Hans Breder at Mitchell Algus

Forty years ago, German-born Hans Breder immigrated to New York and became an assistant to sculptor George Rickey. Bringing with him European influences that included Constructivism and the experiments of Group Zero, Breder found a congenial milieu in New York among practitioners of Minimalism and Op art. In his works of the mid-'60s, Breder placed polished cubes on striped surfaces so that reflections would intersect at optically charged angles. In 1967, Rickey observed that Breder had succeeded in joining virtual and real images, eliminating the separation between the two. Breder began teaching at the University of Iowa in 1968; there he established a graduate program in intermedia and video art that was to become highly influential for a generation of younger artists. In 1970, he videotaped two women lying side by side, visible from the waist down, each holding a large square stainless-steel mirror; the mirror concealed their upper bodies and compounded their legs to a total of eight in the video's virtual (or reflected) world. Breder titled his photographs involving models and mirrors by location, identifying his collaborators in parentheses.

Many of the black-and-white prints in this survey were taken in 1973 near Oaxaca, on the beach at La Ventosa and in the ruins of a convent at Cuilapan. His model was Ana Mendieta, then his companion and an MFA candidate at Iowa. At the time their work was closely related; both were working photographically with the figure in a landscape. In Mexico, Breder used a square-format camera to produce images that would include the vintage black-and-white 7-by-7-inch prints made at La Ventosa included here. In the first two images, Mendieta holds the unframed mirror, her legs scissoring in the shallow water of the strand, one leg doubled in the mirror, the rest of her body hidden behind the reflective panel. Five color prints of the same shoot are horizontal in format and are dated 1973/2003, the second date indicating their transfer from slide to digital print. They show Mendieta's legs in the surf, doubled in the mirror. Cuilapan (1973) shows a similar pose as Mendieta reclines in a declivity in the convent's stone wall, bare legs thrust against the wall for balance.

Mendieta was not Breder's only model. In 1972, working in a wooded landscape near Iowa City, Breder had placed a mirror and Kathryn Van Tussenbroek in the shallow waters of Old Man's Creek (1972), producing the two square, large-format images of that title shown here, printed in gelatin silver emulsion on stretched linen. He revisited the site in 2004, with Jenifer Van De Pol but without a mirror, producing digital prints of images he refers to as "Body/Sculpture," in which a model is subsumed (like Daphne) in a wooded landscape. The show also featured several videos, two of them involving the projection and refilming of projects from the early 1970s. Breder's show at Algus coincided with a retrospective of Aria Mendieta's work at the Whitney Museum [see p. 138, this issue].

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group