Gallery Luisotti

Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce its second collaboration with Royale Projects, Micrographia, the first joint exhibition of Catherine Wagner and Karen Lofgren, opening July 30th, 2022. In response to momentous developments in biological science in the late 20th century (e.g., the Human Genome Project or Dolly the sheep), Wagner photographs laboratories used for cellular, genetic, and genomic research, gleaning them for abstract compositions and larger cultural truths. Lofgren, on the other hand, turns her back on modern science, preferring to research life’s elemental drives and abounding threats through embodiment and rituals. Inspired by the odd similarity between the biomorphic sculptures and the cross-sections of cells in the photographs, this show stages dialogue between healing practices and the biological industry, individual techniques of the body and the large-scale management of disease."

Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce Gardens, its fifth exhibition with landscape photographer Simone Nieweg. Taken during long and observant walks through the German countryside in the 1990s and 2000s, these images revisit the vital stage of the artist’s career dedicated to agriculture, perhaps familiar to some visitors from earlier shows. With her uncompromising patience and careful attention to lighting and color, Nieweg focuses here on eccentrically shaped vegetables, degrading compost piles somehow teeming with life, and individual plots (in some cases, fallow, and in others, meticulously cared-for and planted in tidy rows). These motifs serve as meditations on small-scale subsistence agriculture.

Simone Nieweg (*1962 in Bielefeld, Germany) studied photography from 1984 to 1989 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, completing her education with Bernd Becher’s master class. After the war in Germany, there was a deficit of photography equipment, leading students to learn on 5 x 7 inch view cameras, the only inexpensive and widely available option at the time. Nieweg rigorously restricts herself to this technique still today. Reminiscent of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s famous typologies of dilapidated industrial structures, a monotonous grey sky is prominent in many shots. Nonetheless, Nieweg still finds striking shadows – casted, for example, by a makeshift fence or tree stump – and a variety of warming colors. The heavy turquoise of copper gives body to the fog’s blue tint, dried grass and straw echo the rust of nearby aging steel.