NEW YORK.- Present Tense: Photographs by JoAnn Verburg is an exhibition of the work of American photographer JoAnn Verburg (b. 1950), comprising approximately 60 works that survey her 25-year career. Verburg often works simultaneously on different series of photographs, with subjects ranging from portraits to composed and "found" still lifes to landscapes. They are frequently presented in diptychs and triptychs that demonstrate how the content of a picture can be enriched by using more than one photograph at a time. Her use of a large-format camera and her radiant color palette make her photographs pleasurable balancing acts that intimately describe the physicality of her subjects while deftly exploring time and space.
Present Tense: Photographs by JoAnn Verburg is organized by Susan Kismaric, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, and is on view from July 15 through November 5, 2007, in the Special Exhibitions Gallery on the third floor. After its showing at MoMA, it will travel to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis where it will be on view from January 13 to April 20, 2008.
Ms. Kismaric explains, "Verburg's work is lyrical and sensuous, and, most compellingly, it is grounded in an attention to human interaction--between the people in her pictures, and between her work and its audience--which keeps both artist and viewers perpetually approaching a threshold between searching and finding. Verburg follows her idiosyncratic impulses about what to photograph. She works in alternating series, and nurtures intuitions and ideas."
The exhibition is organized in a loosely chronological fashion, following Verburg's diverse investigation of different series over long periods of time--many of which are still in progress. The exhibition progresses through Verburg's various series, from life-size portraits and images of swimmers made during the 1980s, to still lifes in domestic settings from the 1990s, to a recent series of Italian olive groves.
Early Years and Influences - Verburg was born in 1950, in Summit, New Jersey, and she now lives and works in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Spoleto, Italy. She began taking photographs at age six, in part due to her father's encouragement. He worked as a chemist and then as an executive for Ansco (GAF), the American manufacturer of photographic papers. After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1972 with a Bachelor's degree in sociology, Verburg worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1972-74). During this period, she met many artists working in mediums other than photography--including Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg--and was inspired by the 1972 monograph and exhibition of photographer Diane Arbus that was organized by MoMA.
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