Nathan Lerner / Edmund Teske

Chicago-born Edmund Teske and Nathan Lerner began photographing in the streets of their native city in the early 1930s and each has a wonderful body of work rich in affectionate social documentation and rewarding in the formal qualities of design and technical execution. As the years went by, both artists largely abandoned classical representation to become major exponents of increasingly experimental approaches to this expanding medium. Here their paths diverged.

In his mature work Teske celebrated eastern philosophy, sexuality, history, poetry, and theatre. He created a highly distinctive oeuvre filled with elegant and intriguing metaphors. In many of his prints superimposed images are brought into theatrical existence through experimental techniques such as duotone solarization (which he pioneered).

Nathan Lerner took a somewhat different route. He also created a fascinating body of surreal and evocative imagery, but as a designer and inventor, his photographic output was heavily inspired by Moholy-Nagy and the New Bauhaus/Institute of Design. There he was an early and outstanding student and went on to teach and later direct (Walter Gropius appointed Lerner to head the school upon Moholy's untimely death). Lerner's pictures have a rigorous beauty - redolent equally of science and art.

These two artists, friends for life, were born two years apart and died within a year of one another (Teske, 1996 and Lerner, 1997). We are pleased to reunite them through their work in this exhibition at the Stephen Daiter Gallery! The show includes some of their early documentary work with emphasis on their later experimental photography.

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Experimental Friends: Nathan Lerner and Edmund Teske