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.

THE EYE OF PHOTOGRAPHY FEATURES JULIE BLACKMON'S MIDWEST MATERIALS

ROBERT MANN GALLERY: JULIE BLACKMON: MIDWEST MATERIALS

For her third monograph, Midwest Materials, Julie Blackmon has created a new body of work that sparkles with the wit, dark humor, and irony for which the artist has gained such renown. Finding insight and inspiration in the seeming monotony of her “generic American hometown,” Blackmon constructs a captivating, fictitious world that is both playful and menacing. “I think of myself as a visual artist working in the medium of photography,” Blackmon notes, “and my assignment is to chart the fever dreams of American life.” Midwest Materials follows on the sold out titles Domestic Vacations (Radius Books, 2008) and Homegrown (Radius Books, 2014).

Read the full article here.

ROBERT MANN GALLERY FEATURED IN THE EYE OF PHOTOGRAPHY

ROBERT MANN GALLERY: FRIENDS + FAMILY

Robert Mann Gallery considers all the artists they work with family, and some actually are. Robert Mann Gallery presents their summer exhibition, Friends + Family. This exhibition features works by artists connected not only through the gallery that exhibits their work, but also through the strong ties built between artists sharing a craft. Many artists or thereafter their estates have been with Mann since the 1980’s. After 40 years this is certainly family!

Read the full article here.

ROBERT MANN GALLERY FEATURED IN METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE

ROBERT MANN GALLERY

With over 40 years in the fine art photography market Robert Mann has played a key role in establishing an international market for both classical and contemporary photographs. Robert has been instrumental in launching the careers for many artists as well as enhancing the collectability and value of many established photographers. He has placed significant works in major museum, corporate and private art collections.

Robert began working with pioneering dealer Harry Lunn in Washington D.C. in the mid 1970’s, he then went on to direct the LIGHT Gallery in New York, one of the earliest public galleries established exclusively for the promotion of fine art photography. Striking out on his own in 1985 Robert launched his first public gallery from a townhouse space on Manhattan’s upper east side from where he exhibited artists such as Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, O. Winston Link, Richard Misrach and Aaron Siskind. In the late 1990’s Robert was the first photography gallery to relocate to the new art neighborhood of Chelsea, settling into a 6,000 square foot space. The exhibition program expanded to include large-scale contemporary artists and the gallery remained a fixture in Chelsea for over twenty years.

Read the full article here.

MUSÉE MAGAZINE FEATURES HITCHHIKERS

EXHIBITION REVIEW: DOUG BIGGERT: HITCHIKERS AND A SANDAL SHOP

Doug Biggert shot the hitchhikers he encountered driving his green 1966 VW Bug across the state.

By Megan May Walsh

Strangers carry a certain allure to them. They each have a story, a story yet to be known or a story imagined for them by fellow strangers. Perhaps they are lost souls wandering the ends of the Earth to discover a greater purpose awaiting them or perhaps they are adventure-seekers hoping to discover a new marvel of the natural world. The possibilities and complexity are endless, and photographer Doug Biggert made it his project to collect the possibilities and complexities of strangers’ stories.

The George Adams Gallery with the Robert Mann Gallery are displaying the wanderlust-esque of Doug Biggert’s work. The exhibition consists of two great bodies of work by Biggert, Hitchhikers and Sandal Shop, each of which documents encounters over the course of years. Hitchhikers is a series of portraits Biggert collected on his travels along I 80 and Route 49 in Northern California beginning in the early 1970s. Sandal Shop is mainly portraits of patrons that frequented Socrates Sandal shop on West Balboa Boulevard in Newport Harbor, CA, from 1968-1972.

Read the full article here.

VICE I-D ON DOUG BIGGERT

PHOTOGRAPHING HUSTLERS, HIPPIES, AND DRIFTERS IN 1960S CALIFORNIA

Doug Biggert shot the hitchhikers he encountered driving his green 1966 VW Bug across the state.

By Miss Rosen

By 1968, the Socrates Sandals shop in Newport Harbor, California, had become a favourite destination for Orange County's bubbling counterculture. Here, hippies, surfers, students, blue-collar workers, and radicals of all stripes found kinship in the otherwise conservative SoCal town. Driven to document the random encounters he had throughout the day, store clerk Doug Biggert began photographing customers with a Kodak Instamatic.

Read the full article here.