Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Ugo Mulas: New York – The New Art Scene, the next exhibition in his gallery at 522 West 22nd Street. Curated by Hendel Teicher, the exhibition includes It features more than one hundred photographs taken in New York during the 1960s by Italian photographer Ugo Mulas (1928–1973). The exhibition’s title comes from Mulas’s 1967 book of the same name. The gelatin silver prints were made by Mulas himself almost fifty years ago, and most have never been exhibited in the United States.

Between 1964 and 1967, Mulas took three trips to New York, where he documented a remarkable moment in the history of modern art. Theis photographs in the exhibition curated by Hendel Teicher, conveys the excitement of that moment, focusing on Mulas’s photographs of six artists who left a deep impression on him: Marcel Duchamp, Barnett Newman, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. Though he spoke no English, Mulas quickly bonded with the artists. He grasped the significance of their work, and they allowed him to capture them in intimate photographs taken both in and out of the studio. Many of these images were subsequently published in Mulas’s now-canonical 1967 book New York: The New Art Scene.

Included in the exhibition are seven enlarged contact sheets, each revealing an artist in their studio in rows of sequential exposures. In one, Jasper Johns creates a drawing by pressing his oil-covered face against a sheet of paper pinned to the wall. In another, Barnett Newman orates in front of a large blank canvas. Mulas was adept at balancing journalistic detachment with a deep conceptual engagement, and his intellectual thrill at attending these historic moments is palpable in the photographs. As he wrote, “You cannot understand what the painter is doing without understanding what I, the photographer, have done; you also need to take into consideration that my viewpoint is not only optical but also, and above all, mental.”

All the photographs in the exhibition were printed by the artist and come from the estate of Ugo Mulas.

Ugo Mulas’s photographs have are in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His work as been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions including Kunsthalle Basel (1971, 1974), Musée Rath in Geneva (1984), Kunsthaus Zürich (1985), Fondazione Prada in Milan (1995), Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea and Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, Italy (1995), MAXXI in Rome (2007–08), and Fondation Henri Cartier Bresson in Paris (2016).