03 Gallery is pleased to present new photographs by Collier Schorr. In her current body of work, intentionally untitled, Collier Schorr documents the movements and expressions of a group of young performers. For the past three years she has been following this group of wrestlers, noting each ritual, each motion, as they engaged in almost ascetic forms of self-discipline.
Weaving in-between up to 40 bodies at one time, these pictures were all taken in a matter minutes. Schorr found that a combination of light and shadow could erase locale, creating photographs that focus on intense and private expressionism. According to Massimiliano Gioni:
Schorr’s wrestlers are not far from Caravaggio’s picaresque characters: they are every day men suddenly transformed into divinities of sort. Discretely insinuating into their own private world, the artist has disclosed a hidden, almost supernatural power, projecting a new light onto her models. Just as baroque sculptures and Tenebrist paintings, Schorr’s photographs are popular, immediate, and yet somehow sensual, hallucinated. They freeze a moment of spiritual upheaval, and yet remain rooted in a world of real flesh and pain.
Schorr has always been interested in the appearance of male dominance, but for her, this project became less and less about gender. “I was the only woman in the room, but after a time, the bodies became neutral, more flesh than men. The practice room was a place to observe a kind of physical contact and exertion that actually brought about the appearance of spiritual transcendence. I wanted to examine bodies as forms outside of popular cultural motif’s, almost nude, constantly moving in both structured and unconscious ways.
While Schorr’s portraits, still lives and mis-en-scenes, can be linked to heroic painting, they are the moments that pre-date painting, flesh before it is rendered, almost alive, each gesture and expression a further discovery.
This year Collier Schorr's work was included in “Strangers”, Triennial of the International Center of Photography, New York, NY and “Attack! Art and War in Times of the Media”, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria, as well as featured in the PBS broadcast "Art:21 - Art in the 21st Century". In 2002 Schorr had a one-person exhibition at the Consorcio Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain with a catalogue, and her work was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial. In 2001 her work was seen in “American Tableaux”, at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, an in the "Uniforms, Order and Disorder" exhibition curated by Francesco Bonami at P.S. 1, New York.
Catalogue for this exhibition available.