SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Fraenkel Gallery presents Around the House & Other New Work by Robert Adams, from March 10April 23, 2016.
For almost five decades, Adamss extraordinarily influential photographs have explored the western American landscape and its transformations. In his most recent project, Adams shifts focus to his immediate environs, and finds related complexity, beauty, and mystery through photographs made in and around his own home.
Looking intently at the house in Astoria, Oregon, that he and his wife Kerstin have shared for almost 20 years, Adams focuses on the details that define home: a kitchen table, books and paintings, wooden carvings and calligraphy (created by both Adams and his wife), flowers in vases, and the darkroom with its tools of the artists trade. Periodically shifting to porch or garden, as one might step outside over the course of a day, Adamss photographs convey appreciation of the nearly imperceptible changes in familiar surroundings: the view of the Columbia River, the play of light on leaves, and most especially the evershifting clouds.
In his earlier series such as Prairie, Denver, Our Lives and Our Children, and California, Adams has often explored the larger question of the places we call home. His recent photographs suggest that a persons most powerful connections with the land begin in the very place one lives.
The exhibition coincides with Fraenkel Gallerys publication of a new monograph, Around the House. This 84-page publication features 71 illustrations, and is available in bookstores and at fraenkelgallery.com ($40).
The photographs of Robert Adams (b. 1937) are housed in many museums around the world. He has been the recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation fellowships, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award. His work was the subject of a major touring retrospective, The Place We Live, organized by the Yale University Art Gallery (2011-2014).