Opening on Wednesday, November 20, the gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of photographs by Los Angeles artist Christopher Williams. This will be the artist's second solo exhibition in the gallery.
The exhibition will be composed of both early and more recent photographs, and offers a rare presentation of the complete series of Angola to Vietnam*, completed in 1989 as well as a selection of works from For Example: Die Welt ist schön, an ongoing series started in 1993.
Angola to Vietnam*, an abbreviation of the list of twenty-seven countries, is the result of filtering the list: Angola, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Central African Republic, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Namibia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Seychelles, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Syria, Togo, Uganda, Uruguay, Vietnam, and Zaire–thirty-six countries where disappearances are known to have occurred during 1985 as noted on page twenty-nine of Disappeared!, Technique of Terror, a report for the Commission on International Humanitarian Issues, 1986, Zed Books, Ltd., London and New Jersey–through the 847 life-size models representing some 780 species and varieties of plants in 164 families from the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models, the Botanical Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
For Example: Die Welt ist schön (the world is beautiful) makes reference to the famous book by German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch Die Welt ist schön (1928). Fascinated by the anonymous presence of commonplace things, Renger-Patzsch photographed plants, animals, human beings, landscape, buildings, machines, and industrial products as objectively and realistically as possible shunning theatrical staging. In the spirit of this modernist approach, Williams transports Renger-Patzsch’s classifications and principles into the present. For Example: Die Welt ist schön becomes a critical and ongoing questioning of the making of images in our time.