NYAB Event - Barbara Probst Exhibition

Barbara Probst Exhibition

Murray Guy

This event has ended.

Murray Guy presents our fifth solo exhibition with Barbara Probst. Please join us for an opening reception with the artist.

In a presentation of works ranging from 2011 to 2013, Probst continues to develop a meta-narrative that captures the complexities of viewing. In Exposure #106, one of her more recent and ambitious works, a simple reach for an apple is dramatized by a sequence of simultaneously occurring actions. The scene of a taxi driving through a crosswalk is a point of focus, as is the other side of that apple, half eaten, corralled by cookie crumbs, teetering clumsily on the edge of the table. Probst uses a radio-controlled shutter release and up to thirteen cameras at one time to reveal the kaleidoscopic nature of any given moment. While orchestrated with tremendous precision, the Exposures retain a candid quality through their attention to the details that are hidden just beyond the line of sight. The way in which the body is abstracted, with close-ups of truncated hands in motion or miniaturized figures in the composition, is comparative to the way in which the viewer must move physically from one image to the next in order to see each Exposure in its entirety. Each work presents a singular moment concurrently relying on its temporal and spatial relation to a viewer in order to do so.

In the search for meaning, the viewer incessantly meets dead ends: a portrait is not really a portrait just
as a narrative is not really a narrative. It seems that there simply isn’t enough meaning inside the
individual images to construct a definitive truth about what is being photographically represented. In this
way, Barbara Probst’s ‘Exposures’ reflect the way we experience the world: through endless rows of
disparate fragments, each carrying potential significance and meaning but not realized, in full, until we
build connections between them. And sometimes, when we can’t make sense of the world, we continue
looking for significant details in the spaces between fragments – just as it sometimes seems that the
meaning in Barbara Probst’s works lies in the spaces between the images. The works deconstruct the way
we are used to understanding photography – or at least the way we are used to understanding reality
through photographs. Probst forcefully deconstructs the notion of photographic truth, not by specifically
questioning that photographic truth but merely by pointing out its necessary incompleteness. The
photograph may tell the truth or it may deceive us. But just as in all representation it will never tell the
whole truth.

- Jens Erdman Rasmussen, Sculpting in Time, from Barbara Probst, Hatje Cantz, 2013

For the occasion of her solo exhibition at The National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen, (through 11 January 2014) and its subsequent venue CentrePasquArt, Biel, 2 February - 4 April 2014, Hatje Cantz has published an extensive monograph on Probst’s photographic series. Included are texts by Felicity Lunn, Jens Erdman Rasmussen, and Lynne Tillman, and an interview with the artist by Frédéric Paul. The book release will coincide with the opening of Probst’s exhibition at Murray Guy and signed copies will available for sale at a special price of $45 through the gallery.

Barbara Probst was born in 1964 in Munich, Germany and lives and works in New York and Munich. Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at the National Museum of Photography Copenhagen, and group exhibitions include Per Speculum Me Video at Frankfurter Kunstverein, Lost Places. Sites of Photography at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Mixed Use Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present, curated by Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Elles at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera, organized by the Tate Modern, London, which traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Probst was featured in the 2006 New Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and has had solo exhibitions at Oldenburg Kunstverein, Germany; Stills Gallery Edinburgh, Scotland; Domaine de Kerguehennec, Bignan, France; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.