Folberg's Serpent's Chronicle Opens 3/11 at Flomenhaft Gallery

Neil Folberg

March 11 - April 24, 2010

Opening Reception:
March 11, 5-8pm

The Flomenhaft Gallery is proud to present Serpent's Chronicle: Thirty-five new and evocative photo works by Neil Folberg. He has set himself the difficult task of creating a body of work that brings a biblical narrative into the present. The images have a direct romantic energy that speaks to our primal senses. Serpent's Chronicle is an interpretive narrative of events in the Garden of Eden from the viewpoint of a cunning observer; it is the Serpent's visual and textual record from that archetypal time until now.

The exhibit opens with several impressive landscapes entitled "My Garden," "A Tree Finer than All Others," and "Eden, a Dream," which are presented as haunting silk constructions. This sequence is charged with feelings appropriate to the first murmurs of life. In this elusive world of the unknown and uncertain we share with Eve as "She Has Acquired Cunning," and the apprehension of exile and mortality in "Fear Surrounds Them, Shadows Darken."

This is uncharted territory, but the presentation of works on silk banners, multi-layer silk constructions and dynamic prints perfectly interact with the subject matter and encompass this very special world of alienation, isolation and germination. Vibrating with nervous excitement, the peopled landscape entitled "Fear & Wonder in the Darkening Gloom" has the enormous capacity to say it all.

Folberg uses dancers from the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company as his models who convey a tense rhythm that resonates with the evocative physical environment in pieces such as "Embryonic Man," "One at First," and "Your Ancestral Memory." Folberg concludes the saga with "You Weren't Meant to Remain Immortal."

Neil Folberg was born in San Francisco in 1950 and settled in Jerusalem in 1976. His desert landscapes along with a text he wrote were collected in a book by Abbeville Press in 1987, In a Desert Land. Aperture commissioned him to photograph synagogues of the world for a book, And I Shall Dwell Among Them, published in 1995. Celestial Nights, a series of landscapes set in the ancient ruins of the Middle East was published in 2002 and was the winner of the New York Book Show Prize. In 2005, following in the footsteps of the Impressionists, he created photos that were the basis of a book by Abbeville Press, Travels with Van Gogh and the Impressionists, that has had over 20 readings in museums and other venues in the United States, also in Giverny and in the Auberge Sur L'Oise in France. Folberg's photographs have been shown throughout the United States and abroad.

Flomenhaft Gallery

547 W. 27th Street, Suite 200. New York, New York 10001