MICHAEL HUEY
China Cupboard

January 18 - February 26, 2011

Reception for the artist: Thursday, February 17th 6 - 8pm

Newman Popiashvili Gallery is pleased to present China Cupboard, the second solo exhibition of Michael Huey at the gallery. The exhibition includes images from China Cupboard, a photography series developed over the past decade.

The artist concentrates on themes of loss, legacy, and inventory by reviving found historical photographs and family snapshots, and re-evaluating heirlooms as raw material. Now, extending the practice of working from pre-existing images, Huey goes on to investigate "photography-ready scenes" - landscape views of cupboards and vitrines. He documents personal histories through objects that are at once precious, banal, and private; vistas usually hidden from public view become exposed.

The series captures the readymade nature of extant arrangements of various everyday objects. The familiar takes on a ghost-like shimmering quality through an alteration of color values: Huey reverses, but stops short of assigning, the colors of his photographs.

The serial nature of his work conjures up the Bechers, continuously searching out and photographing water towers, and its visual mystery reminds one of Vera Lutter's camera obscura photographs and their monochrome radiance. Forswearing the austere, Huey composes his painterly images on the intangible border between the recognizable and the concealed.

Michael Huey is a Vienna-based American artist. His work was featured on the cover of Art in America's 2010 June/July issue along with a feature article by Ossian Ward.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Philipp Blom and Jennie Hirsh.

For further information or visuals, please contact the gallery.

Gallery Hours are 11am-6pm Tuesday through Saturday, by appointment.