Gottfried Salzmann: The Classiest Street Artist On West Broadway

By Lizzie Azran

The legacies of quintessential New York pop art and postmodern artists are preserved inside West Broadway art galleries. But amidst those galleries with Warhol prints and Haring originals, the Franklin Bowles Gallery diversifies the Soho art scene with Gottfried Salzmann’s works. Juxtaposing street-scrap collages with graceful watercolor, Salzmann captures the new essence of New York City.

Salzmann’s current exhibition, “Orchestrating the Accidental,” encapsulates Soho’s postmodern atmosphere by collaging his photography with fragments of flyers, battered vinyl signs, torn movie posters, tattered advertisements and other media he discovers on the streets of New York and San Francisco. By contrasting these pieces with watercolor paintings of skyscrapers and apartment buildings, Salzmann pictorializes both the high and low city culture, which complement each other aesthetically and metaphorically.

Fascinated with French Gothic cathedrals, Salzmann moved to Paris from his hometown of Salzburg, Austria. He currently photographs decaying street art and cityscapes in Manhattan and San Francisco.

The title of his exhibition, “Orchestrating the Accidental,” is named after his technique to photograph these “accidents of the moment,” a process which involves stumbling upon such random, tattered objects on the city streets.

Scratching, scraping, drying and wetting his paper have all been fixtures of Salzmann’s work since almost the beginning of adopting the watercolor medium. But his 40 years of work helped transform his canvases from watercolor paper to photography paper, thus channeling his innovation of incorporating printed photos and old city street fragments into his watercolor works.

Salzmann’s exhibit adopts postmodern aspects, such as industrial materials to depict consumer society, as well as remnants with provoking language, collages, collision and fragmentation.

“Orchestrating the Accidental” will be shown until the end of April. The gallery’s next exhibit will open on May 19, showing pseudo-expressionist painter LeRoy Neiman original drawings from the 60s.

Franklin Bowles Gallery, 431 West Broadway, between Prince and Spring St.

Photos by Julia Berke.