Richard Learoyd
A Loathing of Clocks and Mirrors
Pace Gallery, New York
March 7 — April 26, 2025
Untitled Portrait, 2024
© Richard Learoyd, courtesy Pace Gallery
Pace presents new and recent work by photographer RICHARD LEAROYD. The exhibition includes portraits, still lifes, and landscapes produced between 2018 and 2025.
Deeply inspired by Dutch Golden Age painting, Learoyd’s latest works take viewers on a journey through intimate moments and intricate details, examining the relationship between subject, light, and space. The photographs on display explore a range of subjects, from hauntingly evocative portraits to still-life compositions that breathe life into the simplest of objects.
Learoyd’s unique photographic processes require an immense degree of technical precision, resulting in incredibly detailed, luminous prints with a tactile richness rarely seen in contemporary photography. Reflecting on the delicate interplay between light, shadow, and form, Learoyd’s work is imbued with a surreal, auratic presence that speaks to his enduring interest in the notion of collective photographic memory—the idea that a picture can be felt and understood on a subconscious level. The artist is renowned for his masterful use of light and his ability to capture the profound depth and stillness of the human experience.
“Light and space have always been central to my work," Richard Learoyd explains. "I want to capture more than just an image; I want to convey a sense of time, intimacy, and presence—things that transcend the immediate and evoke a more timeless feeling."
Highlights in the exhibition, carefully curated by Richard Learoyd, include a photograph of clasped hands, an ode to Alfred Stieglitz’s images of Georgia O’Keeffe’s hands from the first half of the 20th century. Also on view is the artist’s most recent body of work, a series of photographs created using a new and transformative process of multiple impression printing layered with hand coated gesso on canvas. These multi-dimensional works showcase the artist’s exploration of depth, texture, time, and the relationship between photography and materiality.
In recent years, Richard Learoyd has mounted solo exhibitions at the Fundación Mapfre Casa Garriga Nogués in Barcelona, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. His presentation at Pace in New York coincides with AIPAD’s 2025 Photography Show at the Park Avenue Armory, where the gallery organizes a special program with the artist.
RICHARD LEAROYD
Richard Learoyd (b. 1966, Lancashire, United Kingdom) uses a camera obscura to create large-scale portraits, still lifes, nudes, and landscape photographs in color and black-and-white. After using large-format cameras in the early 1990s as a student at the Glasgow School of Art—studying under landscape photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper—Richard Learoyd revisited the format around 2003 amidst the increasing shift toward digital photography. In 2005, he expanded his subject matter from the quiet landscape images that occupied his practice and began to explore still lifes and portraiture. The same year, he built a camera obscura and has since constructed subsequent versions, all structures with two room-like chambers connected by a bellows with an inset lens. Working with Ilfochrome paper as film, Richard Learoyd uses the camera obscura to render a single positive, full-color image without the use of a negative transparency, resulting in a unique image. Because of restrictions inherent to working with large cameras, limitations in depth of field and color impact his choices of photographic subjects.
Richard Learoyd received a BA from The Glasgow School of Art (GSA), United Kingdom, in 1988 and an MA from GSA in 1991. Important one-artist exhibitions of his work include Richard Learoyd: Unique Photographs, McKee Gallery, New York (2009); Richard Learoyd: Dark Mirror, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2015); Richard Learoyd: In the Studio, Getty Center (2016), which traveled to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (2017); Richard Learoyd, Fundación MAPFRE Casa Garriga Nogués Exhibition Hall, Barcelona (2019); and Richard Learoyd, Pace Gallery, Palm Beach, Florida (2021), among others. His work is held in numerous public collections worldwide including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate, London; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, among many others. Richard Learoyd lives and works in London.
PACE NEW YORK
508 West 25th Street, New York City
