DOUG BIGGERT (1941-2023)

Doug Biggert, Sandal Shop Series (Doug Biggert), c. 1968-72. Kodak Instamatic print, 3.5 x 3.5 inches

Robert Mann Gallery & George Adams Gallery are saddened to announce the passing of Doug Biggert (1941-2023)

Born in Evanston, Illinois in 1941 and raised in St Louis, MO, Biggert attended Principia College and later graduated from Washington University. His first exposure to photography was as a child, though he didn’t begin photographing in earnest until 1968 when he began the Sandal Shop series while living in California. A wanderer by nature, Biggert hitchhiked through the southwest as a teenager and around Europe during a summer abroad while in college. He eventually found his way to California, living in Balboa, Orange County, San Francisco, and finally Sacramento. The urge to explore never left him, however. Biggert visited all fifty states, through his own wanderlust and his role as the manager of distribution of magazines for Tower Records, a position he held from 1978 until 1999. In this capacity, Biggert was hugely influential in improving distribution and exposure for a nascent Zine scene.

Biggert’s first solo museum exhibition, A Sandalshop Wall, was held at the Newport Harbor Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art) in 1972. In 2007, in conjunction with exhibitions in Paris and Brussels, Michael Husson published a selection of Biggert's photographs, Hitch-Hikers, and in 2008 Biggert was the subject of the documentary Beautiful America produced by Xavier Carcelle and Chloé Colpé. In 2009, the Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento, exhibited BIGGERT'S Hitchhikers and Other Work and the following year he was given his first New York solo exhibition, White Room: Doug Biggert, at White Columns. Biggert’s seminal Hitchhikers series, a collection of unique prints, nearly 450 images spanning across three decades that documented an extraordinary time and place in American culture, were presented in simultaneous exhibitions at the Robert Mann Gallery and George Adams Gallery New York in 2022.

Artists in Residence at Open Studios

OPEN STUDIOS WITH MARY MATTINGLY AT KINOSAITO

Mary Mattingly and Leticia Pardo invite you to attend their Artists in Residence Open Studios to see their works in progress and chat with them about their practices.

KinoSaito is a nonprofit interdisciplinary art center established to extend the collaborative and experimental practices of the Japanese American abstract painter and avant-garde theater designer, Kikuo Saito (1939–2016). Located in the newly renovated former St. Patrick’s Catholic School in Verplanck, NY, the center, which had been Saito’s studio, houses two large art galleries, a multipurpose theater/dance/performance space, two studios for a rotating roster of resident artists, a classroom for arts education and public programs, a café, and a bountiful garden.

More information

Mary Mattingly: Ebb of a Spring Tide

 

MARY MATTINGLY AT SOCRATES SCULPTURE PARK

Socrates Sculpture Park presents New York-based artist Mary Mattingly: Ebb of a Spring Tide on view May 20 through September 10, 2023. Mattingly’s first solo exhibition at Socrates unveils new sculptural works exploring our relationship to coastal ecosystems and the shifting nature of rivers and water lines. An Opening Celebration will be held on Saturday, May 20 from 12:00 to 5:00pm.

The exhibition will feature a 65-foot living sculpture titled Water Clock, fabricated on-site in response to the Park’s unique waterfront location along the East River; the place where the edges of land and water meet: the riparian zone. This monumental, scaffold structure, which includes edible vegetation, mirrors the cityscape across the East River, highlighting the human impact on New York City’s riparian edge. The clock’s pulse will be kept by water from the East River moving through tubes on the structure, a reminder of a life support system and the delicate balance of coastal ecosystems.

Read more here

2023 LONDON DESIGN BIENNALE

JohN MACK REPRESENTS THE USA IN THE 2023 LONDON DESIGN BIENNALE

Robert Mann Gallery’s exceptional artists, John Mack and Mary Mattingly, possess a distinct global and environmental consciousness that permeates their work. Mattingly, who was just awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, is known for her discussions and projects pertaining to water conservation and preserving our natural resources. Meanwhile, Mack infuses his creations with a profound exploration of the future consequences of digital interference on our natural landscapes. Mack’s captivating light boxes, coupled with his innovative app that enables users to seamlessly transform Pokémon landscapes into their natural counterparts and vice versa will be showcased at this years London Biennale. As an observer, we can fully appreciate and celebrate these two artists as true trailblazers who contribute to the betterment of humankind and nature through their artistic endeavors.

Since 2016, author and artist John Mack has committed himself to one of the most pressing conversations of our times: the digital takeover of human consciousness.

With this perspective, Mack founded Life Calling, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving our humanity in the ‘Digital Age.’ In Life Calling’s signature program, ‘A Species Between Worlds’, Mack uses digital game design as a means to highlight the modalities of perception that bring about our disconnection from nature, including clues that might lead us back to our unity with it. With a passion for visually capturing not only the surrounding landscape but also the effects of connecting to either the natural or the virtual, Mack crisscrossed the United States of America, from Maine to Hawaii, photographing over forty-five US National Parks.

London Design Biennale is a global gathering of the world’s most ambitious and imaginative designers, curators and design institutes. The fourth edition will take place from June 1 to June 25, 2023 with the theme The Global Game: Remapping Collaborations.

More information here.

Congratulations Mary Mattingly!

Robert Mann Gallery proudly announces that Mary Mattingly is the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship

Mattingly is a photographer and sculptor with a focus on Environmental Art. Mattingly was the Brooklyn Public Library’s Artist in Residence for 2020. Some of her major projects include the founding Swale, a landscape on a barge in New York City;  participating in the Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video Ecotopia show; the Waterpod Project in the New York City Mayor's Office; and Wearable Homes at the Anchorage Museum, examining the intersection of clothing and sustainability. She participated in MoMA PS1's "Expo 1" in collaboration with Triple Canopy Magazine in 2013, received a Knight Foundation Grant for her WetLand project that opened in 2014 on the Delaware River in Philadelphia, and in 2015, she completed a two-part sculpture “Pull” for the International Havana Biennial with the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Her first Art 21: New York Close Up documentary video was released in 2013. Mattingly’s work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, the Seoul Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and the Palais de Tokyo. Her writings were included in Nature, edited by Jeffrey Kastner in the Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art series.

Julie Blackmon Featured in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The delightfully odd world of Missouri photographer Julie Blackmon

by Jane Henderson

The littlest of Julie Blackmon’s subjects seem trapped in a giant bubble.

Older kids, meanwhile, dangle feet in a backyard pool in a nostalgic scene of summer freedom. Further scrutiny, though, shows a chef’s knife stabbed in a watermelon and a swimmer floating face down. Is he looking for a penny, testing his lung capacity or in trouble? No adult is in sight.

Read the full article here.

Larry Fink Featured in Photograph Magazine

REVIEWS: Larry Fink | Robert Mann Gallery

by Jesse Dorris

In a 2011 interview with the now-defunct Visura Magazine, Larry Fink recalled the approach to life recommended by his mother, a one-time Marxist. “Why sublimate your need for elegance and joy and class and style and fun…I am going to live my life as fully as possible.”

Fink has sought that fullness throughout his long and varied career. As a teenager, he left his family on Long Island and arrived in the Village, where he studied with Lisette Model. He photographed Amiri Baraka and others, whom he called “delusional revolutionaries,” and travelled cross-country with them. Eventually, he settled into life on a working farm in Pennsylvania, home base for his work as a photographer for Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and GQ, to name just a few of the many publications who have published his photographs. He’s won countless photography awards for images that focused on everyone from soigné high society elites to Pacific Northwest loggers. One relative constant has been his use of a hand-held flash, a spotlight to direct the eye. Another is his compassion, hardly solemn but impossible to miss.

Read the full article here.

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.