The artist lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands

Website: Ed Gebski
Contact email: info@edgebski.nl

Exhibition Dates: February 5, 2008 through February 26, 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 7, 2008, 6-8 pm
Gallery Location: 530 West 25th Street, Chelsea, New York
Gallery Hours: Tues - Sat, 11am - 6pm

http://www.agora-gallery.com/ExhibitionAnnouncement/02_05_2008.aspx

The Allegory of Form

Featured Artists: K L Campbell, Elie Bou Zeidan, Efrain Cruz, Timo Hanley, Thierry Fazian, Patrice Goubeau

The Allegory of Form is a vibrant collection of artists who defy convenient classification. Through intuition and personal expression these artists have developed unique voices with which to speak to and about the world at large. Audiences will be delighted as they dive into the imaginative paintings created by this selection of visionary artists.

Enigmatic Visions

Featured Artists: Tim Stensland, Jasnica Klara Matic, Pierre Fava, Jia Ming Wang, Carlos Torres, Nic Vincent

With potent abstractions, Enigmatic Visions explores the possibilities beyond our ordinary perception, keying into personal insights, metaphysical concepts, and timeless mysteries. Such unique forms of visual communication requires that viewers interact with the artwork to discover its message, while the breadth of ideas and personalities assures an exciting foray into the contemporary art scene

Vivid Beauty

Featured Artists: Taras Borovyk, Sophie Hieronimy, Daniela Vasileva, Lee Hutton

Vivid Beauty is a full bloom of painterly invention. Each artist in this talented group has discovered an artistic channel to explore their dreams and recollections, street scenes and vibrant landscapes. The exciting visual play is highly individualistic; around each corner is a new way of perceiving the world that will electrify fans of contemporary art.

Website: Collective Exhibition at Agora Gallery
Contact email: amanda@agora-gallery.com

J. Karl Bogartte has been exploring the deep wellspring of the imagination since the early 60’s, both inventing and discovering the motives and imagery of our human passage through endless realities.

Originally through the use of a singular, very original process of collage he invented and named Photomorphosis, which he mined thoroughly like an alchemist driven to transform his psyche into gold… into the Philosopher’s legendary Stone.

At the beginning of 2000 he abandoned the work, and began the exploration of a digital expression, with the same passion and obsession that characterized the earlier imagery.

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J. Karl Bogartte thinks, and rightly so, that �Everything�including ourselves�is moved by the obsessively beautiful conquest of the irrational.� Of course, one needs to invent the means of getting to this irrational, a problem that each great creator solved in his or her own way, taking into account, or not, the achievements of his or her predecessors. Like Man Ray, Vane Bor, Ubac and many others, Bogartte took up automatism again: �Automatism�he says� remains one of the most necessary tools in freeing from slavery the truest products of the activity of the spirit. Art is the clue left at the scene of the crime. It is also its evidence. The crime is freedom, this radiant digression into the revelations of desire.�

Paradoxically, Bogartte uses for this liberating end one of the modern inventions that would seem a priori the least suited to do so: the photocopier, on whose plate he places �all kinds of illustrations,� or fragments of illustrations �regardless of their contents: landscapes, machines and naked women, especially naked women, with eggs and forks, tinfoil, etc. Movement is the key process, as opposed to the natural function of the photocopier of recording the absence of movement and being a simple imitator.� Hence the term of photomorphosis, which means �change or transformation of an organism by means of light.� One should mention here the �self-copies� of Theodore Brauner; and the reader (�) will probably be surprised by the fact that two creators of the same movement obtained at about the same time such different results by using the same impassible mechanism.

On the plane of the �pure fascination� that Breton talked about, the entities that give free rein to their frolics (The Strange Confrontation) are as magical, humorous and �marvelous� as the various sprites, vampires and chimeras, which appeared on the scene of pictorial automatism with Matta, Esteban Franc�s, or Kamrowski (who is, like Bogartte, a member of the American Surrealist Group). In some cases Bogartte cuts up again the images obtained in this way and combines collage and photomorphosis, by adding sometimes fragments of photos�images of birds or butterflies, animal species that he has an elective affinity for (The Wedding Guests Have Arrived�).

The contribution of Bogartte to the field of experimental photography can be already considered of major importance. By combining the different contributions of the photogram, photo-drawing and the so-called �action painting� (by moving rapidly elements under the light) and the �situationist� diversion of the photocopier, a machine which is as practical as it is forbidding, the photomorphosis appears to us as the epitome of the latest research. As such, the fantasy set free by this dream alchemy is considered by us worthy in all respects of participating in the final bouquet of fireworks that �surrealist photography� has been for sixty years.

(From Les Myst�res De La Chambre Noire; le surr�alisme et la photogrphie, by Edouard Jaguer, was published by Flammarion, Paris, in 1982. It is the most comprehensive volume on the myriad uses of photography in the history of surrealism.)

Surrealism and Photography

“Of a time when the beasts (fools) spoke,” it had been possible for a ring of magic fairies to transform pumpkins into carriages. The fact that this never existed only gave the poets a reason to invent it. However, the fundamental idea of the world says “reality” will have evolved considerably over the next 20 years and the “machine” under which all beings will have progressively invested our familiar literary domain, as much as and more than in the animal world of old, the attempt is great for these same poets to go on much longer, dreaming up these “machines.”

Bogartte’s work is like the point of a lightening rod that simultaneously attracts the legendary storms of the past and those which are to come… He is affecting the machines that will dream.

(Edouard Jaguer - October 1984)

Website: Photomorphose
Contact email: photomorphose@mac.com