"Lato Destro: The Photographic Side of Arte Povera"
2003-03-05 until 2003-04-12
Esso Gallery
New York, NY, USA United States of America

The exhibition that will inaugurate the new space is entitled LATO DESTRO: The Photographic Side of Arte Povera Featured are photographic works dating from the 60's and 70's, by the Arte Povera artists Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini, Salvo, Gilberto Zorio together with works by those photographers who also "technically" created the artists’ works and documented that period; photographers such as Italo Bressano, Gianfranco Gorgoni, Ugo Mulas, Paolo Mussat Sartor and Paolo Pellion.

About the relationship between art and photography there is a great deal to say. Too much in a press release. It's relevant to say that in this particular case the alchemical processes in the work of the Arte Povera artists finds a natural ground in photography's alchemical process. During this period the exchange of impulses between this group of artists and photographers created an energy that gave a new volume, a new form and shape to the photographic image and to the artist's work.

The photographers' help was certainly useful to the artists in a period when visual communication (art-magazines, video, etc.) was beginning and especially to those artists intent on producing acts or performances that without photography would have disappeared.

But photographers were not merely creating documentation,they where doing their own work , taking shots, (rarely recognized as art-work) creating their own images and developing their own points of view. The artists on the other hand brought photographic experimentation to a new dimension, they brought new materials and new energies that projected photography outside of the surface of the paper traditional imagery.

In short, this show provides several different optics, logics and statements on photography, according to a group of artists and photographers who shared a short period of their lives and work investigating together the newly found conceptual limits of art.

Jennifer Bacon and Filippo Fossati are pleased to announce the opening of ESSO Gallery's new location at 531 West 26th Street on the 4th floor. After four pioneering years in the Lower East Side and three successful years in the Fur District of Chelsea, ESSO Gallery joins the art crowd in the Chelsea Art Mall, relocating it's exhibition space to the 4th floor of 531 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of New York

Other Important Exhibitions in New York