Product Description
Grant Mudford, Long Beach, Gelatin Silver Print 1979
GRANT MUDFORD (1944- ) Australia
Long Beach 1979
Gelatin silver print
Signed: Long Beach 1979, LB-24/2 (in pencil on back); Grant Mudford 1980 (script in ink)
Framed size: H: 28 ¼” x W: 32 7/16”
Price: $29,000
“Since he moved to Los Angeles from Australia in the late 1970s, Grant Mudford has composed photographs that crisply examine the streamlined geometries of West Coast architecture and landscape. Mudford has zeroed in on the abstract formal relationships lurking within the designs of gas stations, strip malls and apartment buildings. The geometrical arrangements highlighted in his photographs of the masterful modernist structures of Rudolf Schindler and Craig Ellwood have disclosed a link between their midcentury architecture and the contemporaneous hard-edge abstractions of L.A. painters John McLaughlin and Lorser Feitelson.” – Art in America, “Grand Mudford at Rosamund Felsen, September 2003
Grant Mudford, Long Beach, Gelatin Silver Print 1979
JEFF LOUVIERE (b.1971) USA
VANESSA S. BROWN (b.1970) USA
Chlorofemina, Neque (from “As if…”) 2005
Mixed media, pigment print, wax mixed with pigment
Edition: 2/5 (printed in 2008)
Signed: Louviere and Vanessa
Image H: 53” x W: 45”
Price: $35,000
“By collaborating, we put ourselves in the midst of alternating currents of decision and production, action and responsibility, decay and clarity-capturing the moment between ‘has been ‘ and ‘what will be.'”
Jeff Louviere has a background in graphic design and art direction, winning several national and international awards. Vanessa S. Brown was 12 when she made her first photographs, and was exhibiting at 17. Her work gained international acclaim even before she earned her BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology. Louviere received his MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design, and it was in Savannah, Georgia that Jeff and Vanessa met. Their first collaboration was a series of photo storyboards for a film they had written together. The two moved to New Orleans in 1998 and have been exhibiting nationally ever since.
Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown have been collaborating on photographic images and movies since they first met in the mid-90s. Under the moniker Louviere+Vanessa they have created moody, atmospheric visuals with various equipment, including scanners, 8mm film, destroyed negatives, wax and even blood, utilizing the Holga medium format camera, altering the negatives and creating assemblages
WERNER ROHDE (1906-1990) Germany
Self-portrait 1926
Silver gelatin print, ebonized wood frame
Signed: Werner Rohde 1926 (pencil signature and date on back on photo); inv. 3RMG 1081.27
Photo: H: 6 13/16” x W: 4 15/16”
Framed: H: 16 5/16” x W: 14 3/8”
Price: $38,000
Werner Rohde’s visual play with the animate and inanimate draws him close to the aesthetics of the surrealists while maintaining a strong alignment with Germany’s new-vision avant-garde. Rohde experimented widely with double exposures, photomontage, perspective and dramatic lighting that reflected his interest in filmic effects. The son of a glass painter (a medium he would turn to later in life), Rohde took up photography during his studies at the Arts and Craft School in Halle. Like Kesting, Willy Zielke and Kretschmer, he participated in the 1929 ‘Film und foto’ exhibition in Stuttgart that remains one of the historical focal points for Germany’s new photographic vision. Despite this early recognition of his work, Rohde fell into obscurity after the war until the rediscovery of his photographs in the mid 1970s.
Rohde’s fascination with the play between life and lifeless, animate and inanimate, has strong reverberations with surrealism. Masks, mannequins and paper models were used in his photographs to illuminate the uncanny. They were also employed in his self-portraiture in which he mimicked his idol Charlie Chaplin. These techniques of visual illusion provided a mnemonic tool for the images of his wife in which she is posed and photographed to resemble a doll or mannequin. In the act of art imitating life, ‘Wachspuppenkopf’ is uncanny in its mimicry of the human form with realistic teeth, eyes, skin and even the unusual detail of small wrinkles under the eyes. The downward angle, lighting and odd doubling of the neckline utilizes standard surrealist methods to infer life and movement.