ARNO RAFAEL MINKKINEN

Performing for the Camera: Forty Years of Self-Portraits

April 26 – June 29 2012

NEW YORK – Barry Friedman, Ltd. is pleased to present Performing for the Camera: Forty Years of Self-Portraits by the Finnish American photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen. A reception for the artist will be held on Thursday, April 26, from 6-8 pm at Barry Friedman, Ltd., located at 515 West 26th Street.

Minkkinen was one of the first photographers, along with Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman, to turn the camera towards their own bodies. As Minkkinen states, “In 1971, at Apeiron Workshops in Millerton, New York, I stood naked in front of a mirror I had placed in the grass [Self-Portrait, Millerton, NY, 1971]. The following year I am floating on ice surrounded by flames [Pachaug, CT, 1972], a performance artist I suppose, but performance art with a purely photographic intent didn’t come into full swing until much later.” In Minkkinen’s work, there is a distinct separation between process and product—not a document of the performance and not a photograph to be manipulated afterwards. For Minkkinen, performance and process stop the moment the shutter fi res. “You don’t need the rocket after the satellite is in orbit.” Performing for the Camera: 40 Years of Self-Portraits is a survey of more than 80 works spanning the course of Minkkinen’s 40-year career. The photographs are arranged in groupings that stress the visual and poetic connections between works from different periods of time.

Minkkinen’s single negative, black and & white photographs of his own naked body interacting with the physical environment constitute a unique and ground breaking contribution to contemporary photography and have been exhibited in numerous museums around the world. Literally immersed in his surroundings, Minkkinen’s images show him buried in snowdrifts [Fosters Pond, 1996], submerged under rapids [Waterfall, Pachaug, 1973], hanging over precipices [Grand Canyon, 1995], seemingly walking on a pristine lake [Fosters Pond, Millennium, 2000] and performing a headstand on the hull of an upturned boat [Kilberg, Vardø, Norway, 1990]. Minkkinen’s photographs envision the human body as a powerfully unfamiliar form, transformed by its encounters with the world.

In her anthology, Auto Focus, The Self-Portrait in Contemporary Photography, curator Susan Bright writes, “The freedom associated with the nude body in a landscape has been explored extensively in painting, especially in Northern Europe and Scandinavia. Minkkinen celebrates this genre and has made it his own with his particular lightness of touch, energy and humor. …With his acute understanding of how to transform a landscape through the insertion of his body, Minkkinen is one of the few contemporary photographers consistently using the pure body form in the making of self-portraits.”

In 2005, a retrospective of his work, Saga: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen, opened at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA. The exhibition has toured through Europe, China, and Canada. A catalogue of the same name, published by Chronicle Books, is available. The artist has had more than 30 solo museum exhibitions, including at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne; Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona; Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Nice; Fotografi ska Museet at Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Gallen-Kallela Museum, Helsinki. Minkkinen’s work is in the collection of many institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Arno Rafael Minkkinen was born in 1945 in Helsinki, Finland, and moved with his family to America in 1951. He received his MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. He is Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Docent at Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture in Helsinki.

For visuals or additional information, please contact Tracey Norman,  tracey@barryfriedmanltd.com

ARNO RAFAEL MINKKINEN:

SELF PORTRAITS FROM FOUR DECADES

AT BARRY FRIEDMAN LTD
November 15 - December 22, 2007

NEW YORK — Arno Rafael Minkkinen: Self-Portraits from Four Decades will be on view at Barry Friedman Ltd, November 15–December 22, 2007. The exhibition is a survey of the Finnish American photographer’s striking images from 1971 to a broad selection of new works never seen before. An opening reception will be held on Friday, November 16 at the gallery's new Chelsea location at 515 West 26th Street. The artist will be signing copies of his new book, Saga: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen during the opening reception.  The 168-page hardbound volume contains 128 tri-tone plates and essays by novelist Alan Lightman and critics A.D. Coleman and Arthur C. Danto.  Signed copies will be available from the gallery at $75.00.

The forty-two images in the exhibition, 35 of which are murals measuring approximately 3.5 by 5 feet, trace Minkkinen’s highly original form of self-portraiture from the 70s, 80s, 90s, to the present decade. Minkkinen’s unmanipulated, remarkable, black-and-white pictures of his own naked body interacting with the physical environment constitute a unique contribution to contemporary photography and have been exhibited in numerous museums around the world. Literally immersed in nature, his images show him buried in snowdrifts, submerged under rapids, hanging over precipices, and striding the still surface of pristine lakes. Minkkinen’s photographs envision the human body as a powerfully unfamiliar form, transformed by its encounters with the world.

The photographs in the exhibition are arranged in groupings that stress the visual and poetic connections between works from different periods of time. Strongly abstract, Minkkinen’s images often focus on his disembodied arms or legs. Images of hands or fingers juxtaposed with the landscape can appear either isolated or reaching out to a tree or mountain that in reality may be far in the distance.

At times, Minkkinen’s entire body becomes a sculptural entity, a human presence relating to stark expanses of nature and time. One fine example in the exhibition is Birth Places, 2000, a triptych measuring seven and a half feet across. Each panel of the triptych shows one-third of the photographer’s stretched-out body—bridging from feet to hands over three bodies of water—seemingly balanced only by the tips of his fingers and toes. The images were shot on three successive frames and printed as one piece: the first in Finland, the second in Massachusetts, and the third in Japan. Together the three images represent the birthplace of the photographer, his son, and his father. 

The thrust of the exhibition focuses on the last two years with Minkkinen in settings ranging from China to Mexico to Norway. These new works show a shift in his emphasis that began about a decade ago from photographs with a sense of timelessness to those with clear cultural and historical references. This work includes Minkkinen’s responses to urban life and architecture, both historical and modern, and to interiors and objects, as seen in the hands and feet on the whimsical, spiraling Nude Descending a Staircase, 2005. The images can be startling and surreal as much as lyrical or humorous, as in A Man and His Dog, 2007 in which the photographer’s shadow becomes his own canine companion.

The critic A.D. Coleman underscores the pleasure in encountering Minkkinen’s work: “Elegant, witty, inventive, and often stunningly beautiful, the pictures he creates in these circumstances stand first and foremost as acts of visual creativity ... these photographs form an astonishing account of one man’s primal engagement with the civilized and natural worlds, and with himself—both a physical odyssey and a psychological voyage of the human spirit.” Coleman’s essay appears in the large-format book, Saga: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen, published by Chronicle Books.

In 2005, a retrospective of his work opened at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA. The exhibition has toured through three European cities and China, and will continue to Italy and Canada. The artist has had more than 30 solo museum exhibitions, including at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne; Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona; Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Nice; Fotografiska Museet at Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Gallen-Kallela Museum, Helsinki. Minkkinen’s work is in the collection of many institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

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