“Troy Brauntuch: Early Work”

Unlike the most famous artists of the Pictures Generation—Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince—Troy Brauntuch was actually in the 1977 “Pictures” exhibition at Artist Space that lent the aesthetic its name. Braunatuch emerged in the late 1970s with works based on old newspaper and magazine photos made inscrutable through cropping and other devices. The resulting images seemed pregnant with meaning and yet totally opaque. This exhibition presents prime examples sourced, apparently, from archival photos of the Third Reich. Impenetrable at first, images like those of a Nazi Party rally, or of the studio of official Nazi artist Josef Thorak, are transformed here into time bombs of concealed horror set off by sustained viewing.