EXPLOSIVE PHOTOGRAPHY
New Exhibition Traces 25 Years of Growth of Photography as
Major Art Form

January 18, 2004 through April 25, 2004

Explosive Photography uses the work of seven major artists--Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Gregory Crewdson, Cindy Sherman, John Baldessari to explore the unprecedented scale, intensity and breakthroughs of photography over the past quarter century. The American and European artists represented in Explosive Photography, particularly those of the Dusseldorf School, have produced dynamic bodies of work that have meaningfully contributed to the burgeoning growth of photography as an art form, with the result that photographic works are now the core of major museum exhibitions and eagerly sought after by private collectors.

In a companion exhibition, we are presenting Photorealism: Paintings and Sculpture in our Second Floor Galleries. This exhibition, also original to the museum and organized by our own curatorial staff, demonstrates how a younger generation of American artists, beginning in the 1970s, expanded upon Pop Art's recognizable imagery in opposition to abstract or minimal art and traditional realism. These photorealists reinvented the realist idiom by creating paintings which revealed and often exaggerated the detailed, illusionistic character and convincing authority of the photograph as a document of objective truth. The artists represented in Photorealism include Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Duane Hansen, John De Andrea and Ralph Goings, among others.

IN THE CONTEMPORARY GALLERY
BYTE
Digital Technology Creates New Art Forms
January 18 through April 25

For the first time, the museum explores new art media based on digital technology. For Byte, an exhibition planned in conjunction with Explosive Photography, the contemporary gallery is transformed into an environment for these new art formats that are used by artists working in photo-derived techniques and who have carried this art form further as the technology of digital imaging has become more varied and sophisticated. The works in Byte, by such cutting-edge artists as Tony Oursler, Manfred Mohr, Michael Joaquin Grey, Michael Rees and Barbara Nessim emphasize various themes including artificial life, articulated light, animated movement and geometric expression.