NEW YORK, NY – Chelsea’s Agora Gallery will feature the original work of Zie Otto in Encounters: Nature and Culture. The exhibition opens March 13, 2018 and runs through April 3, 2018 with an opening reception on Thursday, March 15 from 6-8 pm.
Placing portraiture on a plane equal to the iconic universality of portraiture and fashion photography, the works of NYC-based Zie Otto are at once nakedly direct and difficult to see. His pictures tend to foreground aspects of his subjects, so as to give their whole figure a decided air of ambiguity. Oftentimes, like a movie director, he allows his subjects to hide behind a mask of emotional expressivity: a look concealing the subjectivity of the person who actually gives it.
In Americanoh-New Glory White Isaiah Earth the gender of the figure photographed is ambiguously situated behind a scrim of painterly white lines, as though the picture had been captured just moments after paint was spilled by casually raising a hand. What these confetti-like splinters of white suggest, however, is an aura of mock-celebration, as though the subject photographed was unambiguously tethered to a particular gender. On the other hand, these same blotches of paint are merely a scrim, and are not dense enough to conceal the chest of the person photographed, who is androgynously neither male nor female, but someone embodying the characteristics of both.
Exhibition Dates: March 13 - April 3, 2018
Reception: Thursday March 15, 2018 6-8 PM
Gallery Hours: Tues-Sat 11:00am – 6:00pm
Gallery Location: 530 West 25th Street, New York, NY
Event URL: https://www.agora-gallery.com/artistpage/Zie_Otto.aspx
Featured Artists:
Ellen Cuylaerts | Elena Gastón Nicolás | Daniel Loveridge | Zie Otto | Michael Victor ª MVR | Franck Sastre
About the Exhibition
Encounters: Nature and Culture
Encounters: Nature and Culture features six artists whose works highlight the underlying presence of subjectivity in all objective understanding. Starting with the depiction of realistic figures — be these painted or photographed — each work shows us how the hand of the artist ineluctably deviates from purely factual descriptions, delineating a world of imagined truth.
Fleeting Worlds: Wildlife Photography from Ellen Cuylaerts
NEW YORK, NY – Chelsea’s Agora Gallery will feature the original work of Ellen Cuylaerts in Encounters: Nature and Culture. The exhibition opens March 13, 2018 and runs through April 3, 2018 with an opening reception on Thursday, March 15 from 6-8 pm.
Ghosts of the Natural World: The Paintings of Elena Gastón Nicolás
NEW YORK, NY – Chelsea’s Agora Gallery will feature the original work of Elena Gastón in Encounters: Nature and Culture. The exhibition opens March 13, 2018 and runs through April 3, 2018 with an opening reception on Thursday, March 15 from 6-8 pm.
MVR: Nature and Virtuality
NEW YORK, NY – Chelsea’s Agora Gallery will feature the original work of Michael Victor ª MVR in Encounters: Nature and Culture. The exhibition opens March 13, 2018 and runs through April 3, 2018 with an opening reception on Thursday, March 15 from 6-8 pm.
