"The Modern Eye: Photographs 1917-1939"

Exhibition: 9 April – 16 May 2015

Edwynn Houk Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of rare and important photographs by European and American artists between the World Wars.

The photographs in this exhibition by Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Alexander Rodchenko, Edward Weston, and 25 other artists, represent the technological, architectural, and psychological revolutions of the modern age. Now considered icons of their era, these works revealed a drastically new vision, with profound and lasting influence.

Artists were quick to respond to the effect of rising skyscrapers, faster cars and mechanized communications with a new freedom of experimentation. Modernist photographers used radically unconventional viewpoints to express the explosion of growth and energy of cities. They also employed many technological discoveries including photograms, solarizations, and photomontage. Introspection, dynamism, and invention characterized the Modernist Movement and defined a new way of seeing with the camera.

The Modern Eye, at Edwynn Houk Gallery, coincides with “Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909-1949” at the Museum of Modern Art and “Reimagining Modernism, 1900-1950” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Edwynn Houk Gallery was founded in Chicago in 1977 as one of the first galleries to specialize in vintage photography of the Modernist Movement (1917-1939).