FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Opening reception: Friday, January 15, 6-8 pm

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce the January 15 opening of Push Comes To Love, an exhibition made by Stephen Prina.

Too Strong

Two cups of coffee on an
Ordinary patio.
Would I like to share something sweet?
Sure, why not?
Some standard and not-so-standard
Conversation,
A moment of distraction,
And then, quite suddenly,
The entire world
Is reflected in your eyes,
Clearly
(BMI) © 1999

...The grey test card, the pure condition of colour photography, surely provides a zero condition for colour comparable to the zero condition for the object offered by plastic's extruded or moulded continuity. (It is also relevant here that the equivalent in video is 'white balance'.) As a zero condition of another kind, a hand-toned contact print of a grey card stood in for a [Gerhard] Richter in a project undertaken by Stephen Prina at the Max Hetzler Gallery in Cologne in 1991. Prina documented every show the gallery had held since its inception, substituting an alternately horizontally and vertically oriented photograph of a grey card for every exhibition for which the gallery did not have an installation shot. Richter's 1982 show of lavish abstract paintings was therefore represented by a vertical rectangle reminiscent of the monochrome paintings of a few years earlier. Richter's career is founded on relationships between painting and the look of the photographic, and it seems poetic, if not ironic, that a grey card that stands in for one of his paintings ends up referring to one he actually made....

Prina's exhibition consists of a series of fifteen sepia-toned diptychs of gelatin silver prints with acrylic and computer-cut vinyl entitled Push Comes To Love: DAAD Gallery, Berlin; a portfolio of five contact-printed gelatin silver prints entitled Push Comes To Love: Monument to the Peripheral; and five photo-screenprint-on-canvas with acrylic enamel paintings entitled, alternately, Push Comes To Love: Bright Blue, Ivory, Yellow, Golden Yellow and Vivid Rose.

Stephen Prina has been a member of The Red Krayola since 1994, appearing on The Red Krayola (1994), The Red Krayola 95, Amor and Language 95, and Hazel 96, as well as the soon-to-be-released Fingerpainting 99, all on Drag City. His first solo recording project, Push Comes To Love, is scheduled to be released early 1999 on Drag City. For further information, please contact the gallery at info@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.