Steven Kasher Gallery is thrilled to announce the acceptance of Phyllis Galembo into the 55th International Exhibition at the 2013 Venice Biennale, la Biennale di Venezia. 

Considered the most important contemporary art exhibition in the world, there are few higher honors for an artist than to be selected by the director of the Venice Biennale to be included in the grand International Exhibition.

Included in the exhibition are eight large-scale color prints presenting figures from Galembo’s Ghana series. In her recurring travels throughout Africa and its Diaspora over the past thirty years, Galembo has taken portraits of revelers during traditional rites, rituals, ceremonies, and festivals. Her profound portraits serve as documentation of these powerful societies, even as the societies and their rituals become a thing of the past.

Saturday, June 1st through Sunday, November 24th

Previews: Wednesday, May 29th through Friday, May 31st

Steven Kasher Gallery presents art meets photography with works by Phyllis Galembo, Henry Chalfant, Daido Moriyama, Jack Roth, Richard Bernstein and more. 

May 9 - 12

PUNK: CHAOS TO COUTURE

The Met's spring 2013 Costume Institute exhibition, PUNK: Chaos to Couture, will examine punk's impact on high fashion from the movement's birth in the early 1970s through its continuing influence today. Featuring approximately one hundred designs for men and women, the exhibition will include original punk garments and recent, directional fashion to illustrate how haute couture and ready-to-wear borrow punk's visual symbols.

Focusing on the relationship between the punk concept of "do-it-yourself" and the couture concept of "made-to-measure," the seven galleries will be organized around the materials, techniques, and embellishments associated with the anti-establishment style. Themes will include New York and London, which will tell punk's origin story as a tale of two cities, followed by Clothes for Heroes and four manifestations of the D.I.Y. aesthetic—Hardware, Bricolage, Graffiti and Agitprop, and Destroy.

May 9 - August 14, 2013

Steven Kasher Gallery presents Miles Aldridge: I Only Want You to Love Me, a retrospective of the British artist's cinematic fashion-based work. The 20 large-scale color photographs in the exhibition present a satirical, darkly humorous view of women, fashion, and commodification today. Aldridge creates an entirely believable world just slightly beyond our own: hyper-sexualized, hyper-materialistic, and full of dread. Think Stepford Wives on acid.

In Miles Aldridge: I Only Want You to Love Me the viewer is transported to a fantastically opulent dreamlike world populated by beautiful flawlessly dressed women playing stereotypical female roles, such as "secretary," "soccer mom," "housewife," and "vamp." But there is something wrong in these meticulously composed scenes. Aldridge's women are strangely disengaged. It is as if the pressure of being an object of desire 24/7 has become too much to endure. They are on the verge of nervous breakdowns. What to buy, how to afford it, how to do it all? Why does my daughter hate me, will he still love me tomorrow, why am I knifing this cake??

This exhibition launches Aldridge's two new books: Miles Aldridge: I Only Want You to Love Me (Rizzoli, 2013, introduction by Glenn O'Brien), and Other Pictures (Editions 7L/Steidl, 2013). This is the artist's second show at Steven Kasher Gallery.

In 2007 at a local auction house in Chicago, historical hobbyist John Maloof randomly purchased a box of film negatives yet to be developed from an “unknown amateur photographer “. It cost him $380, a lot to spend on an unknown quantity you might say, but in doing so, he discovered one of the most fascinating and remarkable artists in recent history – Vivian Maier.

She is now fast becoming known as one of the most pivotal street photographer in the 20th century, yet this 1950′s visionary was a painfully aloof and intensely secret individual. She had never shown a single photograph to anyone – not even her closest friends, yet she’d amassed some 100,000 negatives, 700 rolls of undeveloped colour film and numerous 16mm movies. A 1950′s nanny by day, she worked in quiet isolation in her attic alone at night, sorting and organising through the photographs she’d taken that day. As you’re about to see, her images of 1950s & 60s Chicago/New York are some of the most powerful & magnificent to have ever been taken during that era.

The art world and historians across America are now uniting to find out more about the intensely private women behind these extraordinary photographs. Their aim is to piece together the untold and compelling story of one of America’s most mysterious and talented visionaries.

The Lost-and-Found Selfies of the Great Vivian Maier

One of the finest photographers of the 20th century, her work was lost to history. Until now.

Decades before Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, Grindr, and MySpace, there was Vivian Maier. Working as a nanny in Chicago during the ’50s and ’60s, she captured her world with a profoundly sensitive eye, focusing primarily on street portraits, but also mastering the art of the selfie in a way we’re guessing Stalker Sarah never will. Indeed, in stark contrast to today’s insta-share society, Ms. Maier never showed her work to anyone. An-nee-one. Not her family, not her friends, no one. It wasn’t until 2007 that a box of unlabeled negatives were bought at auction that one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century was found. A full-length documentary is slated for later this year.

Photo District News has chosen Miles Aldridge's 'A Perfect Mum #4' 2012 as their photo of the day. Congratulations Miles!

Next week, “I Only Want You to Love Me,” an exhibition of work by the British photographer Miles Aldridge, opens at Steven Kasher Gallery. The photographs, taken between 2005 and 2012, offer a glimpse into the artist’s cinematic, highly saturated world of female models and conventional household settings. Aldridge uses vivacious color and dramatic poses to add an element of tension to the photographs. 

For the fashion shoot, Lost Weekend, Wallpaper* 150 checked in to the iconic Greenbrier resort in West Virginia. An exclusive hideaway for presidents and Hollywood royalty, it's a lush Southern fantasy redesigned by Dorothy Draper in the 1940s, and updated by her disciple, Carleton Varney.

 
Watch this interview where photographer Miles Aldridge talks cinematic references and Technicolor dreams with Wallpaper Magazine.

Miles Aldridge: I Only Want You to Love Me

Miles Aldridge: I Only Want You To Love Me is an exhilarating adventure seen through the eyes of a 21st century photographer/artist who enjoys little popularity in the United States and much greater notoriety and recognition overseas.

There is no doubt that this premier volume dedicated to his photography will be a treasure for the cognoscenti of fashion and photography as well as for those who thrive on being visually stimulated. Mr. Aldridge is a photographer whose work is unmistakable, unforgettable, and surreal, offering the viewer a unique perspective. It is possible to compare his “art” to that of Helmut Newton but in “dazzling Technicolor” plus steroids!

In more recent times, one might make the assumption that the work of Mr. Aldridge is often referenced in current fashion publications, but the homages never reach the heights of the original creator.

The seasoned fashion lover will see the riffs on Elizabeth Taylor, Avedon, and even possibly Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, but the most obvious aspect of every photograph is that not one of them is off the cuff, extemporaneous: each is a tableau, brilliantly conceived down to every minute detail and all frozen in zombielike or somnambulant state.

Planet Aldridge is a luxury world where surreality reigns. All is perfect, yet something is amiss.

This volume will be classified as one of the great monographs of the 21st century. Its presence will expose just how sheltered we as readers and aesthetes are in terms of the international visual dialogue not fully realized on this side of the Atlantic.

Grab one, cherish it, love it, display it proudly. You will never forget Miles Aldridge: I Only Want You to Love Me.