists Arkady Shaikhet, George Tice, Alexey Titarenko, Pentti Sammallahti, Evgeny Mokhorev and Nicholas Hughes. Please visit our Booth #227. The gallery will be closed for the run of the fair. For more information about ArtHapmtons visit: www.arthamptons.com

Among other news: Evgeny Mokhorev is featured in this month’s issue of Eyemazing, an international magazine for contemporary photography. Alexey Titarenko has been keeping very busy with various exhibitions. If you happen to be in France this summer, please visit his show at Camera Obscura Gallery in Paris and a retrospective show in the museum of Vendome.  Our current exhibition “Dmitri Baltermants: Photographs 1940s-1960s” will run through July 30. The gallery will be closed in August, but we will be available by appointment.

We wish you all a Happy Fourth of July!

 

Best regards,

Nailya Alexander Gallery

 

DMITRI BALTERMANTS: Photographs 1940s-1960s

Mon, 04/19/2010

Nailya Alexander Gallery is pleased to present “Dmitri Baltermants: Photographs 1940s-1960s,” an exhibition encompassing the photographer’s iconic WW II images and his work from the last years of Stalin’s glory and the era of Khrushchev’s politics. The show of some thirty early prints will run from 5 May through 30 July 2010, at 41 E 57th Street, Suite 704.

We are especially pleased to present this exhibition in commemoration of the 65th Anniversary of the end of WW II in Europe this May. During the war, Dmitri Baltermants (1912-1990), who taught himself photography, worked for Izvestia (the Communist Party newspaper) among other journals, covering battlefields in Ukraine, Poland and Germany, reaching Berlin in 1945. His photographs chronicle war as a universal tragedy. Grief (1942), one of his most iconic war images, documents the aftermath of a Nazi massacre in the Crimean village of Kerch by showing grieving village women as they search for the bodies of their loved ones.

Baltermants spent a long time working on images from this ferocious event, which were only displayed for the first time in the 1960s. We are exhibiting three of the photographer’s interpretations of the harrowing scene.

While in Germany, Baltermants took another memorable photograph Tchaikovsky (1945), in which he captured a moment of calm and beauty in the midst of destruction: a group of Russian soldiers, gathered in a shattered room of a ruined house around a miraculously unharmed piano, listening to a soldier playing.

 

After the war Baltermants worked for Ogonyok, a popular illustrated magazine. It was the beginning of Cold War when anti-foreign agitation was visible throughout all spheres of life, particularly in science and culture.  Baltermants made a historic picture of leading Soviet biologist Lysenko attacking Western genetic research in 1948.

And in 1949, he photographed internationally renowned American bass-baritone singer and actor, Paul Robeson (1898-1976), who was warmly embraced in the Soviet Union for his civil rights and peace movement but persecuted in the US for his leftist politics, especially in the age of McCarthyism.

Robeson received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953.  Every Soviet citizen remembered March 6th of the same year, the day when Stalin’s death was announced. Baltermants created the photograph The Announcement of Stalin’s Death out of three negatives in order to depict the grieving workers at the Dynamo Factory. We are also exhibiting a rare color print of Stalin on his death bier.

Being a Kremlin photographer, Baltermants made a favorable portrait of the Party’s next First Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, at his dacha in the summer of 1955. Shortly after consolidating his power, the ebullient and dynamic politician was a stark contrast to the dangerous Stalin.  Khrushchev is probably remembered as a most colorful Soviet leader, known for his dramatic, boorish gestures and unreasonable policies including his unshakable belief that Communism would triumph over capitalism.  One of the spotlight images from this period is of Khrushchev holding a piece of corn at a meeting promoting his campaign to grow corn in the American fashion. After a visit to Iowa in 1959 where he saw field after field of maturing corn, his enthusiasm grew for innovation, which eventually undermined his reputation.

In 1964, with another change of power (Khrushchev was forced to retire), Baltermants became a member of Ogonyok’s editorial board and its main picture editor. The same year he had his first personal exhibition in London and the following year in New York. He became an accomplished artist, an expert in staged photography and a master of socialist realist art.

We are honored for an opportunity to present rare prints of one of the greatest practitioners of Soviet photography. To view more images please visit our gallery or website.

Alexey Titarenko Review in ARTnews

Thu, 04/01/2010

ALEXEY TITARENKO

Through April 24

Saint Petersburg is a city populated by ghosts, as photographer Alexey Titarenko shows us in these pictures taken during the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Titarenko presents the city as mystical and eerie, a reflection of the many tragedies that occurred there throughout much of the 20th century. He uses long exposures and shoots in available light; his subjects disappear as they move before his lens, blurring into snow-covered streets and dramatic architectures.

Titarenko’s key inspiration is not contemporary photographic practice, but rather music, and particularly that of Shostakovich. That is why he organized this show into four “movements”: “The City of Shadows,”  “The Anonymous,” “The Light of Saint Petersburg,” and “Unfinished Time.” In Untitled (Crowd 1), 1992, and Untitled (Zigzag Crowd), 1994, a cloud of humanity rushes up and down subway-station stairs; only the steps and railings remain fixed. In Untitled (Stranger), 1996, a man hurrying down a bleak winter street is just a smudge of black against the white piles of snow on the sidewalk.

 

The best of these black-and-white pictures allow for details that situate the scene in time and place. One of the strongest images is Untitled (Three Women Selling Cigarettes), 1992, depicting a trio of elderly ladies, wearing scarves and shapeless coats, as they tromp onto the street to offer their wares. In Untitled (Sennaya Square), 1998, an aerial view of an outdoor Russian market, the sellers are distinctly visible standing by their stalls, while the buyers dissolve into a river of white streaks. Many photographers in recent years have employed “blur,” but Titarenko applies it to street photography, transforming straight reportage into haunting poetry.

- Barbara Pollack

Alexey Titarenko exhibition opening

Wed, 03/10/2010

 

Alexey Titarenko: Saint Petersburg in Four Movements

Mon, 01/18/2010

Nailya Alexander Gallery is pleased to announce Alexey Titarenko: Saint Petersburg in Four Movements opening on February 11th, in her new space at the Fuller Building, 41 E 57th Street, Suite 704. The exhibition will run through April 24, 2010. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am-6pm and by appointment.

This will be Alexey Titarenko’s first major exhibition in New York that features his entire St. Petersburg series (1991-2009). The four underlying sequences, or movements – to borrow a term from the vocabulary of music, which features prominently in the artist's mind, are The City of Shadows, The Anonymous, The Light of Saint Petersburg  and Unfinished Time. Like music, the expression of time is a presence in Titarenko's art, associated with literature and in particular, the works of Marcel Proust.

This majestic and history-laden city, where Titarenko was born in 1962, is the central subject of his photography, or to be more accurate it is the soul of the city and therefore that of Russia. As the artist himself explains:

"It would be en error to consider my photographs within the context of the values now fashionable in the arts in general and photography in particular. To align them with such and such a trend, without taking into account that their very purpose in existing is defined by the past. Even the most factual of them are not reportage, but a novel. The principal motivation for their creation is, in fact, always the same: Russia's history throughout the 20th century, which is an unending series of tragedies of ever more baffling dimensions, whether you consider the wars, the famines or the so-called times of peace. The history of Russia... but in the form of rather contemporary images, made in a single location, a single city – St. Petersburg. Rather than the city (which is mostly only vaguely visible), these images represent emotion - the range of emotions forming the deep inner character of the people who lived in this country and endured all these disasters, people who were usually only represented from outside. And it is therefore these emotions which, in themselves, are quite general and have remained unchanged in the course of the century, like the emotions aroused by the music of Shostakovich, for example, or by the novels of Solzhenitsin, which are the true subject of my photographs, and my goal would be to convey them to the viewer, to make him or her feel them ... understand, to feel compassion and love."

Titarenko was able to develop a form of expression reminiscent of Dostoyevsky's stories, inspired by the moods and rhythms of the music of Shostakovich. Often, the city, veiled in winter's shadows or bright with summer's dazzle, is inhabited by nearly transparent phantoms. They dwell in its streets, cross its courtyards: crowds on the move, spreading over a vast square like a wave, their individual identities blurred and indistinct. Nevertheless, sometimes a few isolated, improbable figures emerge from the crowd. This photographic technique, involving relatively slow shutter speeds, confirms a taste for randomness and makes each image a unique adventure, a potential source of surprise. The approach also bespeaks Titarenko's long-standing interest in 19th-century landscape photographers, especially those who operated in cities. In addition to this style of representation, which eschews any temptation to be objective and is finally quite impressionistic, the darkroom technique Titarenko uses transforms the black-and-white print into a composition endowed with subtle, suggestive hues and ever-differing nuances of gray. Titarenko never reproduces exactly the same rendering of light and shadow from one print to the next.

Alexey Titarenko has had numerous exhibitions both in Europe and the US. His photographs can be found in the collections of such museums as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (PA); the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (TX); the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (MA); the Museum of Fine Arts in Columbus (OH); George Eastman House, Rochester (NY); Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego (CA); Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara (CA); Davis Museum, Wellesley (MA); Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk (VA); European House of Photography, Paris (France); Musee de l'Elysee, Lausanne (Switzerland); Reattu Museum, Arles (France), and in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg (Russia).

Please contact the gallery for more information at 212-315-2211 or info@nailyaalexandergallery.com

 

Nicholas Hughes: Field (2007-2009)

Sun, 10/25/2009

“The dream of deep ecology will never be realised on earth, but our survival as a species may be dependent on our capacity to dream it in the work of our imagination.”

 From ‘Song Of The Earth’. (Johnathan Bate)

We are pleased to announce Field, a new series by British photographer Nicholas Hughes.

 

"Having sought previously to create a primordial forest in central London, it seemed an appropriate next step to remove myself to a more remote location in order to further examine the human relationship with nature.  At the outset of a two-year period spent in the far southwest of England I determined to restrict my attention to only that which lay within my immediate vicinity and was accessible by foot.  In line with previous attempts to work within a defined space I made a field bordering my home the arena of my activities.  Submerging myself within this space satisfied my desire to restrict my impact on the Earth, for in place of travel to new and exotic destinations I sought the new and exotic at home.

I found inherent in this field a powerful symbol of an historic and continuing paradigm.  Upon leaving our ancient forested home, the cutting of fields marked our first attempts to colonise the wilderness and harness nature for material gain, and in our misguided use of the rainforests today we see how little our philosophies have progressed since.

Yet whilst the land carries the tale of its own destruction, it continues to present alternatives for the future.  Finding little to disturb my camera work enabled a clawing back of senses from the oversaturated and over-stimulated media driven world and offered the possibility, through isolation, of being open to the transformative powers of nature.

This highly concentrated field study drew support from the symbolism inherent in depictions of the rural idyll, and from there emerged an allegory of three parts; an investigation of our past in order to gauge a better measure of our future." © Nicholas Hughes  (October 2009)

View images: Field Verse I (Apart), Field Verse II (Outside), Field Verse III (Surface)

A Glimpse of New Project

Sun, 10/04/2009

Alexey Titarenko has been working with his archive preparing for the two major exhibitions about St. Petersburg scheduled for early next year in Moscow and New York. Here are some of his thoughts about the project: "It would be en error to consider my photographs within the context of the values now fashionable in the arts in general and photography in particular. To align them with such and such a trend, without taking into account that their very purpose in existing is defined by the past. Even the most factual of them are not a reportage, but a novel. The principal motivation for their creation is, in fact, always the same: Russia's history throughout the 20th century, which is an unending series of tragedies of ever more baffling dimensions, whether you consider the wars, the famines or the so-called times of peace. The history of Russia... but in the form of rather contemporary images, made in a single location, a single city - Saint-Petersburg. Rather than the city (which is mostly only vaguely visible), these photos represent emotion - the range of emotions forming the deep inner character of the people who lived in this country and endured all these disasters, people who were usually only represented FROM OUTSIDE. And it is therefore these emotions which, in themselves, are quite general and have remained unchanged in the course of the century, like the emotions aroused by the music of Shostakovich, for example, or by the novels of Solzhenitsin, which are the true subject of my photographs, and my goal would be to convey them to the viewer, to make him or her feel them ... understand, to feel compassion and love." To view more images go here, they are all 7 x 7inches, edition of 5, priced between $1,500 and $2,000.

Blogs

Mon, 09/28/2009

I just wanted to share a couple blogs on our artists. Here is a new one about Nicholas Hughes:
http://photographyforagreenerplanet.wordpress.com/2009/09/27/nicholas-hu...
There are many blogs about Alexey Titarenko, I especially like this piece by Kenneth Woods, a conductor of Oregon East Symphony:
http://kennethwoods.net/blog1/?s=alexey+titarenko
We'll post new images by both artists soon. Still looking for a new gallery space in Chelsea, hoping to reopen in December!

September Update

Fri, 09/11/2009

 

(Andrey Chezhin in his St. Petersburg studio)

It became a tradition for me to travel every summer to Russia to visit with artists and friends. Especially, I enjoy my time during white nights in St. Petersburg, the home town for Alexey Titarenko, Evgeny Mokhorev and Andrey Chezhin. Amadelio, a German-based film company, returned to St. Petersburg in July for more interviews, an hour and a half documentary about Mokhorev will be released by November. 

 

(Evgeny Mokhorev)

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Alexey Titarenko photographs were a part of two major exhibitions at the International Photography Festival in Arles: "Les Artistes des Chambres d'echo" at the Reattu Museum and "Delpire & Co." at the Espace Van Gogh.

Igor Savchenko takes part in a major exhibition Turbulent World - Telling Time, 1989-2009, which first opened in Berlin and recently traveled to Moscow. The exhibition features contemporary photography and video from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan and Germany, it is organized by Goethe Institute.