Spring/Summer Newsletter 2009

Michael Hoppen Gallery and Michael Hoppen Contemporary

The latter part of 2008 was a busy time for the gallery. As well as our roster of shows over three floors, we attended two art fairs in two consecutive months; Paris Photo and Art Miami in November and December.

Despite a reportedly tentative art market, the galleries enjoyed a healthy 2008. Damien Hirst invested in a whole set of Polly Borland’s wonderful BUNNY series whilst Nobuyoshi Araki’s Hana Kinbaku and Tiina Itkonen’s Ultima Thule exhibitions were extremely well-received, with many collectors enjoying new bodies of work from these already established artists. October was Sarah Moon’s month. A highly anticipated and successful exhibition on the first floor ran concurrently with a retrospective at the RCA and the publication of the monograph1 2 3 4 5 by Thames and Hudson. The edition of 6,000 copies had all but sold out by December.

In November, Paris Photo was a buoyant and upbeat event. In keeping in with the country of honour at this year’s fair, Japan, we brought vintage prints by Kishin Shinoyama, Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu, plus work from Yoshihiko Ueda’s new series, Amagatsu which garnered a lot of attention from intrigued collectors. We were also privileged to be able to present 10 vintage pieces from Yokosuka Story by Miyako Ishiuchi, which we are pleased to note was purchased in its entirety, thereby keeping this wonderful rare set of prints together. Alongside our Japanese artists we showed work from Alex Prager’s highly successful Big Valley series and also work from Simon Norfolk’s Missiles project. We also launched the series (Life with) Maggie by young, up-and-coming artist Ofer Wolberger.

The year closed with Art Miami, which despite being a lower key event than previously enjoyed by the fair, was a worthwhile trip with Valerie Belin’s exceptional fruit basket series proving very popular with US collectors.


Shows

5th February-10th March
Scarlett Hooft Graafland
You Winter, let's get divorced
Michael Hoppen Contemporary

This February, we are delighted to announce our second solo exhibition of work by Dutch artist Scarlett Hooft Graafland.

In this new series, Hooft Graafland successfully combines straight photographic practise with performance and sculpture. The resulting work is delightful - visually engaging yet constantly referring to a more profound cultural discourse. Using a surrealist language of intriguing visual jokes, Hooft Graafland wittily alludes to her anthropological interests and environmental concerns. For You Winter, let’s get divorced, she spent four months living in Igloolik in the northern reaches of Canada. The beauty of the harsh natural landscape with its infinite snow and ice forms Scarlett’s canvas and playground. Although her concerns are serious, Scarlett’s childlike palette and informed wit are intrinsic to her work. Bold colour, incongruous objects and local folklore are combined to create an individualistic take on themes such as cultural integrity, domesticity, as well as the dire environmental issues facing the region.

** Scarlett’s new book ‘Discovery’ will be on sale during the exhibition, priced at £20.00 Published in an edition of 500 by Michael Hoppen Contemporary and Vous Etes Ici, this beautifully bound book contains images from all Hooft Graafland’s series from 2004 to 2008.**

Scarlett has another show opening on the 30th January at the Berlin Autocenter, together with German Sculptor Jan Bünnig.
Curated by Caroline Egel, show exhibition will show Scarlett's China project 'Instant Sculpture'- her exploded vases installation.

12th March-16th April
Miyako Ishiuchi
Japans foremost female photographer
Michael Hoppen Gallery

The Michael Hoppen Gallery is honoured to host the first European retrospective of work by Miyako Ishiuchi, Japan’s foremost female photographer. Taking over both floors of the gallery, it will be the first time images from the series ‘Mother’s’ (2000-2005), ‘1906 To the Skin’ (1991-1993) and ‘Yokosuka Story’ (1976-1977) have been shown in Britain. Curated by Dutch photographer and Japanese photography specialist Machiel Botman, the exhibition comes to us from Foam Museum Amsterdam and La Filature Scène Nationale-Mulhouse before moving to Riga Art Space in Latvia. The exhibition was organized and produced by Langhans Galerie Praha, a non-profit organization for the promotion of photography.

In 2006 Ishiuchi was awarded the prestigious Japan Photographic Society Prize, and in recent years has had solo shows at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, as well as representing Japan at the Venice Biennale in 2005.
A very limited amount of the work on show will be available for sale to collectors. This is a rare opportunity to view thirty years of personal, vital and complex work from one of Japan’s most prominent and renowned artists.
The exhibition will be accompanied by the limited edition book MIYAKO ISHIUCHI, edited by Machiel Botman and published by Manfred Heiting.
Printed in the form of a leporello within a slipcase, the book will be available exclusively from Michael Hoppen Gallery.


21st April-30th May
Boris Savelev
31 Years
Michael Hoppen Gallery

’31 Years’; an exhibition of work by Boris Savelev- one of Russia’s most important and renowned photographers will be on show at the gallery in April. It will be the first time his work will be shown in the UK.
‘31 Years’ is a series of photographs created by Savelev from 1976 to 2006. It documents not only his changing sensibilities and aesthetic concerns; light and form, flashes of colour, moments created by the interaction of individuals within their urban landscape, but also his experimentation with both lith paper and meticulously multi layered pigment prints, which feed and inform the resulting images. The pigment transfer prints were made at Factum Arte in Madrid and are part of an ongoing collaboration with Adam Lowe to perfect the process.
Boris Savelev’s background was in aeronautics, but within two years of his graduation he had also begun working free-lance in photography, which he had been interested in since a teenager and to which he switched permanently in 1983. He has been exhibiting and publishing pictures made over the last thirty years not only in Russia but in intensive projects undertaken in London, Rome, Berlin and Madrid. Yet, despite all this cosmopolitan activity, his photographic vision has remained extraordinarily consistent and true to its origins.

3rd June- 19th July
Ofer Wolberger
(Life With) Maggie
Michael Hoppen Contemporary

(Life with) Maggie is the latest project by Ofer Wolberger.
Maggie, a quaint and odd figure, travels around the modern world, but is attracted to sites with an elusive sense of time. Like the typical tourist, Maggie poses in front of objects and environments that suit her temperament, befriends the local people and visits iconic historical sites. She simultaneously blends in with the photographic landscape in which she is held captive, yet her mysterious features and outdated style somehow affect the whole image and give it an otherworldly, three-dimensional feel. This displacement of time and place within the context of tourism helps to portray Maggie as an outsider. At the same time the photographs reflect on the strange habits of all tourists and their pervasiveness around the world. The project ultimately muses over individualism and identity in society, while questioning our possibly outdated notions of borders and boundaries.
Ofer Wolberger lives and works in New York City, and is the recipient of The Humble Arts Foundation’s Spring 2008 Grant for Emerging Photographers. His photographs have been exhibited around the world, most recently in Tim Barber’s Various Photographs as part of the New York Photo Festival and in Young Curators, New Ideas at Bond Street Gallery in Brooklyn including The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, Life and Big Magazine.

**Ofer Wolberger was picked (out of 431 potential portfolios) as one of four artists for 2009 /2010 Talents exhibition at the C/O Gallery in Berlin. In this prestigious exhibtion, four photographers and young art critics are asked to submit work on a specific theme at the Postfuhramt as well as the Goethe institute in New York, forming an experimentation space for international contemporary photography and art criticism.**

News

We are very much looking forward to participating in ART HK 09- Hong Hong International Art Fair on the 14th-17th May. Cited as one of the fairs to watch in 2009 by The Art Newspaper, ART HK 09 will showcase the very best of international Modern and Contemporary art exhibited by galleries of every discipline from all over the world.
We will be showing work by Valerie Belin, Sarah Moon, Desiree Dolron, Annie Leibowitz and Nobuyoshi Araki.
The Fair will take place at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, and the private view will be on the evening of the 13th May.

Tod Papageorge’s exhibition Passing Through Eden- photographs of Central Park, held at the gallery in April last year has been shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Prize, Europe’s premier award in art photography. The shortlist for the 2009 edition is split equally between young and established artists, with two men and two women; Tod Papageorge, Paul Grahame, Taryn Simon and Emily Jacir making up the four names whose work is on show at The Photographers’ Gallery. The £30,000 winner is announced on 5th March.