Go ‘Window’ Shopping for Popular Photographer’s Lesser-Known Work at This Heights Gallery
May. 31, 2023
FOR MORE THAN 40 years, Houston photographer Joe Baraban has found success as an in-demand master of commercial photography, shooting ads for Coca-Cola, IBM, and most of the Fortune 500 companies.
But many people are unaware of Baraban’s separate artistic body of work — an ongoing series featuring windows in decrepit, abandoned buildings that Baraban has encountered while traveling across Texas. These photos, including three belonging to the permanent photography collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, are on display in his humorously titled exhibit Window Dressings, opening this Saturday, June 3, at Nicole Longnecker Gallery.
Some of what Baraban captures, with very little digital manipulation after the initial shot, is quite funny. One photo features the blacked-out horizontal windows of the wooden door to an auto body shop painted in a rich cobalt blue, with three inner tubes for tires leaning against it, each looking a little worse for wear, the signage above it all announcing (albeit with one letter missing) “LUBRICATIO.”
'3554'
'3559'
Other windows are creepier and evoke more ominous scenarios. In “3559” (each photo in Window Dressingsis titled numerically), a white wire hanger dangles in between a pair of intricately patterned white lace curtains behind the glass of a gold-framed window set inside a purple brick wall. Despite this being a sunlit shot, the space behind those curtains is jet black, leaving whatever has happened or will happen inside to the imagination of the viewer.
In his artist statement for Window Dressings, Baraban says, “I can only wonder who the last person was to look out a particular window, and what they might have seen and thought before they left for good.” Each one of Baraban’s windows is imbued with the eye of an artist on holiday from the advertising world and will inspire the viewer to look for the poetry within the detritus they encounter.
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THIS SUMMER, THE Museum of Fine Arts, Houston invites visitors to travel back in time to Paris at the turn of the century to explore the cross-cultural connections between some of the most revered artists of the modern age. Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Pearlman Foundation, which opened May 21, features 38 paintings from the collection of Henry and Rose Pearlman, including works by Cézanne, Manet, Degas, Gaugin, and van Gogh. Works from the MFAH’s collection of impressionist, post-impressionist, and early modern paintings are included in the exhibit, complementing the Pearlmans’ interest in how these displaced European artists met and influenced each other in the years leading up to World War I.
Henry Perlman, the son of Russian immigrant parents — and who at age 24 founded the Eastern Cold Storage Insulation Corporation in New York — was especially interested in artists whose work was shaped by their travels and the experience of emigration. (Three painters in the show, Chaim Soutine, Jacques Lipchitz, and Amedeo Modigliani, were Jewish immigrants living in Paris.)
Many artists in the Pearlman collection, perhaps most famously Paul Gaugin and Vincent Van Gogh, crossed paths and formed friendships in Paris; the influence of one artist’s work on another is one of the fascinating throughlines viewers are invited to explore in the exhibit. Van Gogh’s relationship with Gaugin was notoriously volatile, but it also inspired his masterpiece “Tarascon Stagecoach,” which he painted to show Gaugin how the light in Southern France was leading him toward a more idiosyncratic style of painting.
Upcoming related programming includes a lecture on June 4 by Daniel Edelman, president of the Pearlman Foundation and grandson of collectors Henry and Rose Pearlman. Edelman, along with Dumas and Winnie Scheuer, great-granddaughter of the Pearlmans, will share stories about the family and the works on view.
Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Pearlman Foundation is on view through Sept. 17, 2023.
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