Patrick Painter Inc. is proud to present a group exhibition of photography in the East gallery at Bergamot Station, featuring important conceptual photo works by artists John Baldessari, Dan Graham, Craigie Horsefield, Mike Kelley, Jean-Luc Mylayne, Jeff Wall, Christopher Williams, and Christopher Wool. A series of eight photographs, titled National City (ed. 1996/2009) will be featured in the exhibition by the widely respected master John Baldessari. These images were taken of his hometown near San Diego, and include a painting... Read more

Patrick Painter Inc. is proud to present a group exhibition of photography in the East gallery at Bergamot Station, featuring important conceptual photo works by artists John Baldessari, Dan Graham, Craigie Horsefield, Mike Kelley, Jean-Luc Mylayne, Jeff Wall, Christopher Williams, and Christopher Wool.
A series of eight photographs, titled National City (ed. 1996/2009) will be featured in the exhibition by the widely respected master John Baldessari. These images were taken of his hometown near San Diego, and include a painting of a grey circle in each cityscape that is employed to lure the eye to the visual margins of each photograph. These are prime examples of Baldessari’s interest in the banality and truth that is so essential to his work. Baldessari has been exhibited at institutions that include the Tate Modern in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, and a current retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Dan Graham has proved himself to be an all-encompassing artist in his thirty-plus year career. Entirely self-taught, his wide variety of work consists of performance art, installations, video, sculpture, and photography. A fine example of his conceptual photography from the 1960s will be featured in the exhibition, entitled Robert Smithson (ed. 1968/1993). His work has been exhibited in a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Moore College of Art and Design, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris, the Kroller-Muller Museum in Holland, and the Kaisma Museum in Helsinki, Finland.
English artist Craigie Horsfield prints the black and white photographs of his surroundings and the people around him many years after they were initially shot, thus bringing memory and reality into contrast. His photographs are often part of collaborative social projects that are concerned with how individuality is reliant upon the relationship to one’s surroundings. Horsfield was a Turner Prize nominee in 2006, and his works have been shown many international venues including Documenta XI in 2002 and in the Whitney Biennial in 2003.
Mike Kelley’s work grapples with mass culture’s representations, undermining sacrosanct subjects (history, art, philosophy, religion, science) and their practitioners through popular culture’s leveling and debasing inscriptions. His diverse range of works include textiles, drawings, assemblage, collage, performance, photography and video installation. Kelley earned his BFA in 1976 at the University of Michigan and received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1978. His work has been exhibited at venues that include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the New Museum in New York, the Tate Liverpool, and Centre Georges Pompidieu in Paris. Kelley is also the focus of an upcoming retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
For more than thirty years French photographer Jean-Luc Mylayne has explored the intimate bond between subject and photographer through a non-traditional approach that combines precise conception, visionary inventiveness, and infinite patience. Mylayne’s photographic subjects, commonplace birds such as sparrows, starlings, and bluebirds, belie the unique experience that Mylayne captures in his photography. His work has been shown at the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, and the Musée d’Art Moderne, Saint-Etienne.
Canadian artist Jeff Wall is well known for his large-scale cibachrome photographs that are strategically back-lit. His photographic oeuvre often uses his home city of Vancouver’s blend of natural beauty, urban decay, and the postmodern and industrial mundane as the backdrop. This is combined with classical pictorial compositions which emulate the great Japanese painter Hokusai and other art historical greats like Manet and Cézanne. Considerably well versed in modern art history, Wall received his MA from the University of British Columbia in 1970 with his thesis exploring Berlin Dada. His work has been the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and he has participated in many group shows worldwide.
Christopher Williams’ photography is often described at sociophotographic, as his subjects conceptually explore codes of advertising, photography, architecture, and ethnography. Williams attended the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1980s where he studied under fellow exhibitor John Baldessari. He has been exhibited at Le Magasin in Grenoble, Kunsthalle Zürich, and the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver.
Christopher Wool is often recognized for his large, black and white motifs in the genre of painting, but this can also be observed in his featured photograph Incident on 9th Street (1997). Wool’s specialty also includes a wide range of painterly styles and techniques that include spray paint, silkscreen, and painting by hand. He received his BA from Sarah Lawrence College and later continued his studies at the New York Studio School and New York University. Wool has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam.