Joel Meyerowitz “My European Trip”

Howard Greenberg Gallery

poster for Joel Meyerowitz “My European Trip”

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Howard Greenberg Gallery will show two exhibitions of the work of Joel Meyerowitz from April 17 to May 31. The gallery will recreate MY EUROPEAN TRIP: Photographs from the Car, an exhibition that was curated by John Szarkowski and presented by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1968. The gallery will also show Meyerowitz’s new work, a series of still lifes, mostly made at his home in France.

Presenting forty images from 1966-67, My European Trip: Photographs from the Car includes photographs made by Meyerowitz in France, Greece, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Bulgaria, Morocco, England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. The exhibition opened on August 3, 1968. Using documentation of the MoMA exhibition—right down to the wall text—the exhibition will resemble the original as closely as possible.

“During this European car trip, I often saw remarkable things fly by outside my window, things that would be gone had I stopped to go back to see what they were,” recalls Meyerowitz. “In a way this was my first conceptual work. I thought of myself as sitting inside a moving camera on wheels, and that the window was the frame which showed me the continuous scrolling of events flying by outside. All those humble instants sped past me and left their heartbreaking beauty on film and in my memory.”

In the wall text accompanying the 1968 MoMA exhibition, John Szarkowski wrote, “Joel Meyerowitz drove a car past 20,000 miles of European life and history, each mile of it a mystery to him. With his camera he tried to reach out and touch what he did not understand, and what the exigency of his pace did not allow him to study. Making a photograph was a gesture of recognition to his experience, and later a proof that he had indeed passed such scenes. The pictures he made have to do with the character of photography itself, and with the fragmentation of modern experience, and also with the quality of response of Joel Meyerowitz, who made these irreversible observations while the car was moving.”

“As a 30 year-old photographer having my first show at MoMA after shooting for only 6 years, it was very satisfying to see risky work on the walls of the museum.” Meyerowitz noted. “There wasn’t as much dialogue around photography then, certainly not like there is today. When I first showed the photographs 45 years ago, the kind of discipline and limitation I employed wasn’t being practiced very often. The work feels fresh because life along the roadside still whizzes by at 60 miles per hour, and even though we have all kinds of advanced mechanics, the camera continues to be the only instrument that makes ordinary things seem momentous when we glimpse them in passing and recognize their innocence and beauty.”

In addition to My European Trip, Howard Greenberg Gallery will present THE EFFECT OF FRANCE: New Still Lifes, 2012-2013 in HGG Two. While living in Provence a few years ago, Meyerowitz was inspired to buy a few odd objects as a gift for a friend he was visiting in Tuscany. But when he arrived in Tuscany, the objects suddenly “spoke” to him. “I saw their identity, so to speak, and began to put them, and a few other old objects I came across, into a kind of little theater space I created. After awhile, they seemed to step forward on the stage as individuals, and I found myself making ’portraits’ of them. The portraits were made mostly in dark spaces with a small skylight providing a soft weak light, much like the light Edward Weston used for his pepper. In fact it was the funnel that Weston’s pepper was sitting in that suggested a tighter enclosed space to me as a place for these objects to stand in,” he explains.

Meyerowitz began to build various other spaces to house the objects—semicircles of rusted gas tank forms, folded leather butcher’s aprons, nineteenth-century linens that were stained and mottled, painted canvas backdrops, and corners built of old cardboard painted dark gray. “These objects seemed to have a new life, as if once more they could express something of their character, which is a touching sentiment to give to things that have been rendered useless,” he notes.

[Image: Joel Meyerowitz “Greece, 1967” (1967) gelatin silver print 9 x 13 3/8 in. © Joel Meyerowitz, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York]

Media

Schedule

from April 17, 2014 to May 31, 2014

Artist(s)

Joel Meyerowitz

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