From Life
Solo Exhibition
Gary Schneider
Works from 1975 - present
April 22 - May 21, 2023
Artist Talk and Q&A with a book signing of his
monographs and catalogs: Saturday, May 13, 11-12am
MARQUEE PROJECTS is thrilled to present From Life, our first solo exhibition of the photo-based artist Gary Schneider. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, April 22 from 5-7pm.
Born in South Africa, Gary Schneider is a photographer whose early practices in painting, performance, and film remain integral to his explorations of portraiture. He strives to marry art and science, identity and obscurity, figuration and abstraction, the carnal and the spiritual.
In this exhibition, we present a broad range of Schneider’s work. He was raised during apartheid, emigrating to New York in 1977 at the age of 22, and much of his work is informed by the racial issues he grew up with. Genetic Self-Portrait (1997-1998), for example, is a series of images of his own genetic material in which nothing identifies race. Also included in this exhibition are forensic images that use the strategies he developed in Genetic Self-Portrait. These include body imprints of himself and John Erdman, his muse since 1977, and a handprint portrait of the South African artist Senzeni Marasela. It is from a project produced between 2011-2015 funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship which realized Gary’s desire to meet and make portraits of the community of South African artists thriving post-apartheid. He has been making handprint portraits since 1993 and considers them to be as expressive as any portrait of a face, more private, and perhaps more revealing.
In other portraits (face and figure), made since 1988, the person lies under an 8x10-inch camera in the dark. The exposure is made by the artist slowly exploring their features with a small flash-light, over a long period of time. This traces both his and their performances and produces distortions in color and form that he further manipulates during the printing process.
In many of his series, Schneider endeavors to transform photographic documents into images that are open to interpretation.
Schneider’s solo institutional exhibitions include: The Musee de L’Elysee Lausanne, Switzerland; Artist Space, New York City; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; The International Center of Photography, New York City; The Museum of Photographic Art, San Diego; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA and The Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland. He received an Eisenstaedt Award from Life magazine, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Lou Stoumen Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Some public collections that include his work are: The National Gallery of Canada, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Whitney Museum, Yale University Art Museum, The Guggenheim Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and The Iziko South African National Gallery.