Richard Misrach
Pace Gallery, Seoul
May 11 – Jun 15, 2024
Elephant Parable #22, 2020
© Richard Misrach, courtesy Pace Gallery
Pace presents an exhibition of work by photographer RICHARD MISRACH at its Seoul gallery. This presentation, which marks the artist’s first-ever solo show in Asia, spotlights photographs from his On the Beach, Shorebreak and Icarus Suite series along with his never-before-exhibited Elephant Parable body of work. Together, these mesmeric images—exhibited across two floors of Pace’s Seoul gallery—meditate on humans’ relationships to the natural world and one another.
A champion of color photography since the 1970s, Richard Misrach is known for his poignant, large-scale images that lean into social, political, and environmental issues of the present while also engaging with the history of photography. Subjects for his work have included desert fires, nuclear test sites, and animal burial pits in the American West; San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge; and the landscape of the US-Mexico border. In his radiant, contemplative works, Richard Misrach—who lives and works in Berkeley, California—often examines the destructive effects of human intervention in the natural world. Recent solo exhibitions by the artist include his 2022 presentation At the still point of the turning world, 2002–2022 at Pace Gallery in New York and Border Cantos, which opened at the San José Museum of Art in California in 2016 and later traveled to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. His works can be found the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra; and many other institutions around the world.
In his exhibition at Pace in Seoul, Richard Misrach presents works created between the early 1990s and 2019 on the gallery’s ground floor. Among these photographs is Outdoor Dining, Bonneville Salt Flats (1992), an image from the series Desert Canto XV: The Salt Flats depicting a surreal scene of dining tables and chairs situated, inexplicably, in the middle of a vast salt desert. Meanwhile, in Cloud, Roden Crater (2016), Misrach investigates plays of light and color in the sky at sunset. Photographs from the artist’s On the Beach series, comprising aerial images of figures in the sea, will also figure in the show. With these works—which Richard Misrach has captured from the same vantage point on a hotel balcony in Hawaii for some 20 years—he bears witness to individuals’ interactions with and relationship to the natural world. The first floor will also feature one work from the artist’s Icarus Suite, a series informed by Pieter Bruegel’s take on the Greek myth in Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (ca. 1560)—in these photographs, figures are overpowered and engulfed by towering, swelling ocean waves.
The second floor of the gallery spotlights Richard Misrach’s Elephant Parable body of work, which the artist produced during the COVID-19 pandemic and will be exhibited publicly for the first time in this presentation. Inspired by the fable of the blind men and the elephant, the varied works in this series are all derived from a single image of a bamboo forest in Hawaii to signify the unique perspectives and understandings we each bring to our experience of the world. For Richard Misrach, a negative image is not merely a technical tool but also a vehicle for exploring different aesthetics. Originally commissioned for the UCSF Nancy Friend Pritzker Psychiatric Building, these semi-abstract works explore perceptual nuance through color, composition, and scale.
RICHARD MISRACH (b. 1949, California) graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971 with a BA in Psychology. For over 50 years, Richard Misrach has photographed the dynamic landscape of the American West through an environmentally aware and politically astute lens. His visually seductive, large-scale color vistas powerfully document the devastating ecological effects of human intervention, industrial development, nuclear testing, and petrochemical pollution on the natural world. His best known and ongoing epic series, Desert Cantos, comprises 40 distinct but related groups of pictures that explore the complex conjunction between mankind and nature. Recent chapters capture the highly charged political climate following the 2016 US presidential election through photographs of spray-painted graffiti messages scrawled on abandoned buildings and remote rocky outcroppings in desolate areas of the Desert Southwest. Other bodies of work include Golden Gate, a careful study of times of day, weather, and light around San Francisco’s famed bridge, Destroy This Memory, a haunting document shot with a 4-megapixel pocket camera of graffiti found in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and Petrochemical America, an in-depth examination of petrochemical pollution along the Mississippi River in collaboration with Kate Orff.
PACE SEOUL
267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul