Michael DWECK
EXPOSITION “AMERICAN MERMAID” du 16 septembre au 25 octobre 2010
BIOGRAPHIE
Michael Dweck est né à New York. Ce sont ses parents qui lui donnent son premier appareil photo à l’âge de sept ans. Il étudie l’art au Pratt Institute de Brooklyn. Il fait carrière dans la publicité et devient l’un des meilleurs Directeurs Artistique recevant plus de 40 prix internationaux dont le lion d’or au festival international de Cannes. Deux de ses long métrages sont devenues des pièces intégrant la collection permanente du Musée d’Art Moderne de New York.
Puisant son inspiration dans sa propre adolescence passé sur les plages
de Long Island, Dweck excel dans la capture photographique de la surf culture
Américaine de Montauk un village de pêcheur endormi de 1970 devenu
un paradis pour les surfeurs de la côte est.
Le premier livre de Michael Dweck intitulé «The End: Montauk,
N.Y» reçut les meilleurs critiques internationales. L’ouvrage
est une chronique photographique hommage aux communautés de surf. «L’hommage
ultime à la vie ensoleillée du culte surf. Sensuel, séduisant
et incroyablement sexy» suivant le New York Times.
Les surfeurs
ont les cheveux longs, les jeunes femmes sont nues sur la plage et les planches
de surf sont empilées dans un coin d’herbe et de sable quand
elles ne sont pas arrimées au toit d’une camionnette.
Le monde photographique de Dweck évoque la mer, les vagues, les fleurs,
la douceur et la sensualité comme un éternel été...
Son second livre «American Mermaid» célèbre la vision
romantique d’un temps ou le monde faisait état d’innocence.
Sa sortie prévu pour la rentrée devrait faire l’objet
d’un booksigning.
Les photographies de Michael Dweck ont été publiées dans
Vanity Fair, le Vogue Français, Esquire et beaucoup d’autres
publications. De New York à Tokyo, en passant par Los Angeles ou Paris,
ses images poussent à l'emerveillement et à la rêverie.
MICHAEL DWECK/
Michael Dweck’s first major photographic work was published in volume
form as The End: Montauk, N.Y., in 2004, and was featured in several exhibitions
and art fairs that year. The work portrays the old fishing community of Montauk
and its surfing subculture. It is an evocation of a real-world paradise lost:
the paradise of summer, youth, and erotic possibility, and of community and
camaraderie in a perfect setting. Blending nostalgia, fantasy, and documentation
the photographs present a compelling portrait of a place in time and a way
of life at once fading and being reinvented.
In his follow-up to that success, in 2008, Dweck returned with his new project
Mermaids. The exhibition and accompanying volume feature a dazzling array
of photographs in which the photographer explores the theme of the female
nude submerged in water. The simple sexy elegance and allure of these images
is breathtaking. As Christopher Sweet writes in his introduction to the book:
“Whether diving in the blue refractions of a swimming pool or suspended
like a seraph in the cool, pellucid depths of a spring or emerging tentatively
onto a rocky shore, Michael Dweck’s mermaids are lovely and aloof and
bare of all raiment but for their beautiful manes and the elemental draperies
that surround them. Water, light, and lens converge to capture in modern guise
the elusive creature of myth.”
The exhibition and accompanying book celebrate the modern mermaid, as represented
by beautiful young women who appear very much at home in the water. Some of
Dweck’s subjects come from Aripeka, an island fishing village on the
gulf coast of Florida, and have spent much of their lives in and around the
water and are capable of holding their breaths underwater for as long as five
to six minutes. Photographed in Montauk and Amagansett, but mostly in the
vicinity of the Weeki Wachee River in Florida, Dweck’s new work, while
often abstracting the female body in a painterly swirl of watery refractions,
celebrates the physical charm of the female form and the transformational
effect that is achieved by the shedding of clothes and psychic baggage in
the meditative isolation of the underwater world.
In Dweck’s first body of work, he drew inspiration from his teenage
years spent by the beach on Long Island and captured the vanishing surf culture
of Montauk. The mermaids project also has its origins in Dweck’s years
on Long Island where he often went night fishing along the south shore and
off Montauk. Out on the water on moonlit nights he was intrigued by the shadowy
shapes of fish passing swiftly by just under the surface, and he imagined
those fleeting forms to be beautiful women—the ancient allure of the
mermaid.
Michael Dweck was born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island, and studied fine
arts at the Pratt Institute. From there, Dweck began his career in advertising
in which he went on to become a highly regarded Creative Director receiving
over 40 international awards, including the coveted Gold Lion at the Cannes
International Festival in France. Two of his long-form television pieces are
part of the permanent film collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Having taken up photography at an early age and used photography throughout
his career, he left advertising to focus on photography full time.
Dweck's photographs were first showcased at Sotheby’s, New York, in
2003, in their first solo exhibition for a living photographer, and have been
exhibited extensively at some of the world's most prestigious galleries such
as Maruani & Noirhomme in Belgium, Staley-Wise Gallery in New York, Modernism
is San Francisco, Eric Franck Fine Art in London, and the Blitz Gallery in
Tokyo. His work is also shown at the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles and
the Robert Morat Galerie in Hamburg. His current exhibition will feature the
work from Mermaids and The End and will tour galleries throughout the United
States, Europe, and Asia. Michael Dweck lives in New York City.
Solo Exhibitions
Sotheby's, New York, 2003
Theory, Tokyo, 2005
Blitz, Tokyo, 2006
Gallery Orchard, Nagoya, Tokyo, 2006
Maruani & Noirhomme Gallery, Knokke, 2008
Staley Wise Gallery, New York, 2008
Blitz, Tokyo, 2008
Keszler Gallery, Southampton, NY, 2008
Gallery Orchard, Nagoya, Tokyo, 2009
Modernism, San Francisco, 2010
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