Gallery White Room Tokyo


日本語

13 Jun to 25 Aug 08
Opening Reception with the artist: Friday 13 Jun 08, 19:00 - 21:30

Gallery White Room Tokyo is pleased to announce The Chance is Higher, a solo exhibition of photographer Ari Marcopoulos. The exhibition presents a new series of large-scale photocopied photographs.

Marcopoulos has captured urban life through an intimate lens: in the 1980s and ‘90s, his chronicling of New York subcultures that became an ongoing portrait of the city’s youth in hard-edged contrasts and a poetic style. He captured the emergence of resistance movements, the world of hip hop and skateboarding, and iconic artists, such as Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Hammons, in the same ease as the striking portraits of his own family and surroundings.

In The Chance is Higher, Marcopoulos’ photographs are treated through photocopying, altering their size and contrast, and exploring the ephemeral, evoking the memory of lost instants. In this new body of work Marcopoulos brings together portraits of his family, of skaters and graffiti artists who transform their urban surroundings, and of the city itself. He explores the strange beauty always inherent to loved ones, to youth, to their bodies, however scratched up or bruised. His work here further blurs the relationship between the photographer and his subjects. The images are personal and autobiographical, but do not strive to be candid or unconcerned with a particular moment.

THE CHANCE IS HIGHER is also a 72-page book featuring 40 black-and-white imagesby legendary Dutch photographer Ari Marcopoulos, all of which were printed on a Xerox machine. For years Marcopoulos has worked with Xeroxes as

			sketches for books, zines, and exhibitions. In love with the simple direct beauty of this low-fi technique, the artist turned to that medium to create this new body of work. Of a recent group show at Cohan & Leslie, the art critic Vince Aletti wrote in the New Yorker,“[Marcopoulos’s] huge black-and-white Xerox of a bruised elbow is a minimal high point.” Often Marcopoulos’ work is talked about in the context of his engagement with subcultures (skateboarding, art, music) but his work now immerses as a series of images of non-descript skies, anonymous television footage, and unpopulated landscapes, as well as the action of extreme sports, the stage, or the street, for which he is most known. Curator Kate Fowle in her text for the Flow exhibition states: “ For every photograph that has been presented, there are hundreds more that he has not yet found the right moment to introduce. Timing is not just in relation to taking the shot, but also to its public exposure” Artist's Profile Ari Marcopoulos is a photographer and filmmaker born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He moved to New York in 1979 and now resides in Northern California. His work has been exhibited in The Whitney Biennial at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kunsthalle, Bern, The Photographer’s Gallery in London, Porto Mercosul Biennial, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, and PS1/MOMA in New York, Kunsthaus Zurich. His films include Larry Wright featured in P.O.V, The American Documentary, and Key to the Riddle screened at MOMA, NYC in their New Documentaries series. Six monographs of his photographs have been published. Currently he is working on a documentary on his friend Craig Kelly and a solo exhibition at MC gallery in Los Angeles.