RICHARD MISRACH
Pace is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by photographer Richard Misrach at its Seoul gallery. Together, these mesmeric images meditate on humans’ relationships to the natural world and one another.
May 11 - June 15, 2024
On view from May 11 to June 15, this presentation, which marks the artist’s first-ever solo show in Asia, will spotlight photographs from his On the Beach, Shorebreak and Icarus Suite series along with his never-before-exhibited Elephant Parable body of work.
A champion of color photography since the 1970s, Misrach is known for his poignant, large-scale images that lean into social, political, and environmental issues of the present while also engaging with the history of photography. Subjects for his work have included desert fires, nuclear test sites, and animal burial pits in the American West; San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge; and the landscape of the US often examines the destructive effects of human intervention in the natural world.
His works can be found the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra; and many other institutions around the world.
Among these photographs is Outdoor Dining, Bonneville Salt Flats (1992), an image from the series Desert Canto XV: The Salt Flats depicting a surreal scene of dining tables and chairs situated, inexplicably, in the middle of a vast salt desert. Meanwhile, in Cloud, Roden Crater (2016), Misrach investigates plays of light and color in the sky at sunset.
With these works, he bears witness to individuals’ interactions with and relationship to the natural world. The first floor will also feature one work from the artist’s Icarus Suite, a series informed by Pieter Bruegel’s take on the Greek myth in Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (ca. 1560).
The second floor of the gallery will spotlight Misrach’s Elephant Parable body of work, which the artist produced during the COVID-19 pandemic and will be exhibited publicly for the first time in this presentation. Inspired by the fable of the blind men and the elephant, the varied works in this series are all derived from a single image of a bamboo forest in Hawaii to signify the unique perspectives and understandings we each bring to our experience of the world.