Lewis Baltz: Prototypes/Ronde De Nuit December 13, 2010

Beginning in 1965, but especially in the years between 1967 and 1971, photographer Lewis Baltz (born 1945 in Newport Beach, California) made a body of work concentrated on the dialectic between simple, regular geometric forms found in the postwar industrial landscape with the (far from simple) culture that generated such forms, or was conditioned by them. Stucco walls, parking lots, the sides of warehouse sheds or disused billboards baked in the steady Californian sunlight--these and other "hyper-banal" subjects were printed in blacks and whites of a breathtaking tonal evenness. Baltz called his works "Prototypes," by which he meant replicable social conventions as well as model structures of replicable manufacture. The fraught relation of neutral form to highly charged content plays itself out on the emphatically planar surface of these prints, objects that exude magnificence and severity simultaneously. Baltz has not had a solo exhibition in the United States since 1998, when works from that decade were shown at LA MoCA. He is best known for the 1974 book 'New Industrial Parks' near Irvine, California and generally associated with the New Topographics movement, christened after a 1975 photography exhibition of that title at the George Eastman House. 'New Industrial Parks' was first published, however, by Leo Castelli Gallery, and it is as part of that avant-garde art context that the impact of the Prototypes may best be recovered today. The present exhibition proposes to bring together approximately 40 of Baltz's photographs from the series with a sculpture by Sol LeWitt from the Art Institute collections and an oilstick drawing by Richard Serra.