Franco Fontana

Italian Vintage Dye Transfer Photograph Franco Fontana Color Landscape Photo

1987

Franco Fontana (Italian, born 1933) Title: Los Angeles, California 1979 Edition 6/15 Medium: dye-transfer Dimensions: Frame 21.5 x 29.25. Sight 13 x 19.5 Provenance: Monique Goldstrom Gallery Franco Fontana (Italian, 1933) is an Italian photographer. He is best known for his Minimalist abstract colour landscapes. He was influenced by Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism. Franco Fontana was born in 1933 in Modena. He started taking photographs in the 1950s when he was working as a decorator in a furniture showroom. In 1961 he joined a local amateur club in Modena. The experience would be a turning point in his career, and Fontana went on to have his first solo exhibition in 1965 at the Società Fotografica Subalpina, Turin and at the Galleria della Sala di Cultura in Modena in 1968. Since then he has participated in more than 400 group and solo exhibitions including the exhibit Lines, Spheres and Glyphs at Robert Klein Gallery with works by photographers: Franco Fontana, Mario Giacomelli, Ernst Haas, Gyorgy Kepes and Aaron Siskind. Franco Fontana is considered one of the most relevant photographers of our time, In 1963 he exhibited his work at the Biennale of Color in Vienna, and in 1968 he held his first solo exhibition in Modena. Fontana often pares landscapes down to their essential elements, producing flat, geometric compositions reminiscent of the color field abstract expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman, by underexposing his transparencies. Contrasting blue skies with green or yellow grass and the rigid lines of buildings with the softness of puffy clouds, he makes color and texture his primary subjects. He has also shot in Polaroid film, Cibachrome, C Print and chromogenic prints. His art has been acquired by some of the most important museums worldwide, including the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, MoMA in New York, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Museum of Modern Art in Norman, Oklahoma, National Gallery in Beijing, Australian National Gallery in Melbourne, University of Texas in Austin, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris. Fontana has photographed for advertising campaigns for brands such as Fiat, Volkswagen, Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, Snam, Sony, Volvo, Versace, Canon, Kodak, Robe di Kappa, Swissair, and has been a magazine photographer for publications including Time, Life, Vogue (USA and France), Venerdì di Repubblica, Panorama, and with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and The New York Times. Fontana's first book, Skyline, was published in 1978 in France by Contrejour and in Italy by Punto e Virgola with a text by Helmut Gernsheim. Fontana is the art director of the Toscana Foto Festival. He has received numerous awards, such as the 1989 Tokyo Photographer Society of Japan - The 150 Years of Photography - Photographer Award. Fontana is especially interested in the interplay of colours. His early innovations in colour photography in the 1960s were stylistically disruptive. According to art critic Giuliana Scimé, Fontana "destroyed all the structures, practices, and technical choices within the Italian tradition." Fontana uses 35mm cameras, and as noted by Iwan Zahar, deploys distant viewpoints with telephoto lenses to flatten contours in a landscape of crops and fields into bands of intense, saturated colour. This is an effect that Franco Lefèvre has described as 'dialectical landscapism'. Of his use of colour in his 2019 retrospective exhibition Sintesi ('Synthesis') at Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, curator Diana Baldon has observed; “His bold geometric compositions are characterised by shimmering colours, level perspectives and a geometric-formalist and minimal language, By adopting this approach during the 1960s, Fontana injected a new vitality into the field of creative colour photography for then multicolour was not in fashion in art photography., The way Fontana shoots, dematerializes the objects photographed, which loose three-dimensionality and realism to become part of an abstract drawing”. Aside from the rural landscape Fontana has applied his graphic sensibility to other subjects: city architecture, portraiture, fashion, still-life and the nude. He was included in the exhibition of the Helmut Newton Collection along with Brassaï, Diane Arbus, Franco Fontana, Horst P. Horst, Irving Penn, June Newton, Just Loomis, Man Ray, Mark Arbeit...

Genre: Contemporary Subject: People Medium: Digital, Print Surface: Metal Country: United States Dimensions: 49 3/4" x 38 3/4" This extra large montage of photographs is mounted onto aluminum from Ken Gonzales-Day's dysmorphologies series. Ken Gonzales-Day's interdisciplinary and conceptually grounded projects consider the history of photography, the construction of race, and the limits of representational systems ranging from the lynching photograph to museum display. The Searching for California Hang Trees series offered a critical look at the legacies of landscape photography in the West while his most recent project considers the sculptural depiction of race. Profiled began as an exploration of the influence of eighteenth century "scientific" thought on twenty-first century institutions ranging from the museum to the prison and extended to the sculpture and portrait bust collections of several major museums including: The J. Paul Getty Museum; The Field Museum, Chicago; The Museum of Man, San Diego; L'École des beaux-arts,Paris. The Bode Museum, Berlin, Park Sanssouci, Potsdam; The National Museum of Natural History, Paris; The Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; among others. Gonzales-Day lives in Los Angeles and is Chair of the Art Department at Scripps College. Fellowships and Grants Chercheur Accueilli, Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art (INHA); COLA Individual Artist Award; Art Mattes Grant; Mid-Career Award, California Communtiy Foundation; Durfee Fondation ACG; Graves Award for the Humanities; Visiting Scholar/Artist-in-Residence, Getty Research Institute; Senior Fellow, American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution; Fellow, Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center, Bellagio, Italy; Van Lier Fellow, ISP, Whitney Museum of American Art; Rotary International. Select Solo Exhibitions Luis De Jesus Los Angeles; Galerie Steph, Singapore; The Vincent Price Museum, LA; Fred Torres Collaborations, NYC; Tufts University, Medford, MA; Las Cienegas Projects, L.A.; UCSD Art Gallery, La Jolla, CA; Steve Turner Contemporary, L.A.; LAXART, L.A.; CUE Art Foundation, NY, NY; Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; Susanne Vielmetter Projects, L. A.; Cristinerose Gallery, NY, NY; White Columns, NY, NY, among others. Select Group Exhibitions Our America: The Latino presence in American Art, Smithsonian Institution; MDE11, Medellin, Colombia; COLA 2011, at LAMAG, Los Angeles; Spy Numbers, Palais de Tokyo, Paris;How Many Billboards, MAK Center, W.H.; State of Mind, MoPA, San Diego; Phantom Sightings, LACMA, L.A.(traveled); Encuentro Hemispherico, Bogota; Under Erasure, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin; Under Pain of Death, Austrian Cultural Forum, NYC;ArtMediaPolitique, DIX291, Paris; Viva Mexico, Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw (traveled); Past Over, Steve Turner Contemporary, L.A.; Crimes of Omission, ICA Philadelphia; Exile of the Imaginary, Generali Foundation, Vienna; Civil Restitutions, Thomas Dane Gallery...

"Anomalous" is a part of Christopher Kennedy's "Surrealism" series that uses his abstract PhotoLuminism technique combined in this case with a boat and a puffin from the real world t...

Taken from Long Island City, this tightly cropped composition emphasizes bold silhouettes while revealing the interplay of two of New York City's most iconic buildings. The horizonta...