Victor Schrager

Born in Maryland, Victor Schrager grew up in New York City and earned a B.A. at Harvard in 1972 and an MFA at Florida State University in 1975. Schrager took his first job at the Light Gallery in New York, where his interest in photography deepened as he grew familiar with the many leading photographers on the gallery's roster, including Emmet Gowin, Harry Callahan, and Aaron Siskind. Since the late 1970s, Schrager has been photographing still lifes and collages, as well as other forms of combined imagery and text. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Award in 1980, and in 1993 a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been shown in numerous important group exhibitions, including the 1981 Whitney Biennial, and The Photography of Invention: American Pictures of the 1980s organized by the National Museum of American Art in 1989. He has been given one-person exhibitions in New York City at commercial galleries and at P.S. 1, and his work is held by many major museum collections.

Victor Schrager's photography explores how different modes of information, especially visual, literary, historical, and scientific, function to produce and communicate knowledge. In the works for which he is best known, he photographs still lifes composed of layered images and texts--among them reproductions of paintings, maps, magazine pictures, pages from books, and photographic prints--in an investigation of how context structures the meaning of all representations. Schrager is one of several artists of the 1980s

who made use of strategies such as appropriation and montage in works that examine the proliferation of information in contemporary culture. Schrager’s photographs are radiant and abstracted images where luminous planes of color interact with sharp descriptive edges. The tension between objective photographic description and the savoring of pure color and form that can transform everyday objects is inherent. In the tradition of classical still life painting, Schrager’s compositions are not content driven, but rather an increasingly pure and heroic presentation of simple subjects. The scale of the pictures and the soft focus of each image enables solid color fields to bounce off of and blend into one another, creating a palate of unexpected hues.