ASPEN, CO.- The Aspen Art Museum presents a debut U.S. museum presentation of photographic works by renowned American photographer Stephen Shore. The exhibition features 32 images from a recent series shot in Abu Dhabi. Photographed with a digital camera and printed and exhibited for the first time, these works give U.S. audiences a street-level view of the region that is refreshingly free from media inflection or exaggeration. The exhibition will be on view through Sunday, October 9, 2011.
As an artist and teacher, Stephen Shore has had perhaps the most deeply felt impact on American photography of the past half-century. In 1965, Shore began documenting Andy Warhol’s factory in New York. In 1971, Shore’s work was the subject of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first-ever single-artist exhibition by a living photographer. Shore was 24 years old at the time.
Shore’s iconic images from the American Surfaces and Uncommon Places series of the 1970s brought radical treatments of color and space to often banal views of American life—documenting such seemingly mundane subjects as working-class homes, small-town intersections, plates of food in diners, and the graphic exuberance of strip malls and cinemas. Today, as then, his apparently casual and mundane choice of subject matter is dynamically balanced with a masterful formal rigor, giving his works a poetic tension and lending a charged beauty to what we see around us, but so often overlook.
Embracing the speed and freedom of digital photographic and reprographic technology over the past decade, Shore has been shooting images and producing on-demand, short-run books with Apple iPhoto software, allowing him to create stunning new bodies of work through modest means and through the use of vernacular techniques.
Stephen Shore was born in 1947. He is the current Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts, Director of the Photography Program and Chairman of the Arts Division at Bard College. Recent solo exhibitions include: Stephen Shore and the New Düsseldorf Photography, NRW-Forum Dusseldorf, Germany (2010); The Biographical Landscape, Museet for Fotokunst, Odense, Denmark, and Johannesburg Art Gallery, organized by The Roger Ballen Foundation for Photography, (2009). Recent group exhibitions include: Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the West, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009); New Topographics, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, traveling to Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Jeu de Paume, Paris, and Photographische Sammlung, Cologne, Germany, Museum of Fine Arts, Bilbao, Spain, and more (2009); and Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009). Shore’s work is part of permanent public collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Yale University Art Gallery; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Neue Sammlung, Munich; and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.
