Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Richard Misrach, one of the most influential photographers working today. Comprised of approximately fourteen large-scale photographs made over two years, the exhibition will be on view from January 8 to February 28, 2009.
Misrach’s new photographs mark a radical break with his work to date, in that they are his first images made without film. Working with a state-of-the-art digital camera yielding astonishing detail, Misrach has deftly switched positive and negative along the color spectrum. The images extend the artist’s longstanding interest in landscape and seascape imagery, yet they transform nature in extreme and heretofore technologically impossible ways.
Rocks vibrate with saturated tones, water’s surface shimmers as a vast enigmatic expanse, and surf takes on improbable deep red shades. Misrach’s panoramic “desert scrub” images become even more mysterious as colors are transformed into their negatives – branches become brushstrokes in a photographic “action painting.” The images are both foreign and familiar. Seen in total, the series suggests an apocalyptic vision of the natural world as we have known it.
Richard Misrach has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad. His work is represented in many permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Misrach is a recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. In 2008, he received the Lucie Award for Achievement in Fine Art Photography and in 2002, the Kulturpreis for Lifetime Achievement in Photography from the German Society of Photography. He lives in Berkeley, California.
