NEW YORK – Jen Bekman Gallery is pleased to present …Practice…, thirty seven photographs by Gregory Krum. …Practice… is Krum’s first solo exhibition in New York. On view through Sunday, June 27th, at Jen Bekman Gallery.
Titled after Gerhard Richter’s book The Daily Practice of Painting, …Practice… embraces Richter’s convictions about art and art making. In a series of carefully grouped photographs, Krum explores the ways in which truth is derived simply by virtue of belief.
Photographs of tombstones, images of dust and sand, and a pair of enigmatic photos of flowers taken with the artist’s Blackberry hang alongside one another. Together they depict the ruminations of investigations, both elemental and expansive, and the search for the tangible entities that define the beliefs through which we find meaning in life and art.
Five still-lifes, evocative of Dutch interiors, illustrate more literally how objects often become vessels of life’s meaning. Finally, twenty-four small photographs – pinned in a grid to the wall by the artist – depict devotional offerings in varying states of decay. The repetition of these sculptural objects mimics the daily rituals that become symbols of belief. The artist\’s daily compulsion to create is rooted in the same faith that inspires the spiritual to practice these rituals.
Of Krum’s work, gallery founder Jen Bekman notes: I cannot articulate what makes Greg’s work so magical for me. That formal qualities and deep intellect inform his practice doesn’t justify the way that it seems perfectly acceptable for me to allow his truths to serve as impostors for my own memories. But does that matter, really? Is memory about experience and belief, or an emotion?
Gregory Krum was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. He studied biology, sculpture and design at Portland State University and received an MA in studio art from New York University and the International Center for Photography. His work has appeared in Purple Magazine and has been exhibited at the Armory Show and Spencer Brownstone Gallery in New York and Soren Christiansen Gallery in New Orleans. He lives and works in Brooklyn and Hong Kong.
Image: Gregory Krum Untitled (Mantle), 2010 Jen Bekman Gallery
Jen Bekman Gallery
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New York, New York 10012
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