LEE FRIEDLANDER
On 9 September 2010 the Mary Boone Gallery will open at its Fifth Avenue location Recent Western Landscape, an exhibition of photographs from 2008-2009 by LEE FRIEDLANDER.
Shot in locations such as Glen Canyon, Death Valley, and the Mojave Desert, in these works Friedlander often focuses on tangles of foreground brush, with occasional glimpses of rocky or snow-covered landscape beyond. In the catalogue to the exhibition, Klaus Kertess has written:
The heterogeneous organic mesh so often experienced in the foreground of these landscapes imbue forests and mountains with a kind of intimacy and immediacy ordinarily reserved for those actually trekking through the photographed terrain. The foregrounds do not diminish the power of the hills and mountains but rather draw them into the whole of the rectangular plane, at once veiling and celebrating their volume and shape. On occasion the reflection of a mountain in a body of water viewed through the interstices of the foregrounded screen draws the mountain into the frontal plane and unfurls a panoply of reflected illusion. When snow is added, the soft light becomes still more diffuse, trees appear as almost immaterial filigrees of shadow, and recalcitrant leaves still clinging to branches enliven the foreground with delicate, chiming repetitions. The muffled silence of the snowbound landscape, the fragile delicacy of the leaves, and the trees almost dissolving in the misty atmosphere envelop the plane in lyrical reverie seldom equaled in painting or photography.
The exhibition, at 745 Fifth Avenue, will continue through 23 October 2010. An illustrated catalogue with an essay by Klaus Kertess will be available. Please contact Ron Warren at the Gallery for further information, or visit our website www.maryboonegallery.com.
