Bob Kolbrener: Sky Country

Bob Kolbrener: Sky Country
Feb 15, 2025 – Mar 23, 2025

San Carlos and 9th
Carmel, CA 93921

he Center for Photographic Art is proud to present Sky Country, a solo exhibition by award winning photographer, Bob Kolbrener. In celebration of the artist's new monograph of the same name, CPA partnered with Nazraeli Press to create this beautiful exhibition of silver gelatin prints of Kolbrener's iconic images of the West. This special show includes some of the artist’s most recognizable images as well as some that publisher Chris Pichler discovered in Kolbrener's vast archive! We’re excited that both the artist and publisher will be in Carmel in person to launch Kolbrener's latest book project and share copies of this beautiful new monograph, Sky Country (Nazraeli Press, February 2025).

A native of Missouri, American artist Bob Kolbrener was born in 1942 and began his career in St. Louis. He established a commercial photography business there in 1969 that was structured to give him and his wife, Sharon, time to photograph the American West. “We would work for five months and then head out for a month of fine art photography…living as nomads for two months of the year for over forty years,” said Kolbrener. A life-long devotion to California landscapes began when he saw six large-format Ansel Adams photographs in a gallery in Yosemite National Park in 1968. A transformational experience, it resulted in Kolbrener meeting, studying under, and ultimately working with Adams throughout the 1970s as he continued to build his own reputation as a superb landscape photographer.

Kolbrener’s technical method, which remains grounded in the “old fashioned way,” as the artist describes it, uses fiber-based silver gelatin paper, tray processing and selenium toner. His photographs are made on film, using medium and large format cameras.

Kolbrener’s photographs have been exhibited in museums, art galleries and libraries across the country and in Austria, Great Britain, China, Indonesia, and Japan. His images are in collections at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Monterey Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, and Washington University. In 2019, following a retrospective of his work, the Booth Museum acquired nearly two dozen of his works for their permanent collection. The Kolbreners moved to the Monterey Peninsula in 1996, closer to the iconic western landscapes that define his work.

Bob Kolbrener has a recent monograph published by Nazraeli Press: California (2022) which features 60 plates of black-and-white photographs taken between 1968 and 2019. Kolbrener's upcoming book, Sky Country (Nazraeli Press, February 2025) is a masterpiece of Western landscapes and includes an essay by CPA's executive director, Ann Jastrab. Both of these beautiful monographs are limited to 1,000 copies.


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