Gitterman Gallery

Gitterman Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of early work (1989-1997), from the secondary market, by the Guatemalan artist Luis González Palma (b. 1957). During his early career, Luis González Palma made portraits of Guatemalan people of Mayan or mixed Mayan descent to honor their heritage and bring attention to the discrimination and exclusion they faced. In the process, he gained a greater understanding of his own mestizo ancestry. González Palma explains that “…having lived in a country ravaged by more than thirty years of armed conflict…[t]he subject of fear, loneliness, emptiness and absence are deeply embedded in my work.” (see interview with Alasdair Forester) González Palma uses Christian iconography as well as social and cultural symbolism to create his own lexicon which alludes to universal themes of life and death, fate, spirituality, and mysticism. Through the poignant gaze of his subjects, especially present in these works, González Palma engages the viewer as he honors Mayan identity and acknowledges the complex social history of Guatemala. He also implies that this is one history of many in which humans trespass against their fellow humans. Though González Palma photographed with black and white film and printed these images as gelatin silver prints, he used various additional processes and techniques including toning, collage, and painting with bitumen and asphaltum. Some are collaged with red ribbons to symbolize a bloodline; others have pages from biblical texts. Some have handling marks, and sometimes scratches, cuts and folds. The collage and handwork emphasize the physical dimension of each piece. They are not pristine photographic prints that suture us into a specific narrative but rather objects with textures from human touch that engage us as poetic evidence.

I am always on the lookout for art that will contribute to my understanding, art that will broaden my perspective or make me feel a sense of connection. Most importantly, it needs to be distinctive enough that I want to experience it again. The exhibition includes a selection of recent additions to the gallery inventory, mostly from my trip to Paris this summer. They are a diverse group and made in the 1920s through 1960s, yet all were created with an avant-garde style, ranging from Modernism to Surrealism to abstraction to conceptual portraiture. It is fascinating to see how well these works from periods gone by hold up and speak to a contemporary perspective. They were created by artists, some heralded, some lesser known, who were adding their own original expression to an ongoing discourse. Artists included are: Laure Albin-Guillot, Pierre Boucher, Émeric Feher, Raymond Journeaux, Francois Kollar, Helmar Lerski, Daniel Masclet, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Jean Moral, Jean Painlevé, Roger Parry, Jaroslav Rossler, Frederick Sommer, and Raoul Ubac.

Gitterman Gallery proudly presents Jackie Robinson and the Color Line, an exhibition of the collection of Paul Reiferson, which uses photographs and artifacts to vividly narrate the story of baseball’s journey toward integration. Jackie Robinson, a trailblazing figure in civil rights, shattered baseball’s color line when Martin Luther King, Jr. was still in college, earning praise from King as “a sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.” The exhibition frames Robinson’s odyssey within a larger one that had begun sixty years earlier, when men like Fleet and Weldy Walker, Sol White, Robert Higgins, and Javan Emory played for integrated teams in the late 19th century.

This selection of avant-garde Czech photography focuses on rare vintage works by two seminal figures, František Drtikol and Josef Sudek. Each created exquisite prints that added dimension to their innovative visions. František Drtikol’s (1883-1961) photographs are distinctly emblematic of the Art Deco period (1920s and 30s) by merging styles of Symbolism, Pictorialism, and Modernism. Though most known for his Pictorial images of nudes in Modernist stagings, we highlight a series from the early 1930s he referred to as “photopurism.” In this series, he photographed paper cut-outs and carved wood figures, as Mannerist silhouettes of the human form, in geometric abstract environments, to explore themes of Buddhism. He gave up photography in 1935 to concentrate on painting. Josef Sudek (1896-1976), after having lost his right arm in combat during World War I, devoted his life to photography. Working with a large format camera, he stayed close to home. He primarily worked in his studio in Prague, photographing intricately constructed still lifes and atmospheric views through his studio window, as well as portraits, landscapes and his city. Though Sudek chose seemingly conventional subjects, his delicate prints convey the poetic magic of the photographic medium. In addition, we present an iconic image by Sudek’s early teacher, Jaromír Funke.

This exhibition brings together a selection of rare figurative works, most of which include masks, one of the artist’s most recognizable motifs. Masks have long associations to the surreal and the macabre but Meatyard also employed them to obscure the identities of his subjects. This approach elevated his images from the specific to the universal. Though an optician by trade, Meatyard was close with an important Kentucky literary circle and enjoyed friendships with writers Wendell Berry, Guy Davenport, Thomas Merton and Jonathan Williams. Intuitively, Meatyard understood the importance of narrative in images and, perhaps even more importantly, he understood how ambiguity in images opened up possibilities to engage the viewer. The exhibition features three sequences of images from 1968-69. Each of the sequences bears a nonsensical title, once again offering the viewer a chance to employ their own imagination to determine the meaning of each work. Meatyard’s experience as an optician gave him knowledge about lenses and vision that informed his work as a photographer, as did his interest in philosophy, especially Zen. Spirituality underlies his often haunting and complex imagery. Tragically, Meatyard died from cancer in 1972 at the age of 46.