Steven Kasher Gallery 521 West 23rd Street NY 10011 New York États-Unis
Leo Rubinfien among its represented artists with a small exhibition of large color prints from his book A Map of the East. In these photographs, made in Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines not long after the Americans departed from Saigon, there is no more violence, but the lush and gorgeous landscape of Southeast Asia seems to brood with the silence that remained where the war had been. Beyond the War is presented in conjunction with our exhibition Vietnam: The Real War: A Photographic History from the Associated Press.
A Map of the East is one of the most esteemed photographic books of the 1990s. It appeared in 1992 together with one-man exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Seibu Art Forum, Tokyo. Rubinfien spent much of the 1980s exploring the lesser known streets and back roads of Japan (where he had grown up), China and Southeast Asia, and producing a body of work admired for its lyricism, intimacy, humanity and vivid detail. The New York Times praised “these elegant, lonely pictures,” and the New York Review of Books called them “superb.”
Rubinfien is an acclaimed American photographer whose work was featured three years ago in the Cincinnati Museum of Art’s authoritative survey exhibition, Starburst: Color Photography in America, 1970-1980. His photographs have been honored with one-man exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and the Yale University Art Gallery, among other institutions, and his photographic books include A Map of the East (1992), Wounded Cities (2008) and The Ardbeg (2010). Widely known as well for his writing on photography and other subjects, Rubinfien is also the author of Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation (2004) and Garry Winogrand (2013). He was Guest Curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s recent retrospective of the work of Garry Winogrand, which will appear at the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum and the Jeu de Paume next year. From October 4th through December 8th, 2013, a one-man exhibition of work from Wounded Cities will appear at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, as part of the twelfth Fotografia, Festival Internazionale di Roma.