Your day in Montauk with Artist Michael Dweck and Hamptons Magazine Publisher Debra Halpert will be unforgettable. First, Michael will shoot your portrait on the way out to Montauk in a convertible! Because creative juices invariably amp up the appetite, you'll then sit down to eat with the pair at Michael’s favorite lunch spot.
You'll also become the proud owner of a signature mermaid surfboard Michael created.
Michael Dweck studied Fine Arts at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, but learned shortly thereafter that there was little money to be made in fine art, and instead pursued a career in advertising. He went on to become a Creative Director, receiving more than 40 international awards, including the Gold Lion at the Cannes International Festival in France. Two of his long-form television pieces are part of the permanent film collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. After a successful career at his own firm, he learned that money was overrated and there was no little fun to be had outside of art, and left advertising in 2002 to focus on photography, a lifelong passion.
His photographs were first showcased at Sotheby’s, New York, in 2003, in the auction house’s first solo exhibition for a living photographer. Dweck’s work has since become part of important international art collections and has been exhibited extensively throughout the world, with solo exhibitions at the Staley-Wise Gallery (New York), Modernism (San Francisco), Acte2 (Paris), Maruani & Noirhomme (Belgium), Robert Morat Galerie (Hamburg), the Blitz Gallery (Tokyo) and Izzy Gallery (Toronto). His work has also been shown at the Fahey/Klein Gallery (Los Angeles) and Eric Franck Fine Art (London).
Dweck was raised on Long Island in an era when “The Island” wasn’t a pejorative. He maintains the profound sense of place and community this setting instilled in him in his youth. As a result, his work reflects vivid geographic and social connections. His first major photographic work was published in 2004 in volume form as The End: Montauk, N.Y. (Abrams), and portrays the old fishing community of Montauk and it’s surfing subculture, at the very end of Long Island. Blending nostalgia, fantasy, and documentation, the photographs present a compelling portrait of a place in time and a way of life at once fading and being reinvented with each new season. In 2008, he returned with Mermaids (Ditch Plains Press), an international exhibition with an accompanying volume photographed in the waters of Montauk, Amagansett, and Florida’s Weeki Wachee River. Its origins traced back to moonlit fishing expeditions on Long Island where, seduced by the ancient allure of the mermaid, he imagined the shadowy shapes of passing fish to be the fleeting forms of beautiful women. Dweck’s images, while often abstracting the female body in a painterly swirl of watery refractions, celebrate the physical charm of the feminine form and the meditative isolation of the underwater world.
His third published work, Michael Dweck: Habana Libre (Damiani editore, October 2011) is a contemporary, personal exploration of a secretive social order within Cuba - the privileged creative class in a classless society. This visual narrative was a story suggested, never told, and its subtext is an allegory of seduction - a forbidden island, which embodies a provocative mix of danger, tension, authority and mystery, teeming with an intoxicating air of sensuality and a rhythmic, almost hypnotic undercurrent. It was well-regarded by critics and hailed by the art press as “a work so rich and expansive, only run-on sentences could do it justice.” Dweck is currently directing his first 90-minute feature film entitled Blunderbust, which explores and documents the culture of stock car drivers at the Riverhead Raceway in Riverhead, New York. It is scheduled for completion in August 2014.
Special thanks to Hamptons magazine, Douglas Elliman, Global Surf Industries, and New York Sunshine.
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