Wolfgang Tillmans at Andrea Rosen Gallery

Chelsea's contemporary Andrea Rosen Gallery is currently displaying the photographs of famed artist Wolfgang Tillmans. While it is extremely difficult for photographers to create original, deeply personal and instantly recognizable visual styles, Tillmans has successfully done so, transforming himself into an innovative artist-photographer of modern life.

While the photographer has boldly explored various genres, techniques, and subject matters throughout his career (which began in the early 1990s), his eclectic creations all point to a “Tillmans-esque style” (one that is widely imitated and well – known). Tillmans' images portray beauty and nonchalance – accomplished through the photographer’s use of monochrome colors and abstract and fragmented styles. He seeks to create uncontrived pieces and sticks by his belief that photographs should occupy wall space more like a sheet than a piece of art (this is why he frequently leaves his photos unframed).

In his current exhibition, the photographer masterfully adheres to his signature style - as much of the gallery is hung with unframed pictures of varying scale – with some clustered and some isolated. In a recent review in NY Magazine, Jerry Saltz remarks,

“Visiting is like being suspended in a photographic aquarium. Although at first you might think he was just traveling around, snapping the shutter willy-nilly, you soon see that he’s trying, with each picture, to make something powerful and personal out of impossibly clichéd subjects.”

I’d love to be a fish in this aquarium! The exhibition runs through March 13th.

Check out other current exhibitions going on in Chelsea

Check out these photography exhibitions now on display at galleries and museums around NYC

An Insider's View of Warhol's Factory

So, sadly, the exhibition at 303 Gallery of photographer Stephen Shore's snapshots from Andy Warhol's Factory closes today. I didn't read about it until today. Doh.

But, even if you, like me, missed the exhibition, there's a cool feature with a selection of Shore's images in Time Out New York online. The photographer provides interesting anecdotes and tidbits about fifteen photos of icons of the 60s, such as Edie Sedgwick, kicking back in the studio. The Factory truly seemed like such a cool spot. Check it out!

Richard Avedon at ICP

My own familiarity with the photographer extraordinaire Richard Avedon is his portraiture, such as his iconic image of Marilyn Monroe with her guard down; after hours of posing for Avedon, the tired actress plopped down on a stool and let him snap a few more, which artist Vik Muniz rightly characterizes as "a picture of Norma Jean, not Marilyn."

The current show at the International Center for Photography showcases another side of the versatile photographer's oeuvre: Avedon Fashion photographs, 1944 - 2000. The exhibition opened on May 15th and runs through September 6th (note, press release says Sept 6, website says Sept 20). Roberta Smith had nothing but glowing things to say about the dynamic, vibrant photographs in the ICP exhibition:

Avedon’s fashion photographs from the late 1940s to the early ’60s are everything you want great art to be: exhilarating, startlingly new and rich enough with life and form to sustain repeated viewings. Their beauty is joy incarnate and contagious. The best of them are as perfect on their own terms as the best work of Jackson Pollock or Jasper Johns from that era, and as profoundly representative of it.

You can read Roberta Smith's full review here. I am putting this exhibition on my must-see list of the summer!

(below, left: A 1994 shot of Stephanie Seymour; right, Veruschka, dress by Kimberly,
New York, January 1967. Copyright 2009, the Richard Avedon Foundation)