Valentin Samarine

Abstract Photograph Post USSR Russian Avant Garde Solarized Photo Non Conformist

Artist Unknown. From Muse X Editions. An (now defunct) LA based innovative publisher of limited-edition prints, Muse X has launched its first group of prints and is just beginning to make itself known to artists, curators, dealers and collectors. Among works just off the press are otherworldly landscapes by Barbara Kasten and Oliver Wasow, a sizzling sunset by Peter Alexander, abstract compositions by Pauline Stella Sanchez and Jennifer Steinkamp...

Valentin Samarine started doing abstract painting in the 60s, and abstract photography in the 70s. He moved fairly easily from one to the other. It is in a perfectly logical sense: Valentin relies in both cases on a model of spontaneous creation, implemented in the post-war years in European painting, whether it is abstract expressionism (USA), action art (England) or tachism (France) . Valentin Samarine methodically destroys, at all stages, the mechanistic function of the photographic process. In Leningrad, he had experimented and put a dose of unpredictability at the time of the shooting and during the development. In Paris, Valentin went from the negative to the process of revelation of the positive, by giving the "representation the maximum of possibilities for possible metamorphoses, without imposing anything on it, in particular with regard to the range of colors. the metatechnics of contact between the still invisible, floating or spinning jets, like sleds coming down from the mountain. " (V. Samarine) This deeply respectful, almost religious attitude towards the process of creation and all its components allows the artist to approach the limits of three-dimensional space, beyond which vibrate the parapsychological, transpersonal and metaphysical dimensions. Insofar as metareality is unlikely to resemble that constantly returned to us by mainstream cinema, with its zoo- or anthropomorphic beings and its technical aggregates, the work of Valentin Samarine is, in a way or another, entirely non-figurative and abstract. Valentin Till Maria Samarine-Smirnov (1928) is a representative of Leningrad underground culture, immigrated to France in the early 1980s. His solo photo exhibition Sanki Magic was held in the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. Valentin Samarine was an active participant of the cultural and political life in Leningrad. In 1978, the photographer organized Studio 974, an art gallery in his own apartment. The studio hosted regular exhibitions of Leningrad artists and photographers. An atmosphere of total democracy reigned there. Samarine’s art recorded the key cultural events of the epoch. His photos depicted such significant events, as Andrey Tarkovsky’s burial service in Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Joseph Brodsky’s performances, cross procession in St. Sergey Metochion. Inspired by Choreographic Miniatures by Leonid Yakobson, the photographer was keen on ballet. He took pictures of many theater and ballet performances. But soon, through the pressure of the Soviet authorities, the photographer had to immigrate to France, where he continued his photo experiments. Samarine called his oeuvre Sanki Art. It was a special technique of the new old silver-based photography. Sanki is an ordnance of the old silver-based photography, metamorphoses of energy projections, invisible in the ordinary photo, metaphysics of invisible projections of the Light and the Shadow of the spiritual world of a person, his passions, said the author. The word Sanki was adopted from Sense energetics, a book about Ancient Chinese philosophy. The notion reveals invisible energy potentials of Time and Space, which determine our earthly existence. This special technique enables the master to display the things that are hidden from the viewers in the ordinary photos. Artworks by Samarine are in the collections of Moscow Museum of Modern Art; the Russian Museum; Yaroslavl Art Museum; the Museum of Non-Conformist Art, St-Petersburg; the State Museum of Urban Sculpture...

Adolph Studly, Swiss born American photographer. His work is kept in the Photographic Archive at The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. He was known for his gallery photographs of works by artists represented primarily by the Buchholz gallery, Curt Valentin, and Stephen Radich Galleries. Artists whose work he shot include Max Beckmann, Francis Bacon, Chaim Soutine, Allan Kaprow, Clyfford Still, Georges Braque, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Picasso, Auguste Rodin, Georges Rouault. He worked with Louis H. Dreyer, the pre-eminent architecture photographer in New York City. Chaim Jacob Lipchitz, 1891-1973, was born in Lithuania and came of age in Paris during the early 20th century, where he was active in the avante-garde community of Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Diego Rivera, Chaim Soutine, and Juan Gris. Art historian H. H. Arnason, who ranked Lipchitz with Picasso and Marc Chagall, wrote, "Lipchitz, as a pure sculptor, is ...unquestionably one of the greatest sculptors of this century." The architect Philip Johnson asked Lipchitz to make a wall sculpture to be placed on the brick chimney over a fireplace of a guest house owned by Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III on West 53rd Street in New York. Lipchitz decided to develop the piece from his Pegasus designs and call it Birth of the Muses in honor of the Rockefellers' interest in the arts. In 1950 he completed the work as a bronze relief five feet high. It was installed as planned and later was acquired by Lincoln Center. He participated in the Flight portfolio...

This large montage of photographs (is not mounted onto aluminum) from Ken Gonzales-Day's dysmorphologies series. Fujifilm Fuji Color Crystal Archive paper color Photo paper. This is not signed or numbered. 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. Much of Gonzales-Day's work considers the larger political and social representational histories of the Mexican-American experience. His early work draws on the constructed photo methods of artists like Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman, or Gregory Crewdson. For example, in Bone Grass Boy (1996), Gonzales-Day casts himself as all the central characters in a staged photonovella set during the Mexican American War...

American artist and photographer, Sandra Haber, born 1956 Exhibited at MoMA, 1984

FLORA & FAUNA SERIES, c.1998, Fuji crystal archive paper. Unsigned. Photographer Jeffrey Rothstein focuses on different elements within Nature for his subject matter, ranging from f...

This beautiful photograph aROUNDme 19 was shot by the Italian photographer Giulio Gonella. Print on hahnemuhle photo rag paper from the series aROUNDme...

Tulips. 2004, photography, ice/sun/water, 44x29 cm

Eden. 2004, photography, ice/sun/water, 44x29 cm

Streets of Kowloon Navy, part of Richard Heeps series photographing on the streets of Hong Kong in Kowloon in 2016 this stunning abstract piece is so striking in a room. The whole 20...

Streets of Kowloon Gold, part of Richard Heeps series photographing on the streets of Hong Kong in Kowloon in 2016 this stunning abstract piece is so striking in a room. The whole 20...

Absolut is an abstract photography, limited to 10 and signed. I like the momentum mood which the photography is evoking - for me F. Kupka. The picture was taken during a work process...