COLOGNE.- Zander Galerie is presenting an exhibition of seminal early work by Lewis Baltz from the 1960s and 1970s, showcasing his landmark serial work The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, Califor­nia and selected photographs from The Prototype Works.

Lewis Baltz’s work describes landscapes created as epiphenomena of a post-industrial society. Born in 1945 in Newport Beach, California, he experienced the rapid development of the technology and leisure industries and the suburban expansion in the American West. His aesthetic is cleanly com­posed and detached. Focusing not on the particular or idiosyncratic but on generic forms of appearance, Baltz uses photography as a tool to reflect on socio-economic structures and critically expand the documentary discourse. His redefinition of landscape photography was instrumental in conceptual photography taking its place among other media in contemporary art.

Baltz’s earliest body of work are The Prototype Works, which he started in 1965 while still a student at the Art Institute in San Francisco. In this series, he looks for standardised forms in his everyday environment, such as walls and façades, signs, letterings and parking lots. The aesthetic and precision of the black and white gelatin silver prints show references to modernism and, continuing through the 1970s, incorporate influences from his contemporaries in painting and sculpture from minima­lism, conceptual art and land art, as for example John McLaughlin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha, and Robert Smithson. Very early on, the influential New York gallerist Leo Castelli recognised the radicality of Baltz’s approach and mounted his first one-person exhibition when the artist was just 26 years old.

While The Prototype Works reveal formal beauty and modernist references in mundane archi­tec­ture, The New Industrial Parks (1974) investigates the economies of the built environment. 51 black and white prints, installed in a grid, reorganize space. The photographs themselves take on the status of objects. Lewis Baltz was part of the groundbreaking exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975 at The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, which marked a paradigm shift in landscape photography. The exhibition included seminal work by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Adams, and Stephen Shore. Key impulses from this pivotal period have affected the trajectory of photography in contemporary art until today.

Lewis Baltz’s work has been exhibited in over 50 one-person exhibitions at venues including the Whitney Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tokyo Institute of Polytechnics, the Albertina, Vienna; and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid. His works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among many others. Baltz has received fellowships including National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship , and the United States-United Kingdom Bicentennial Fellowship. The archive of Lewis Baltz, documenting the artist’s entire career, was acquired by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, in 2013. He died in Paris in 2014.