The Nature of Curves: Photographs by Intae Kim, E.F. Kitchen, & Leonard Nimoy

The Nature of Curves: Photographs by Intae Kim, E.F. Kitchen, & Leonard Nimoy

Saturday, June 20 - Saturday, August 29, 1998

LOUIS STERN FINE ARTS will open the exhibition The Nature of Curves: Photographs by Intae Kim, E.F. Kitchen, & Leonard Nimoy on June 20, 1998.  In bringing together the work of these three photographers, the show explores the ways in which the contours of the natural world recur again and again, under very different circumstances.  As in a musical composition evolved from variations on a theme, the lines, shapes, and contrasts which make up these photographs form a kind of weave, an eb and flow, which expresses the dynamic harmony that the artists find in nature.

Intae Kim was born and educated in Seoul, South Korea.  Although he now resides in Los Angeles, he has recently spent time in Japan researching its artistic culture.  The photographs in the current show depict sand dunes which are suggestive of the human body.  These images are stunning displays of light and shadow, which create bold yet sensuous forms.  Kim has had solo exhibitions at the Seoul Gallery and Pinehill Gallery in Seoul, Korea, and at the Sabine Lee Gallery, Prism Gallery, Sierra Gallery, Modern Art Gallery, and Samil Gallery, all in Los Angeles.  He has been featured in group exhibitions at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Municipal Art Gallery, and other major venues.  Kim is represented in both private and public collections throughout Los Angeles.

E.F. Kitchen studied at the New York University School of the Arts and the Institute of Film and Television in New York.  She has had solo exhibitions at 72 Market Street, the Palos Verdes Art Center, Santa Monica Heritage Museum, The Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, and has been included in group shows across the country.  Her work can be found in many museum collections, including the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Art (Houston, Texas), the Bibliotèque Nationale (Paris, France), and others.  Kitchen has commented that in her Water Series photographs, she began “a study of color and motion, using water as my canvas.  I worked happily with the water surfaces, using the reflections and the incident light to explore a new visual world created by the incredible layers of my canvas which was no longer a flat plane.”

Leonard Nimoy has lived his creative life as an actor, director, writer and producer.  And all the while he has also been a photographer.  “The black and white image has been a fascination for me since my early teenage years, when I made my first prints using the family Bellows camera”.  He went on to study with Robert Heineken at UCLA, who, Nimoy says, “inspired me with his sense of photography as art.”  In the past Nimoy has been involved in landscape photography, as well as the informal portrait.  The Nudes included in the current exhibition are, for the most part, done in the studio.  The controlled studio environment allows Nimoy to put all the elements of the process - light, composition, gesture - toward the real subject matter of his work, “the relationship of yourself to the world.”  Nimoy has had his work featured at such venues as The Photographers’ Gallery in Palo Alto, the Photo Soho Exhibition in New York, Art on the 7th Floor in Washington, D.C., and the Halsted Gallery in Michigan.

The Nature of Curves: Photographs by Intae Kim, E.F. Kitchen, & Leonard Nimoy will be on view during gallery hours:  Tuesday through Friday, 10am-6pm and Saturday, 11am-5pm.  A reception for the artists will be held in conjunction with the other West Hollywood Gallery openings on Saturday, June 20, from 6pm to 9pm.