Maroesjka Lavigne: Ísland reviewed in Artnet News

May 12, 2014
Elizabeth Manus

Some words for Ísland, or Iceland as it's written in Icelandic: hoarfrost, white-hot, névé. And now, some pictures for Ísland, each of them on display at Robert Mann Gallery. Here work by the young Belgian photographer Lavigne, who (according to press materials) drove alone across Iceland for four months, evokes the kind of world that a 19th-century snowshoe-clad loner could love—spare, brightly lit, and miles from cities jammed with multi-story filing cabinets stuffed with people and their belongings. Snowmen, Reykjavik (2011) shows a circle of sun-faceted snow menhirs (clean white) foregrounding a lone soccer goal on a grassy field, a line of blue water and, farther in the distance, ghost-white houses. Phantom, Krossneslaug, Westfjords (2011) has a man just below the surface of a glacial pool, the dapple of light and liquid erasing his facial features. A Kelly green Excavator, On the Road (2011) raises the question of what Iceland needs to clear away in order to develop. Perhaps some precincts of the world deserve their blank spaces, Lavigne suggests, deserve to be left to themselves and their own quiet thoughts—like the faraway-eyed young woman in Hildur in Her Car, Mosfellbaer (2012), or the individuals taking the thermal waters in 2011's Blue Lagoon, Reykjavik. Or artists.

To read the article online, click here.

Laurent Millet at the Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Angers

Les Enfantillages Pittoresques
Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Angers
Angers, France
May 17 - November 16, 2014

The city of Angers is hosting an exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts devoted to artist Laurent Millet, in collaboration with La Galerie Particuliére in Paris, who will host an exhibition of the artist's work in May and June.

In his work as a photographer and visual artist, Laurent Millet (b. 1968) can be said to compose the chapters of an imaginary encyclopaedia, peopled with objects that he constructs in either a natural setting or in his workshop. His assemblages are hybrids of traditional, scientific and architectural objects, as well as works of artists close to Millet's heart.

How can one define his work? Is it sculpture? Drawing? DIY? Installation art? The artist stages 'poetic machinery' which he then photographs, this final image justifying all of the stages preceding it.

In his own way, relying mostly on a certain awkward erudition rather than skill, he attempts to question the images—those he produces, and those, which are latent, waiting to be awakened in the landscape and in the objects. He thus examines their modes of appearance, persistence and practical nature, as well as their uncertain identity.

To continue reading and for more information about the exhibition, click here.

Robert Mann Gallery at Downtown Fair

Booth DT 16
May 8-11, 2014
Downtown Armory
New York City

Please join us this Thursday through Saturday at Downtown Fair, where we will be mounting a dynamic solo exhibition of works by Julie Blackmon. The artist's subjects, rich in character and animation, dominate their settings with playful behavior infused with impending disaster. Translucent in their referral to Dutch Renaissance master Jan Steen's paintings, Blackmon's photographs modernize the raucous, familial scenes of the proverbial "Jan Steen household," while also borrowing from the strange interpersonal compositions of French painter Balthus. Our Downtown Fair exhibition will include several sold-out works by Blackmon, as well as her newest images. For more information or to purchase tickets please click here. We hope to see you there!

Maroesjka Lavigne: Ísland reviewed in The Wall Street Journal

The young Belgian photographer Maroesjka Lavigne spent four months driving alone across Iceland. "Yellow House, On the Road" (2011) is one of many pictures dominated by snow. The little yellow house sits doll-like amid a vast expanse of white snow; the white is modulated with hints of blue and melds imperceptibly into a sky that is also white with suggestions of blue. The vehicle in "Autobus, On the Road" (2012) is a red touring bus, but most of its side and windows are plastered white with snow. It is parked in a white field before a small white building whose red roof is also mostly covered with snow. Snow is falling in "Black Church, Búðir" (2012); white streaks are set against a pale-blue sky, and the simple church endures in stoic isolation. The white in "Shrimps, Reykjavík" (2011), however, is a porcelain sink; 11 translucent-and-pink shrimp with black dots for eyes cluster around the stainless-steel drain stopper.

There are three fine portraits: "Hildur in Her Car, Mosfellbaer" (2012), "Magni the Magnificent, Prikið, Reykjavík" (2011) and "Phantom, Krossneslaug, Westfjords" (2011). The first is an attractive young woman with auburn hair wearing a lace-fringed Peter Pan collar; light from an unknown source falls across her eyes. The second is a 17-year-old writer shown in a booth in a literary club, his hair slicked into place, and wearing suspenders and a polka-dot bow tie. The face of the male swimmer in the third is obscured by the rippled surface of the water.

—William Meyers

Read the article online here.

Maroesjka Lavigne: Ísland reviewed in Photograph Magazine

In a photograph that recalls Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, a lone figure overlooks Iceland's Gullfoss waterfall. Unlike Friedrich's wanderer, who towers confidently over the scene beneath him, Belgian photographer Maroesjka Lavigne's subject is nearly indiscernible in the landscape, his black clothing almost completely blanketed in snow.

He's not the only person or man-made object made small by nature in Lavigne's series Ísland, on view at Robert Mann Gallery through May 17. A swimmer floating in a turquoise pool is rendered faceless by Lavigne's flash against the surface of the water. A red bus and a red roof are almost entirely veiled in white. Nature, if not humanity's superior, often seems at least its contemporary, a force with which to be reckoned.

But Lavigne's perspective is not so simplistic. Just as often, we are forced to consider humanity's influence on nature. In one photograph, a smattering of pink shrimp lie fetus-like across a clinically white kitchen sink. In another, taken at Reykjavik's Blue Lagoon, the tops of bodies are dots across the landscape, drifting in a cloud of steam rising from the water. Or is that haze from the industrial facility, just visible in the background, spewing clouds of smoke from a set of chimneys?

Continue reading the article here.

Jennifer Williams at AIPAD in The New York Times

Origins Story, Through a Modern Lens
Experimental Strategies at Aipad's Photography Show

The photography world has been ruled in recent years by a fascination with abstraction and experimental processes and techniques. You see this everywhere in the current Association of International Photography Art Dealers show at the Park Avenue Armory. Even Hans P. Kraus Jr., who deals in photographic old masters, is showing—alongside vintage prints by Charles Marville, now featured in a show at the Metropolitan Museum, and Eugène Atget—some 19th-century pencil drawings by John Herschel, an important contributor to early photography...

...Other works that extend the medium in interesting directions include Jennifer Williams's small, sculptural collages made with photographs, at Robert Mann; John Wood's collages and assemblages at Bruce Silverstein; and Wynn Bullock's "Color Light Abstractions" from the '60s at Rick Webster. Although there is plenty of straight photography here, including historical photojournalism at Daniel Blau, it's the drive toward process, abstraction and experimentation that makes this fair feel particularly relevant.

—Martha Schwendener

Read the full article online here.

Robert Mann Gallery featured as a Must-See Booth in Artinfo

Must-See Booths at the AIPAD Photography Show

The mood was light as the 34th edition of the AIPAD Photography Show opened its doors last night to a buoyant crowd of dealers, collectors, curators, and fans. Photography, a medium that has grown comfortably into its malleable place within the art discussion, certainly attracts a friendly crowd, with dealers popping into each other's booths throughout the evening... Portraiture was alive and well, with some fantastic inclusions from Julie Blackmon, at Robert Mann Gallery, of her seemingly stylized vignettes of nuclear families, and Song Chao, at M97, whose shots of mine workers read as political statements that are visually reminiscent of work by Michael Halsband.

—Julie Baumgardner

Read the full article online here.

Maroesjka Lavigne in Interview Magazine

Maroesjka Lavigne, Once on this Island

"When you take a picture in a beautiful place, you have to realize that nature isn't the background for your photograph," says 24-year-old Belgian photographer Maroesjka Lavigne. "Rather, you are its prop. The only thing added to the scene, after all, is you."

During a four-month excursion to Iceland that began with an internship at The Reykjavik Grapevine, Lavigne became enamored of the country's stark scenery and how its people dealt with the challenges of going about daily life in an environment reigned by vast, inescapable nature. Steering away from typical depictions of Iceland's great mountainscapes and volcanoes, her work seeks instead to deconstruct the auras of intimidation surrounding these overwhelming forms, uncovering what makes Iceland a home to those who live there. The photographs carry a sense of familiarity and nostalgia for Reykjavik and its nearby towns that is marked by an uncanny awareness of our limited time on earth, through side-by-side portrayals of human life and the more lasting, terrestrial features. For Lavigne, nature is unconquerable, and everywhere: a small figure peers contemplatively over a bridge, allowing the falling snow to envelop his image in white, while a suburban street sleeps trustingly beneath an ominous, rust-colored sky. In "Ísland," her first solo show opening at Robert Mann Gallery this Thursday, April 3, Lavigne presents the rare findings of her travels in "moments when color, light and subject merge into the perfect image."

Read the full interview here.

Chip Hooper: Surf reviewed in April 2014 issue of ArtNews

Chip Hooper's eight large-scale photographs of the ocean were assembled here under the title "Surf". These rather kinetic images revealed water caught in motion while also suggesting how quickly our visual metaphors for water can change with painterly shadow plays and expressive gestural effects. Hooper has long drawn inspiration from the sea; his series of photographs capturing the coasts of California and New Zealand take strong visual cues from the landscape photography of Ansel Adams. But in this show, Hooper's documentary impulse went deeper, as seen in extreme close-ups taken over the last ten years that focus on the nature of water in ways that can only be expressed by the camera.

In Surf #1176 (2003), the sea assumes a striated texture, as vertical ripples interspersed with wiry stitches of spray spreads across the surface. Dramatic works, such as this one, were tempered by the presence of a suite of three photographs of feathery, amorphous waters, in white and pale grays that almost appeared to be sketched in charcoal. Though these cloudy images may be less striking visually, they served to make the more charged photos, with their sharp contrasts, that much more pronounced.

Surf #1082 (2003) captures a moment of high drama in a sea of waves: by isolating an instance of water threatening to crash in on itself, Hooper calls attention to water's powerful but ephemeral forms with a sculpture's eye. By contrast, Surf #2154 (2012) stood out: in this photo, the foamy surface is not just an element of the water but a detail of the image itself. Hooper's work is less aligned with that of Adams than with the impulses of the Abstract Expressionists whose work emphasizes pattern and mood.

—Ali Pechman