Anton Perich
Current Electric
June 12 – July 3, 2011 (extended to July 11)
Opening Sunday June 12, 6-9pm

Anton Perich, Andrea, machine painting , 54 × 60 inches © 2011 Courtesy the artist

Microscope Gallery is very pleased to announce CURRENT ELECTRIC, the debut of new electric paintings and video by artist, videomaker & photographer Anton Perich in Bushwick. The bold and haunting series of acrylic on canvas portraits, nudes and abstract paintings are the result of decades of fine-tuning and experimentation with Perich’s mechanized painting machine, an invention he built in 1977, and of which Andy Warhol declared in his diaries that he was jealous. A recent video “The New Girl”, dealing with the dependency on technology and showing our most intelligent machines reduced to primitive tools of survival, will also be on view. The dark, humorous piece features Misha Sedgwick on the floor with a laptop, cell phone, knife and little else.

Perich was born in Croatia. He moved to New York in 1970 – via late 60s Paris –and became a contributing photographer for Warhol’s INTERVIEW Magazine. He also began working with video, taping hundreds of hours of performances and directing loose and highly improvised narratives featuring both known performers and underground stars. Seizing the new and mostly unutilized opportunity offered by early cable access TV, Perich aired these radical videos to great controversy and eventual censorship. Where Perich’s early works were at the forefront of new technology and foresaw the switch from chemical processes to a digital world, his works today – made with the same tools – oppose with wit and sensuality the flat and sterile perfection of an over-processed, high resolution world. Perich’s work can perhaps be considered the link between Pop and Digital.

Perich’s work was exhibited this year at Copenhagen Photo Festival 2011, Max’s Kansas City at Steve Kasher Gallery in New York, and his photographs of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol and others appear in James Rasin documentary Beautiful Darling now screening across the country. His photographs, paintings and videos have been shown and published worldwide and are in the collections of the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Warhol Foundation, and Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in NY. Since 1978, Perich has published NIGHT Magazine, featuring painting, photography, poetry, fiction, essays, and interviews. And in 2007, The New York Academy of Sciences stated in a paper that Perich’s painting machine was possibly the world’s first ink jet printer.

Concurrent with the exhibition, Perich’s feature documentary Muhammad Ali: The Long-Lost Movie, screens at Anthology Film Archives on 7/1.

Still from The New Girl, a video by Anton Perich, starring Misha Sedgwick, col, sound, 2011

All images are courtesy of Anton Perich © 2011