Three new exhibitions will open at Portrait Society Gallery in the Third Ward on Gallery Night, January 20, from 6 to 9 p.m.

The Third Annual Winter Chapel installation will be presented by artists Keith Nelson and Paula Schulze. Nelson is building a structure within the gallery. Paula Schulze, using geometric patterns, will design the altar component and interior of the chapel.

This year’s annual Snow Sermon by Dr. Jeff Filipiak will be at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, February 3. This year, Filipiak has been awarded the semi-official title of Milwaukee’s Ambassador of Snow, and will extend his message of positive engagement with winter to broader audiences.

The Winter Chapel project was initiated three years ago to add dimension and insight to the harsh climate in which we live. Each year, a different artist or team is invited to build a chapel of their choosing, dedicated to a kind of meditation on winter. The chapel is meant to offer an experiential encounter with visitors.

In the front room at Portrait Society will be Lucid Dreams: New Paintings by Rafael Francisco Salas. Salas is a Wisconsin-based painter who last had a show at Portrait Society in 2010. His new work delves further into the ambivalent middle zone between abstraction and representation and how it speaks, obliquely, of the portrait.

The third room of the gallery will host a small group exhibition called Wisconsin Self-Taught, in conjunction with the Milwaukee Art Museum’s major exhibition, Accidental Genius: Art from the Anthony Petullo Collection, opening February 10. Portrait Society represents a number of Wisconsin self-taught artists and this exhibition will feature three: Bernard Gilardi, Rudy Rotter and Mike (Ringo) White. (A short video about Ringo White, made by Sara Caron, will be shown as well).

In conjunction with these shows, there will be two other Bernard Gilardi exhibitions opening at Wisconsin Institutions in January.

The Museum of Wisconsin Art (MWA) in West Bend, WI will host a Bernard Gilardi retrospective, Into the Light, from January 11 to March 25, 2012. Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin is hosting an exhibition of Gilardi’s religious themed paintings January 6 to March 11, 2012.

For additional information please contact Debra Brehmer, Portrait Society, portraitsocietygallery@gmail.com or call 414.870-9930.

Giotto’s Eyes opening December 2

Three new exhibitions are on view through January 14, 2012. The opening reception was Friday, December 2.

Exhibition review, Third Coast Digest, Kat Murrell

Jean Roberts Guequierre, a Milwaukee based painter,  taps historical references in her work, most often turning to the Early Netherlandish paintings  of the 15th and 16th centuries.  For this show, however, she has been looking at the work of an early Renaissance Italian artist, Giotto, and extracting faces from his frescoes to translate into her own portraits.

A second project at Portrait Society is a video installation by a group of students from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. With guidance from professor Jamal Currie, the students have designed a project that deals loosely with the ideas that Giotto considered in his work during the cultural shifts of the early Renaissance. At this time, the idea that sky and nature begin to re-appear within religious painting represented a new way of thinking about man’s position in the world.

The third gallery will host a show called Every Day. Thirteen artists/photographers were invited to shoot images during a single day of their lives. The intention was to escape intent, packaging and ambitions and seek out the mundane. Each artist has been given a two-foot wide by 10-foot high space to present the project. This exhibition also loosely addresses the issues that Giotto brought to image making in the 1400s as he re-staged religious stories down on earth, within real-life settings (rather than against gold-leaf backgrounds in the netherlands of a spiritual world). All of the images in this project will be for sale at 50 cents to $1 per inch.

Francis Ford and Jack Eigel’s Men of Leisure

September 16 to November 6, 2011

Opening reception: Friday, Sept. 16, 6 to 9 p.m.

Gallery Night: October 21

This collaboration between the photographer Francis Ford and Milwaukee’s well-known man-about-town Jack Eigel began in 2000 with an exhibition at Kent Mueller’s now defunct KM Art Gallery. The second iteration of the project, “Jack’s Dolls” was in 2003 and the third, “Dairyland Divas and Dandies,” was in 2006 (accompanied by a book).

Portrait Society Gallery is honored to host the fourth chapter of the project, Men of Leisure. This new body of work emerges from the span of five years that have passed since Dairyland Divas and Dandies, a time in which both Jack and Francis suffered life-threatening health crises.

Jack Eigel, 55, experienced cardiac arrest in 2007. In subsequent years, his heart deteriorated to the point that he needed a full transplant. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel covered the 2009 surgery in Madison in a series of front-page articles. Jack had a rare condition where his heart was on the opposite side of his body, making the surgery extremely difficult. Not only did he survive the surgery but he has since become involved in the US Transplant games, winning a Bronze in swimming.

Although many people know Eigel as the iconic salesperson at George Watts and Sons, a position he held for many years, he has chosen to take time off post transplant because he says he is having too much fun with his renewed lease on life.

Francis Ford, 66, Wisconsin’s best known and perhaps most revered portrait photographer, experienced a fully unexpected bleeding aorta while watching a film of the Metropolitan opera’s Der Rosenkavalier,  at the South Shore Cinema in January 2010. Unexpected to survive emergency surgery, Ford has since fully recovered.

The new project, Men of Leisure, obliquely addresses both of their near-death experiences and the subsequent changes in their lives but lands squarely in the same playful, whimsical inventive narratives of the previous bodies of work. Indeed, Ford’s passionate interest in opera and Eigel’s affinities with vintage fashion and style infuse these staged images with a potent blend of theatricality, absurdist folly and humor.

Jack Eigel is the ultimate chameleon. He invents these scenes by first dipping into his vast repository of vintage clothing, which is stored at his Wauwatosa home in an orderly and accessible manner. The outfit then triggers the setting and staging of the concept. Eigel concocts all of the ideas and titles and enlists friends in supporting roles and then tells Francis where to arrive with his camera. This could be his cousin’s lake house, city hall, the Hob Nob supper club in Racine, who knows. From there, Ford uses his considerable mastery to frame the idea and cast the drama as a compelling picture.

The first project, “Jack Show,” completed in 2000, featured only Jack, as a solitary performer. Still anchored to film and darkroom chemicals, Frank followed Jack through all kinds of imagined scenarios: Jack wearing furry chaps and a cowboy hat while drinking a cocktail in a horse pasture or Jack wearing a headdress of daisies and floral patterned pants and sipping wine, still manly with a five-o’clock shadow, in the backyard by the Weber. The descriptions get cumbersome as the images become laden with layer upon layer of artifice, that is also, ironically, an amplified reality.

From the relative simplicity of this first project evolved increasingly complex and multi-character scenes.

The exhibition features the Men of Leisure work in the front gallery and “greatest hits” from the past projects in the other two rooms, pulled from the total 108 pictures. In any of these images the viewer can easily detect sparks igniting between photographer and subject. There’s a shared joy in the making of the pictures and it energizes the compositions.

Both Jack and Francis have always lived a little on the edge of the mainstream and when they throw themselves fully off the cliff into their own invented wacky world, it’s as if they are suddenly more at home.  For Jack and Francis, the celebration of the exaggerated is a place of comfort, a place where we are all finally, fully safe from becoming numbed and absorbed by the monotonous consumption of daily life. Francis has always gravitated toward drag queens, rock bands and eccentrics. In contrast, Jack has lived an almost absurdly normal life by day in his parent’s home in Wauwatosa, selling china and wine glasses to dreamy future brides at Watts, yet fully commanding a Milwaukee nightlife existence as a flaneur (a lounger, saunterer or loafer as the dictionary defines it). It is here, after dark that Jack would flow across all boundaries from gay to straight, from grunge to business elite.  It is legendary how he could land on any bar stool and inextricably bring enchantment and charm to the encounter.

For Eigel, whatever persona he concocts, be it sailor, crossing guard, tough guy, bar fly or civil servant, it seems to engender him. People often ask what Jack “is” – is he an actor, a performance artist, a comedian, a cross dresser? Oddly, he defies categories. There is really no title for Jack’s role in life or his avocations. Perhaps he is simply more alive and engaged in the exploration and expansion of his composite selves than most of us. And that becomes an art form because it allows us to imagine what our own composite selves might look like if we dared unleash them. Recently, when pressed to come up with a label, Jack said he is a “novelty model.”

Writing about the artist, actor and writer Antonin Artaud (Theatre of the Absurd), Marthe Robert said that theatre to Artaud was “absolute freedom in revolt.” She writes, “To outfit life in the most garish fashion in order to force it to show itself as it really is, to recapture a language that existed before value judgments froze the word – such was the task Artaud entrusted to theatre…” (Marthe Robert in “Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper,” Museum of Modern Art, 1997).

Ford and Eigel’s long collaboration first speaks from this realm of theater. Photography then steps in to burnish these bizarre little vignettes with a veneer of truth, allowing them to co-exist in our space as wacky alternatives to our often deadened world of perception.

Within these constructed photographic narratives, Eigel/Ford’s greatest antecedent would be Lady Clementina Hawarden in the 1860s who costumed her adolescent daughters in staged compositions. The role-playing seemed to allow these women to step out of proscribed Victorian social codes. Then there’s Sally Mann and Cindy Sherman and, more recently, Yasumasa Morimura, and Nikki S. Lee. But Ford and Eigel’s project stands fully on its own as something “other,” perhaps in part because of the decade-long engagement and the odd blending of art and life that they manage to keep tethered together.

The new body of work, Men of Leisure, is shot in color. Francis Ford has seldom worked in color.  To wander from the older work into the room of new work is a Wizard of Oz experience. Ford has manipulated the color to unnaturally blanch skin tones toward a colder, paler contrast as well as heightened some colors and isolated contrasts between areas. Eigel’s wardrobe choices are given full lavish, shout-out attention. But even beyond the color, there is something different about this new body of work. While the black and white images feel grounded in the editorial and documentarian, somehow limited to the page and pushed just a little away from us, the color work embraces us fully into these contrived worlds.

Even with Jack dressed in a vintage airline stewardess dress in the role of a school crossing guard juxtaposed with a young girl who looms brightly in the foreground, or Jack dressed in a gingham apron in the kitchen peeling a very phallic plastic carrot there’s an innocent goofiness to the scenarios that is trusting and inclusive.

Perhaps when one enters a real-life zone that feels fully impossible and unreal – such as the near-death experiences and medical/hospital worlds from which they’ve both recently emerged – the invented world of art and fiction become less severed. The gap closes when life gets as implausible as anything one could imagine. This new body of work has a bolder assertion to it. Sure Jack and Francis are aging but they are not letting go of that wide-eyed kind of looking at life that notes just how truly bizarre it all is, on every possible level.

-Debra Brehmer, Gallery Director

 

 

Portrait Society Gallery, 207 E. Buffalo Street, Fifth Floor, is a contemporary gallery devoted to the exploration of the portrait and its role in society. The gallery is open Thursday through Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m. For additional information contact Gallery Director Debra Brehmer, 414-870-9930; portraitsocietygallery@gmail.com.

 

Tracy Cirves

 Tracy Cirves: Lavender Longings

July 15 to September 10, 2011

Galleries A and B

Opening reception: gallery night: July 29, 6 to 9 p.m.

Portrait Society is pleased to present paintings by Tracy Cirves during the summer months of 2011.

Ms. Cirves earned her undergraduate degree in painting from UW-Madison in 2008 and completed her MFA at Yale in 2010. She has recently moved back to the Madison area.

Primarily large scale, Ms. Cirves’ work deals with issues of womanhood, isolation, contemporary fashion and the more self-reflective ideas of how the act of painting navigates between the shores of truth and fiction, between true emotion and performative affect. The artist’s most recent body of work places women in interior settings and is influenced by “The Yellow Wallpaper, ” a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman published in 1892 about a woman confined to her upstairs bedroom by her physician husband because of her “nervous depression.”

Tracy says, “I have found the interior spaces that I am depicting in my paintings as metaphorical to my own interior space, and a way to contemplate the fiction within the reality of my experience of being. “

Here is an excerpt from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s preview of the exhibition:

Women in solitude, or isolation, depending on your perspective, is a time-honored theme in art history. Solitudinous gals were particularly in vogue for the Romantics, usually men. Think Frederic Leighton’s “Flaming June,” Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Beata Beatrix” or John Everett Millais’ “Ophelia.”

Tracy Cirves is neither a romantic nor a 19th-century male, but she does explore a similar melancholic territory in her portraits. Though she brings her intellect to bear in these paintings, her work is more than feminist critique. They appear to be that rare thing: unabashedly sincere explorations of self.

Of late, her large, color-saturated works have been inspired by “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s late-19th-century story of psychological and physical isolation, womanhood, interior spaces and the act of painting. “I see these women as fictional portraits of myself,” the Madison-based artist says.

In addition to work by Tracy Cirves, a third room of the gallery (The Lounge) will present an installation in tribute to the imprisoned contemporary Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who was released in June. Running in conjunction with the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Summer of China exhibitions, the project was inspired by the international discussion (launched by Mary Louise Schumacher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) regarding how Milwaukee should address this human rights crisis at the same time that it is celebrating China’s cultural heritage. Portrait Society’s project is a collaborative undertaking that will focus on portraits of Ai Weiwei by Stephen Somers. It represents an effort to keep the issues of his art and detainment visually present through the summer months.

For additional information, please contact Gallery Director Debra Brehmer at 414-870-9930.

More than Real: The Death of Kodachrome

(Special event: Thursday, June 30 at the gallery. Premiere screening of J. Shimon and J. Lindemann’s kodachrome film, “Charlie’s in Kodachrome.” 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Also Professional Dimensions and CoPA will have receptions at the gallery.)

May 13 to July 10, 2011

Portrait Society Gallery is pleased to present  “More than Real: The Death of Kodachrome,” three new exhibitions running May 13 to July 10, 2011. Journal Sentinel review.

Each show serves as a tribute to the medium’s demise last year and looks at the unique properties of Kodachrome as a means of rendering images and memories.

Gallery A features “Casa Happiness” a collection of printed Kodachrome slides of local attorney Judy Drinka’s 1957 honeymoon in Cuba. Ms. Drinka was 19 years old and had never been out of the country. Her new husband, Martin, was a camera buff who took many slides during their three-week trip.

Julia Taylor, a Milwaukee photographer and President of the Greater Milwaukee Committee, became interested in this collection of vintage slides for both its artistic merits and her personal connection to the Drinkas. Ms. Taylor, in her own work, had been exploring outmoded photographic media, from Polaroids to Kodachrome.  The 19 images in the exhibition show pre-Castro Cuba through the saturated hues of the Kodachrome chemistry as the newly wedded couple embarked on their life together. (Cuba images)

Gallery B  presents Erik Ljung’s “Pilgrimage to Parsons, Kansas.” Ljung is a young photographer who had one 36-frame roll of undeveloped Kodachrome film in his possession when he heard that the last processing plant would close on December 30, 2010. Ljung decided to drive the 1,400 miles to Dwayne’s Photo in the town of Parsons, Kansas and use the film to document the journey.

The visual story of this trip, which meandered through Ronald Regan’s birthplace of Tampico, Ill. and a courageous snack of pickled gizzards in Grinnell Iowa, is presented in the show. The last picture was supposed to be saved for a portrait of Dwayne’s Photo but Ljung couldn’t resist photographing a “mashed up road kill,” which now marks the end of his journey as well as the end of Kodachrome.

In the Lounge is the third installment of this exhibition. “Flowers by Livija” is a project by Milwaukee photographer James Brozek. Fifteen years ago, Brozek was given a box of slides by an apartment manager who was closing out the residence of an elderly tenant. Recalling that he “felt something” for this body of non-descript slides that had fallen into the oblivion of non-ownership, he kept them.

Only fragments of information could be unearthed about Livija, the Latvian woman who took the slides. It appears that during the 1950s and ‘60s, Livija would create simple flower arrangements and then dedicatedly photograph them in still-life compositions. It was her private artistry. She also photographed each new floral arrangement that she would leave on the grave of her husband who had died in 1959. More images by Livija

All three of the exhibitions speak of the sense of distance and history now contained in the Kodachrome medium and explore how our memories are influenced and defined depending on the vehicle of their preservation.

For additional information please contact Gallery Director Debra Brehmer at 414-870-9930 or portraitsocietygallery@gmail.com.

Fred Bell’s Marshall Building Portrait Project

Milwaukee artist Fred Bell has embarked on a project to paint portraits of all the tenants and workers in the Historic Third Ward’s Marshall Building. His first twenty portraits are now on view at Portrait Society, 207 E. Buffalo Street, FIFTH Floor, Marshall Building, Milwaukee. Shepherd Express article on project.

Portrait Society at Next Fair, Art Chicago

Portrait Society is pleased to participate in Next Fair at Art Chicago on April 28 to May 2 at the Merchandise Mart. We will be bringing work by Bernard Gilardi, Boris Ostrerov and J. Shimon & J. Lindemann. If you would like free tickets to the fair, let us know. Next Fair, Chicago

Friends: John Riepenhoff, Fahimeh Vahdat, Mona Webb

March 18 to May 1, 2011

Opening Reception: Friday, March 18 from 6 to 8 p.m. with a performance by John Riepenhoff. Slide show of opening reception

Gallery Night: April 15, 5 to 9 p.m.

Portrait Society Gallery is pleased to announce a new exhibition that looks at the role of the portrait in defining and preserving notions of friendship and community. The three artists, John Riepenhoff, Fahimeh Vahdat and Mona Webb, are from very different backgrounds, eras and social conditions. Yet each has used the portrait to better see and preserve the friendships they have nurtured which in turn form the larger, defining framework of their lives.

A sense of community has strongly informed the art practices of all three artists.

John Riepenhoff is well known in Milwaukee as a purveyor of contemporary art, as well as an artist. He opened the Green Gallery while still an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and currently co-runs two venues, Green Gallery East and West. His art and curatorial practices are entwined and built on the idea of offering “platforms” to present work and ideas. He is a 2009 winner of the Mary Nohl Fellowship.

While Mr. Riepenhoff’s art practice takes many forms, his interest in the portrait may be his most direct. For the past year, he has informally drawn pictures of his friends while they draw him. Traditionally, the artist actively renders a portrait of a passive subject. Mr. Riepenhoff equals the playing field by having both parties engaged in the act of the portrait at the same time.  The final drawing has an image of his friend and also an image of John Riepenhoff that the friend is drawing, a picture within a picture. He is interested in the ideas of framing: how the paper frames the process, how the gallery frames the project.

He says, “I feel like my interest in the portrait is directly related to recognizing how the social plays in our development of meaning and value in art and life.”

Mr. Riepenhoff  has titled his Portrait Society project “Jake Palmert and Other People Drawing John Riepenhoff by John Riepenhoff.”

A portfolio of 17 prints of these portraits in a frame with a casette tape of the three songs performed by Riepenhoff at the opening reception is available in an edition of 15 for $200. Contact the gallery at portraitsocietygallery@gmail.com for information.

Fahimeh Vahdat is an installation artist, social activist and professor in the painting/printmaking department at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.  Originally from Iran, she left the country due to the 1979 revolution and the persecution of her family who were of the Baha’i faith. Ms. Vahdat traveled through Greece, Spain and stayed in England for a year and one-half before coming to the United States. She then lived in California and Texas and attended Richland College and Southern Methodist University in Dallas where she earned an MFA.

It was as an undergrad in 1988 that Ms. Vahdat learned the etching process and began making small portraits of people who were important to her.  Since then, she has maintained the practice of using etching plates as her sketchbook pages, carrying zinc plates and an etching needle with her regularly. She continued to chronicle the people who came into her life as a personal means of honoring and remembering them, but never intended to show this body of work. Ms. Vahdat is better known for politically engaged installations that deal with gender oppression, Middle Eastern politics and human rights abuses.

Mona Webb (1914-1998) was an African American woman who was born in Texas. She moved to Madison, Wisconsin in the early 1960s after attending college, marrying a professor and raising four children. Prior to moving to Madison, Webb left her husband and fled to Mexico with her children to avoid racial persecution in the south. Here pre-Columbian art as well as the revolutionary murals of Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco inspired her. She met the Indian mystic, Krishnamurti, as well as British writer Aldous Huxley (Brave New World).

In Madison, the dynamic Ms. Webb turned her home on Williamson Street into the “Wayhouse of Light,” a place open to poets, artists and thinkers. For three decades, Ms. Webb hosted exhibitions and performances and created her own sculpture and paintings, transforming the storefront building into an art environment where every wall and ceiling was ornamented. An important part of her practice was to paint portraits of the people who occupied her life during this time.

Mona Webb died in 1998 and several years later, the Wayhouse of Light was dismantled. Edgewood College in Madison now houses the remaining estate and it is through the university that Portrait Society has acquired this body of work. Ms. Webb’s work is represented in the collection of the Museum of Visionary Art, Baltimore. In 2010, Edgewood College published a book about Ms. Webb, “Mona Boulware Webb: Treasures from the Mystic Wayhouse Gallery.”

For additional information, prices or additional images, please contact Debra Brehmer at portraitsocietygallery@gmail.com, 414-870-9930. Essay by Dr. Jeffrey Hayes about Mona Webb. Mona Boulware Webb images

Boris Ostrerov and Winter Chapel

Two new exhibitions at Portrait Society

January 21 to March 11, 2011

UPCOMING EVENT:

On Thursday, February 24, at 6:30 p.m. at the Artbar, 722 E. Burleigh Street, Portrait Society Gallery will resume its Art History lecture series (previously held at Lemon Lounge). This year’s slate of bar lectures (informally irreverent but competently rich in content) is being offered in collaboration with Fine Line magazine, Wisconsin’s new quarterly publication of visual arts. The February 24 speaker will be Graeme Reid, assistant director of the Museum of Wisconsin Art. His lecture is titled “Let the Good Times Roll? A short history of Alcohol in Art.” This crucial though sometimes under-estimated commodity greatly affected the history of Modern art. This event is free.

current Exhibitions Portrait Society is excited to offer the second annual Winter Chapel installation. Each year an artist or architect is invited to transform Gallery B into a self-styled chapel. To help ease us into the darkest, coldest months of winter, the Chapel seeks to offer a place of inventive quietude and solace, but it also aims to expand our ideas about how one ‘constructs,’ through material means, the idea of beauty.

Linda Wervey Vitamvas, this year’s chapel designer,  is a sculptor who works with minimal porcelain forms. She was featured in this year’s Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and is currently an artist in residence at the Kohler’s Art and Industry program.

A former obstetrical nurse, Ms. Vitamvas returned to school several years ago to complete an MFA at UWM. Her lengthy career in nursing still informs her work as she creates minimal, white porcelain forms that suggest the intersection of the body and the world of medicine.

Ms. Vitamvas’ chapel was inspired by a recent trip to Rome and the Capuchin Crypt, which is an underground burial chamber containing the bones and bodies of 4,000 Capuchin friars. At Portrait Society, her chapel is white and minimal, with a curtain of bone icicles in front of an altar where 40 candle-holders in the shapes of pelvic bones will light the room.  Glass shelves line the walls and hold hand-made bones that cast shadows to the floor.  A clock, also constructed of various bone shapes, keeps immortal time on another wall.

The public has been invited to participate in this project by purchasing a bone that can be inscribed with a message of their choice and included in the chapel. The seven-word-maximum inscriptions range from an artist’s list of all the colors in spectrum to the lyrics of a recently deceased relative’s favorite German folk song. Call 414.870-9930 for additional information.  Click here to see what Judith Moriarty said of the project: Third Coast Digest preview

Boris Ostrerov: New paintings

Gallery A features new paintings by Boris Ostrerov. The exhibition can be viewed here: Boris Ostrerov: New Paintings. This is Boris Ostrerov’s second solo show at PSG. He has since moved to NYC where he is in graduate school at Hunter College.  In this new body of work, Ostrerov explores smaller scale color compositions that take the forms of mounds or piles of lines. They are lyrical and abstract, yet each one, depending on the shape, arrangement, color or density of the thick lines, suggests a totally different set of conditions and mood. His artist statement addresses how these seemingly abstract compositions also embed much larger principles – of both science and life as well as the act of painting itself:

“I often find a seemingly dumb misunderstanding is more intriguing than an understanding and may reveal a surprising truth.

With this idea in mind, I create stacks of brush-marks that exist in their own world, the space of which is confined to the dimensions of the substrate I work on.

I think about:

A pile that grows up not knowing where it came from or how it got there.

A pile that grows up with the possibility of collapse.

A pile that keeps growing with the knowledge that any subsequent growth can add instability.” – Boris Ostrerov

Please contact Debra Brehmer (414) 870-9930 for additional information or e-mail portraitsocietygallery@gmail.com.

Bernard Gilardi: Four Decades

Bernard Gilardi: Four Decades is on view at Portrait Society from October 15 to January 8, 2011. Additional images, Catalog essay

A second installation of this exhibition will open with a free reception Friday, December 3, from 6 to 9 p.m. featuring all new work. It is also Open House night in the Marshall (Arts) Building.

Fred Bell’s “Making Babies” is also on view in the Rudy Lounge, with 50 small scale paintings of babies. Babies by Fred Bell

Bernard Gilardi (1920-2008) worked as a lithographer for a printing company and lived in a small house on Milwaukee’s near North side. Having always been interested in art, he started painting in the late 1950s. He continued to make oil paintings throughout his life in his basement studio. By the time he died in 2008, at the age of 88, he had completed about 400 paintings. Portrait Society will present two bodies of work as well as a catalog to introduce Bernard Gilardi’s legacy to the public.

Gallery A will feature an assortment of figurative paintings in a style of Mr. Gilardi’s own invention, but loosely fitting in with a historic Midwestern tendency toward “magic realism” or Surrealism (Karl Priebe, John Wilde and more recently Dennis Nechvatal and Fred Stonehouse). Although Mr. Gilardi was interested in attending art shows and reading about artists, he did not show or sell his own paintings. After serving in the Army Air Corps in World War II, he took at least one art class at the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee, but his formal art education seemed to end there. Nevertheless, Gilardi’s work shows great sophistication in his ability to render complex scenes, paint different textures convincingly, and orchestrate color.

Gallery B will present a suite of large scale (26 x 30 inches) oil on panel portraits of Abraham Lincoln done between 1973 and 1976. Mr. Gilardi’s fascination with Lincoln at this time coincides with the aftermath of the civil rights movement of the mid to late 1960s. Coincidentally, Father Groppi, a local civil rights activist, lived up the block from the Gilardis on N. 41^st Street beginning in the early 1980s. The Lincoln paintings also came at a time when our presidential leadership under Richard Nixon erupted in scandal, which led to his resignation (1974) and the 1976 election with Ford and Carter as running mates. Leadership, integrity and doubt were surely on the mind’s of many people at this time.

Bernard Gilardi’s work is like a time capsule, pulling from the stylistic tendencies of the decades in which he worked, yet always infused with his own gentle humor and creative vision. It is extremely rare that such an accomplished body of work is created in isolation and survives intact. Milwaukee Magazine article

J. Shimon & J. Lindemann’s Real Photo Postcard Survey

J. Shimon & J. Lindemann’s Real Photo Postcard Survey Project on view through October 2, 2010. Also, Vansessa Winship in Gallery B. Portrait Society is located at 207 E. Buffalo Street, Fifth Floor of the Marshall Building, in Milwaukee’s

Historic Third Ward. Hours are Friday and Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m. John Shimon and Julie Lindemann have been long-time collaborators, working together for nearly 20 years. They began shooting portrait commissions for this project in their studio in Manitowoc, WI about two years ago. Since then, they completed about 160 portraits, all done in the historic palladium printing process in a postcard format.

The exhibition includes the commissioned portraits as well as a body of postcard portraits from the early 1900s. A small catalog with a sample of six postcards (two of each to total 12) is available for $10 in conjunction with the show.

As the project unfolded , more and more people arrived in Manitowoc to stand on the tape line with very clear ideas of how they wanted to present themselves. Some brought dogs and props or wore special clothes. Each confronted the camera with his or her own ideas of what the moment might contain. A project blog was established to post the portraits as they were printed.

Lawrence University in Appleton, WI, where Shimon and Lindemann are professors in the art department, has generously provided a grant to fund some of the printing and framing of the work.

Shimon and Lindemann’s work is currently included in the Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. A solo show of their work, “Unmasked and Anonymous,” was presented at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2008. Real Photo Postcard Survey Project

Vanessa Winship: Dancers and Fighters

In conjunction with this exhibition, Portrait Society is also hosting a companion show of work by London-based photographer Vanessa Winship.  Winship is well-known in international photography circles, but this is her first solo exhibition in the United States. She most recently won the distinguished 2010 PhotoEspana prize. She is showing a body of work called “Dancers and Fighters” featuring portraits of children taken in the Republic of Georgia,  where she has frequently worked. Vanessa Winship

Portrait Society Gallery is located in Milwaukee’s Historic Third Ward in the Marshall Building, 207 E. Buffalo Street, Suite 526. It is open Thursday through Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m.  Please contact gallery director Debra Brehmer for additional information at portraitsocietygallery@gmail.com or 414.870.9930. realphotopostcardsurveyproject.blogspot.com

An essay from The British Journal of Photography about Vanessa Winship

Truth and Beauty: Vanessa Winship

By Simon Bainbridge

(Excerpted from The British Journal of Photography, September 2008).

‘The Balkans is a fantastic place, but the burning … ‘ Vanessa Winship is speaking in mock dramatic tones, but of course there’s a terrifying truth behind her sardonic affection for the powder keg of Europe, still smouldering from its most recent bout of bloody ethnic warfare.

She knows the area well, having moved there with her partner and fellow photographer, George Georgiou, at the denouement of the Kosovo crisis at the end of the 1990s, and staying on in the region when most of the world’s press had moved on to burning pastures new. But though she’s chosen to spend the best part of the last decade living and working in Europe’s most enduring battle zone, Winship is not so much a conflict photographer as a lyrical storyteller, drawn to the Balkans and neighbouring Black Sea provinces because of their rich sense of cultural identity – a sense only intensified by the divisions in the territory.

‘For me, photography is a way of understanding the world, and of course politics comes into that. But I’m not a campaigning photographer, that’s not my agenda. I’m interested in what makes people tick – their fantasies and dreams. I’m interested in history and the way it’s told.’

History, she observes, depends on who’s telling. ‘My truth is my own reality, and someone else’s truth is their reality. And they’re both true. This is where conflict happens; when different peoples’ reading of truths are not necessarily the same.’

Borderland

Her passion for the region was sparked by a very particular obsession. ‘Going to the Balkans began with a fantasy relationship I had with Albania,’ she recalls. ‘When the Iron Curtain fell, there were all these images of places, often dreadfully poor, and in amongst them I saw a few pictures of somewhere really beautiful. Albania has an extraordinary history, with this dictator (Enver Hoxha) and very peculiar culture, but I wasn’t in a position to go there, so I looked at it from a distance. I joined the Albanian Society and I read Ismail Kadare, who’s this incredible novelist who wrote during the time of Hoxha. His writing is surrealist, and he was able to make this critique about the system he was living under in a very veiled and convoluted way, using mythology and symbols. It was this looking at things in a more layered way that interested me.

‘And, of course, I read about the politics, so when the crisis in Kosovo happened, I kind of had to go. My son was 18, so I felt I could leave, and it was in that context, having read about this strange place, that I decided to go.’

She knew she and Georgiou were leaving Britain for a long time, but says it was very much an open-ended journey. From Albania, they went to live in Belgrade, explaining that, ‘it would be completely unfair not to go and find out about these “wicked” Serbs, which of course they’re not’, then on to Athens before finally settling four years in Istanbul and embarking on long term project on the people and places in the countries surrounding the Black Sea.

‘I was thinking about this whole idea of border,’ she says, ‘and I’m still thinking about the separating of belief systems, where you belong and attachment to land and the fact that people are willing to die for it. It’s expressed in such a raw way in times of change.’

New direction

The first thing that strikes you about Winship’s photographs is their melancholic beauty. She has surely absorbed Kadare’s dense, textural layers and applied them with a sense of faded, Baroque grandeur. Each frame drips with Old World theatre, within which history is ever present, yet time seems to stand still.

Partly, she puts it down to her ability to be invisible. ‘I think it’s because I’m good at being quiet. I’m not very threatening. People talk to me quite easily, they feel comfortable. And I’m willing to stay around much longer than most people. But what I really want to do is have the viewer – me and everyone else – engage and take responsibility for their gaze. That’s partly why I’ve switched from this very passive capture of things passing through – though it’s not always like that.’

She’s referring to Sweet Nothings, a series of portraits of Turkish schoolgirls, captured in a much more deliberate way standing in front of Winship’s tripod-mounted large format camera. Captured on their way to class, sometimes for the first time, their dresses are embroidered with lace, flowers and well-wishing messages. Photographed in the rural Eastern Anatolia fringes near the borders of Syria, Iraq and Iran, where Kurdish separatists continue their fight for greater independence, the uniforms symbolize the Turkish state.

But this complex backdrop, and the obvious poverty of their lives, is almost irrelevant. They are simply and defiantly presented as children, photographed at an age when they remain largely unaffected by the mask of self-consciousness – their nervous grace before the camera more extraordinary than where they’re from, what they do, and what they stand for.

‘It was also about making the whole process much slower. I really wanted to create a space, and when you arrive with a (large format) camera and a tripod it’s a kind of event, it’s a small piece of theatre. I wanted it be an occasion, an event you could literally walk into. I could be very controlling in that way, but what actually happened in that space had nothing to do with me. And that was the real beauty. Yes, I set up a really structured way of making the images – the formality of the distance and so on – but actually beyond that, who they were and how they responded to me and the situation was completely out of my control. Maybe the reason why they touch people is the juxtaposition of the formality set against the girls’ vulnerability. That tension has really struck a chord.’

However, she riles at a recent suggestion that she aimed to represent the girls in any way. ‘The only thing I could possibly do is give them a moment. It would be preposterous for me to imagine that I’m giving them a voice. I’m not. That’s a hugely egotistical idea. Yes, I made them in the context of this campaign to get girls into school, and of course that’s a really important issue, but actually, in many ways it’s a much more personal connection.’

Monochrome future

She imagines she’ll stick with monochrome for the foreseeable future, convinced it’s still relevant. ‘I’ve always found it really strange that black-and-white has been associated with truth, because the world’s in colour,’ she says. ‘I like the idea of black-and-white because I’m making a statement that this isn’t the real world, it is a representation, and black-and-white does that very well. In the art world, we don’t ask, “Why are you drawing with a pencil?”, which is the equivalent of black-and-white. I simply don’t see why we have to equate it with the past.

It’s a typically uncompromising view from Winship. But while she’s sticking with black-and-white capture, she seems determined to continue where she left off with Sweet Nothings, defining a simpler, more purist approach.

‘I had to work really hard to make good compositions, it certainly wasn’t something that came naturally. But I’ve learnt that, and you have to free yourself from it in order to be the real deal. I’m still learning to lose the taught stuff, and these very simple portraits are the beginnings of getting rid of photographic gymnastics.’