Maureen Paley is pleased to announce a solo project by Deimantas Narkevičius at the gallery that will present two films - The Role of a Lifetime (2003) and Into the Unknown (2009). Narkevičius’ work examines and proposes interpretations of history and the passing of time within the context of a post-1989 Europe. Edited together footage from found, archival and original sources is often accompanied by soundtracks composed from interviews and appropriated material. By allowing multiple timelines and narratives to co-exist within individual works Narkevičius questions how personal and collective memories are constructed and how they resonate in the present.

Deimantas Narkevičius -

En 1932, à l'âge de 24 ans, Henri-Cartier Bresson acquiert un Leica, un appareil de photo léger et maniable. L'appareil - devenu mythique grâce à lui - devient l'extension de son œil et ne le quittera plus. Il voyage, transporte son Leica partout, et observe le monde à travers lui. C'est ainsi que "l'œil du siècle", Henri Cartier-Bresson (Chanteloup-en-Brie 1908 – 2004 Monjustin), l'un des photographes les plus influents du 20e siècle, co-fondateur de la célèbre agence Magnum, a débuté sa carrière.

Apres s'être essayé au dessin et à la peinture, "la photographie lui permet de saisir ces instants du réel", le Leica représentant à ses yeux "l'instrument parfait pour le dessin accélère et l'exercice du regard sur la vie". Il photographie abondamment, d'abord en Côte d'Ivoire où il passe un an et dit y prendre ses premières images, puis, envoûté par le surréalisme, voyage en France, en Italie, en Espagne, au Maroc, au Mexique, puis à New York. En trois ans, il pose sa grammaire visuelle et crée l'une des Œuvres les plus originales et influentes de l'histoire de la photographie.

Henri Cartier-Bresson -

A retrospective exhibition featuring the work of a female street photographer whose impressive oeuvre was only discovered at the end of her life – and then immediately caused a worldwide sensation. Vivian Maier (b.1926 – d. 2009) worked as a governess for more than four decades from the early 1950s onwards. Her entire life inevitably passed by unnoticed, until in 2007 her photographic body of work was discovered: a colossal archive consisting of more than 120,000 negatives, super 8 mm and 16 mm films, various recordings, miscellaneous photographs, and a multitude of undeveloped films. The presentation in the Willy-Brandt-Haus, Berlin, provides a glimpse of the fine eye and subtlety with which Maier appropriated the visual language of her age.

Maier photographed the street, people, objects, landscapes in her spare time; simply put, she ultimately and abruptly photographed what she saw. She knew how to capture her era in a fraction of a second. She narrated the beauty of ordinary things, seeking the imperceptible cracks and elusive in-flections of the real in everyday banality.

The exhibition's prints come from the collection of John Maloof, Chicago.
With the Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.

Vivian Maier -
Curator Anne Morin -

The "Piccadillies", as they are collectively known, comprise one of Dieter Roth’s most celebrated artistic undertakings. The series was realized first as 6 "Piccadillies", only to branch out over the following years into a vast trove of experiments and variations on the original series. 

Roth (1930-1998), a Swiss artist already well known in 1969 for his artist books and sculptures made with cheese, chocolate, and other biodegradable comestibles, started out on this particular artistic journey with a single tourist postcard of Piccadilly Circus—one of the first mass-consumed postcard subjects—that belonged to an extensive collection of Piccadilly postcards assembled by the British artist Rita Donagh. After selecting one from a range of similar but distinct views, Roth, in collaboration with his print publisher Hansjörg Mayer, made a photographic blow-up, which he then printed and laminated onto both sides of a series of boards. He then overlaid each of the resulting boards with a variety of complex silkscreened surfaces, producing a range of distortions and re-interpretations of the original image, including a number of “misprints,” many of which were developed into unique works, either as composites or as overpainted prints. 

Dieter (Diter Rot) Roth -
Curator Dan Cameron -

Ana Prada -

What the works on display have in common is that they manage with little. They are part of the long tradition of European Minimalism, which had its beginnings in ancient Laconia, where the Spartans prided themselves on saying anything important in just a few words – in contrast to the flowery manner of speaking their oriental neighbors preferred. Hence the expression 'laconic'.
One associates little with poverty, as well as with thriftiness – as a conscious economic stance emancipated from deficiency, which in the field of art and culture becomes an aesthetic strategy related to asceticism. The aim behind this approach is to achieve the best with the least means. The lowest possible consumption of space, time, material, energy and labor, thriftiness characterizes the early bourgeois perspective on production, in contrast to feudalistic waste. Its purpose was the magnificent presentation of wealth as social strength.
To this day the strategy of emotional overpowering based on abundance so typical of Baroque is recognizable in the extensive spatial installations of many artists. Only when the excessive spread of capitalist accumulation and the consumerism that goes with it, personalized by a voracity for more and more, has penetrated all areas of life, can a limitation to just a little become an alternative. And indeed even have a subversive impact – as – self-assertive – abstinence.
Burkhard Brunn

Kirstin Arndt - Charlotte Posenenske - Michael Reiter - Martina Wolf -
Curator Burkhard Brunn -

INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is proud to present Fetching Blemish, a group exhibition of portraiture and figurative work addressing human flaws as sites of revelation and distinction. The show revels in flaws, deformities and the grotesque, rendering or expressing internal conflicts and anxieties as physical features, and approaching imperfection as a portal of identity and self-horror as a form of selfrecognition (or liberating and even transcendent performance). This all in a cultural moment, or perhaps its immediate aftermath, in painting and otherwise, enamored with style and seductiveness as an uncomplicated bid for recognition of the most satisfyingly charged kind. That is, to the extent it is enamored with figurative work at all.
Each of the artists in this show are in some ways, or understand themselves to be, outsiders, some of them stiff-arming and others processing and repurposing a harsh critical gaze. All seem engaged in overturning tendencies, preferences, and prejudices in recent portraiture as showcase of beauty, as refracted vanity, even as pin-up.

Wolfgang Black - Celeste Dupuy-Spencer - Nicole Eisenman - Genieve Figgis - Dan McCarthy - Rebecca Morgan - Aurie Ramirez - Amy Sedaris - Cindy Sherman -

What material does an artist select, and for what reasons? The international group exhibition Living in the Material World examines the role of materials in contemporary art. It brings together important positions in contemporary art including - in Theaster Gates - a participant at dOCUMENTA (13) 2012 in Kassel, and contributors to the two most recent Venice Biennales in Lara Almarcegui, Karla Black, Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Oscar Tuazon.
The twelve artists invited to participate here focus on the characteristics and narrative potential of such diverse materials as fabric, concrete, wood, ceramics, glass, plastic or paper. While it was still important during the 1960s to assimilate random materials once considered alien to art into fine art at all, and so to oppose traditional material hierarchies and art-historical conventions, today the use of such an artistic repertoire is no longer a trigger of outrage. The materials being used here are familiar – in the exhibition space as well. The artistic focus is less on the discovery of new materials and more on a re-dedication of the familiar, giving it a novel function.

Lara Almárcegui - Michael Beutler - Karla Black - Berta Fischer - Theaster Gates - Ane Mette Hol - Jessica Jackson Hutchins - David Jablonowski - Markus Karstieß - Alicja Kwade - Marie Lund - Oscar Tuazon -
Curator Beate Ermacora -

Maureen Paley is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by Morgan Fisher following on from his screening at the gallery in 2013.
 
"My father taught me photography in 1955, when I was twelve years old. I made my first movies (they were conventional home movies) with a Brownie 8mm camera in 1956. I believed that photography and film as I found them in the 1950s would last forever.

All of the works in this exhibition were made as photographs or films. I didn’t do this to sustain my belief, it was the way I wanted to do things, and they were easy and normal things to do. But in treating some of the works after their original production I have chosen to work digitally because it is simpler."
Morgan Fisher, October 2014

Morgan Fisher was born in 1942 in Washington, D.C. He studied art history at Harvard College and then film in Los Angeles. He lives and works in Santa Monica, California.

Morgan Fisher -

Chris Newman -