Craig Krull: Walking Venice, on view at Craig Krull Gallery from September 5 to October 31, traces a photographer's lifelong dialogue with a neighborhood that shaped him. The exhibition brings together images made during daily pandemic walks through Venice, California, where Krull grew up in the early 1970s amid rundown canals and a bohemian counterculture that included some of Los Angeles's most significant artists.
Krull returned to Venice in the 1980s to live on the beach while building his career in the gallery world, eventually becoming a founding presence at Bergamot Station Arts Center in 1994. His professional path intersected with Julius Shulman, the pre-eminent architectural photographer of California modernism, whose influence sharpened Krull's eye for line, space, and edge. During the pandemic, Krull began walking Venice without a fixed route, treating the act itself as an art form in the tradition of British land artists Richard Long and Roger Ackling, who elevated walking into conceptual practice.
The photographs avoid obvious landmarks in favor of palimpsests, decay, and the detritus that accumulates in Venice's alleys. Speedway, the raw backstreet Krull frequents, becomes a stage where discarded furniture, colorful boxes, and projectile trash arrange themselves with an almost sculptural logic reminiscent of Nancy Rubins or the formal compositions of Richard Diebenkorn. Gentrification creeps through the frames, yet the town retains its funky, unbridled character, an ongoing circus that refuses to be tamed.
At the center of the exhibition stands Memento, a tower of mismatched concrete breeze blocks cradling sweet alyssum, a sculptural ode to Krull's Angeleno roots and the layered history of a place that shaped him. The work distills an ongoing engagement with Venice's peculiarities, one that Krull has chronicled on his Instagram account, @krull90291, into a meditation on place, memory, and the art of looking closely at what others walk past.
Image: Wavecrest P.A, 2025. archival pigment print. 5 1/4 x 4” image, 11 5/8 x 8 3/4” paper size © Craig Krull, courtesy of the Craig Krull Gallery.
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