Gallery Bershad will exhibit the photographs of Donald Greenhaus and Peter Hendrick from November 13 through December 31, 1999. In the gallery's first exhibition of photography they bring together two artists' visual exploration of New York City's architecture.
Donald Greenhaus has augmented his black and white In-Between Time series of photographs since the 1960's. Culled from thousands of film rolls on an array of subjects, photographs reveal his roots as a photojournalist trained to extensively document a subject. In these atmospheric photographs, he romanticizes the subject of New York City. Greenhaus focuses his lens on light reflecting from cityscapes, leaving only the suggestion of skylines with forms occluded through gradations of gray. The nocturnal cityscapes, a central subject of the series, create a potent tension between quivering reflections and the shadowy structures. The illusory quality of these photographs subsumes the viewer in their subtleties.
The city that (Donald Greenhaus) shows is an empty city - without hard edges, without people. His compositions are strange, his time eternal, and his work full of details like those of a completed puzzle - while giving us a final 'whole' picture, they almost even tell us the temperature at the moment it was taken.
-Lola Garrido. La Fundación Issue #4, Madrid, 1993.
Peter Hendrick exhibits new photographs in tandem with works from his series Shadows of the American Dream. The interrelated works illustrate the landscape of his current surroundings, revealing the gritty reality of New York's dreamy architectural relics. That Peter Hendrick does not consider himself first a photographer, is no caveat against the quality of his images. Hendrick integrates his assiduously prepared Cibachrome prints into light boxes and devices which interrupt the experience of viewing the photograph as a singular image. Light modifies the image and the elements become dependent on each other with their viewer to transmit meaning.
Hendrick, with a self-conscious and conspicuous literalness uses photographic images that serve as catalysts for our mental constructions, as the basis for his physical constructions.
-Bill Arning. Peter Hendrick, Other World exhibition catalogue, 1999
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