PRESS RELEASE
Inge Morath – Masquerades & Enoc Perez – Cut Shapes May 7 – June 13, 2015
Danziger Gallery is pleased to present a two-person show of photographs by Inge Morath and photo collages by Enoc Perez. Created half a century apart, both works share a sense of humor, an interest in concealment, and a delight in cutting and making shapes out of paper.
Inge Morath (1923 – 2002) and artist Saul Steinberg (1914 – 1999) engaged in a unique collaboration by having friends and acquaintances don his paper bags drawn with fantastic faces and then posing them for her photographs. In a delightful series of individual and group portraits taken from 1959 to 1963 the images convey both humor and an unnerving psychological depth. We may not know who is beneath each bag, but we seem to know the type they are playing. Between Morath’s deadpan style and Steinberg’s flights of fantasy they created a veritable encyclopedia of attitudes, postures, and mannerisms.
Inge Morath joined the photographic cooperative Magnum in Paris by invitation of Robert Capa in 1953 and was assistant to Henri Cartier-Bresson before becoming a full member. Her work was widely published in magazines, including Life, Paris Match, and Vogue, and in numerous books.
Ms. Morath was married to Arthur Miller and they had one daughter, the film director Rebecca Miller. In 2015 the Bienecke Library at Yale acquired the bulk of the Inge Morath Estate.
Enoc Perez was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1967. He currently lives and works in New York. Known primarily for his multi-layered paintings of modernist buildings, throughout his twenty year career the artist has nevertheless engaged with a variety of subjects that appeal to him from voluptuous nudes to still lives of Don Q rum bottles.
Enoc Perez’s new photo collages engage with social media, appropriation, and the artist’s consistent and inventive search for new forms. Sourcing images from the internet of minimally dressed or nude women, from amateur selfies to more professional photos, Perez adds hand painted and cut collaged forms to both obscure and enhance the picture.
The cutout shapes function as censor’s marks – thwarting our ability to see the original image in its entirety while making it all the more attention-grabbing and voyeuristic. At the same time the collaged bits make it into a happy game, playful colors and forms replacing a need for more visual information and reminding the audience of the artist’s role in directing and delivering fresh ways of seeing.
Enoc Perez’s work belongs to the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Art Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, among other significant institutions throughout the United States. The first complete monograph on his work was published by Assouline in 2013.