Exhibitions

Loock Galerie is featuring Charlie White and Sibylle Bergemann at The Armory Show 2014.

Charlie White's work has ranged from carefully staged tableaux that aim to expose the complex nature of representation, to detailed portraits that take an uncomfortably close look at adolescence and the cultural image of the young girl. Though his practice focuses on the operations of photography, his projects have also included film, animation, music, personal archives, and writing. Working against the prolific output model expected in late capitalism, White produces only a few photographs at a time, often separating his projects by several years.

In his current series, Self Portrait, White continues an investigation of portraiture by collapsing the classical nude and the contemporary naked self-shot. He also introduces his first Still-Life photographs, cornucopia-like compositions which operate as corollary to the naked figures. "Self Portrait" addresses the dominance of the "self" in popular photographic forms, locating the origin of these shared vanities in the temporal operations of sexualized self-shots trafficked across platforms such as Craigslist, Backpage, and 4chan. Naked figures employing the lens as a communication tool and solicitation device are paired with grabbing hands pilfering tabletops of Flemish-inspired abundance, offering a reassessment of selfcommodification and survival in our current moment.

Charlie White's works were recently featured in The Sun and Other Stars, a major two-person exhibition at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum). His film American Minor was featured at Director's Fortnight in Cannes, and his recent monographs include American Minor, JRP/Ringer 2009, and Such Appetite, LBM 2013. White is editor of the journal The Enemy, and holds the position of Associate Professor at the USC Roski School of Art and Design.

In contrast to Charlie White we exhibit the Vintage Gelatin Silver Prints by Sibylle Bergemann (1941 – 2010) from the 70s and 80s.
Bergemann is one of the most recognized photographer of East Germany. We focus on her fashion work, she took from 1970 onwards and which made her name better known. This photographs has been published in the „Magazine for Fashion and Culture“ „Sibylle“ founded in the GDR in 1956, and for which she continued working until it closed down in 1995. In these pictures, though, the poses of her models avoid the sort of coquetry and artificiality favoured by many photographers of the West working in this field. Rather, she portrays – in accord with the female image favoured in the GDR – self-confident, intelligent women, yet without ever succumbing to the demands of the state with regard to how the socialist society of the GDR should be represented. On several occations, her work aroused the criticism of the Women´s Committee of the Socialist Party.

After her death in 2010 her work was shown in numerous renowned institutions, like in the Exhibition „The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today“ at the MoMA – Museum of Modern Art, which
travelled in the following year to the Kunsthaus Zürich. In 2011 the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg create a homage to her work and she was part of the prominent Exhibition „GESCHLOSSENE GESELLSCHAFT/ Artistic photography in the GDR from 1949-1989“ at the Berlinische Galerie.
Both artists are exposing the particular identity of their own society which holds a subliminal critic.

The Gallery represents also the following artists at The Armory Show 2014:
Anton Henning, Takehito Koganezawa, Jonathan VanDyke and Ulrich Wüst