NEW YORK.-Painting Then For Now. Fragments of Tiepolo at the Ca' Dolfin by Svetlana Alpers, James Hyde and Barney Kulok is on view at David Krut Projects, New York. 526 West 26th Street #816. New York, NY 10001 through January 2008.

Painting Then For Now weaves together the contiguous disciplines of art history, painting and photography to consider the act of looking at painting as a creative practice. With nineteen photographic prints of sections of three paintings by Giambattista Tiepolo, Svetlana Alpers, James Hyde and Barney Kulok sustain a conversation about time, painting and photography.

In August 2006, the three collaborators spent six hours in front of three canvases from Tiepolo's Ca' Dolfin cycle (1726 - 1729), which depicts Roman battle scenes and triumphs, in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Alpers, Hyde and Kulok shot sections of the canvases with an 8 x 10" camera, which resulted in nine photographic negatives. These were scanned into a computer, dissected, discussed, then further sectioned to produce the final nineteen images. At two to three times the size of the actual canvases, these photographs forcefully bring us deep into Tiepolo's painting practice, revealing pigment, impasto, canvas weave and minutiae not available to the unprompted eye.

These photographs draw attention to the topicality of an eighteenth-century Venetian painter who addressed the enduring theme of war, presented to us in the modern context through photography. We are asked to take a long and thorough look at these slow and at times difficult works, which come into sight at various levels of legibility.

An 84 page publication featuring full color illustrations of the works will be released on the occasion of the exhibition.

Svetlana Alpers is Professor Emerita of the History of Art at the University of Califonia, Berkeley, a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Fine Arts at New York University, and author of The Art of Describing, Rembrandt’s Enterprise, The Making of Rubens, The Vexations of Art, and with Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence.

James Hyde is a painter who has exhibited extensively in the United States and Europe over the last twenty years. His work has been shown at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, San Diego Musem of Art, Albright Knox Gallery, Brooklyn Museum, Le Crédac in Paris and Le Quartier, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Quimper, France. He is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., in New York, Galerie les Filles du Calvaire in Paris, Elisabeth Kaufmann in Zurich and David Risley Gallery in London. Since 2003, photography has been an increasingly important part of his work.

Barney Kulok received his BA from Bard College in 2004 and is the recipient of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s 2002 Manhattan Community Arts Fund grant. Upcoming exhibitions include Galerie Hussenot, Paris, and Galerie Elisabeth Kaufmann, Zurich. He is represented by Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York.