Almost inevitably there are tensions in the picture, tensions between the outside world and the inside world. For me, a successful picture resolves these tensions without eliminating them.
Aaron Siskind
Our paths first crossed, unknown until many years later, at an intimate yet bustling wedding reception in a south Chicago apartment. This was probably 30 years ago, perhaps even the same year a new gallery, Torno Wright, opened at the end of my street to a fanfare of Eames, heralding new changes to come. Criss-crossing breezes of chance encounters, meandering spirits, hazy focus of time and space, of enthusiasm and knowledge sought, now united again in the same city.
That same serendipity, prompting impulse and discovery, guided welcome reward in the crucible of that great industrial city, still littered with the artefacts of the American mid-century. It was within this uneven yet fertile terrain, hidden slightly below surface, that Patrick’s intuitive talent—honed first as photographer then embellished as artist—would treasure the valuable neglected as passionate collector, and then as the inspirational dealer that I was to meet again, years later in New York City.
If asked to select one word to describe Patrick, I would resist and pick two. The first would be curiosity—a fundamental essential, to stimulate inquiry and rigour in all things, both great and small, of any era or region, type or surface. Even the most fleeting survey of this selection for sale is a celebration of innovation and of inspiration—an unerring eye for the unusually exceptional, or perhaps the exceptionally unusual. The chances are, that these are indeed discoveries that you have not yet realized that you needed to make.
Mentor, would be my second word. If artefacts and objects articulate visual, cultural and historic language, then the fluency of skillful mentorship—to guide, nurture, describe and explain—releases the eloquence of murmuring histories. In this capacity Patrick is that most earnest and sincere of excellent narrators. If ever I had friends, clients or colleagues visiting New York looking for unusual inspiration, there was always the certainty that Patrick’s gallery would offer them a glimpse of the hitherto unseen or the unusually seductive, always with the reassurance of the most fascinating story waiting to be told.
Mentorship and curiosity, when balanced in equal measure, reveal the precious alchemy of a curator. And it is the duty of the mature curator to discern and detect, to cultivate change, and from there to pioneer, and to share. Innovation is never static, and the Present is already the Future. Fresh dialogs evolve, energies to be nurtured, opportunities to be guided. Renewed and re-orientated, Patrick now faces fully forward—as benefactor, interlocutor and mentor to a new, inquisitive generation of talented creators, and the quest for discovery rejuvenates.
— Simon Andrews
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Aaron Siskind 1903–1991
Born in New York City, Aaron Siskind created a body of photographic work that deeply impacted the development of the American avant-garde. Siskind began as a documentary photographer but would become aligned with the Abstract Expressionist movement, and his introduction of abstraction into photography was both controversial and influential.
Siskind grew up on New York’s Lower East Side, graduating from City College of New York in 1926 and going on to teach high school English for multiple decades. He became interested in photography in the early 1930s, when he was gifted a camera as a wedding gift. Soon after, Siskind joined the Film and Photo League in New York, a Communist organization, becoming part of a group of documentary photographers who were dedicated to using image-making to advance social causes. As his practice progressed, however, Siskind’s photographs became more and more abstract; by 1950, he had left his previous style of documentary imagery behind in favor of images that focused on detail, texture, and composition instead of social context. As Andy Grundberg has written, “[Siskind’s] pictures have both the traditional descriptiveness of conventional photographs and a graphic, metaphoric emotional power.”
Siskind resigned as a high school teacher in 1949, in hopes of supporting himself as a full-time photographer. This proved challenging, and Siskind moved to Chicago at the behest of his friend Harry Callahan. There, Siskind taught photography at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, where he espoused his belief in a primarily graphic approach to the medium and served as head of his department from 1961 to 1971, during which time he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966. He joined the faculty of the Rhode Island School of Design in 1971, and taught there until retiring in 1976.
Siskind’s works have been exhibited widely, including in 38 exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, between 1941 and 2022. His photographs are included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among others.
Auction Results Aaron Siskind
