Arthur Tress: Wheels on Waves: California Skate Parks

Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present the photography of Arthur Tress: Wheels on Waves--California Skate Parks.  The exhibition opens on Saturday, July 16, with a reception for the artist from 6-9 pm and continues through Saturday, September 3, 2005.

As a young man traveling the world after graduation from Bard College in the early 60’s, Arthur Tress initiated his professional career as a photographer marketing his ethnographic documentary images.  In all his subsequent and celebrated imagery, Tress has retained his documentarian’s gift for finding the extraordinary or the provocative moment inside a seemingly ordinary routine.  This deftly surreal eye, along with the artist’s early formal training as a painter, are showcased to mesmerizing effect in his evocative new studies of the skate park culture.

Skaters and their silhouettes carve elegant lines across the steeply sloped skate ramps.  Jagged graffiti patterns offer a textural counterpoint to the smooth arcs cut by the riders.  Sunlight floods the scuffed background surfaces and the skater’s shadow appears to be sailing through the ramp itself.  In all the photographs a strong sense of implied movement somehow co-exists with the transcendent esthetics of a dream.

The artist’s previously published photographic series include The Open Space in the Inner City (late 60’s), Dream Collector and Theatre of the Mind (70’s), Facing Up (late 70’s), Teapot Opera and Fish Tank Sonata (80’s), Hospital (late 80’s) and Requiem for a Paperweight (90’s).  Mr. Tress was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1972 and was the subject of a major retrospective at the renowned Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in 2001.

Mr. Tress’ work is included in numerous private collections and the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.  This is his first solo exhibition with the gallery.