The High Museum of Art will premiere an exhibition of new work by Californiabased photographer Robert Weingarten in January 2010. Weingarten’s project consists of twenty large-scale digitally-created portraits of American icons, and represents a bold departure from traditional camera portraiture.
Dennis Hopper, 2007. Pigment print, 60 x 90 inches. Collection of the Artist ©Robert Weingarten
For “The Portrait Unbound,” Weingarten created sophisticated digital compositions of imagery alluding to specific achievements or moments within the subject’s life. The result is a unique and compelling collage of images that describes the subject through biographical rather than physical information. Organized by the High Museum, “The Portrait Unbound: Photographs by Robert Weingarten” will be on view from January 23 to April 4, 2010.
“Weingarten’s new project represents a bold foray into the world of digital photography, which will be a first for the High and for our visitors. The photographs are crafted with consummate skill using the very latest in digital technology.,” says Julian Cox, curator of photography at the High. “They have the scale and presence of paintings, but are made employing advanced digital techniques and a finely honed aesthetic. Ultimately, Weingarten’s photographs propose a radical new way of thinking about the portrait as a form of representation.”
The digital portraits in the exhibition include eminent Americans from the worlds of art, science, sports, politics and culture—among them Hank Aaron, Buzz Aldrin, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Chuck Close, Sandra Day O’Connor, Frank Gehry, Jane Goodall, Billy Graham, Dennis Hopper, Quincy Jones, Carl Lewis and Colin Powell. A short film detailing Weingarten’s artistic background and inventive methods will accompany the exhibition.
Robert Weingarten
Born in New York City in 1941, Robert Weingarten graduated from Baruch College in 1962 with a degree in finance. For the next thirty years he pursued a career in finance and served as CEO of several financial institutions. His first and abiding passion was photography, which he pursued over all those years as time would permit. At the age of 54 he decided to become fully committed to his photographic art. His photographs have been exhibited in more than 50 exhibitions worldwide, and are represented in numerous collections including the George Eastman House, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the High Museum of Art. Weingarten has also received numerous awards in photography, including the 1997 Licentiateship of the Royal Photographic Society (LRPS); the Associate of the Royal Photographic Society; the Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society (FRPS) and the Silver Medal for the Royal Photographic Society’s 143rd International Print Competition, Bath, England. Weingarten’s photographs are the subject of several monographs and his work has appeared in multiple publications. He currently lives in Malibu, California.
High Museum of Art
The High Museum of Art, founded in 1905 as the Atlanta Art Association, is the leading art museum in the Southeastern United States. With more than 11,000 works of art in its permanent collection, the High Museum of Art has an extensive anthology of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and decorative art; significant holdings of European paintings; a growing collection of African American art; and burgeoning collections of modern and contemporary art, photography and African art. The High is also dedicated to supporting and collecting works by Southern artists and is distinguished as the only major museum in North America to have a curatorial department specifically devoted to the field of folk and self-taught art. The High’s Media Arts department produces acclaimed annual film series and festivals of foreign, independent and classic cinema. In November 2005 the High opened three new buildings designed by architect Renzo Piano that more than doubled the Museum’s size, creating a vibrant “village for the arts” at the Woodruff Arts Center in midtown Atlanta. For more information about the High, please visit www.high.org.
The Woodruff Arts Center
The Woodruff Arts Center is ranked among the top four arts centers in the nation. The Woodruff is unique in that it combines four visual and performing arts divisions on one campus as one not-forprofit organization. Opened in 1968, the Woodruff Arts Center is home to the Alliance Theatre, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the High Museum of Art and Young Audiences. To learn more about the Woodruff Arts Center, please visit www.woodruffcenter.org
