Jack Pierson

Cheim & Read is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Jack Pierson. Born in 1960, in Plymouth, Massachusetts, this will be the artist's second presentation at the gallery. Pierson's art is concerned with the grand themes of life-love, pain, desire, memory and mortality. He works in a variety of mediums such as sculpture, language, photography, painting and installation. The following paragraph is excerpted from Carlo McCormick's catalog essay, "Jack Pierson: Pieces of an Exhibition," from his recent show at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany:

Associated at the outset of his career with a certain obvious grouping of photographers (including Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Mark Morrisroe and Philip-lorca diCorcia) who had befriended one another while living in Boston, it was easy for the institutions of cultural pigeon-holing to collapse the diversities of the "school" into a particular commonality of shared interests and experiences. According to the academic needs of criticism and the fetishist desires of the market, idiosyncratic portraiture was politicized according to the social and sexual marginality of its subjects, and the personal/autobiographical was given a dominant precedence over whatever other formal

considerations were evident. This is not to say that the
way in which Pierson's art was contextualized was entirely invalid, it is simply to suggest that when one tries to connect this so-called personal photography to his myriad expressions of the Nineties there are certainly far more pertinent aspects of his vision worth considering. Among the prevalent concerns still evident in Pierson's latest body of work one might consider his emphasis on process, subversion of photographic authority, exploration of visual cliché, regard for the formal aspects of composition and always in the forefront, potent convergence of eroticism and melancholia.

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Jack Pierson

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Jack Pierson

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