PaceWildenstein and Pace/MacGill announced an exhibition of recent photographs by RICHARD MISRACH on view in the Chelsea gallery located at 534 West 25th Street. The exhibition features nearly twenty large-scale pigment prints from the artist’s “Untitled” series (2007-2009). The photographs range in size from 4 x 6 feet to nearly 8 x 10 feet.
Considered a pioneer in the 1970s for his use of color photography, Richard Misrach once again pushes the medium’s boundaries. Misrach’s newest pictures – the majority of which are made entirely without film – mark a radical shift from his past work and herald a new era in photography’s history. With the advent of digital photography, the analog process and the color negative will eventually be rendered obsolete and with this body of work, Richard Misrach carefully examines the evocative beauty of the color negative. Using the positive capture – the equivalent of a negative from an analogue camera - from a state-of-the-art digital camera, Misrach creates ravishing images of landscapes and seascapes in a reversed color spectrum. True colors are inverted to become their photographic, “negative” opposites. The series continues Misrach’s portrait of the American landscape, yet transforms the natural world into an almost hallucinatory alternate reality: vast expanses of sea assume pink and red hues, and sand dunes in Nevada and rocky outcroppings along the Oregon coast glow like sculpted mountains of ice. Misrach’s subjects are simultaneously otherworldly and wholly familiar. When viewed together, the photographs present an unorthodox exploration of the natural environment as translated by the power of digital technology.
RICHARD MISRACH (b. 1949, Los Angeles, CA) received a BA in 1971 from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1973, 1977, 1984, 1992), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1979), the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for a Publication (1988), the Kulturpreis for Lifetime Achievement in Photography from the German Society of Photography (2002), and the Lucie Award for Achievement in Fine Art Photography (2008).
Richard Misrach’s photographs have been the subject of numerous exhibitions and can be found in over 50 museum collections worldwide, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the High Museum, Atlanta; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Monographs of his work include: Telegraph 3 A.M.: The Street People of Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley (1974); Desert Cantos (1987); Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West (1990); Violent Legacies: Three Cantos (1992); Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach (1996); The Sky Book (2000); Richard Misrach: Golden Gate (2001); Pictures of Paintings (2002); Chronologies (2005); and On the Beach (2007).
RICHARD MISRACH
January 15, 2010 — February 20, 2010
PaceWildenstein
534 West 25th Street
New York, NY
pacewildenstein.com
