Mitch Epstein
The Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Rocks and Clouds, an exhibition of new photographs by Mitch Epstein that explore the significance of time through ancient rocks and fleeting clouds. As with his acclaimed tree portraits (New York Arbor), these large-format black and white pictures were made in the five boroughs of New York City, and deepen Epstein’s investigation of how nature and society interact. Epstein is less interested in wilderness than in how the natural world exists in an urban landscape--where architecture is, at its most elemental, made of rock. These pictures evoke the human aspiration--and inability--to harness time and nature. Epstein uses his signature technique of pictorial layering, and with Rocks and Clouds he further refines his convergence of the conceptual and documentary.
A pioneer of fine art color photography in the 1970s, Epstein employs his formal mastery to describe the city’s sky and bedrock, as both sculptural and potent. The mirroring of rocks and clouds and the synthesis of what’s above and below the horizon have intrigued ancient Chinese painters, as well as modern earthwork artists such as Robert Smithson, both of whom were inspirations for this series. Made with an 8x10 field camera, Rocks and Clouds salutes slow photography in a digital culture. In this way, the subject of time informs the work’s content and its methodology. When it seems impossible to make a fresh picture of New York, Epstein surprises us with an unfamiliar view of it.
Mitch Epstein (born 1952 in Holyoke, Massachusetts) has gained renown over the last forty years for photographing the culture, landscape, and “American-ness” of the United States. Epstein has won numerous awards, including the Prix Pictet, the Berlin Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been exhibited and published extensively in the United States and Europe, and collected by major museums, including New York's Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Tate Modern in London. His twelve books include the forthcoming Rocks and Clouds, as well as American Power and Family Business, for which he won the Krazna-Krausz Photography Book Award (2004). In 2013, the Walker Arts Center commissioned Epstein and cellist-composer Erik Friedlander to create a theatrical performance of American Power, which traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts and Victoria and Albert Museum.
Mitch Epstein recently collaborated with cellist Erik Friedlander on a limited edition LP based on music composed for a presentation Epstein made last summer at the Arles Photography Festival. Additionally, Epstein and Tate Museum curator Simon Baker will discuss Epstein's photography as a part of the Prix Pictet Conversations on Photography, at Whitechapel Gallery in London on Saturday, May 12 at 4:30 pm.
Mitch Epstein's acclaimed series American Power is the subject of a solo exhibition at the Musee de l'Elysee, Lausanne, Switzerland through November 20. Epstein was awarded the prestigious Prix Pictet Photography Prize for American Power, a series that examines the production and consumption of energy in the United States and its impact on society and the American landscape.
Gallery artists Olivo Barbieri, Mitch Epstein, and Victoria Sambunaris are included in The Altered Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, opening September 24th and running through January 8, 2012.
Mitch Epstein's acclaimed series American Power is currently on display in Paris at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, through July 24, and is also included in New Documentary Forms at the Tate Modern in London, through March 31, 2012.
Gallery artists Mitch Epstein, David Hilliard, Lisa Kereszi, Andrew Moore, Alex Prager, and Victoria Sambunaris are all included in People Power Places: Reframing the American Landscape, a group exhibition at Davidson College, North Carolina, on view through March 6, 2011.
Gallery artists Mitch Epstein, David Hilliard, Kenneth Josephson, Laura Letinsky and Hellen van Meene are all included in Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection, a group exhibition at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, on display through June 19, 2011. The exhibition also features works by Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Irving Penn, Cindy Sherman, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Vik Muniz, and Richard Misrach, among others.
Photographs by gallery artists Mitch Epstein, Alex Prager, and Bertien van Manen are currently on display in Embarrassment of Riches: Picturing Global Wealth, a new exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, open through January 2, 2011.
Epstein's latest project tackles one of the most loaded issues on the nation's agenda: what and who powers America? American Power is Epstein's portrait of early twenty-first-century America, as it clings to past comforts and gropes for a more sensible and sustainable future.
Mitch Epstein's works Dad, Hampton Ponds III, 2003 and Apartment 304, 398 Main Street, 2001 were recently acquired by the Brooklyn Museum are on now on exhibit at the museum in Extended Family: Contemporary Connections. Steidl has also recently released Epstein's 9th monograph, American Power.