Artist: Abelardo Morell

Edwynn Houk Gallery presents Abelardo Morell: Out of Paper, In Dialogue with Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski & Larry Poons. The exhibition presents recent photographs by Morell alongside an exemplary painting by each of the named Color Field artists. It is Morell’s sixth exhibition with the gallery and the first time the gallery has presented painting alongside photography.

For four decades, Morell has approached photography as an instrument of transformation. Across series, his subject has consistently prioritized the conditions of seeing over the thing itself. His camera obscura works juxtapose two ways of looking: in rooms he has transformed into person-sized cameras, interior and exterior occupying the same space at once, as the outside world enters and drapes itself upside down onto walls, beds, and sofas. His tent-cameras fold the landscape directly onto the ground. Other series have revealed universes inside unlikely objects: a wine glass, a shadow, a stack of bills. A single early work in the exhibition, Book Damaged by Water (2001), belongs to this tradition: paper, a material generally taken to be flat and neutral, shown to contain a world. In each case, Morell shows, looking longer changes the picture.

Morell’s new abstraction series is built around that shift. Working with colored construction paper and painted plywood, Morell makes photographs that push beyond representation. On first encounter, his bands of color read like the smooth vertical stripes of Davis or the geometric fields of Noland. Sustained looking reveals the pulp and grain of paper, the texture of wood, and sculptural qualities that the photograph initially concealed. In those veins, the photographs find company in Olitski’s sculptural construction of color and Poons’ layered rivulets. Placed alongside these paintings, Morell’s photographs extend their invitation: to experience color and light as perceptual events in themselves.