Ricco/Maresca Gallery is pleased to announce Hans Neleman - Night Chicas, the opening photographic exhibition for the Fall Season 2003. The show opens September 4 and runs through October 11. It will be presented in conjunction with the publication and release of Hans Neleman Night Chicas, the artist’s new monograph from Graphis (2003). Night Chicas presents the artist’s journey through a unique social landscape, a series of brothels he visited in Guatemala over the last several years. This unlikely investigation of innate beauty literally battered and buffeted by poverty includes portraits of the female sex workers and their surroundings. The tension between the artist’s attempt for objective documentary observation or social commentary with his heightened aesthetic sensitivity is rendered in a rapturous palette of lush greens and blues and hot pinks and reds. Night Chicas finds a sad, disturbing beauty in atroubling setting. The book, Night Chicas, includes essays by Ana Castillo, A.D. Coleman and George Pitts among others. His earlier books include Moko, Maori Tattoo and Silence, both from Editions Stemmle. A Dutch-born-American Neleman is one of the most successful commercial photographers working today. He has exhibited internationally at the Biennale de Lyon (also in Lyon’s Musee Art Contemporain), the Holland Festival, Museum Kunst Palace in Dusseldorf and Mexico’s Nuevo Leon Center of Photography. He has been the recipient of many industry awards (Eisie, PDN Annual, Clio, American Photography Annuals, Art Director’s Club, etc.), and he has been profiled in a variety of magazines, most recently Photo District News. He maintains a studio in New York City and lives in Connecticut. This is his gallery debut with Ricco/Maresca.