Ace Gallery Beverly Hills held a preview exhibition of the Samuel Bayer photography exhibit on Saturday night.
Doug Chrismas explained to me that the reason the public opening for the reception is listed as Sunday night was that the gallery invited the artist’s rolodex for the Saturday opening and the gallery’s rolodex for the Sunday opening.
Samuel Bayer has a degree in Fine Art form SVA in New York but changed the course of visual culture directing two of the most groundbreaking, distinct, influential music videos in the history of the genre: Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit (where he famously locked horns with Kurt Cobain over the direction, relenting to Cobain’s much darker, anarchic version) and Blind Melon’s No Rain (aka the Bumblebee video).
He subsequently directed commercials and movies at a rarified level of success, but the fine art demon gnawed in his belly all the while, finally landing him in the lap of Los Angeles fine art luxury – a solo show at Ace Beverly Hills.
The exhibit is of models photographed in triptych and enlarged – with shaved pudenda and navel at eye level. The consistency of each pose echoes in the precise consistency of each artwork. In the back room, one of the portraits hangs at normal, life-size (each portrait is available in editions of the life-size and larger than life size).
Using this life-sized portrait as a gauge to test the art minus the artist’s use of scale, I found the cool, forward eye contact of each nude model reminiscent of the veiled intimacy Richard Avedon rendered in his portraits, where the desire of the viewer to become more intimate with the subject underscores photography’s nature as an illusionary medium.
Having passed the scale test, then, the installation of these massive portraits is a riveting reinterpretation of the gaze… viewer being scrutinized as deeply as one might visually engorge one’s self of the flesh.