Natural History
Photographs from the 70’s by Leandro Katz
March 4 to March 30, 2010
Reception March 4, 7 to 9 pm
Natural History is a selection of vintage, time-based, photographs from the 1970’s dealing with time and nature by Argentine-American artist, writer and filmmaker Leandro Katz.
The themes of the works in the exhibition range from waterfalls and rivers to the sea and the moon. Although the subject of each composition varies, they all share a common element: each individual subject is repeatedly photographed over a specific interval of time. Twenty seconds in the life of a palm tree, illustrated above, is an early work from 1975 comprised of twenty individual frames of the same tree taken one second apart.
Lunar Alphabet is composed of 26 progressive variations of the faces of the moon, starting from the first visible crescent, through the full moon and ending with the new moon. Each of the 26 individual images was matched to a letter of the alphabet which the artist used to compose words, phrases and sentences, thus inventing the lunar language. The installation Lunar Sentence II and Lunar Alphabet II was just acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Leandro Katz’s work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museo del Barrio, Bronx Museum for the Arts, PS1, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and most recently, The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid in Spain.
Images from the exhibition can be seen in the artist’s latest book, Natural History, published by the independent press Viper's Tongue Books, with texts in Spanish and English. This book will be launched on March 5th at Newman Popiashvili Gallery, 504 West 22nd Street, New York, from 7 to 9pm. Two other books by the artist, S(h)elf Portrait 1972 and The Ghosts of Ñancahuazú, will also be presented.
Leandro Katz. Argentina, 1938
A visual artist, writer, and filmmaker, he is known for his films and his photographic installations, as well as his long-term, multi-media projects that delve into Latin American history through a combination of scholarly research, anthropology, photography, moving images and printed texts.
Leandro Katz has produced books and artists’ books, and seventeen films, including Splits (1978), The Visit (1980-86), The Day You’ll Love Me (1997) and Paradox (2001). His latest artists’ book, S(h)elf Portrait, was published in Buenos Aires in 2008. His most recent books, Natural History and The Ghosts of Ñancahuazú, were published in 2010. Recent exhibitions include Encuentros de Pamplona 72: fin de fiesta del arte experimental (Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2009), Natural History (Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York, 2010), Imán-New York (Proa, Buenos Aires, 2010), 10,000 Lives (Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, 2010) and A (Los Alfabetos), (11x7 Gallery, Buenos Aires, 2011).
For his work he has received support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (USA), and the Hubert Bals Fund (Holland), among many others.
Leandro Katz was a member of the faculty at the School of Visual Arts, New York, the Semiotics Program at Brown University, Rhode Island, and a professor of Film Production and Theory at the School of Art and Communication, William Paterson University, New Jersey. A New York artist for over four decades, he now lives in Buenos Aires.