MOCA Focus: Florian Maier-Aichen

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) continues its MOCA Focus series, a major initiative to showcase the work of emerging artists in Southern California, with an exhibition featuring Los Angeles-based artist Florian Maier-Aichen. MOCA Focus: Florian Maier-Aichen will be on view at MOCA Pacific Design Center June 28 through September 30, 2007. Organized by MOCA Assistant Curator Rebecca Morse, MOCA Focus: Florian Maier-Aichen focuses on the artist's photographic portrayal of the natural, industrial, and cultural landscape. He creates expansive, haunting vistas-landscapes devoid of humans, but visibly touched by mankind-bathed in an ethereal, almost otherworldly light.

Since its debut in 2005, the MOCA Focus series has featured challenging new works and diverse practices, including sculpture, installation, photography, painting, new media, and experimental video. In addition to being the first solo museum exhibition for the artist, each exhibition will be documented by the artist's first monographic catalogue, including images of the artist's works and a major scholarly essay by the exhibition curator. Artists Alexandra Grant and Matthew Monahan are also included in the 2007 MOCA Focus series.

"Since 1983, MOCA has consistently presented solo exhibitions of innovative and intriguing new work by emerging Los Angeles-based artists," said MOCA Director Jeremy Strick. "Continuing that tradition with these three installments of the MOCA Focus series, the Museum reaffirms its commitment to the city of Los Angeles and its dynamic and talented artistic community."

As a young artist in Germany in the late 1990s, Maier-Aichen rejected the photographic conventions established by Bernd and Hilla Becher and instead began utilizing photography as an elastic medium, individualizing each image in terms of content, approach, and processing method. Starting with a traditional large-format image captured on film, Maier-Aichen uses modern technology to digitally weave disparate images from separate sources into seamless photographs that are printed as either a C-print or albumen print.

The subject matter of Maier-Aichen's work is quite varied, examining plush geographies in one photograph and rigid industrialism in the next. For example, in Above June Lake (2005), Maier-Aichen focuses his lens on the rugged landscape of the High Sierras and its ski trails, mountain peaks, and bodies of water. The detailed contours of the land revealed in the oversized print (86 ½ x 73 inches) give the impression of a topographical map, in which the natural and man-made aspects of the landscape are pictured. In LADWP (The factory that works) (2007), by contrast, Maier-Aichen captures the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's industrial campus along the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Here, two striped smokestacks, raised like flags, evoke a sense of anxiety about the current state of industry and the global climate.

Florian Maier-Aichen was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1973 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles and Cologne, Germany. He received his master of fine arts degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. He also studied at the University of Essen, Germany, and the Hoegskolan for Fotografi och Film Gothenborg, Sweden. His work has appeared in solo exhibitions at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles (2006, 2004, and 2002); 303 Gallery in New York (2006); and Gallery Min Min in Tokyo, Japan (2005 and 2003). He has also been included in several important group exhibitions, including the 2006 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Photography 2005 at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London, England; and Snapshot: New Art From Los Angeles at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California. Maier-Aichen's work is in the collection of the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Accompanying the exhibition is a 64-page hardcover catalogue, featuring 34 full-color and black-andwhite images. Designed by Michael Worthington, the book features an essay by Rebecca Morse. MOCA Focus: Florian Maier-Aichen is available for $24.95 at all MOCA Store locations and is distributed through Distributed Art Publishers (DAP).

MOCA: http://www.dexigner.com/directory/detail/146.html

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