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Richard Misrach
Pictures of Paintings
HC, 28 x 24 cm., in a slipcase
Blind Spot / Powerhouse 2003
Richard Misrach's Pictures of Paintings showcases photographs of select museum masterpieces by Thomas Eakins, Gericault, Anthony Van Dyck, Frederick Remington, William Adolphe Bourgereau, Martin Johnson Heade, Orazio Riminaldi, Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, among others. Working primarily in the art museums of the American West, along with The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, he photographed details of paintings not unlike those normally found in art historical texts, but to a different end. Misrach attempts to reexamine these details, not so much as a guide to the artist's style or technique, but as a means of understanding a lexicon of cultural values, among them race, gender, religion, and power. By collapsing the barriers between the traditional practice of documentation and the recent strategies of appropriation art, these photographs raise important questions regarding representation itself. Pictures of Paintings marks the first comprehensive compilation of this significant body of work.
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