FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: HIRSCH PERLMAN at DONALD YOUNG GALLERY Reception for the artist on Friday, January 25th, 5:00-7:30PM

Donald Young Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by one of Chicago’s most acclaimed artists Hirsch Perlman. This exhibition features the premier of a new video projection entitled, Two More Affect Studies, 2001 together with over fifty new black and white photographs. In this untitled photographic series Perlman chronicles daily his three-year retreat into his L.A. studio where he creates a world of figures and giant heads out of packing materials and cardboard boxes. This “tragic-comic” series of photographs is situated within a narrow conceptual frame-work. As the series progresses the solitary cardboard figures turn into an animated cast of characters that Perlman poses as solitary, relaxing quiet-types or as innocuous, suspicious groups. The limited set of materials suggests as much about Perlman’s intentions as it does about the act of art making. It is clear that although Perlman never meant for his initial playful act of creating a figure to turn into an on-going and obsessive study into the process of “making art” he has come to full grips with his recent project and embraced it with the wit and self-reflexiveness for which he is well known.

Two More Affect Studies, 2001 accompanies the video Two Affect Studies, 2000-2001 (also on view) that debuted in Los Angeles last year. Both videos combine animated images with music by artists such as Johnny Cash or Samuel Barber and are “low-tech allegories of process” that are explorations of artistic practice or, as Perlman says, stories “about what artists do.” In Two Affect Studies a tape measure marks the spot where Perlman photographed a rubber band snapped into the air and then sets these images grooving to Thelonius Monk’s Functional. But these videos are also affectations in the sense that the effects produced by the changes in the images are quite emotive. The billowing rise of cigarette smoke set swaying to Barber’s Adagio for Strings compliments the music so perfectly that the burning out of the cigarette is as poetic as it is definitive.

Perlman has gained international acclaim for his art including a solo project show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, inclusion in the Venice Biennale and exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Renaissance Society, Chicago, and Kunsthalle, Vienna, Austria. Most recently Perlman’s new series of photographs was selected for the 2002 Whitney Biennale.

The reception is free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10:00 to 5:30 and Saturday, 11:00 to 5:30. If you would like more information, please contact Rebecca Epstein or Emily Letourneau at 312.455.0100.