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Robert Koch Gallery

July 7 - August 28, 2011

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http://www.kochgallery.com/

49 Geary Street, 5th Floor San Francisco, CA 94108

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Florence Henri, Composition, 1936

The Robert Koch Gallery is pleased to present its first exhibition of photographs by Los Angeles-based artist David DiMichele. DiMichele’s recent series Pseudodocumentation depicts imaginary art installations—mountains of broken glass, treacherous gashes cut into the floor, giant hoses snaking around columns—in monumental exhibition spaces. These pseudo-documents, which are actually photographs of small models in the artist’s studio, playfully engage scale and perception, while blurring the lines between fact and fiction, and questioning how we experience art. The Pseudodocumentation series addresses the role of photography in documenting temporary installations; most people experience these artworks through photographs rather than first-hand. DiMichele’s constructed spectacles are not parodies, but homage to the grandiose ideas of artists like Richard Serra, Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson. “The works deal with issues of abstraction, conventions of documenting art, and the ideology of the gallery space,” DiMichele says. His rich, dream-like images draw the viewer in, to imagine oneself in the exhibition hall. But the images are not altogether inviting. Dramatically shot from an omniscient perspective, the dwarfed figures are overwhelmed, suggesting that the idea of art is perhaps, unsettlingly, larger than life. David DiMichele studied art at the University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Santa Cruz; and California State University, Long Beach. In 2008 he was awarded the prestigious City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship. His solo projects have been exhibited in New York and Los Angeles, and he has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Kohler Arts Center, Wisconsin; the Laguna Art Museum; the Haggerty Art Museum, Milwaukee; Irvine Fine Art Center; and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, among others.

David DiMichele, Pseudodocumentation: Broken Glass, 2006