Robert Mann Gallery artists at The Smithsonian

A Democracy of Images: Photographs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
1st floor West, American Art Museum
Washington, DC
Through January 5, 2014

Featuring work by gallery artist Susan Rankaitis as well as the late Joe Deal, Aaron Siskind, and others, A Democracy of Images celebrates the ways in which the American experience has been molded and captured by photography. Rankaitis' combined media work Marvel (1986) reveals the outermost limits of the medium, while images by Deal, Siskind, Harry Callahan, and Robert Frank take on American landscapes and American characters with a modernist eye.

Landscapes in Passing: Photographs by Steve Fitch, Robbert Flick, and Elaine Mayes
2nd Floor South, American Art Museum
Washington, DC
Through January 20, 2014

Eschewing idealistic vistas or romanced plains, the 48 works in Landscapes in Passing highlight the rapid expansion of civilization into the natural world. Flick's photographs, drawn from his series "Sequential Views" consist of grids of images made in Los Angeles in 1980 as he traversed the streets, stopping at prescribed temporal or geographical intervals. The installation is part of a series that highlights objects from the museum's collection that are rarely on public display.

The Wall Street Journal reviews Hot Summer, Cool Jazz

A soundtrack for the Herman Leonard exhibition at Mann would have to feature "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," not only because so many of the musicians pictured performed and recorded the song, but because smoke is an important element in many of the images. Fats Navarro and Frank Sinatra are both holding cigarettes as they perform. Smoke curls up in front of the saxophones of Gerry Mulligan and Sonny Stitt.

Smoke is also critical in "Lester 'Prez' Young, NYC" (1948); the saxophonist himself is not in the picture, but is instead represented by the pork pie hat with which he was synonymous. The hat hangs on the opened cover of his sax case; next to it is an empty Coke bottle with a lit cigarette balanced on its rim. The lighting on the hat emphasizes its regular oval shape, which contrasts with the irregular curling of the cigarette smoke. The picture is simultaneously simple and complex, not unlike Young's playing.

Herman Leonard (1923-2010) opened a studio in Greenwich Village in 1949, when it was a center of live jazz, and he made a specialty of photographing jazz musicians. All the players included in this show are of continuing interest: Louis Armstrong, Chet Baker, Ray Brown, Nat King Cole, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Dinah Washington and more. A young Sarah Vaughan radiates melody as she sings at Birdland in 1949, and see Duke Ellington's enraptured smile as he listens to Ella Fitzgerald at the Downbeat Club in 1948.

To read the article online, click here.

Announcing representation of Jennifer Williams

Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of Jennifer Williams.

Williams' work refutes traditional classifications in its bold challenge to two-dimensionality through constructed illusion. Her photographic installations radically rupture the square frame and surface plane, bursting out in irrepressible radial fans on gallery walls or pouring down madly onto the floor.

Montaging images of such apparent mundanity as buildings, ladders, and garbage collected and photographed during walks through the city, Williams forges a sense of place. For the artist, the camera is not a vehicle of truth. Instead of attempting to capture an image as a static record, she makes work at the intersection of photography, sculpture, and collage to create nonlinear urban narratives of space and experience.

Williams received her BFA from Cooper Union and her MFA from Goldsmiths College in London. Her work has been widely exhibited throughout the country, and honors include the A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship and the NARS Foundation International Artist Residency, as well as the 2008 Juror's Grand Prize at the 4th Annual Alternative Processes show. She lives and works in New York City.

Jennifer Williams' first solo show at the gallery will open this October. For additional information about this work, please contact the gallery.

Mary Mattingly joins Art 21's New York Close Up

Gallery artist Mary Mattingly was one of seven New York-based artists recently added to the roster of the Art 21 documentary series New York Close Up. The program focuses on a culturally and creatively diverse group of artists in the first decade of their careers, following them through residencies and exhibitions and into their homes and studios to explore what it means to live and work in the New York City. The gallery will be exhibiting Mattingly's new work, which combines photography with environmental activism and large-scale sculptural projects, early this fall.

Read the article here.

The New York Times reviews Various Small Books

The New York Times reviews VARIOUS SMALL BOOKS: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha, edited by Jeff Brouws, Wendy Burton and Hermann Zschiegner.

The New York Times reviews VARIOUS SMALL BOOKS in the Sunday Book Review. The publication, an homage to the series-based work of Ed Ruscha, includes photography by gallery artists Jeff Brouws and Robbert Flick. It is also is co-edited by Brouws, who cites Ruscha as a long-time influence.

Read the article online here.

Town and Country reviews Richard Finkelstein Exhibition

According to the artist Richard Finkelstein, diorama building brings with it certain hazards. Aside from the potential disasters that can come with those tiny jars of Testor's hobby paint, the major time-wastage involved in trolling online offerings of Preiser and Arttista miniature figures, and the brain-twisting specifics of scales and gauges, there's a track record, if you will, of going off the deep end into an alternate, Lilliputian universe, one dominated, Finkelstein says, by "demented model-train addicts."

But Finkelstein, a former trial lawyer, has maintained a firm grip on his rationality, and his striking photographic images—of elaborately constructed tableaux that ingeniously incorporate ready-made elements you might find at a hobby shop—hum with precision, not to mention the kind of luscious, slightly bruised palette you might find in an Edward Hopper painting. His debut show at New York's Robert Mann Gallery, "A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes" (May 16-June 29), comprises a dozen or so photographs of these tiny worlds, some printed at colossal size. Each one—whether of a solitary figure throwing an impossibly long shadow on a sidewalk or of an intricately brocaded interior—is like a still from half-remembered movie, and their unabashed artificiality never fails to suggest something achingly real.

Read the article and view the slideshow online here.

Knight Foundation Awards Grant to Mary Mattingly

Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to announce that artist Mary Mattingly's Wetland project has recently received a grant from the Knight Foundation, an organization dedicated to environmental conservation and to fostering community art projects. In 2009, Mattingly designed and engineered a 3,000 sq. ft. barge-like structure, The Waterpod Project, in order to explore issues of global environmental politics in the current postindustrial age while investigating the efficacy of a self-sustaining mobile community. Her on-going projects serve as part of a larger initiative on behalf of the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs called smARTpower, which seeks to engage youths by creating a broader cultural and environmental awareness through its unique projects. To honor the program's achievements, the Bronx Museum of the Arts is hosting an upcoming celebration on Friday, May 3rd showcasing documentary films which track 15 artists in 18 countries around the world including Mattingly herself. On the heels of this tremendous accolade, the gallery will be exhibiting new works by Mary Mattingly this coming Fall.

The New Yorker reviews Margaret Watkins Exhibition

As both a teacher and a photographer, Watkins (1884-1969) was a key, if little known, figure in photography's transition, in the early twentieth century, from painterly pictorialism to a tougher, sleeker modernism. This excellent overview of her career, which petered out in the mid-nineteen-thirties, includes portraits, landscapes, and two terrific female nudes. But Watkins's still-lifes, a number of which were made as advertisements, are her most distinctive work. Whether her subjects are poppies, gourds, glassware, or dishes in a sink, she frames them with striking clarity and warmth, casting a fond and thoroughly engaging eye on ordinary domesticity. 

The Wall Street Journal reviews Margaret Watkins Exhibition

This is a strange tale: Margaret Watkins, born in Canada in 1884, by 1920 was a full-time instructor at the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York. Besides teaching such talented photographers as Doris Ulmann, Ralph Steiner and Paul Outerbridge, Ms. Watkins was a successful photographer who had commercial assignments from Macy's and J. Walter Thompson, a portfolio published in Vanity Fair and was recognized as a leader in the movement from soft- focus Pictorialism to a modernist idiom. Then in 1929, she went to Glasgow, Scotland, to care for two sick relatives and never came back; her career was over. She died in obscurity in 1969 and it was only because of the tenacity of a neighbor to whom she left a trunk of prints that her reputation has revived. The National Gallery of Canada had a retrospective exhibition in 2012 with an accompanying catalog.

Mann is showing 20 of her pictures and 10 by her students. Almost all of hers are platinum/palladium prints, including a 1925 portrait of composer Sergei Rachmaninov and a 1919 self- portrait that shows a certain hauteur and an elegant neck. There are nudes in the Clarence White mode, and wonderful still-lifes. "The Kitchen Sink" (1919) is a fine example of modernism with its emphasis on simple shapes: a milk bottle, a cup, a creamer, a bowl, a faucet, a teakettle spout, and their shadows on the sink's white enamel.

Robert Mann Gallery at the AIPAD Photography Show

We look forward to seeing you at booth 214 at the AIPAD Photography Show from April 4 - 7 at the Park Avenue Armory located at Park Avenue and 67th Street. The gallery will present new works by many of our contemporary artists including Julie Blackmon, Richard Finkelstein, and Mary Mattingly all of whose colorful compositions delicately balance the whimsical with the artful.

Robert Mann Gallery is especially pleased to present work by seminal 1970s photographer Mike Mandel. On display at AIPAD will be Mandel's elegantly crafted People in Cars which provides a humorous and honest documentary glimpse into the ubiquity of California car culture, and the ordinary individuals that comprise it.

In addition, alongside the work of our contemporary artists will be a well curated selection of vintage works by several modern masters including works by Harry Callahan, Fred Stein, Aaron Siskind, and David Vestal, among others.

Our display will also include photographs by artist Margaret Watkins whose work contributed heavily to the pivotal shift from Pictorialism to Modernism in the United States during the 1920s. Through her compositions, Watkins draws our attention to the beauty inherent in everyday objects. A larger selection of her work can be viewed in the gallery's current exhibition Margaret Watkins: Domestic Symphony up through May 11.

We invite you to attend the opening night gala to benefit inMotion, an organization dedicated to helping low-income women obtain legal services. For more information or to purchase tickets please click here.

We look forward to seeing you at AIPAD!