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Barney Kulok was granted access to observe and photograph the construction of the highly anticipated Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park last Fall. The memorial park, designed in 1973 by Louis I. Kahn and situated on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, was the last design the great modernist architect completed before his death in 1974. Revived after almost forty years, the Park will finally open to the public this coming October. |
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Barney Kulok,Untitled (59th Street Bridge), 2011. Gelatin silver print, 29 x 40 inches. Courtesy of Nicole Klagsburn Gallery and the artist.
In honor of Archtober, Architecture and Design Month, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery has been running “BUILDING,” a solo exhibition of Barney Kulok in conjunction with the release of the artist’s first monograph, Building, published by Aperture. On Tuesday, October 30th, Aperture Gallery and Bookstore is hosting a conversation between photographer Barney Kulok and Morgan Library & Museum photography curator Joel Smith to discuss Kulok’s new book and his experience photography the construction of Four Freedom Park on Roosevelt Island.
Barney Kulok was granted access to observe and photograph the construction of the highly anticipated Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park last Fall. The memorial park, designed in 1973 by Louis I. Kahn and situated on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, was the last design the great modernist architect completed before his death in 1974. Revived after almost forty years, the Park will finally open to the public this coming October.
Kulok, free to roam the site and use it as an outdoor studio, limited his project to the boundaries of the site and the duration of its construction. Comprised largely of details of materials, objects, and their incidental arrangements, Kulok’s photographs do not illustrate the architect’s design or describe the building process. Instead, the photographs attend to the surface of the landscape and depict micro-events encountered during the building of the monument: a constellation of cobblestones splayed out on an unfinished promenade, a pebble resting precariously on the face of a 36-ton granite block, shards of light scattered across a workshop drawing. The gelatin-silver prints, dense with information and nuanced in tone, are a testament to the value of carefully articulated photographic seeing. In “Luminous Silence,” Steven Holl’s afterword in the artist’s forthcoming monograph, the architect writes, “Kulok’s photography probes material, detail and circumstance of the construction site. Rather than a documentation of construction they form a poetic parallel.”
With this body of work the artist continues to address the near-documentary photographic and pictorial concerns central to his practice. Here Kulok extends his exploration of detail, surface and fragment through precise observation of the conditions and constraints of the construction site. Kulok’s approach to picture making has in the past included video installations, light boxes and painted panels. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery. He has exhibited nationally and internationally in both group and solo exhibitions, including Galerie Hussenot, Paris; Galerie Elisabeth Kaufmann, Zürich; de Pury & Luxembourg, Zürich.
Barney Kulok: Building
Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery
September 13 – October 27, 2012
532 West 24th Street
In Conversation: Barney Kulok and Joel Smith
Tuesday, October 30th
6:30pm
Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10011
Barney Kulok, Untitled (Cobble Constellation), 2011. Gelatin silver print, 29 x 40 inches. Courtesy of Nicole Klagsburn Gallery and the artist.
