The Mechanics of Expression

About

The experimental vision and spirit of the Fotoform group is on view in The Mechanics of Expression: Vera Lutter, Sameer Makarius & Otto Steinert at Howard Greenberg Gallery from April 6 – May 13, 2017. The exhibition explores work by Steinert and his Fotoform group, as well as Sameer Makarius (1924-2009) who formed a photography group in Argentina, and  contemporary artist Vera Lutter. Although living in different countries at different times, the artists exhibit a similar visual vocabulary. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, April 6, from 6 – 8 p.m.

From its origins, the medium of photography has held out the promise of enhanced vision, of eyes outside our bodies, in the words of László Moholy-Nagy.  It has enticed its practitioners into realms of experiment and speculation, and inspired them to produce works that are equal parts science and self-expression.  Even as the medium evolved artistically toward a documentary precision and a fidelity to appearances, it developed an alternative history, a tradition of testing the boundaries of the visual. 

The artists in the exhibition have carried that tradition forward in dramatic ways.  They have given free rein to photographic processes, embraced abstraction, explored extreme ideas of form, and adapted the oldest photographic tools to new uses and formats.

Profoundly influenced by Moholy-Nagy, Otto Steinert led an effort after World War II to revive the investigative essence of Bauhaus photography.  Forming the Fotoform group in 1949, Steinert organized a series of exhibitions that broke with the conventions of documentary realism that largely defined the medium.  Championing what he called subjective photography, Steinert and the Fotoform artists sought to reforge the links between photography’s experimental, nonobjective elements and the inner experience of both viewer and photographer.

Egyptian-born Sameer Makarius established his own photography group, Forum, in Buenos Aires.  Makarius was one of Argentina’s premier documentarians but also one of the medium’s most radical practitioners. Also influenced by Moholy-Nagy, he merged painting and photography through the use of cliché verre – creating his own abstract negatives on glass. 

The contemporary work of Vera Lutter (b. 1960) has embodied this experimental spirit in photography by looking forward and back simultaneously. Lutter has revived the prephotographic device of the camera obscura to create large, one-of-a-kind negative pinhole images of cityscapes.  Her focus on industrial sites evokes a city of labor and production, but one long since undergoing transformation.

By playing with reality, the photographers at times cause the viewer to question what they are seeing. In the exhibition, Steinert’s experiments with textural vaselike forms turned horizontal from 1955-56 are juxtaposed with his early 1950s industrial smoke stacks. An extraordinary level of experimention can be seen in Makarius’s 1961 amorphous splattered abstractions. Lutter, who credits the Fotoform group as an influence, is represented by her depiction of bold architectural forms in her 1996 Fulton Ferry Landing and 2015 Brooklyn Bridge photographs.

The photographers in The Mechanics of Expression: Vera Lutter, Sameer Makarius & Otto Steinert offer viewers a new role – as explorers of visual worlds far beyond the range of normal seeing.  As Steinert wrote, “Photography gives us for the first time a feeling of the structure of things with an intensity which the eye, limited by its accommodation, had hitherto been quite unable to perceive.”     

About Howard Greenberg Gallery

Since its inception over 30 years ago, Howard Greenberg Gallery has built a vast and ever-changing collection of some of the most important photographs in the medium. The Gallery's collection acts as a living history of photography, offering genres and styles from Pictorialism to Modernism, in addition to contemporary photography and images conceived for industry, advertising, and fashion. Howard Greenberg Gallery is located at 41 East 57th Street, Suite 1406, New York. The gallery exhibits at The ADAA Art Show, The Armory Show, The Photography Show presented by AIPAD, New York, Photo London, Art Basel, Paris Photo, and Art Basel Miami Beach. For more information, contact 212-334-0010 or info@howardgreenberg.com or visit www.howardgreenberg.com.

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