FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Opening reception: Saturday, October 26, 6-8 pm

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce the second solo show of photographs by Los Angeles based artist Sharon Lockhart. The opening reception is on Saturday, October 26 from 6 to 8 p.m and the exhibition continues through December 7.

The new body of work exhibited consists of eight color photographs, (all Untitled, 1996), ranging in size and subject matter, from a minimal blizzard landscape to a restaurant interior where a waiter is absorbed in his task of pouring. All of the images in the show depict seemingly uneventful moments. In one photograph, a young woman stands in profile staring out the picture frame. A circular glass coffee table and carpet separate her from the camera and a tiled floor leads through a door behind her into another room. In the largest work, a man glances toward the floor in front of a full length glass window at twilight. Activity begins to take place in many subtle relationships created within and between photographs. Specific motifs of space, light and reflection are emphasized here and encourage a prolonged looking.

Sharon Lockhart scouts locations and casts people for her photographs but it is not the Hollywood film world that inspires her as much as the films of Andy Warhol and Chantal Akerman. Lockhart has no script or basis in narrative, rather, she works to set very specific parameters which bring together places, people, and objects that hover in a quiet and sometimes fleeting world between the motion picture and the motionless painting.

Sharon Lockhart's work is included in Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945, which originated at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and is currently on view at The Wexner Center in Ohio. Her work is being exhibited now in Playpen & Corpus Delirium at the Kunsthalle Zurich, and in persona which originated at the Renaissance Society in Chicago and is now at the Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland. Lockhart is also included in the group show, a/drift, at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, in Annadale-on-Hudson, New York, which is curated by Joshua Decter.

For further information, please contact the gallery at info@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.