Anne Collier

Public Opening: September 10, 6 — 8 PM

 Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by the New York-based artist Anne Collier. This will be Collier’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. 

Over the past two decades Anne Collier has developed a complex body of work that considers our social and cultural relationships with images and with the medium of photography itself. Central to Collier’s ongoing project is a consideration of the emotional and psychological attachments we develop with images, and how these (auto)biographical narratives relate to photography’s inherent relationship with memory, melancholia and loss. 

At Anton Kern Gallery, Collier will present – for the first time in New York - works from her most recent series which has the collective title Filter (2019-). Collier’s Filter works expand upon her long-standing consideration of the analog photographic process and the mechanics at play in the production, construction and distribution of images. In the Filter works Collier starts with a greatly enlarged detail of an image of an emotionally distraught woman sourced from a vintage romance comic book. She then applies a Kodak Color Print Viewing Filter on top of these images, to create a series of ‘frames’ around the recurring or repeated images. The Kodak Color Print Viewing Filter was a pre-digital technical device designed to assist with color correction when making photographic prints in the darkroom. Collier’s resultant Filter works depict sequential images that suggest a liminal space somewhere between the photographic and the cinematic: between a still and a moving image. In foregrounding the photographic process in these works, and through her privileging of seriality, framing, cropping, and chromatic shifts Collier makes evident the manipulations inherent to the medium of photography itself. 

 Alongside the works from the Filter series Collier will also present new works that further explore her interest in the aesthetics, language, and modus operandi of the self-help industries, as well as recent works from her ongoing Woman Crying and Woman Crying (Comic) series. Writing about the Woman Crying (Comic) series in 2018 the art historian Tom McDonough observed: “With these works we are in the realm of the extreme close-up … At this level of engagement, we become engrossed by the details of the printing process itself, with its separation and overlay of cyan, magenta, and yellow dots and its inky black that sits on top of these colors, defining contours and the dense thickets of eyelashes and brows. We even glimpse the grain of the cheap paper on which these panels were printed, losing ourselves between the heightened emotional state depicted, its stylized representation, and the mechanical means by which it has been reproduced.” 

Shot in the studio using a large-format analog camera, Collier’s work is informed as much by technical and commercial photography as by the work of the artists associated with the ‘Pictures’ generation. Throughout her work Collier seeks to privilege the relationship between gender and image-making, whilst simultaneously maintaining a tension between the ’objective’, almost forensic-like depiction of her subjects and the often fraught and highly emotive nature of the images and objects that she re-presents. 

Writing on the occasion of Collier’s 2018 survey exhibition at Hannover’s Sprengel Museum, curator Stefan Gronert summarized Collier’s approach thus: “Collier demonstrates the staging function of photography by way of deliberate enactment: with this duplication and enhancement she reveals the power of the image and the cultural channeling of the eye.” 

For additional images and information, please contact: press@antonkerngallery.com. 

Anne Collier (b. 1970, Los Angeles) currently lives and works in New York. Collier’s work was the subject of a survey exhibition at the Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany, (2018), that traveled to Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2019). Other recent solo museum exhibitions include: FRAC Normandie, Rouen, France (2017); and a major survey organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2014), which traveled to the Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2014); the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2015), and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada (2016). 

Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; FRAC Normandie, Rouen, France; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Tate, London, among others.

Recent monographic publications include: Anne Collier – Photographic, Sprengel Museum Hannover and Fotomuseum, Winterthur (Hartmann Books, 2018);  Women With Cameras (Self-Portrait), (Karma Books, 2018, with an afterword by Lynne Tillman); and Women With Cameras (Anonymous), (Karma Books, 2017, with an afterword by Hilton Als).