Opening on Saturday, March 25, the gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new photographs by Los Angeles artist Christopher Williams. This will be the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery. Upcoming exhibitions include For Example: Die Welt ist schön (Revision 20) Couleur Européenne, Couleur Soviétique, Couleur Chinoise at Le Magasin, in Grenoble, France.
For Example: Die Welt ist schön (the world is beautiful) is an ongoing project started in 1993, which repositions specific modes of photographic presentation and representation with references to the artist's interest in modernism. The phrase itself is based on the title of the famous best-selling 1928 book by German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch.
The exhibition consists of 20 new photographs, both black-and-white and color. With the new works, the artist addresses the formal implications of color (Couleur Européenne, Couleur Soviétique, Couleur Chinoise) and examines the use of political and cultural language in Europe, Africa, Cuba and the United States in the late sixties and early seventies. Another important theme inherent in this body of work, is the notion of displacement. For example, included in the exhibition is an image of Chinatown in Los Angeles, and one in Havana, Cuba. There is also a series of images, taken in contemporary Los Angeles, of a 1960s Renault car, manufactured in the now famous Billancourt plant in Paris.
Even though the artist uses the conventions of pictorial genres, such as people/portraits, places/landscape and things/objects, he ultimately fragments and extracts their meanings by using the photographic medium to address sculptural issues relating to history, culture, aesthetics, and politics.