When the trend at galleries is black-and-white, never-before-seen color photographs are rare. But that’s the case for the Marie Cosindas retrospective at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York, where certain photographs are being displayed for the first time in a commercial space. So, perhaps not “never-before-seen,” but certainly almost unknown. Thirty-five works by this American photographer, now in her 90s, show a somewhat rococo world adorned with human figures, old dolls, masks, rugs and, especially, flowers and plants. The colors of these objects delicately blend with skin and men and women’s clothing in meticulously textured polaroids. Decorative and disturbing, Cosindas’s eccentric photographs are also filled with humor.
Her work was the subject of a historic exhibition at the MoMA in 1966. But it was in Boston that she developed her baroque style, in a studio where she created “arrangements” of figurines, jewels, perfume bottles, tarot cards and other objects which came to define her signature style. Often pyramidal in structure, her compositions exhibit a kind of old-world style pushed to excess that borders on kitsch. In 1961, Edward Steichen purchased three of her photographers, and Cosindas became a major figure in the photo world. John Szarkowski labeled her work as one of the few “conspicuous successes” in color photography, predating Williams Eggleston. (At the time, Szarkowski wanted to make an American the representative of color photography, but Brassaï and Berko had already used it brilliantly.) Arrangements is a series with a pictorial aesthetic, composed from modest, small photographs barely larger than 5cm, and is among the most remarkable exhibitions in New York this season.
EXHIBITION
Marie Cosindas, Arrangements
Until March 8, 2014
Bruce Silverstein Gallery
535 W 24th St #1, New York, NY 10011
USA
T: (212) 627-3930
