Angelika Kollin: Turning Darkness into Light

M+B is pleased to present Rearview, an exhibition of new works by Matthew Brandt. This is the artist’s seventh solo show with the gallery. The exhibition opens November 23, 2024 and will run through January 4, 2025 with an opening reception on Saturday, November 23 from 6 to 9 pm. Matthew Brandt’s artistic practice bridges historical traditions with contemporary innovation, drawing inspiration from 19th-century American landscape photography while reviving time-honored techniques. Brandt’s unique approach integrates physical elements sourced directly from his subjects—lake water, tree-derived charcoal, and even unconventional materials like tar or cocaine—transforming his works into a dynamic interplay between art and nature. This process imbues his photography with a sense of organic unpredictability, allowing natural forces to shape the outcome and revealing the tension between human control and entropy. His work, whether focused on landscapes or human-made structures, highlights the poetic and tactile qualities of his materials, creating images where the subjects themselves actively contribute to their depiction. Brandt’s latest exhibition focuses on Los Angeles, capturing the city as a realm of stark contrasts, where timeless landscapes meet the relentless sprawl of freeways and smog-filled horizons. Employing a variation of the ancient fresco technique, he translates LA’s iconic freeway systems, palm trees, and saturated sunsets into layered compositions that are as rugged and weathered as the city itself. Each fresco, created with pigment and plaster is formed through a meticulous process. Layers of plaster are applied to a cement board, serving as a base for transferring the pigment from his photographic inkjet prints onto the wet surface. Each layer corresponds to a different image, with the process demanding careful application and adjustment. The material properties of the plaster result in cracks, breaks, and bends, echoing the entropy and impermanence of the city Brandt seeks to depict. Each piece in the series resonates with personal memory, recalling Brandt’s childhood spent gazing out of a car window at the city’s labyrinthine highways. Monumental in scale and spirit, these frescoes underscore the raw physicality of LA’s sprawling structures. The ancient medium of fresco, tied to architecture and endurance, serves as an apt vessel for his exploration of the city’s dual nature—its simultaneous permanence and decay. In Brandt’s hands, the freeways become symbols of both movement and stagnation, encapsulating the allure and despair that define Los Angeles. The weathered textures mimic the passage of time, with cracks and abrasions suggesting the city’s enduring struggle against nature’s forces. Rendered in soft, faded hues, the palm trees and sunsets evoke a poignant nostalgia, tethering the viewer to a shared memory of place. Brandt’s frescoes honor Los Angeles not merely as a physical environment but as an emotional and historical landscape, embedding the city’s complexity into every layer of plaster. His work is a hauntingly tactile tribute to LA, merging history, memory, and material into an enduring dialogue with the city he calls home. Matthew Brandt (b. 1982, Los Angeles, CA) received his BFA from Cooper Union and MFA from UCLA. The artist has been the subject of numerous institutional solo shows, including Light & Matter: The Art of Matthew Brandt at the Forest Lawn Museum, CA; Orphic Forest, Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art, Saint Petersburg, Russia; Rocks and Eagles at the Newark Museum, NJ, Sticky/Dusty/Wet at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus OH, which travelled to the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA. Recent museum group exhibitions include Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees, Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene at the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC (traveling); Ansel Adams in Our Time, de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, CA (traveling); New Territory: Landscape Photography Today at the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; The Magic Medium at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Second Chances at the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; What is a Photograph? at the International Center of Photography, New York, NY; and Land Marks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Brandt recently received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship Award in the discipline of Photography. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Art Gallery of South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Cincinnati Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Royal Danish Library, National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; Denver Art Museum; High Museum, Atlanta; Detroit Institute of Arts; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; and the Columbus Museum of Art, among others. Matthew Brandt lives and works in Los Angeles.

M+B is pleased to present Bright Sun Sours, an exhibition of new works by Matthew Porter. This is the artist’s seventh solo show with the gallery. The exhibition opens on November 23, 2024 and will run through January 4, 2025 with an opening reception at the gallery on Saturday, November 23 from 6 to 8 pm. Bright Sun Sours is a collection of eight photographs, printed on an adhesive and mounted directly to the wall. The individual pictures are like chapters in a book of essays, connected by their visual style and recurring themes of cinematic romanticism. The medium’s inherent flexibility, along with the incorporation of techniques such as appropriation, digital montage, studio models, and AI tools, allows the artist to add to and manipulate photographs made in the studio or field. The result is less a coherent narrative than a series of glimpses into possible storylines, tempered by the realities of our time, and an underlying mood of concern. A man stands under a tree wearing a thong, a gas can in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. Perhaps he’s consolidating his resources, dressed for life under a blistering sun and a warming climate. The image seems absurd at first glance, yet the reality it posits is a future that’s one-part possible reality, the other a ridiculous post-apocalyptic genre piece. A young woman, wearing a sailor costume, checks her phone before stepping into her car, while her mother loads something into the trunk. Her outfit matches the one worn by Dasha Nekrasova, who first became internet famous for fending off a right-wing commentator by weaponizing the bored affectation of an acerbic teenager. Later, during the pandemic, she became a leading voice in the downtown right-leaning Manhattan cultural scene made famous for its roster of edge-lord artists and writers. Black Moon, Louis Malle’s mostly tedious 1975 fantasy horror film, contains a scene where the protagonist, a young woman frayed from a series of violent and dialectical conflicts, encounters a Unicorn. The brief conversation that ensues in probably the sanest thing that happens in the movie, and it wraps up with the Unicorn wandering off and proclaiming “I won’t be back for another hundred and fifty-four years.” The rest of us are stuck at the chateau for the remainder of the movie. Death Valley is famous for its cracked, parched look—a thick crust of salt baking in the sun, like snow that never melts. But during a recent storm, unprecedented rains flooded the basin with a few inches of water, turning the scorched desert into a placid lake. At sunrise and sunset, the water is still enough to reflect the mountains that surround the valley, mirroring the colors of the desert sky. The rest of it can be summed up quickly: An inverted truck, a tractor without its trailer, looms at the crest of a hill. The image is intended to feel like an 80s movie poster—a possessed piece of machinery that stalks a quiet neighborhood. Crumbling ruins, Greek columns, a tiny model placed next to the real thing. A figure in silhouette stands on a balcony, shielding their eyes from the ozone haze, like an insect fixed in amber. The balcony juts from the upper floor of a skyscraper, the tower modeled on the angular modernism of late 20th century science fiction. Butterflies clustered together for warmth, their wings opening in the dappled, late afternoon sunlight of a California winter. Matthew Porter (b. 1975, State College, PA) received his BA from Bard College and his MFA from Bard-ICP. Recent solo exhibitions include This Is How It Ends, Danzinger Gallery, New York, NY; The Sheen, The Shine, Gallery Xippas, Geneva, Switzerland, and Skyline Vista, M+B, Los Angeles, CA. His work has also been included in the thematic exhibitions Autophoto at the Fondation Cartier, Paris; Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age at the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; Polaroids: The Disappearing at Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, After Photoshop at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Perspectives at the International Center of Photography Museum, New York. Porter's curatorial projects include Soft Target, organized with Phil Chang at M+B, Los Angeles; Seven Summits at Mount Tremper Arts, New York; and The Crystal Chain at Invisible Exports, New York. He is the co-editor of Blind Spot magazine Issue 45 and his writings and interviews have been featured in Triple Canopy, Blind Spot, Artforum and Canteen. The artist’s work is held in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; and the UBS Art Collection, New York, among others. Matthew Porter lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Dana Claxton (Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations) presents a solo exhibition of her large-scale, backlit, color transparency photography, which she terms “fireboxes.” Works from her Lasso and Headdress series, including a newly commissioned Headdress portrait, draw together contemporary Native subjects with regalia and items from the subject’s own cultures. The exhibition situates many of the objects depicted in the firebox images alongside objects from the BMA’s historic Native art collection. Together, they recognize cultural belongings as extensions of the people who made them, provoking a consideration of personal and institutional care. .

Josh Kline’s Climate Change is both an exhibition and a total work of art—an ambitious, immersive suite of science-fiction installations that imagines a future sculpted by ruinous climate crisis and the ordinary people destined to inhabit it. Begun in 2018 and produced in sections over the last five years, Kline’s eponymous project will be brought together for the first time for this exhibition, mobilizing sculpture, moving image work, photography, and ephemeral materials to completely transform the galleries of MOCA Grand Avenue. Climate Change is a visceral, charged work of 21st-century expanded cinema. In this vision, which could be called dystopian but in truth is terrifyingly near, a catastrophic sea-level rise has inundated the world’s coasts, unleashing a flood of hundreds of millions traumatized refugees. What happens in a world where the systems built to sustain and extend capitalist enterprise and global hegemony melt down their own foundations? Kline opens the door to such a future, inviting us to place ourselves within it and consider the rear view. Josh Kline: Climate Change is organized by Rebecca Lowery, Associate Curator, with Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo, Curatorial Assistant, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Widely acclaimed when it was published in 1987, Joel Sternfeld’s American Prospects has come to be regarded as one of the important early monuments of color photography. Sternfeld (American, b. 1944) was one of a small cohort of pioneers, including William Eggleston, Helen Levitt, and Stephen Shore, who in the 1960s and 1970s began exploring the potential of color photography as a fine art. Sternfeld developed a unique aesthetic for the use of color and a distinctive personal vision. Inspired by the photographers Walker Evans and Robert Frank, he embarked on an ambitious quest to document America, traversing the continent from 1978 to 1983 with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship. American Prospects is the result. Although Sternfeld saw deep fissures and contradictions in the country at the time, he also went on the road with a sense of optimism and discovery. His goal was not to document the failure of the American Dream, but to record what was great, vital, and regenerative about this nation. On one hand, Sternfeld’s imagery includes damaged landscapes and industry in decline. He delights in the curious, bizarre, and accidental in the everyday. Scenes of an elephant collapsed on the road or a firefighter buying a pumpkin while a fire rages in the background convey a sense of absurdity. And yet underlying the series is a vision of a beautiful land and the eternal cycle of the seasons, and of the variety and resiliency of the American people. Even today, Sternfeld is optimistic about the American prospect: “America has a tremendous capacity to right itself,” he noted recently. Sternfeld’s vision is as complicated as the nation. His images are deep, rich, and powerful specifically because they are complex and conflicted, at once both critical and affectionate. Guest curated by Robert Wolterstorff, Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects will mount more than forty large scale color prints, among them many of the most iconic images from the series, along with others that have never before been exhibited. It coincides with a new edition of American Prospects published by Steidl Press.

he work of the Philadelphia-born photographer and activist Harvey Finkle offers an intimate view of the hardships, sacrifices, and joys experienced by members of the diverse communities and political movements he has engaged with over the course of his career. In the Moment explores photography’s ability to interrogate social inequities, arouse empathy, and inspire political action. Consisting of photographs that Finkle has taken over the past half-decade, the show surveys the multiple and sophisticated ways in which his work forges meaningful connections with its audiences. Guest-curated by Antongiulio Sorgini, categorical groupings take us through Finkle's journey, chronicling the stories that shape our collective consciousness.

Native America: In Translation, curated by artist Wendy Red Star, assembles the wide-ranging work of nine Indigenous artists who offer contemporary perspectives on memory, identity, and the history of photography. “I was thinking about young Native artists and what would be inspirational and important for them as a road map,” said Red Star. This road map spans intergenerational image makers representing various Native nations and affiliations, and working in photography, installation, multimedia assemblage, and video. Among them, the late Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais investigates landscape and language through his evocative Polaroids. And the stylish self-portraits of Martine Gutierrez pose as fashion ads and question conceptions of ideal beauty. Together, their work confronts the historic, and often fraught relationship between photography and the representation of Native Americans, while also reimagining what it means to be a citizen in North America today.

Debuting at the High this fall and co-organized with the University of Arizona Center for Creative Photography and the Cleveland Museum of Art, this groundbreaking exhibition will feature a powerful body of work by Kelli Connell (American, born 1974) that reconsiders the complicated relationship between writer Charis Wilson and photographer Edward Weston from a contemporary queer and feminist perspective. Through a close examination of Wilson’s prose and Weston’s photographs, Connell enriches our understanding of the couple and weaves their stories together with her own artistic practice. Using their publications and archives as a guide, Connell and her former partner, Betsy Odom, traveled to locales where Wilson and Weston lived, made work, and spent time together. Along the way, Connell collaboratively made photographs of Odom that upend conventional notions of photographer and muse. She also photographed, in a raw and less idealized manner, the grand Western landscapes that Weston made iconic seventy-five years before. The exhibition will include more than forty of Connell’s recent large-format portrait and landscape photographs, along with dozens of Weston’s classic figure studies and landscapes made between 1934 and 1945, one of his most productive periods and the span of his relationship with Wilson. Four of Connell’s photographs in the exhibition are drawn from the High’s collection, exemplifying the museum’s recent commitment to growing its holdings of work by queer artists. Image: Kelli Connell (American, born 1974), April, 2008 © Kelli Connell

Beginning in the early 1980s, Fani-Kayode (1955–1989) developed a photographic practice that refused categorization, cutting across cultural codes, gender norms, and artistic traditions. Born into a prominent Nigerian family, Fani-Kayode emigrated to London in the 1960s, seeking political refuge during civil war. As an art student in the United States, he came to negotiate his outsider status along multiple axes, balancing his family heritage and immigration status alongside his own queer sexuality and exposure to underground subcultures. Channeling these multiple facets of his identity into photography, Fani-Kayode generated a remarkable body of images over the course of a career cut tragically short by his death in 1989. Organized in partnership with Autograph (London), Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion is the first North American survey of Fani-Kayode’s work and archives. This major exhibition brings together key series of color and black-and-white photographs along with archival prints and never-before-exhibited works from Fani-Kayode’s student years. Often created in collaboration with his partner Alex Hirst (1951–1992), Fani-Kayode’s photographs treat romantic love with spiritual reverence, translating the emotional intensity of same-sex, multiracial desire into richly evocative symbolic language. Today, his art remains a potent source of inspiration, presciently anticipating contemporary photographic approaches to identity, sexuality, and race.

Made in Germany? Art and Identity in a Global Nation takes an unprecedented look at German art since 1980. Featuring artists from different generations and diverse backgrounds, the exhibition complicates notions of German identity, especially the idea of ethnic and cultural homogeneity. In fact, the country is second only to the United States as a destination for immigrants from around the world. The exhibition offers a range of reflections on German national identity, which was shaped by labor migration following World War II, the unification of East and West Germany in 1990, and the influx of asylum seekers to the country since 2015. As the pointedly interrogative title suggests, Made in Germany? asks, rather than offers ready answers to, the question of who or what represents Germany today. Race, migration, labor, history, and memory are at the forefront of this inquiry into German identity. The works on view often focus attention not solely on racial, ethnic, or religious diversity, but on marginalized groups at the very edges of German society: recent refugees and asylum seekers as well as the aging, the economically disadvantaged, and the unhoused. The exhibition contributes to wide-ranging debates on diversity, nationalism, and social change in the face of migration and globalization; it frames discussions on racial violence, right-wing populism, and ethnically defined national identity—issues that are resonating not only in Germany but also in the United States today. The artists featured in the exhibition span several generations, and their works—often made and remade over an extended period—address German history and identity through film, video, photography, painting, printmaking, drawing, collage, and installation. Women, East Germans, long-term residents, recent citizens, and individuals with a “migration background” are represented among the 23 artists in the exhibition: Nevin Aladağ, Sibylle Bergemann, Cana Bilir-Meier, Marc Brandenburg, Kota Ezawa, Isa Genzken, Hans Haacke, Candida Höfer, Yngve Holen, Henrike Naumann, Pınar Öğrenci, Hans-Christian Schink, Cornelia Schleime, Ngozi Schommers, Gundula Schulze Eldowy, Katharina Sieverding, Hito Steyerl, Gabriele Stötzer, Sung Tieu, Rosemarie Trockel, Corinne Wasmuht, Ulrich Wüst, and Želimir Žilnik. Uniquely positioned as the only museum in North America devoted to the art of German-speaking Europe from the Middle Ages to the present day, the Busch-Reisinger Museum is one of three museums that comprise the Harvard Art Museums. Established at Harvard in 1903, the holdings continue to grow and expand to reflect the diversity of modern Germany. An accompanying print catalogue, the first of its kind published in English, includes contributions from curators and scholars who examine the circumstances that have shaped notions of identity in modern-day Germany as well as the diverse artists who are challenging ideas of what it means to be “German.” Image: 50 U Heinrich-Heine-Str., 2009 © Corinne Wasmuht

Just over twenty years ago, scientists introduced a term to denote a new geological epoch in which human activity has had a marked impact on the global climate: the Anthropocene. Since that time, the concept of the Anthropocene has been exposed to a wider public audience through expanding environmental studies and scholarship, increasing coverage in the popular press, widespread and fervent activism, and a variety of artistic responses. Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene is the first major exhibition to examine the Anthropocene through the lens of contemporary photography. Comprised of forty-five photo-based artists working in a variety of artistic methods from studios and sites across the globe, Second Nature explores the complexities of this proposed new age. Collectively, these artists offer compelling visual imagery necessary for picturing the Anthropocene: aerial views of beautiful but toxic sites, collages that incorporate archival photographs to counter colonial narratives, depictions of urbanism on an unimaginable scale, and imagined yet precarious futures. In doing so, they address urgent issues such as vanishing ice, rising waters, and increasing resource extraction, as well as the deeply rooted and painful legacies of colonialism, forced climate migration, and socio-environmental trauma. Since its emergence, the term “Anthropocene” has entered the common lexicon and has been adopted by disciplines outside of the sciences including philosophy, economics, sociology, geography, and anthropology, effectively linking the Anthropocene to nearly every aspect of post-industrial life. Organized around four thematic sections, “Reconfiguring Nature,” “Toxic Sublime,” “Inhumane Geographies,” and “Envisioning Tomorrow,” the exhibition proposes that the Anthropocene is not one singular narrative, but rather a diverse and complex web of relationships between and among humanity, industry, and ecology—the depths and effects of which are continually being discovered. Image: Gideon Mendel, Anchalee Koyama, Taweewattana District, Bangkok, Thailand, November 2011 from the series Drowning World: Submerged Portraits, 2011. Laser print on fabric, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Axis Gallery, New York & New Jersey. © Gideon Mendel.

Visitors will experience Smith’s reflective approach throughout the galleries. The works on display also expand beyond photography. The centerpiece, a multimedia commission that animates a series of photographs using projection, marks an entirely new direction in her practice. Also on view are recent collages and color photographs—all set to an ambient soundscape created by Smith’s son, Mingus Murray. The exhibition also includes nearly 30 photographs from Smith’s Africa series, taken during her travels to Senegal, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, and Egypt over the span of three decades. The series began in 1972 on Smith’s first trip to Africa, when she traveled to Dakar, Senegal, on a modeling assignment. The expansive series of photography documents everyday scenes from across the continent as they happened and shares a narrative of the places she visited from her perspective as a Black woman. As Smith has stated: “I was affected by the spirituality of the people. Somehow it seemed that our cultures are very different, but we are very much connected.”. Ming Smith: Wind Chime is part of the FotoFocus Biennial: backstories