We are extremely pleased to announce our representation of Malerie Marder and her first one-person show at the gallery. The exhibition will include approximately thirty photographs from her newest series, Anatomy, consisting of photographs of sex workers made during the past five years in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. The photographs will be installed salon-style, unframed in a range of sizes.
Marder’s subjects, depicted in lush jewel-like color and poses that subtly suggest masterworks from the history of painting, are simultaneously alluring and disturbing. The series title refers both to their raw physicality and also an encyclopedic tome, The Anatomy of Melancholy, written in the seventeenth century by the Oxford scholar Robert Burton, in part to stave off his own recurring bouts of depression.
The artist, who achieved early acclaim for erotically charged, ambiguously staged nude photographs of herself, family, and friends, decided to create a body of images solely of women that were, in her words, “part hallucinatory and part real, who intrinsically have a different relationship to their bodies.”
While traveling to The Netherlands for an exhibition of her work she became aware of the extremely diverse population of women who support themselves and their families through legal prostitution. Begun in 2008 and concluded earlier this year, the series includes images of women of all ages and ethnicities. During that time, and over the course of many transatlantic trips, she meditated on the separate realities behind and in front of her lens, noting:
Women’s bodies hide as much as they reveal. I thought of Aphrodite, working single mothers, odalisques, adulterers and enigmas … The thought of how they got there was deeply troubling. My camera was a passport into a gray, hidden world; the result of a liberal society where free will is a question mark.
The exhibition, Marder’s first solo show in New York since 2006, will be presented in conjunction with the publication of her newest book Anatomy (Twin Palms Publishers, 38 four-color plates, 88 pages, casebound).
Malerie Marder was born in Philadelphia in 1971 and lives and works in Los Angeles. She studied photography with Stephen Shore at Bard College and received her MFA in photography from Yale in 1998, achieving widespread recognition the following year after her participation in Another Girl, Another Planet, the landmark exhibition at Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren, organized by Gregory Crewdson and Jeanne Greenberg. Since then Marder’s photographs have been exhibited in group and solo shows in galleries and museums in the US, Europe, and Australia, and are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Seattle Art Museum; the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, and other institutions.
Marder’s work is currently on view in Everyday Epiphanies: Photography and Daily Life Since 1969 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (through December 2013).
Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects is located on the sixth floor of 535 West 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm.