Barney Kulok


Barney Kulok is an American artist and photographer who lives and works in New York City.

Early life and education

Kulok was born in New York City. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Bard College in 2005.

Life and work

Following the New York debut of his collaborative video installation in Walls 'N' Things, a group exhibition of young artists curated by Clarissa Dalrymple at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in 2005, Kulok was identified as one of the ten "23-Year-old Masters" by The [Wall Street Journal]. Critic Vince Aletti wrote "Working in a black-and-white and color and in a wide range of scales, Kulok turns out extremely self-conscious pictures of mostly ordinary things: bouquets of fake flowers in a car's rear window, doorbells in a tenement foyer, a stained leatherette headrest, a wind-blown tree at night, a barn. But each of these images is tight, engaging an surprisingly elegant; the headrest is close to perfection."
In 2012 Aperture Foundation published Kulok's first monograph, Building: Louis I. Kahn at Roosevelt Island. Writing about Building for Frieze critic Chris Wiley observed, the black-and-white photographs "take into account the art historical precedents of Minimalism and Post-Minimalism, with a deftness that has had few parallels since the work of Lewis Baltz."
In 2013 Kulok was commissioned by Brian Sholis, then editor of Aperture magazine, to write Reflections on the Concrete Mirror, an essay about the relationship between photography and architecture. In 2014 Kulok co-edited, with artist Vik Muniz, the 20th Anniversary issue of Blind Spot Magazine. In 2016 Kulok founded Hunters Point Press in Long Island City, NY where he has published books by Baldwin Lee, B. Wurtz, Jeremy Sigler, Janice Guy, Jared Bark, and Svetlana Alpers.

Publications

  • Building: Louis I. Kahn at Roosevelt Island. New York City: Aperture, 2012.

Solo exhibitions

Building, Shinsegae Gallery, Seoul, Korea, 2013Building, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York, 201311.11.11, Galerie Hussenot, Paris, 2011In Visible Cities, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York, 2009

Collections

Kulok's work is held in the following permanent collections: