The Opening Gallery is pleased to present Norman Pastorek’s photographic oeuvre for the first time. Although he is best-known for his medical practice, Norman Pastorek started out as a photographer and has not put down his camera in 50 years. Not surprisingly, the surgeon known for his miraculous hands creates photographs that are enchanting, sharp, and breathtaking. Pastorek’s artworks are a vivid portal into his unique imagination and insightful perception. Now, his first retrospective, made up of twenty-two photographs is launched at the Opening Gallery in Tribeca. Pastorek’s five-decade career spans an extensive range of themes including portraits, city scenes, landscapes, flowers, always defining a deeper, almost cinematic, human experience both beyond and within the realistic and the everyday. The artist transforms the everyday into a panorama, often depicting scenes with an eye toward serenity and liveness, Pastorek’s work balances the permeable threshold between the humans and the world they inhabit.

The solo exhibition gives a broad overview of the years from the 1970s to the present, integrating one comprehensive look at a time that has been sparked by impressive ingenuity, modernization, and creativity. The art that is being created in New York today continues the spirit of vitality, energy, and innovation of the last fifty years, however, Pastorek’s photographs are offering us a unique view and anatomy of Manhattan’s inner operations evoking a sense of the poetic and the transcendent. The artist is seeking beauty in the form of a flower, a movement, an expression, a face and if we were to rephrase, Sir Charles Bell in his 1824 Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, we could note that Pastorek ‘values [the face] not as a mere fixed form of beauty, which may remain like a bust before us, but as the varying index of the mind.’ Aesthetically this series of works nods to the artist’s interest in a piercing unassumingness and simplicity depicting raw life in twenty-two scenes, from spontaneity through experience into confrontation of our humanness.

Through his lens, Pastorek composes a compendium of inspiring and intriguing insights from nature but also from one of the most fascinating world cities, designed for those gravely afflicted by a desire to know just a little bit more, it provides an eclectic collection of colorful and rare moments for the most intrepid explorers of the human condition.