Larry Sultan: Homeland Exhibition @ Yancey Richardson, New York

Larry Sultan: Homeland

Yancey Richardson, New York

October 30 – December 20, 2025

Yancey Richardson presents Homeland, an exhibition featuring photographs from Larry Sultan’s series of the same name and the third exhibition of his work with the gallery. In his expansive photographs of Latino day laborers set against the backdrop of a suburban California landscape, Larry Sultan explores the liminal spaces between actions, the moments that exist as time passes. Though he borrows from the tradition of landscape painting, with its presumption of order through perspective, Sultan’s photographs emphasize the indeterminate and the ambiguous instead, revealing the sense of possibility that remains embedded in the act of waiting. 

Over the course of a two year period Sultan drove to lumber yards and hardware stores in the Bay Area and Simi Valley, California, where every day hundreds of men waited for temporary employment. Rather than hire them as laborers, Larry Sultan employed them as actors, working with them to choreograph their movements in landscape on the outskirts of suburbia, rehearsing and doing take after take, creating picture after picture. Just as they originally occupied the marginal and transitional zones within the landscape—those that remain overlooked and passed over—Larry Sultan cast these men in similar roles for Homeland, asking them to carefully pose and sit, to cast their gaze outward from the picture frame. Instead of depicting dynamic motion or dramatic action, Larry Sultan created meticulous tableaux that express the interrelated experiences of looking for, leaving and coming home. The notes of longing and melancholy that are present in these photographs are counterbalanced by one of emergent possibility, where the familiarity of the banal can give way to the unforeseen and unexpected.

It was in the act of exploring truths in storytelling, notions of identity and the influence of home that Sultan returned to time and again in his work, regardless of subject matter or setting. The lasting imprint of his childhood and the spaces that defined it—the empty fields behind strip malls and the borderlands of the LA river that ran behind his home in the San Fernando Valley—were areas that represented a small and diminishing stretch of refuge that existed just outside the boundaries of private property. By investigating these spaces in Homeland, Larry Sultan sought to complicate the stereotype of what suburbia was and can be with pictures suff used with anticipation and a quiet reverence for the ordinary.

LARRY SULTAN grew up in California’s San Fernando Valley, which became a source of inspiration for a number of his projects. His work blends documentary and staged photography to create images of the psychological as well as physical landscape of suburban family life. Sultan’s pioneering book and exhibition Pictures From Home (1992) was a decade long project that features his own mother and father as its primary subjects, exploring photography’s role in creating familial mythologies. Using this same suburban setting, his book, The Valley (2004) examined the adult film industry and the area’s middle-class tract homes that serve as pornographic film sets. Katherine Avenue (2010), the exhibition and book, explored Sultan’s three main series, Pictures From Home, The Valley, and Homeland alongside each other to further examine how Larry Sultan’s images negotiate between reality and fantasy, domesticity and desire, as the mundane qualities of the domestic surroundings become loaded cultural symbols.

Larry Sultan’s work has been exhibited and published widely and is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Modern, the National Gallery, London, the Stedelijk Museum, Musée de l’Elysée, Centre Pompidou, the National Gallery of Art, DC, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he was also recognized with the Bay Area Treasure Award in 2005. Larry Sultan served as a Distinguished Professor of Photography at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946, Larry Sultan passed away at his home in Greenbrae, California in 2009.

The exhibition will be on view in the project gallery. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, October 30 from 6–8PM.

YANCEY RICHARDSON

525 West 22nd Street, New York, NY

www.yanceyrichardson.com

David Alekhuogie @ Yancey Richardson Gallery - "highlifetime" Exhibition

David Alekhuogie: highlifetime

Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

September 2 – October 18, 2025

David Alekhuogie 

Mother Country Masque I, 2024

© David Alekhuogie, courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery

Yancey Richardson presents highlifetime, an exhibition of new work by David Alekhuogie, the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together work from his series A Reprise—including layered, wall-mounted works that combine photographs, collage and sculpture—David Alekhuogie continues his exploration of how narrative and authorship are embedded in Western presentations of African art while reflecting on how Black aesthetics are circulated, accessed, valued and interpreted today. Coinciding with the exhibition is the release of Alekhuogie’s new monograph titled A Reprise, published by Aperture. 

Reflecting his understanding of the relationship between modernity and colonialism, David Alekhuogie sees photography as a site where complex historical processes unfold and where the consequences of those processes continue to be seen. In his works, he critiques the underlying structures of western appropriation and classification that shape the collective understanding of images, often through his own acts of appropriation whereby source material is rephotographed, reimagined and remade.

Alekhuogie’s series A Reprise is the result of his engagement with the photographs Walker Evans made while on commission from the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1935 of African sculptures included in the exhibition African Negro Art. These photographs were revisited in Perfect Documents: Walker Evans and African Art, 1935, an exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2020, that reexamined the tightly cropped and formally inventive images Evans made.

Alekhuogie’s encounter with this exhibition and the images Evans made sixty-five years prior provided the basis for considering how Black aesthetics and cultural objects have been altered—if not altogether changed—by their exhibition in western institutions and subsequent documentation by photographers such as Evans. In highlifetime, Alekhuogie investigates these images of African sculpture by remixing them into vibrant and multilayered collages which attempt to reanimate historical objects after their original capture.

To make these works, David Alekhuogie transposes facsimiles of masterpieces of African art onto paper structures of his own making, before then rephotographing these image-sculptures, regularly using East and West African textiles as backdrops to create dynamic juxtapositions of space and form. The spatial interpretation of the original sculptures via Evans’ photographs is intensified by Alekhuogie’s layering of two or more framed photographs into new sculptural constructions. Through his own transmutation of these images, David Alekhuogie brings what he calls the “hand-me-down nature of Pan Africanism” to the foreground and questions through whose eyes and whose agency African Americans form their cultural narrative.

Accompanying new works from the A Reprise series are selections from Alekhuogie’s 2017 series Pull_Up, which is on view in the project gallery. Referencing the fashion trope of sagging pants that reveal successive layers of clothing, David Alekhuogie creates flattened and nearly abstract fields of layered color and contrasting textures. With the horizon line of the waist present yet concealed, Alekhuogie reimagines the body as a landscape, one where the coded representations of Black masculinity can be explored.

Through his critical evaluation of Black antiquity and formal interpretation of contemporary representations of Black masculinity, Alekhuogie’s images pose fundamental questions about our relationship to the past and how we continue to remake it in the present.

David Alekhuogie (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) is a photographer and artist based in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from Yale University in 2015 and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. His work will be featured in the Hammer Museum’s upcoming Made in LA 2025 biennial. His work was also included in Companion Pieces, the 2020 iteration of the Museum of Modern Art, New York’s biennial New Photography series and was presented in Men of Change: Power. Triumph. Truth (2021) at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles.

From 2024 to 2025, he was a fellow of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. His work has been exhibited at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angles, CA.

YANCEY RICHARDSON 

525 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

yanceyrichardson.com

Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC, Celebrating 30 Years Anniversary

Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Celebrating 30 Years

July 16 – August 15, 2025

Yancey Richardson celebrates its 30 year anniversary with a milestone exhibition bringing together works by all of the gallery’s artists and estates. Titled Celebrating 30 Years and co-curated by the artists themselves, the exhibition features works that speak across decades and through varying styles and technical approaches. The show highlights the breadth and diversity of the gallery’s roster and its steadfast commitment to supporting artists working in photography and lens-based media.

Celebrating three decades as a pioneering exhibition space, one where the public has witnessed and engaged with the continued evolution of photography and artistic expression more broadly, the gallery has invited its artists to select work by their peers with whom they share creative affinities. The work on display reveals the gallery’s deep engagement with photography as both a historical and contemporary medium, with work made using classic darkroom techniques alongside multidisciplinary and experimental processes.

Celebrating 30 Years includes work by Guanyu Xu selected by David Alekhuogie, David Alekhuogie selected by Mickalene Thomas, Mickalene Thomas selected by David Alekhuogie, Olivo Barbieri selected by Lynn Saville, Jared Bark selected by Rachel Perry, Omar Barquet selected by Mary Lum, Ori Gersht selected by Terry Evans, Terry Evans selected by Victoria Sambunaris, Mary Ellen Bartley selected by Ori Gersht, Lisa Kereszi selected by Sharon Core, Sharon Core selected by Hellen van Meene, Mitch Epstein selected by Lisa Kereszi, John Divola selected by Mitch Epstein, Tania Franco Klein selected by Laura Letinsky, Carolyn Drake selected by Tania Franco Klein, Sandi Haber Fifi eld selected by Bryan Graf, Bryan Graf selected by Yamamoto Masao, Jitka Hanzlová selected by Laura Letinsky, Anthony Hernandez selected by Olivo Barbieri, David Hilliard selected by Kahn & Selesnick, Laura Letinsky selected by Carolyn Drake, Matt Lipps selected by Guanyu Xu, Mary Lum selected by Omar Barquet, Esko Mannikko selected by Sharon Core, Andrew Moore selected by David Hilliard, Zanele Muholi selected by John Divola, Rachel Perry selected by Sandi Haber Fifi eld, Victoria Sambunaris selected by Anthony Hernandez, Lynn Saville selected by Andrew Moore, Mark Steinmetz selected by Victoria Sambunaris, Kahn & Selesnick selected by Jared Bark, Larry Sultan selected by Anthony Hernandez, Tseng Kwong Chi selected by Zanele Muholi, Hellen van Meene selected by Jitka Hanzlová, Yamamoto Masao selected by Mary Ellen Bartley, Pello Irazu selected by Jared Bark and Lynn Geesaman and Sebastião Salgado selected by Yancey Richardson.

Over the past thirty years and nearly 290 exhibitions, Yancey Richardson has helped foster the careers of some of the most critically-acclaimed artists working today. The gallery opened in 1995 at 560 Broadway in SoHo with an exhibition by Sebastião Salgado. In 2000 the gallery relocated to 535 West 22nd Street in Chelsea, then a burgeoning arts neighborhood. Over the next 13 years, the gallery presented historically significant exhibitions with artists such as Lewis Baltz, William Eggleston and August Sander, along with exhibitions by artists such as Mitch Epstein, Zanele Muholi and Mickalene Thomas, who have been with the gallery ever since. In 2013 the gallery moved to 525 West 22nd Street, where it remains to this day. Since moving, the gallery has continued to grow and welcome new artists and estates to its roster, such as David Alekhougie, Omar Barquet, John Divola, Anthony Hernandez, Tania Franco Klein, Larry Sultan and Tseng Kwong Chi.

In addition to maintaining long-term representation of a wide-ranging and international group of artists, such as Olivo Barbieri, Ori Gersht, Jitka Hanzlová, Sebastião Salgado, Hellen van Meene and Yamamoto Masao, the gallery has also mounted New York debut exhibitions for many artists who have gone on to achieve critical acclaim, such as David Alekhuogie, Carolyn Drake, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Guanyu Xu. Understanding photography as always changing and in flux, the gallery has consistently welcomed artists to its roster who engage with the medium in an expanded way, as both a technical process and a historically-informed mode of perception.

Alongside its support of emerging, mid-career and historically significant artists through exhibitions, the gallery has consistently supported the publication of monographs and photobooks as an essential expression of photography. Now representing over 40 artists and estates, Yancey Richardson continues to work tirelessly alongside museums and cultural institutions around the world to ensure that their artists reach the widest possible audience and that their achievements are promoted and their legacies safeguarded.

Yancey Richardson stated, “Since the day we opened our doors in 1995, the gallery has remained committed to supporting and embracing photography across the widest possible spectrum, from modern masters to new and contemporary expressions. Though both the medium itself and society’s understanding of it has changed dramatically over the past 30 years, I have endeavored to keep the gallery as a space where those changes—where history itself—can be seen, felt and interacted with. To the extent that this has been achieved is due in no small part to the countless individuals who have worked with me over the years. Above all else, I wish to thank the artists who have entrusted us with their legacies and whose work continues to challenge us to see and think in different ways, all while offering a constant reminder of the power of art to help us understand the times in which we live.”

YANCEY RICHARDSON 

525 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

yanceyrichardson.com

Laura Letinsky and John Paul Morabito @ Yancey Richardson, New York - "orchidsgladiolascowsdaffodilscandywrappersyelloworange-bloodredroses&shit" Exhibition

Laura Letinsky and John Paul Morabito

orchidsgladiolascowsdaffodilscandywrappersyelloworange-bloodredroses&shit

Yancey Richardson, New York

February 27 – April 12, 2025

Laura Letinsky & John Paul Morabito 

indiapilehamletmemajamina, 2015 

Cotton and wool, 52 x 41 inches

© Laura Letinsky & John Paul Morabito

Courtesy Yancey Richardson

Yancey Richardson presents 

orchidsgladiolascowsdaffodilscandywrappersyelloworange-bloodredroses&shit, an exhibition of cotton and wool tapestries made by Laura Letinsky and John Paul Morabito. The exhibition is on view in the project gallery.

Since 2013, Letinsky and Morabito have worked collaboratively, bringing photography and weaving into dialogue and exploring the cooperative possibilities between the two mediums. Central to their conception of this project was an understanding of the loom as a kind of precursor to the creative capacities eventually unleashed by the computer and the digital age more broadly.

In orchidsgladiolascowsdaffodilscandywrappersyelloworange-bloodredroses&shit, Laura Letinsky continues her career-long investigation of photography’s relationship to temporality, specifically through the genre of still-life. While travelling across India in 2014, Letinsky made multiple trips to the Bangalore Flower market where she found streets transformed by remnants from the early morning market. Crushed gladiolas, orchids, roses, marigolds and lilies blended together, creating dense and vivid fields of complex color. In Mumbai, Laura Letinsky made pictures of flower petals left behind on the streets following celebratory wedding nights. With her camera aimed straight  down she created pure abstractions of texture and color.

Weaving together richly hued cotton and wool thread, Morabito translated Letinsky’s digital abstractions into lusciously colored painterly tapestries. In contrast to the sharp delineation of forms so typical of photographic prints, the tapestries present abstract yet tactile visual fields that connect us back to moments viscerally felt. Expressed through a wide range of brilliantly colored threads, the works explore the tensions between beauty, fragility and loss.

In Letinsky and Morabito words: “Last night’s flowers, digitally apprehended, are cast out of an Eden remembered, and brought home to the loom. The shutter’s click is joined by a wooden whirr as the shuttle plies back and forth. Line by line, the digital screen is consumed by lapis blues, acid yellows, and putrescent greens. Those wool threads, loose and tangled, are mired amongst the flowers (redolent with their perfumes and high noon sweat).”

Laura Letinsky was born in 1962 in Winnipeg, Canada. She received her BFA from the University of Manitoba in 1986 and MFA from Yale University’s School of Art in 1991. Since 1994, she has been a Professor in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at FOAM, Amsterdam; PhotoEspaña, Madrid; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Denver Art Museum; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Renaissance Society, Chicago. Public collections featuring Letinsky’s work include the Art Institute of Chicago; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Art, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yale University Art Gallery. She has received numerous awards, including the Canada Council International Residency (2014); Richard Driehaus Foundation Award (2003); Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2002) and the Guggenheim Fellowship Award (2000). Publications include To Want for Nothing, ROMAN NVMERALS, 2019; Time’s Assignation, Radius Books, 2018; Ill Form and Void Full, Radius Books, 2014; After All, Damiani, 2010; Hardly More Than Ever, Renaissance Society, 2004 and Venus Inferred, University of Chicago Press, 2000.

John Paul Morabito was born in 1982 in New York, USA. They are Assistant Professor and Head of Textiles at Kent State University School of Art. In 2024, John Paul Morabito was named a United States Artists Fellow for their significant contributions to weaving and contemporary art. Morabito has exhibited at international venues including the Zhejiang Art Museum (Hangzhou City, China); the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (affiliate of the North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston-Salem, NC); the Des Moines Art Center (Des Moines, IA); the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS); the Center for Craft (Asheville, NC); and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI). Their work is represented in public and private collections including the North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh, NC) and the Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec (Montréal, Canada). They hold a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. John Paul Morabito is represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery in Los Angeles, CA.

YANCEY RICHARDSON

525 West 22nd Street, New York City

www.yanceyrichardson.com

Sharon Core @ Yancey Richardson, NYC - "Facsimile" Exhibition

Sharon Core: Facsimile

Yancey Richardson, New York

February 27 – April 12, 2025

SHARON CORE

Peony: Tempest, Page 66, 2023 

Epson UltraChrome ink on Canson Photo Rag paper 

20 x 22 inches

© Sharon Core / Courtesy of Yancey Richardson, New York

Yancey Richardson presents Facsimile, an exhibition of new work by SHARON CORE, the artist’s fifth solo presentation with the gallery and one that continues her ongoing interrogation of the meaning of authenticity and authorship in her work. 

Through the meticulous recreation of historical still-life paintings, along with more recent artworks rendered through the medium of photography, her work explores the tension between reality and its photographic representation. In Facsimile, Sharon Core expands these themes by subverting her usual process. Rather than reproducing painted still-lifes through photography, she has instead turned to Irving Penn’s iconic Flowers series—a masterful collection of photographic still-lifes—and reinterpreted them through painting. This ambitious project both deepens and reframes Core’s exploration of the still-life genre by posing questions not only about photography in the digital age, but about material specificity and the status of the reproduction as well. 

At the center of Facsimile is a hand-made reproduction of Penn’s 1980 book Flowers, which originated from a commission for Vogue magazine for its annual Christmas edition in 1967. Each year from 1967 to 1973, Irving Penn focused on a different flower—beginning with tulips and moving on to poppies, peonies, roses and other blooms—capturing their ephemeral beauty in various states of perfection and decay. In 1980, these images were compiled into the popular and widely available book Flowers, published by Harmony Books, now out of print. Core’s Facsimile: “Irving Penn, Flowers” resurrects and reimagines the book as a tactile, meticulously handcrafted object that visitors are invited to handle. Alongside this edition, Sharon Core presents a selection of her 73 hand-painted recreations of Penn’s photographs, displayed throughout the gallery to offer a closer look at her reinterpretations of the original works. Rather than a departure, we might see this as a return for Sharon Core, who originally trained as a painter. The interplay between painting and photography has always been central to her practice and Facsimile brings this dialogue into sharper focus.

Core’s process for Facsimile is as intricate as it is conceptually layered. Each of Penn’s photographs is recreated as a painting using Epson UltraChrome inks on Canson Photo Rag paper, materials typically associated with digital photographic printing. Through this method, Sharon Core subverts the intended use of contemporary materials, transforming them into tools for painting. She then photographed her painted pages, designed a layout replicating that of the original book and bound the final prints into an edition of seven. In Core’s words, “the book is a multiple sculpture or a three-dimensional print that must be handled and touched to experience. My name is nowhere in the ‘book,’ therefore it is not an artist book, per se, but in fact a converted replica or facsimile.” By humanizing and rarifying a mass-produced object, Core’s “three-dimensional print” calls for a different kind of attention from the viewer. It cannot be experienced via a screen and must instead be encountered physically. In this generous gesture, the now out-of-print book is given a new lease on life, taking on a different meaning through a complex process of conversion: transforming photographs into paintings, which are then re-photographed, printed and bound into a book.

Visually, Facsimile diverges from Penn’s original photographs through Core’s expressive, painterly approach. Unlike her earlier series, in which she precisely reproduced certain still-life paintings in three-dimensions and photographed the results, effectively posing questions about the boundaries between illusion and reality, here Sharon Core seeks to emphasize the handcrafted nature of all photographs. As she notes, “Ever more so, the photograph is manipulated and collaged and is printed not through time and light, as in analog process, but with a fluid medium on paper. It becomes a machine assisted drawing or painting.” In Facsimile, Sharon Core makes explicit the artistry behind the work: the hand-lettered text is visibly imperfect and the images, while faithful to Penn’s compositions, are imbued with the texture and fluidity of the artist’s brushwork. Even the colors in the paintings result from a rigorous process of mixing and diluting the digital hues of cyan, yellow, magenta and black.

There is no trompe l’oeil effect at play here, nor any photorealist painting technique either and the result is therefore not an exact replica but a layered gesture that urges us to reflect on the evolving nature of representation in the digital age. By moving from a mechanical form of reproduction to an analogue process, while using a medium of mass production, Sharon Core questions the role of materiality in image-making. This finely crafted body of work seems to slip between painting, photography and sculpture, casting new light on Penn’s original photographs and book, while posing deeper questions about image-making technologies and their supposed ties to representing reality in this post-truth era.

SHARON CORE was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1965. She received her BFA in painting from the University of Georgia in 1987 and her MFA in photography from Yale University School of Art in 1998. Sharon Core began exhibiting her photographs in New York City in 1998 and has since shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in the United States and abroad. Her work is included in major public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth; The Phillips Collection, Washington DC; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. She was the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Art Grant in 2000. Her monograph, Sharon Core: Early American, was published by Radius Books in 2012. The artist lives and works in Esopus, New York.

YANCEY RICHARDSON

525 West 22nd Street, New York City

www.yanceyrichardson.com

John Divola @ Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC - "The Ghost in the Machine" Exhibition

John Divola

The Ghost in the Machine

Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

January 9 – February 22, 2025

JOHN DIVOLA  

GAFB F7418 (10_27_2023), 2019-2024 

From the series Blue with Exceptions

Archival pigment print, 36 x 48 inches

© John Divola, courtesy Yancey Richardson

JOHN DIVOLA

Vandalism (74V13), 1974 

Vintage gelatin silver print 

Image: 11 x 11 inches, Frame: 14 x 18 inches

© John Divola, courtesy Yancey Richardson

Over the course of a career spanning five decades, California-based artist JOHN DIVOLA has redefined the possibilities of the photographic medium, blending its observational precision with expressive experimentation. Challenging traditional notions of photography’s role as merely a transparent document of reality, Divola’s work explores the intersections of photography with painting, performance, installation, and, more recently, artificial intelligence. The Ghost in the Machine, on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery, brings together works from Divola’s latest series, Blue with Exceptions (2019–2024), alongside selections from his seminal early series, Vandalism (1973–1975). This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to trace the evolution of Divola’s practice and his enduring fascination with the process of image-making. 

Since 2015, John Divola has created numerous photographic projects at the abandoned George Air Force Base in Victorville, California. The Base was closed in the early ‘90s and now stands as a relic of Cold War-era militarization and environmental neglect. In Blue with Exceptions (2019–2024), his most recent project at the site, Divola captures its physical deterioration and layers of marks left by time, nature, human activity, and his own earlier interventions, creating a dialogue between the spectral presence of history within the abandoned spaces and the gestural possibilities of photography, between what remains and what is lost. As the artist notes: “Photographs can accommodate a broad range of interpretations, from the concretely informational, social, political, and esthetic to an index of a specific life and its engagements. I aspire to embrace that messy complexity.”

On view in the project gallery are a number of works from Divola’s seminal Vandalism (1973–1975) series, the first instance in which he intervened in a space in order to photograph it. Illegally entering and photographing abandoned homes in greater Los Angeles, John Divola spray-painted the interiors with patterns such as grids, spirals, and dots, engaging in a form of physical and conceptual mark-making that pushed his process beyond purely documenting what he saw. Using black, white, and silver paint to align with the tonal range of the black-and-white silver gelatin prints, his interventions played with perspective, light, and depth, at times disorienting the viewer and questioning photography’s conventional role as a transparent window to the world. By photographing his acts of “vandalism,” Divola affirmed his approach to the photograph as both documentation and artifact, where the artist’s physical engagement with a space becomes inscribed within the image. Years later, Divola revisited similar themes in his Abandoned Paintings (2006–2008) series, recontextualizing discarded amateur artworks, deteriorated by time, by photographing them within derelict interiors.

In Blue with Exceptions, John Divola takes this gesture further by introducing AI-generated imagery into his work; idealized images of songbirds are inserted into the dilapidated interiors of the Base and then re-photographed. His interest in the interplay between the symbolic and the specific is highlighted here, as he juxtaposes the specificity of the decaying site—laden with social and historical significance—and the amorphous, non-space of AI-generated visions. There is a palpable sense of fragility within these tightly-framed images, as if the birds might be trying to break free from the crumbling walls that confine them. These uncanny pictures within pictures open up questions about the role of technology in shaping our perception of reality. Indeed, the artist sees the songbirds as symbols of environmental sensitivity—a metaphorical “canary in the coal mine”—which he links to the “dawning of the Anthropocene” and humanity’s fraught relationship with the natural world. 

John Divola’s work across these series reflects a fascination with how imaging technologies—whether photography, painting, or Artificial Intelligence—interact with specific environments. The George Air Force Base offers a socially and politically charged space to explore these tools’ ability to preserve, distort, and reinterpret reality. At the same time, Divola’s practice resists being reduced to commentary on military, technological, or environmental themes; it is just as much about process, observation, and the creative possibilities that arise from his engagement with these spaces. The Ghost in the Machine invites viewers to explore the layered complexity of Divola’s work, where histories converge, technologies collide, and the boundaries between presence and absence blur.  

JOHN DIVOLA: BIOGRAPHY

Born in Los Angeles in 1949, John Divola earned a B.A. from California State University, Northridge in 1971 and an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles in 1974, where he studied under photographer Robert Heinecken. Since 1975, he has taught photography and art at numerous institutions including California Institute of the Arts (1978–1988), and since 1988 he has been a Professor of Art at the University of California, Riverside. Divola was featured in the 1981 and 2017 Whitney Biennials and was the subject of a three-museum retrospective in 2013 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Benton Museum of Art, California. His various projects have been published in 11 monographs.

Since 1975, John Divola’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in the United States, Japan, Europe, Mexico, and Australia, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Modern, London; and Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris. Divola’s work is held in numerous prestigious collections including multiple New York institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Tate, London; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Among Divola’s awards are multiple Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1976, 1979, 1990), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1986), a Fintridge Foundation Fellowship (1998), a City of Los Angeles Artist Grant (1999), and a California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship (1998).

YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY

525 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

www.yanceyrichardson.com

Photographer Lynn Saville @ Yancey Richardson, NYC - "Elevated" Exhibition

Lynn Saville: Elevated

Yancey Richardson, New York

April 4 – May 18, 2024

LYNN SAVILLE

Plymouth Water Tower, 2019 

Archival pigment print, 34 1/2 x 40 1/2 inches

© Lynn Saville, Courtesy Yancey Richardson

Yancey Richardson presents Elevated, Lynn Saville’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Seven photographs are on view in the project gallery. 

 

Twilight in the city, after the sun disappears below the horizon and the hustle and bustle has dissipated, is where Lynn Saville finds refuge and inspiration. For decades, she has documented these fleeting, dream-like moments suspended in time within the urban landscape. 

 

Elevated showcases Lynn Saville’s mastery of the city’s natural light. Much like Edward Hopper, who painted the solitude of New York City through its buildings and rooftops, Lynn Saville’s photographs transform architectural elements and structures into dramatic geometric forms and patterns through light and shadows. Lynn Saville describes the importance of capturing images at twilight, “During this transitional time, the change from daylight to moonlight and artificial light seems to awaken the city’s own dreams, apart from the business and errands of its inhabitants. For me, these dreams are expressed in basic shapes and patterns, as if the infrastructure were communing with its own geometry while distracting details are hidden in shadow. The shifting light brings out forms that may disappear in the darkness of night or remain invisible during the more chaotic visual world of daylight.” 

As the exhibition title implies, photographs featured in the show were taken from the elevated platforms of New York City’s mass transit system or from the street looking upward at structures on rooftops. These photographs explore perspectives on the language of the built environment and our perception of the cityscape. For example, Elevated subway platforms offer an expanse of skyline structures such as rooftops, water towers, and upper sections of nearby buildings, which along with the coming and goings of trains become the focal point. 

LYNN SAVILLE

 

Born in Durham, North Carolina, Lynn Saville lives and works in New York City. She earned her BA from Duke University and her MFA from Pratt Institute. Her work has been widely exhibited in the US and abroad, including at The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina; Tucson Museum of Art; and Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University. Her work can be found in numerous major public collections including National Portrait Gallery, London; International Center of Photography, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. 

 

Lynn Saville has published four monographs: Acquainted with the Night (Rizzoli, 1997); Night/Shift (Monacelli/Random House, 2009), with an introduction by Arthur C. Danto; Dark City: Urban America at Night (Damiani, 2015), with an introduction by Geoff Dyer, and Lost (Kris Graves Projects, 2018). Lynn Saville’s archives were acquired by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. 

YANCEY RICHARDSON

525 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

www.yanceyrichardson.com

Mary Ellen Bartley @ Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC (Online) - 7 Things Again And Again

Mary Ellen Bartley: 7 Things Again And Again
Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York (Online)
May 21 - June 20, 2020

Yancey Richardson presents 7 Things Again and Again, an online exhibition of new still life photographs by Mary Ellen Bartley made each day during the month of April. A portion of the proceeds from the sales of 7 Things Again and Again will go to benefit the God’s Love We Deliver Covid-19 Emergency Fund. Known for her exploration of the tactile and formal qualities of books, Mary Ellen Bartley was in the midst of her residency at Giorgio Morandi’s studio and library in Bologna, Italy when the pandemic began. As Italy shutdown, she returned to her home in Sag Harbor, New York to shelter-in-place. There, Mary Ellen Bartley assigned herself a project inspired by Morandi’s process of reduction, repetition and restraint as a vehicle for meditation and introspection. Mary Ellen Bartley chose a set of seven common household items, and committed to photographing them each day for the thirty days of April. 

Mary Ellen Bartley's attic studio became a refuge from the anxiety gripping the world, where her seven elements remained recognizable but were detached from their everyday function, serving instead as an exploration of form and process. Experimenting with exposure, depth of focus and subtle variations in light and shadow, Mary Ellen Bartley transformed the quotidian objects into moments of stilled time. In addition to these quietly contained compositions, Mary Ellen Bartley experimented with veiling the objects, re-photographing her images, or recombining portions of prints into new compositions, pushing the imagery further toward abstraction. The hushed tranquility and containment of the resulting images speak to our current moment, of a world on pause.

YANCEY RICHARDSON
535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
www.yanceyrichardson.com

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Sebastiao Salgado, Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC - Migrations

Sebastiao Salgado: Migrations
Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York
June 29 - August 24, 2001

The Yancey Richardson Gallery presents an exhibition of work by the internationally renowned photographer Sebastiao Salgado. Coinciding with Sebastiao Salgado’s large-scale exhibition at the International Center of Photography, Migrations documents the seismic shift in human populations around the world. For this most recent project, Sebastiao Salgado photographed migrants, refugees and displaced persons over a seven year period in 40 countries. His work captures the late 20th century phenomenon of whole cultures being displaced. Sebastiao Salgado documents Latin American and Asian peasants abandoning rural poverty for the promise of the megacity. The work includes images of the Hutu escaping from Rwanda into Zaire, the Bosnia refugees fleeing the Balkan strife, and the assimilation of the Amazonian Yanomani Indians.

Sebastiao Salgado states, "People have always migrated, but something different is happening now. For me, this worldwide population upheaval represents a change of historic significance. We are undergoing a revolution in the way we live, produce, communicate, and travel. Most of the world's inhabitants are now urban. We have become one world: in distant corners of the globe, people are being displaced for essentially the same reasons."

Sebastiao Salgado was born in Brazil in 1944. He was educated in Brazil and later received a Ph. D in economics. He began working as a photojournalist in 1973 and later worked with the Magnum Photo Agency. Aperture published An Uncertain Grace in 1990 and Workers followed in 1993. He has been honored with several prestigious awards including Photographer of the Year by the International Center of Photography and received the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography. Most recently Sebastiao Salgado won the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography. He has been the subject of largescale solo exhibitions at major museums around the world including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum for Photographic Arts in San Diego among others. 

YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
www.yanceyrichardson.com

Julius Shulman & Richard Neutra, Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York - Modernism Defined

Modernism Defined: Julius Shulman & Richard Neutra
Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York
November 11, 2000 - January 6, 2001

Yancey Richardson Gallery announces the opening exhibition at their new Chelsea gallery, "Modernism Defined: Julius Shulman & Richard Neutra". The exhibition is comprised of an extensive selection of vintage photographs of important structures by Richard Neutra, one of the most highly acclaimed architects of the 20th century. Julius Shulman, widely recognized as one of the most important photographers of modernist architecture, took his first architectural image of a Neutra building in 1936. Neutra's enthusiastic response to the photographs helped launch Julius Shulman's career and the two continued to work together for the remainder of Richard Neutra's life. Julius Shulman ultimately photographed 90% of what Richard Neutra built and is credited with interpreting and exporting the ideas of modernism to the rest of the world through his images.

The exhibition celebrates Julius Shulman's 90th birthday and coincides with the release by Taschen of Richard Neutra - Complete Works, a definitive volume on Neutra's work in a large-scale limited edition book, illustrated primarily with Julius Shulman's images. Also this fall, Taschen is publishing Modernism Rediscovered, a book of Julius Shulman's photographs of the work of lesser-known but important modernist architects. 

Concurrent with this exhibition of Julius Shulman's Neutra photographs, Donzella, a gallery of 20th century design, features an exhibition of Julius Shulman's photographs of the interiors of Paul Laszlo, a recently rediscoverd mid-century California designer. Donzella is located at 17 White Street in New York City.

YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
www.yanceyrichardson.com