Schroeder Romero is thrilled to announce the exhibition Summer Camp featuring James Bidgood, Brice Brown, Tom of Finland, Scott Hunt, Heather Johnson, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Cary Leibowitz/Candyass, Jean Lowe, Robert Mapplethorpe, Uzi Parnes, Carl Plansky, John Waters, and Ken Weaver representing over forty years of work about and within 'camp' culture and aesthetic-an aesthetic, according to Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp (1964), focused on artifice, frivolity, naïve middle-class pretentiousness, and 'shocking' excess.

Twisting the mundane, Jean Lowe, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt and Cary Leibowitz/Candyass all use banal everyday materials in their work. Lowe's papier-mâché "books" are both entertaining and seductive as well as intellectually provocative. Lanigan-Schmidt is a pioneer both in his use of reflective materials (plastic, Mylar, colored foils, chenille stems, staples and all manner of ephemera) and in his unique confluence of aesthetic, religious and secular thought. Leibowitz has produced a special takeaway edition of 396 coffee mugs printed with humorous and critical text of his invention.

Of course, one cannot have a show on "camp" without including specifically homosexual topics and imagery. Carl Plansky's musky, over the top painting of a nude male, Robert Mapplethorpe's polaroid of Peter Berlin, the most recognized gay icon of the 1970's, Tom of Finland's androerotic sketches of men with highly exaggerated sex traits, Brice Brown's life sized Harlequin costume with a silver cast mask of the artist's face and James Bidgood who was the first to take the pulp and glamour aesthetic of the 40s and 50s and apply it to male erotic fantasies and is a stylistic precursor to Pierre et Gilles and David LaChapelle.

Tackling issues of class, position, and artifice: Scott Hunt continues his obsession imposing high drama onto the utterly mundane with his meticulous charcoal drawing of a woman sunbathing at an amusement park. A carnal scene unfolds in Ken Weaver's obsessively drawn diorama of a busty queen. A different kind of romance is seen in Heather Johnson's appropriations of 19th century romance novels. By changing the white male figure embracing the lily-white female with that of a black man, the image changes from a lovers' embrace between a vixen and a scoundrel to a forbidden romance between owner and slave.

And with 'camp' so often concerned with performance and film we are thrilled to include Uzi Parnes's photographs of Jack Smith including "I Was a Male Yvonne De Carlo for the Lucky Landlord Underground" in 1982, showing a founding father of American performance art doing the Dance of Seven Veils. John Waters presents an eleven-part gelatin silver prints of film stills of "Baby Doll" showing the title character arising from her crib/bed. This is doubly campy as Waters is considered the king of camp and trash employing imagery of an equally campy film.

Also on view through June 30th:  Jean Hélion: Five Decades    

  

Click here to read Lance Esplund's review of the exhibition
which appeared on May 29 on Bloomberg. 

And click here to read David Cohen's review in Artcritical.

Jean Hélion, Nu Accoudé, 1949, Oil on canvas, 32 x 24 inches

Shredder is thrilled to announce Jean Hélion: Five Decades, a retrospective of the great French painter's fifty-plus-year career. Composed of over two dozen important paintings and works on paper, the exhibition looks at the full scope of the artist's work from his acclaimed abstractions of the 1930s to his evolving figuration and scenes through the 1980s.

Gallery hours:

Tuesday-Friday 10-6, Saturday 11-6

July-August: Closed on Saturdays

Please contact the gallery for more information.  (212) 630-0722 or info@srandsgallery.com