Abelardo Morell: Out of Paper, In Dialogue with Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski & Larry Poons, on view at Edwynn Houk Gallery from September 10 to October 31, marks a departure for a photographer who has spent four decades treating the camera as an instrument of transformation. The exhibition pairs Morell's recent abstract photographs with exemplary paintings by four Color Field artists, creating a conversation between photography and painting that the gallery has not attempted before.
Abelardo Morell, born in Havana in 1948 and raised in the United States since 1962, built his reputation on works that prioritize the conditions of seeing over the thing itself. His camera obscura series, which earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993, turns entire rooms into person-sized cameras, projecting inverted images of the outside world onto interior walls, beds, and sofas. He later extended the technique outdoors with tent-cameras that fold the landscape directly onto the ground, merging surface and scene in a gesture that connects photography's earliest mechanics with the plein air tradition of van Gogh and Monet.
The new abstraction series pushes beyond representation altogether. Working with colored construction paper and painted plywood, Morell makes photographs that on first encounter read like the smooth vertical stripes of Gene Davis or the geometric fields of Kenneth 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 Jules Olitski's sculptural construction of color and Larry Poons' layered rivulets, extending an invitation to experience color and light as perceptual events in themselves.
A single early work, Book Damaged by Water from 2001, belongs to this tradition, showing paper, a material generally taken to be flat and neutral, containing a world. Morell's major retrospective, The Universe Next Door, traveled from the Art Institute of Chicago to the Getty Museum and The High Museum of Art in 2013, and his work is held in leading collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. This exhibition, his sixth with Edwynn Houk Gallery, demonstrates that looking longer changes the picture.
Image: Book Damaged by Water, 2001 © Abelardo Morell.
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