Maria Antelman, Alien, 2023. Archival pigment print, 24 x 16 inches.
Maria Antelman, Dream Rock, 2024. Archival pigment print, 25 x 25 inches.
Maria Antelman, Germinator, 2024. Archival pigment print, 24 1/2 x 16 inches.
Maria Antelman, Hall of Mirrors, 2020. Archival pigment print, 39 x 19 inches.
Maria Antelman, Hand, Plow, 2024. Archival pigment print, 21 1/4 x 25 inches.
Maria Antelman, Immediate, Immediately, Afterward, 2023. Archival pigment print, 24 x 16 inches.
Maria Antelman, Me, Tree, 2024. Archival pigment print, 23 1/2 x 15 3/4 inches.
Maria Antelman, Memory Rock, 2021. Archival pigment print, 27 x 16 inches.
Maria Antelman, Mother, Milk, 2024. Archival pigment print, 20 3/4 x 27 1/2 inches.
Maria Antelman, Motherboard, 2022. Archival pigment print, 24 x 16 1/2 inches.
Maria Antelman, Natural Man, 2021. Archival pigment print, 23 x 36 inches.
Maria Antelman, Operator, 2024. Archival pigment print, 21 1/2 x 27 1/2 inches.
Maria Antelman, Self as a Plant, 2025. Archival pigment print, 22 1/4 x 14 1/4 inches.
Maria Antelman, Tree Talker, 2023. Archival pigment print, 23 x 19 inches.
Yancey Richardson is proud to present Conjurer, an exhibition by Greek artist Maria Antelman, her first with the gallery. Bringing together work made over the past five years, the exhibition highlights Antelman’s unique approach to photography in which her lyrical and experimental approach to imagery and montage is combined with a sculptural sensibility and attention to the photograph as an object in three dimensions. Through her merging and splicing together of images—those from the body and from nature—Antelman endeavors to re-mystify our understanding of the natural world. On Saturday, May 31, the gallery will host a conversation between Antelman, Jenny Calivas and independent curator Katerina Stathopoulou.
Over the past twenty-five years Antelman has worked across and at the intersection of several mediums, including sculpture, video and photography, to explore not only the rapid development of technology and the near total entanglement of it with our personal lives, but also how these same technologies reshape our experience of the world. Rather than see it as merely being a tool or appendage, Antelman understands technology as having the capacity to create a new reality around us which, when considered alongside the ever-increasing capacity of science to explain how nature functions, disrupts our ability to connect with and relate to the natural world in more spiritual, even magical, ways.
Conjurer features Antelman’s photographic works that show the intertwining of humankind and nature, though in ways that defy logical or rational explanation. Working predominantly with 35mm film, her works are often composites of multiple images, with fragments of the body—a limb, a nose, a pair of eyes or set of hands—set alongside or even interrupted by an image of a natural form, such as a tree trunk or a stone. Antelman constructs her works to communicate metaphoric meaning, first through the image and then the object as a whole. More than simply providing a container for the images, she treats the frame as a form in its own right and explores its relationship to the space of the image. Instead of functioning as a passive or neutral component, she instead uses the frame to dynamically shape what the images show. In some cases, the frame even provides a graphic quality as well, as their rounded and curved shapes evoke the organic forms found in nature.
Thinking of these juxtapositions as a kind of montage, Antelman is able to create novel and unexpected combinations, with some that reflect upon how we instrumentalize nature, while others show how we can still be reunited with it. Just as often, she merges these different worlds together into a single visual field, resulting in images that recall the bizarre, subconscious spaces of Surrealism or the photomontages of early modern photography. Though they remain beguiling for their novelty and invention, these works also consistently reveal moments of contemplative and serene beauty, moments which are philosophical in their construction yet poetic in tone.
Antelman both deconstructs the body and then reassembles it, not just as a way of imagining a deeper connection with nature, but also as a way of expressing how malleable the very idea of it has become. In place of a techno-utopianism, in which the steady advance of technology is uniformly celebrated, Antelman expresses an atavistic position instead, one which delights in the complexity of nature rather than seeking to explain or instrumentalize it. Her work reminds us that what is mysterious in the world often connects us to what is mystical in it as well.
Born 1971 in Athens, Greece, Maria Antelman received her MFA in New Genres from Columbia University and a BA in Art History from the Complutense University, Madrid. Her work has exhibited internationally, including at the Bemis Center of Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE; Pioneer Works, New York; Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki; Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas, Austin; Botanical Garden I&A Diomidos, Athens; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens; Benaki Museum, Athens; Centro Nacional de Arte Contemporaneo, Cerillos, Chile and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Antelman’s work was included in Companion Pieces: New Photography 2020 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has been the recipient of grants from the Onassis Foundation USA, as well as the National Museum of Contemporary Art and the J.F. Costopoulos Foundation, Athens. Antelman has taken part in artist residences including Silver Art Projects, Pioneer Works and the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York. Antelman currently lives and works in Athens.
