Danziger Gallery is pleased to announce our representation of Oliver Wasow. An artist/photographer who engages with the medium in both a straightforward way and through technology, for more than 20 years his work has covered myriad subjects including science fact and fiction, dystopian landscapes, portraiture, politics, and UFOs.
Wasow’s work has been included in numerous national and international group shows, including such benchmark exhibitions as ‘Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,’ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ‘Image World,’ at the Whitney Museum of Art in NYC, and ‘The Photography of Invention,’ at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Recently the gallery successfully exhibited Wasow’s most recent portrait work at Untitled Houston and we will be showing three new images at Untitled Miami. These portraits are made using a combination of media, including painting, analog photography, digital photography, and generative AI.
In Wasow’s words:
The pictures begin as separate photographs either taken by me or drawn from my collection of found mid-century vernacular portraits. I combine images drawn from my collection of vernacular portraiture with photographs I take of friends in my studio, and then synthesize these sources with conventions drawn from portrait painting, particularly the aesthetics found throughout British social portraiture. The images then undergo a much longer editing and enhancement process in Photoshop before being output as archival inkjet prints on matte paper.
Throughout this process, I am interested in the unsettled, uncanny space between seemingly disparate things: painting and photography, the analog and the digital, high art and the vernacular. And perhaps the most fundamental tension in art itself: fact and fiction. Like all art, regardless of how it is made, these pictures carry the DNA of the images that preceded them. I hope they point toward an evolving mode of generative image-making, in which the histories and cultural associations embedded in existing images become raw material for new forms of visual expression. In this sense, creativity is not necessarily located in the device that produces an image, but in the larger network of choices, references, transformations, and cultural histories through which the image comes into being.”
Wasow’s many series can be seen on his website - https://www.oliverwasow.com/