2023 LONDON DESIGN BIENNALE

JohN MACK REPRESENTS THE USA IN THE 2023 LONDON DESIGN BIENNALE

Robert Mann Gallery’s exceptional artists, John Mack and Mary Mattingly, possess a distinct global and environmental consciousness that permeates their work. Mattingly, who was just awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, is known for her discussions and projects pertaining to water conservation and preserving our natural resources. Meanwhile, Mack infuses his creations with a profound exploration of the future consequences of digital interference on our natural landscapes. Mack’s captivating light boxes, coupled with his innovative app that enables users to seamlessly transform Pokémon landscapes into their natural counterparts and vice versa will be showcased at this years London Biennale. As an observer, we can fully appreciate and celebrate these two artists as true trailblazers who contribute to the betterment of humankind and nature through their artistic endeavors.

Since 2016, author and artist John Mack has committed himself to one of the most pressing conversations of our times: the digital takeover of human consciousness.

With this perspective, Mack founded Life Calling, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving our humanity in the ‘Digital Age.’ In Life Calling’s signature program, ‘A Species Between Worlds’, Mack uses digital game design as a means to highlight the modalities of perception that bring about our disconnection from nature, including clues that might lead us back to our unity with it. With a passion for visually capturing not only the surrounding landscape but also the effects of connecting to either the natural or the virtual, Mack crisscrossed the United States of America, from Maine to Hawaii, photographing over forty-five US National Parks.

London Design Biennale is a global gathering of the world’s most ambitious and imaginative designers, curators and design institutes. The fourth edition will take place from June 1 to June 25, 2023 with the theme The Global Game: Remapping Collaborations.

More information here.

Congratulations Mary Mattingly!

Robert Mann Gallery proudly announces that Mary Mattingly is the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship

Mattingly is a photographer and sculptor with a focus on Environmental Art. Mattingly was the Brooklyn Public Library’s Artist in Residence for 2020. Some of her major projects include the founding Swale, a landscape on a barge in New York City;  participating in the Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video Ecotopia show; the Waterpod Project in the New York City Mayor's Office; and Wearable Homes at the Anchorage Museum, examining the intersection of clothing and sustainability. She participated in MoMA PS1's "Expo 1" in collaboration with Triple Canopy Magazine in 2013, received a Knight Foundation Grant for her WetLand project that opened in 2014 on the Delaware River in Philadelphia, and in 2015, she completed a two-part sculpture “Pull” for the International Havana Biennial with the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Her first Art 21: New York Close Up documentary video was released in 2013. Mattingly’s work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, the Seoul Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and the Palais de Tokyo. Her writings were included in Nature, edited by Jeffrey Kastner in the Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art series.

Julie Blackmon Featured in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The delightfully odd world of Missouri photographer Julie Blackmon

by Jane Henderson

The littlest of Julie Blackmon’s subjects seem trapped in a giant bubble.

Older kids, meanwhile, dangle feet in a backyard pool in a nostalgic scene of summer freedom. Further scrutiny, though, shows a chef’s knife stabbed in a watermelon and a swimmer floating face down. Is he looking for a penny, testing his lung capacity or in trouble? No adult is in sight.

Read the full article here.

Larry Fink Featured in Photograph Magazine

REVIEWS: Larry Fink | Robert Mann Gallery

by Jesse Dorris

In a 2011 interview with the now-defunct Visura Magazine, Larry Fink recalled the approach to life recommended by his mother, a one-time Marxist. “Why sublimate your need for elegance and joy and class and style and fun…I am going to live my life as fully as possible.”

Fink has sought that fullness throughout his long and varied career. As a teenager, he left his family on Long Island and arrived in the Village, where he studied with Lisette Model. He photographed Amiri Baraka and others, whom he called “delusional revolutionaries,” and travelled cross-country with them. Eventually, he settled into life on a working farm in Pennsylvania, home base for his work as a photographer for Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and GQ, to name just a few of the many publications who have published his photographs. He’s won countless photography awards for images that focused on everyone from soigné high society elites to Pacific Northwest loggers. One relative constant has been his use of a hand-held flash, a spotlight to direct the eye. Another is his compassion, hardly solemn but impossible to miss.

Read the full article here.

ROBERT MANN GALLERY & LARRY FINK

ROBERT MANN GALLERY ANNOUNCES NEW REPRESENTATION AND UPCOMING EXHIBITION OF LARRY FINK

Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of Larry Fink along with his inaugural exhibition at the gallery, opening on December 7th. The show will feature works from the series: Social Graces, Boxing, and Loggers among others. Born in Brooklyn in 1941 and raised in New York City, Fink began making pictures in his early teens. He was privately taught and mentored by photographer Lisette Model whose work greatly influenced Fink. He was strongly influenced by the dichotomy within his family, and in particular, the contradictory nature of his mother—who he has described as a bourgeois woman and a Marxist.

Read more about the upcoming exhibition here.

JULIE BLACKMON FEATURED IN COLLECTOR DAILY

Julie Blackmon: Up Around the Bend @Robert Mann

JTF (just the facts): A total of 8 color photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung against white walls in the single room gallery space. All of the works are archival pigment prints, made in 2021 or 2022. The prints are available in three sizes – roughly 26×32, 36×47, and 45×60 inches – and come in editions of 7 or 10. (Installation shots below.)

Comments/Context: In the past two decades, Julie Blackmon has built an enviable photographic career out of deliberately pushing scenes of American domesticity into the realm of warmly recognizable fantasy. At first glance, her pictures of backyards, summer nights, modest neighborhoods, and kids running free seem altogether familiar, with the rhythms of the often chaotic everyday lives of families and children frozen for just an instant. But up close, Blackmon’s compositions reveal themselves to be meticulously controlled constructions, engaging facsimiles of reality where every single detail has been carefully placed and stage-managed to generate a desired effect. In a sense, Blackmon has used the flexibility of contemporary photography to transform images back into something like hyper-real paintings, using the mechanism of the camera to capture all the controlled elements of a given scene, but pre-visualizing and arranging them with an eye for very specific compositional choices and outcomes.

Read the full article here.

THE NEW YORK TIMES FEATURES MARY MATTINGLY

The Optimistic Art of Mary Mattingly

The artist’s work addresses future climate crises while attempting to make the urban environment a better place to live right now.

In the summer of 2009, the artist Mary Mattingly moved out of her New York apartment and onto a barge for a five-month experiment in off-grid urban living. With salvaged-wood cabins; a geodesic dome; a garden sprouting lettuce, squash, berries and corn; a rainwater filtration system; and solar panels that (at least on sunny days) produced enough power for brief hot showers, “Waterpod” was both a floating sculpture and a mostly self-sufficient community. Mattingly, who celebrated her 31st birthday onboard, rarely stepped ashore. She shared the space with four chickens and a rotating cast of friends, who also lived aboard the vessel. The 100-foot-long, 30-foot-wide barge floated around the New York waterways, docking for two-week stints at public piers across the five boroughs. A tugboat brought it from place to place, but the rest of the power aboard the craft came from the sun and a jury-rigged stationary bike.

Read the full article here.

The Eye of Photography Features Jeff Brouws’ Typologies

ROBERT MANN : JEFF BROUWS : TYPOLOGIES

Robert Mann Gallery presents Typologies, an online presentation of works by Jeff Brouws.

Practicing what the artist terms “visual anthropology,” Brouws, over the past thirty years, has persistently pursued a body of work that examines the evolving American landscape through its myriad cultural and industrial artifacts. Taking inspiration from the “anonymous sculpture” studies of Hilla and Bernd Becher, the New Topographics Movement, the deadpan artist books of Ed Ruscha—and with these latest series the topographic surveys of the 19th Century—Brouws has produced visual archives focused mainly on architectural and landscape forms that forge his own photographic territory. Without romanticizing his subject matter, the photographs ask us to consider the historic, economic or social forces that have shaped our built environment—from its initial development to its eventual demise to its rebirth.

Read the full article here.

THE NEW YORK TIMES FEATURES JULIE BLACKMON

SPRINGFIELD, MISSOURI, IS THEIR MUSE

Working in their home city, the photographer Julie Blackmon and her daughter, Stella, a filmmaker, find some mystery in everyday life.

Julie Blackmon grew up in Springfield, Mo., a city of 165,000 people in the southern part of the state, and went to college there. She got married in Springfield and raised three children there. For much of that time, her home city struck her as “this generic town with a generic name, in the middle of the country, in the middle of nowhere,” she said. And then, about 20 years ago, she picked up a camera.

“All of a sudden I’m driving by Starbucks, and the guy that served me coffee every day is outside smoking a cigarette,” said Ms. Blackmon, whose third book of photographs, “Midwest Materials,” was published this month. “I remember thinking, ‘He’s got the most beautiful cheekbones when he inhales.’ He looked right out of a Balthus painting.”

Read the full article here.