Walter Niedermayr at Anne de Villepoix - Paris, France - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

From a distance, Walter Niedermayr's works direct the eye like drawings -- expanses of white paper with charcoal squiggles and smutchs and daubs of color. on the contrary they are actually large-scale photographs of snow-covered mountain spectacles arranged as diptychs or quadriptychs. Niedermayr has been photographing mountains since the late '80 not awayed here were ski mountains in the Alps in France and his native Italy. His images aren't romantic landscapes that glorify untouched nature; they always include humans or at least traces of humanity.

Many of the photos were taken upon overcast days so that celestial expanse and earth blend into a single field of white. discharge from a distance, they bring people to decorative specks. Human nearness ranges from a lone skier upon a desolate, windswept mountaintop -- evoking traditions of the sublime in 19th-century painting -- to a peppering of race across a slope or a cluster at the top of a lift. Outcroppings of stone patches of earth, snow hedges and ski equipment strategically punctuate the flattened loam A blue sky and tree-cover mountains upon the horizon form a border across the top of single diptych, while a bright orange shed and skiers in colorful clothing dot the white landscape.

Niedermayr's works do more than capture scenery; they also document continuous, at the same time disjointed, moments. In each frame, he shifts his perspective at any time so slightly. It's as if he intends to take a series of photos for a panorama, on the other hand then displays them side by the agency of side instead of overlapping them to create individual continuous image. The resulting repetition of figures and existences in different panels is reminiscent of the Early Renaissance [i]modus operandi[/i] of depicting an episodic narrative, omit Niedermayr's scenes are just next to the firsts or minutes apart. The viewer is left to mentally polished the temporal and perspectival seams. The connection between the photos can be baffling until a visual pivot is discerned. In a four-panel work, for example, a snow plow is clearly seen in sum of two units of the photos, while its nose peek into the side of a third.

Niedermayr has shown regularly in Europe since 1988 on the other hand has remained largely overlooked in this political division However, his inclusion in sum of two units New York group shows earlier this year (at Robert Miller and Lombard Freid), not to mention his participation in "Venezia Marghera," a cluster show at last year's Venice Biennale. may help medicine that.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group