Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by photographer Richard Learoyd. The Outside World is the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.
Working with a large and portable camera obscura of his own construction, Learoyd has journeyed outside of his London studio, into the art-historically rich English countryside, producing images that have long been latent in his imagination. Bringing a refined studio sensibility to the geology of the landscape, at times Learoyd introduces an element of implied narrative through subtle intervention and staged figures.
In Gordale Scar we are confronted with a vast rock wall, interrupted only at the upper right corner by a long view into a canyon; in For Cookham Read Holt we are presented, without explanation, the severed boughs of a magnolia tree suspended by white thread above a grassy lawn. Deftly woven through the exhibition are several in-studio still lifes and portraits that form a bridge with his continuing studio practice.
Made within the past year, the roughly fifteen photographs exhibited in The Outside World are large-format, black-and-white gelatin silver contact prints, made using the negative/positive process invented roughly 170 years ago by Englishman W. H. Fox Talbot. Among the largest contact prints ever made—up to 80 inches wide—Learoyd has consistently produced photographic images using unconventional methods. The finished prints have an object quality that defies accurate reproduction.
