NK
NICOLE KLAGSBRUN
532 West 24th Street
New York New York 10011
212.243.3335
nicoleklagsbrun.com
Barney
Kulok
BUILDING
September 13 — October 27, 2012
opening reception: September 13, 6–8pm
Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery is pleased to announce BUILDING, a solo exhibition of new work by Barney Kulok.
The artist’s first monograph, Building, will be published by Aperture (October 2012) and will include an essay
by architect Steven Holl and an afterword by filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn.
In the fall of 2011 Barney Kulok was granted access to observe and photograph the construction of the highly
anticipated Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park. The memorial park, designed in 1973 by Louis I. Kahn
and situated on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, was the last design the great modernist architect
completed before his death in 1974. Revived after almost forty years, the Park will finally open to the public
this coming October.
Untitled (Cobble Constellation), 2011
gelatin silver print
29 x 40 inches, 61 x 50.8 centimeters
Edition of 6 + 4APs
BUILDING
Photographs by Barney Kulok
Essay by Steven Holl
Afterword by Nathaniel Kahn
Published by Aperture
Publication Date: October 2012
Kulok, free to roam the site and use it as an outdoor studio, limited his project to the boundaries of the site
and the duration of its construction. Comprised largely of details of materials, objects, and their incidental
arrangements, Kulok’s photographs do not illustrate the architect’s design or describe the building process.
Instead, the photographs attend to the surface of the landscape and depict micro-events encountered during
the building of the monument: a constellation of cobblestones splayed out on an unfinished promenade,
a pebble resting precariously on the face of a 36-ton granite block, shards of light scattered across a workshop
drawing. The gelatin-silver prints, dense with information and nuanced in tone, are a testament to the value
of carefully articulated photographic seeing. In “Luminous Silence,” Steven Holl’s afterword in the artist’s
forthcoming monograph, the architect writes, “Kulok’s photography probes material, detail and circumstance of the construction site. Rather than a documentation of construction they form a poetic parallel.”
With this body of work the artist continues to address the near-documentary photographic and pictorial
concerns central to his practice. Here Kulok extends his exploration of detail, surface and fragment through
precise observation of the conditions and constraints of the construction site. Kulok’s approach to picture
making has in the past included video installations, light boxes and painted panels. This is the artist’s
third solo exhibition at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery. He has exhibited nationally and internationally in both
group and solo exhibitions, including Galerie Hussenot, Paris; Galerie Elisabeth Kaufmann, Zürich;
de Pury & Luxembourg, Zürich. Kulok (b. 1981) studied at Bard College and lives and works in New York.