Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Robert Adams: On Any Given Day in Spring & Light Balances, the next exhibition in his gallery at 526 West 22nd Street. The exhibition consists of two new series of photographs. Light Balances is the title of a group of 59 photographs made between 2005 and 2011 in a protected forest around the Columbia River estuary near the town of Astoria, Oregon where Adams has lived since 1997. These dense black and white images capture the diverse qualities of light as filtered through and onto t... Read more

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Robert Adams: On Any Given Day in Spring & Light Balances, the next exhibition in his gallery at 526 West 22nd Street.

The exhibition consists of two new series of photographs.

Light Balances is the title of a group of 59 photographs made between 2005 and 2011 in a protected forest around the Columbia River estuary near the town of Astoria, Oregon where Adams has lived since 1997. These dense black and white images capture the diverse qualities of light as filtered through and onto the leaves, trunks, grass, and dirt of the uncontaminated forest.

The 30 photographs in On Any Given Day in Spring depict flocks of seabirds on the North Beach Peninsula in Washington State. They were made between 2007 and 2009 and capture the relationship between the birds, the ocean, and the sky. Adams writes of his chance encounters with the birds, “There is no certainty, on any given day in spring, that the birds will be there.”

Two new artist’s books reproducing the photographs in On Any Given Day in Spring and Light Balances will be published to accompany the exhibition.

Robert Adams: On Any Given Day in Spring & Light Balances is on view concurrently with the artist’s, The Place We Live, a Retrospective Selection of Photographs at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut through October 28, 2012, which includes over 300 photographs made over four decades. After Yale, this exhibition, which has already been seen at museums in Vancouver, Denver, and Los Angeles, travels on to institutions in Spain, Germany, France, and Switzerland.

Robert Adams (b. 1937) has been photographing the American landscape for almost 50 years. His photographs emphasize the redemptive beauty of nature in the face of humans’ widespread and unremitting use of the land. In 1989 the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized a retrospective of Adams’s work, and in 1997 his photographs were included in Documenta X. Adams was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1994 and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in 2009.

Robert Adams: On Any Given Day in Spring & Light Balances will be on view from September 7 through November 3, from 11:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. at 526 West 22nd Street.