150 W 28th Street, 1101 New York, NY 10001
INFORMATION“The man-made world is constructed through human interaction, even the streets and sidewalks. But we take it for granted. This work is about not taking it for granted.” – Lewis Stein, Mousse, 2017
Lewis Stein (b. 1945; d. 2022) was a conceptually oriented artist active across various mediums. After studying at MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, from 1968 Stein lived and worked in New York City. This exhibition focuses on one of Stein’s most significant bodies of work: a 1984-85 photographic series that takes surveillance cameras as their subject. This series was initially exhibited at Postmasters Gallery in New York in 1985.
Stein turned to photography starting in the late 1970s. He was interested in extending his investigation of systems of control by documenting elements of his surroundings with a balance of criticality and humor. An apogee of this exploration is his Surveillance series, five of which are on view here. For these works Stein used high speed film to photograph surveillance cameras around New York City, embracing the grainy effect generated by this process. This confrontation and interface between one mechanized lens and another captures the ominous ubiquity of constant surveillance which has only proliferated and become ever more insidious in the present moment. Yet in making these cameras the quirky subjects of large scale photographs, taken frontally, blown up and blurry, the cameras are defanged. With the distance of time they evoke eccentric robots.
The exhibition also includes a readymade sculpture from 1968– a billy club that hangs from a nail.
The exhibition provides a rare opportunity to assess the systems that quietly condition our daily lives from a prescient and still timely commentator.
Written by Alex Bacon
Lewis Stein (b. 1945; d. 2022) was a complex, deliberately contradictory artist who embraced conceptual approaches to explore the larger systems that surround seemingly innocuous objects and images. Born and raised in New York, Stein briefly attended MIT before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley where he pursued a degree in fine art.
Recent presentations include 2024 and 2017 solo exhibitions at Maxwell Graham / Essex Street, and a 2020 solo exhibition at Vin Vin Gallery in Vienna, Austria. Stein’s work has been included in group exhibitions at MMK, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt in 2023 and MAMCO, Geneva in 2018. Early in his career Stein had solo exhibitions at Postmasters in 1985 and 1986; Artists Space, New York in 1979; Galerie Rolf Ricke, Cologne in 1970 and 1972; and Nicholas Wilder, Los Angeles in 1969.
Stein’s work is in the collections of MAMCO, Geneva, and Kunstmuseum, St Gallen, Switzerland, as well as Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany.
Organized in collaboration with the Lewis Stein Estate, this exhibition could not have been realized without the curatorial acumen of Gabe Melson.
