To celebrate the end of Philippe Garner’s exhibition New York – All Seasons & Summer Still Lifes, I – V we are excited to announce an open gallery event with the artist on Saturday 25th April from 2pm to 4pm.
The artist will be in the gallery to answer questions about the works and his career.
The exhibition comprises vibrant colour images taken between 2000 and 2018 in New York – ‘the American city that has proved my most frequent and insistent subject’, says Garner – and Summer Still Lifes taken in the south of France in the summers of 1983 and 1984, presented for the first time in the gallery.
‘Like others of my generation,’ Garner explains, ‘I was inspired by an idea of this vast country, an idea fuelled by the movies, music, magazines, TV, radical art, and certain strands of literature. I nurtured my version of the American Dream and have endeavoured through half a century to fix traces of that fiction in my open-ended portfolio of pictures.
Countless trips later, I have accumulated an extensive memory-bank of images that distil all that has delighted my eye in this crazy land. Mine are mostly urban subjects – a riot of signage, lights, and reflections, of vivid colours and emblematic motifs. Several of these images are in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. With this show – following the atmospheric monochrome of my recent virtual exhibition Greetings from Asbury Park – I am pleased to introduce a selection of colour images made between 2000 and 2018 in New York.’
In marked contrast to these spontaneous observational pictures, we discover the lovingly contrived symbolism of Garner’s suite of five Summer Still Life compositions.
Click here to read Philippe Garner in conversation with John Paul Pryor about the works in the show