Sheila Metzner

Rebecca, Tiffany Vase, Large Scale Sheila Metzner Photograph

1987

Sheila Metzner’s unique photographic style has positioned her as a contemporary master in the worlds of fine art, fashion, portraiture, still life and landscape photography. Looking at Metzner’s photographs is a captivating experience. Innocent, sensual, and sexual, each photo, regardless of subject, exhibits and elicits deep emotion. It is nearly impossible to just glance at Metzner’s photos; they beg to be studied. She says, “Photography in its most basic form is magic…This image, caught in my trap, my box of darkness, can live. It is eternal, immortal. The child in the image will not age as the living child will.” Sheila Schwartz was born in 1939 to an orthodox Jewish family in a poor section of Brooklyn. While attending the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan (now the High School of Art and Design), she was awarded the Mayor Robert F. Wagner scholarship to the college of her choice. She chose Pratt Institute, where she majored in visual communication. Her fondness for painting and sculpture also led her to study with abstract artists Jack Tworkov and James Brooks. After graduating in 1961, Sheila worked as an assistant to Lou Dorfsman at CBS Network Advertising. Five years later, she was hired by the Doyle Dane Bernbach advertising agency as its first female art director, and in 1968 she met and married director, creative director, and painter Jeffrey Metzner. While pregnant with their first child, she was riding in a cab with her mentor and friend, photographer Aaron Rose, discussing whether or not to give up her career in advertising. “He said, ‘You should be a photographer. You live like an artist. You have a good eye, you’d be good at it.’ ” Metzner started taking pictures, amassing them slowly over the next 13 years, while raising her and Jeffrey’s five children—Raven, Bega, Ruby, Stella and Louie. Jeffrey’s two daughters from a previous marriage, Evyan and Alison, were also a regular part of the family. “When they were really small, I’d be with them during the day, photographing and printing at night. At eight or nine in the evening, when they were all asleep, I’d take a shower to wake up and put on high heels and lipstick, which I wore then, to give me the feeling of being ready to work.” She continues, “My children never interfered. When I couldn’t travel because of them, I would find a place in upstate New York and call it Antarctica or Egypt. I found microcosms.” Nine years later, Metzner had accumulated a box of 22 pictures. One of them, a black-and-white photograph titled “Evyan, Kinderhook Creek,” caught the eye of John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, which he included in his famous and controversial exhibition “Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960.” The New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer loved the picture and soon it became the dark-horse hit of the exhibition. Later that year, Metzner’s first solo show at the Daniel Wolf Gallery in New York drew record crowds. Metzner was now ready to work in color, but not just conventional color. Of her subjects, she once said, “If I use a rose, I want it to be the essential rose—the rose Beauty brought to her father from the Beast’s garden.” Now she aspired to an essential kind of color. “I wanted something that would last. I was looking for Fresson even though I didn’t know they existed.” The Fresson family works outside of Paris and specializes in a labor-intensive four-color “process de charbon” method, which they invented in 1895. Some prints can go up to seven colors, and are pigment prints, the only true archival color print. Metzner is one of just ten American photographers with whom they are willing to work. Fresson prints are the perfect complement to Metzner’s style—soft, sensuous, and grainy, the prints resemble paintings, with a finish which Metzner describes as “a glaze on fine porcelain. The moment I saw the neutral gray,” she adds, “I knew it was perfect.” In 1980 Metzner showed her Fresson color prints at her second solo exhibition at the Daniel Wolf Gallery. This show led to commissioned editorial work for such magazines as Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Rolling Stone. She secured an exclusive contract with Vogue for the next eight years. Metzner considers her portrait of actress Jeanne Moreau for Vanity Fair a turning point in her career. “It gave me a chance to show my work to a broader audience. I wasn’t just producing photographs for the art world.” Of Sheila’s foray into fashion, critic Carol Squiers says, “At a time when fashion photography was caught between sterility and the snapshot, Metzner created a sumptuous vision that stimulated the entire field.” Metzner also started doing commercial photography around this time. Her first client was Valentino, soon to be followed by Bloomingdale’s, Perry Ellis, Revlon, Shiseido, Saks Fifth Avenue, Paloma Picasso, Victoria’s Secret, Levi’s, Ralph Lauren, and fragrances for Chloe and Fendi (the Fendi campaign won a Fragrance Foundation Recognition Award). Her work also appeared on John Mellencamp...

This was from Muse X publishers. It came in a plastic bag signed Emily Cheng. (the plastic bag is not included) It is on Fuji crystal photo paper. It depicts two Asian faces in a cubist, fractured way, with a woman (or man) holding a photograph over his/her face. It is a proof print and is not signed or numbered. Emily Cheng (born in New York City, in 1953) is an American artist of Chinese ancestry. She is best known for large scale painting with a center focus often employing expansive circular images radiantly colored, radially composed. Cheng received her BFA in 1975 from the Rhode Island School of Design and attended the New York Studio School. Cheng has exhibited widely in the US and in Asia. In 2011, Cheng created Charting Sacred Territories, an exhibition exploring world religions which opened in the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei (MOCA) , Taiwan (2011) and traveled to Hanart TZ Gallery in (2015), Shenzhen Art Museum, Shenzhen, China, (2015) and in Europe at the Palais Liechtenstein Feldkirch, Austria (2019). Cheng has had numerous solo shows in the US and in Asia and is represented by Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong. In 2007, Timezone 8 published a monograph of Emily Cheng titled, Chasing Clouds, a decade of studies, with essays by Kevin Powers and Johnson Chang. Emily Cheng has lived and worked in New York City since 1977 and teaches Asian Art History at the School of Visual Arts. Influenced by a wide array of eastern and western artists including Van Gogh, Gauguin, Manet and Giacometti as well as de Kooning, early Philip Guston and Jackson Pollock. Nicolas Carone and Leland Bell were both among her teachers as well as Elaine de Kooning. Selected solo exhibitions Ille Arts, Amagansett, New York, Shenzhen Art Museum, Shenzhen, China, (2015) Hanart T.Z. Gallery, Hong Kong, Zane Bennett Contemporary, Santa Fe, New Mexico, (2013) Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Taipei , Taiwan (2011) Louis Vuitton Maison, Kowloon, Hong Kong, (2010) Ayala Museum Makati, Philippines, (2006) Plum Blossom Gallery, New York, NY, (2004) Schmidt/Dean Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Byron Cohen Gallery, Kansas City, MO (2001) Metropolitan Museum of Manila , Philippines (1997) John Post Lee Gallery, New York, NY, Projects Room (1997) Contemporary Arts Center , Cincinnati, Ohio, 1994 David Beitzel Gallery, New York, NY, (1992) Lang & O'Hara Gallery, New York, NY, The Bronx Museum of the Arts , Bronx, NY, (1989) White Columns , New York, NY, (1985) Selected group exhibitions Art Basel Hong Kong , (Hanart Gallery) , Hong Kong, 2017 China Institute, New York, NY, 2014 Beijing Art Fair, Beijing, China, 2013 Museum of Chinese in America New York, NY, 2010 Kidspace, MASS MoCA , Williamstown, MA, 2010, 2005 Museum of Contemporary Art , Shanghai, China, 2009 Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong, China, 2009 Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China, 2008 Contrast Gallery, Shanghai and Beijing, China, 2008 University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum , Tampa, Florida, 2006 Hong Kong Arts Centre , Hong Kong, 2004 American Academy of Art , New York, New York, 2004 Longmarch Project, Beijing, China, 2002 Sotheby’s , New York, NY, 2001 Newhouse Center, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, NY, 2000 Katonah Museum of Art , Katonah, NY, 2000 National Academy and Museum, NY, 2000 Municipal Museum of Gyor, Hungary, 1999 New Museum of Contemporary Art , New York, NY, 1998 De Cordova Museum and the Computer Museum , Boston, MA, 1994 International Graphic Biennial, Muveszeti Museum, Hungary, 1995 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts , San Francisco, CA, 1994 Drawing Center, NY; traveled to Corcoran, Washington D.C., Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica CA; The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis MO; American Center, Paris, France, Cone Editions Gallery, New York 1990 Anina Nosei Gallery, New York, 1988 Greenville County Museum of Art , South Carolina, 1988 North Carolina Museum of Art , Hallwalls , Buffalo, NY, 1988 Grace Borgenicht Gallery , New York, 1986 Tibor de Nagy, New York, 1985 Asian American...

Please bear in mind that all prints are produced to order. Lead times are expected between 15-20 days. Currency fluctuations may cause the price to change. This is a contemporary pr...

Please bear in mind that all prints are produced to order. Lead times are expected between 15-20 days. Currency fluctuations may cause the price to change. This is a contemporary pr...