The exceptional vintage prints in this exhibition are masterful examples of Aaron Siskind’s interest in exploring the inherent abstraction of the real world.
With these works, Siskind simultaneously captured the bold, graphic qualities of his subject and their nuances of texture and tonality. The images appear both as powerful, gestural forms from a distance, and as rich topographies with minute details and subtlety up close. As abstract as they are, his photographs still possess a sincere, humanist quality.
His subjects are often fragments of marks or forms created by others, traces of human existence. As such, the images function as meditations on what we leave behind: emotional, even spiritual records of the interconnectedness of all things. Siskind’s work has often been compared to that of the Abstract Expressionists, with whom he identified and even exhibited. The visual similarities between Aaron Siskind’s graphic photographs and the bold, gestural marks of Abstract Expressionist paintings is striking, but there are important differences as well. As photographs of actual things (walls with peeling paint, piles of rocks, etc), Siskind’s works introduce a tension between the real and the abstract that is absent from any painting.
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Information
Gitterman Gallery
41 East 57th Street New York, NY 10022 USA
October 16, 2017 to January 20, 2018
