NEW YORK, NY.- In celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the opening of Nailya Alexander Gallery, the gallery opened Color of Light: Fifteen Years of Nailya Alexander Gallery, on view from Thursday May 16th to Friday July 12th, 2019. For the past decade and a half, the gallery has prided itself on its diverse roster of contemporary international fine-art photographers, as well as on its collection of rare and vintage gelatin-silver prints by the great pioneers of the Russian avant-garde.

Color of Light is a celebration of the creative genius of the contemporary artists represented by and exhibited at Nailya Alexander Gallery. The show includes works by an international group of twelve photographers and printmakers from Russia, Finland, Germany, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. What unites these artists is their poetic approach to photography, their sensitive investigations of the nature and color of light, and the personal and spiritual insight they bring to their medium. Their work is united in both the physical space and the ethos of the gallery, where visitors of all kinds – from dedicated collectors and patrons of the arts to students and fellow artists – are invited to contemplate and be moved by their vision and craft.

On view in Color of Light are exquisite prints that explore a diverse range of subjects and processes. Some artists find beauty in the natural world, such as Denis Brihat, whose gelatin-silver prints of fruits and flowers are colored by the salts of precious metals; George Tice, whose large, lustrous palladium print of an aspen grove has the quiet delicacy of a graphite drawing; and British artists Nicholas Hughes and Jane Hilton, who turn their lens toward the vast expanses of sky and desert, respectively.

Others excavate beauty from centuries past, such as Marcia Lippman, who discovers it in the paintings of the great masters; or Lynn Stern, whose images of the human body evoke the form and texture of ancient marble sculptures. Light and color are sensual elements in the work of Ann Rhoney, who, along with Ingar Krauss, combines photography with painting, applying oils directly to gelatin-silver prints; while the duo Albarrán Cabrera experiment with sepia, selenium, gold leaf, and hand-made Japanese paper in their metaphysical examinations of time and the nature of memory. Toned gelatin-silver prints by Alexey Titarenko and Pentti Sammallahti capture subtle nuances of water and light that span a seemingly infinite scale of grays; in Titarenko’s work, the images are suffused with an emotional quality and a concern for human values that have been a constant throughout his thirty-year career. On another wall, a large, abstract work by Carolyn Marks Blackwood glows with the deep red of sunset.