Jan Avgikos

Susan Cahan

William Bartman

Tim Rollins

Felix Gonzales-Torres

Gaylen Gerber

The exhibition of Gerber's work at The Renaissance Society in 1992 marked the culmination of a ten-year period in which Gerber persistently painted the same opaque, monochromatic still-life over and over, in a bold artistic assertion that seeing is not believing but simply perceiving. This catalog is the first monograph publication of Gerber's work, and documents the artist's installations of these paintings at various international exhibitions, including Documenta 9 in 1992, and Robbin Lockett Gallery in Chicago in 1988. At the Society's exhibition, Gerber hung a single row of his paintings abutted end to end on a wall crossing the entire gallery space. Jan Avgiko's catalog essay, written in close tandem with Gerber, is a brilliant investigation of the role perceptual aesthetic theories play in the modernist and postmodernist monochrome.

January 20-February 29, 1992

Katy Grannan

Katy Grannan's portraits examine the desire of her subjects to offer themselves up to the camera lens. Throughout Model American, the influence of portraiture, from classical painting to fashion advertising, can be sensed in the poses and gazes her models adopt. From escapism to self-discovery and catharsis, the motivations for posing - the projection of an idealized self into the lens of a stranger - are varied, yet the resulting images consistently reflect the intensity of the relationship between artist and model. Each image resonates with the tension of a first encounter. In three of Grannan's five series, she photographs her models in their own surroundings or her own home, paying meticulous attention to the elements of each domestic setting: wood paneling, patterned wallpaper, and other mundane but often telling details. The subjects choose to remain clothed, to model nude, or to pause somewhere in between, working with Grannan to arrive at the pose. In Grannan's most recent series, "Sugar Camp Road" and "Mystic Lake," she moves the exercise outdoors, using municipal parks and their surrounding areas as the backdrop. Even though the parklands and roadsides that serve as her set bring the private encounters of her earlier series into the public landscape, she maintains a delicate - yet increasingly charged - sense of intimacy. Model American: Katy Grannan is the first published collection of her work, offering over seventy of her finest images.

Model American

Lynne Cooke

Chantal Akerman, Lili Dujourie, Francesca Woodman

Ellipsis

Jan Avgikos

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