CHICAGO, IL.- This spring and summer, the Art Institute of Chicago draws exclusively from its rich photography collection to present nearly 100 works by the groundbreaking Aaron Siskind. On view from April 18 through August 14, 2016, Aaron Siskind: Abstractions features some of the most influential photographs of the 20th century, those that charted a new course for the medium and would inspire generations of artists to come.

“This exhibition demonstrates just how relevant Siskind remains, even 25 years after his death,” said Elizabeth Siegel, curator of the exhibition and Associate Curator of Photography at the Art Institute. “Siskind taught generations of photographers to see differently, and these works will do the same for visitors to the exhibition. Siskind’s abstractions—from those of recognizable objects to flat, painterly depictions of peeling paint and graffiti on walls—are not only a critical chapter in the history of photography; they also imbue his everyday subjects with a kind of gravity and significance.”

Siskind (1903–1991) initially worked as a documentary photographer, chronicling the working-class lives of fellow New Yorkers, most notably in his contributions to the Harlem Document (1932–40). By the 1940s, as Siskind developed relationships with many important Abstract Expressionist painters, including Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning, he joined them in drawing new attention to the flatness of the picture plane and emphasizing form as content. In 1950, Siskind wrote, “First, and emphatically, I accept the flat plane of the picture surface as the primary frame of reference of the picture.” This declaration, a radical position for a photographer, charted a new course for Siskind into photographic abstraction.

This transition from the social to the formal fueled Siskind’s production until his death, and his abstractions are now recognized as one of the most pioneering developments in 20th-century photography. Siskind worked in New York until 1951, when Harry Callahan persuaded him to join the faculty of the Institute of Design in Chicago, where he remained for 20 years; Siskind’s association with the Art Institute of Chicago began in 1955, when the museum offered him a one-person show and began collecting his work in earnest the following year. Twenty years later, Siskind, again at the urging of Callahan, joined the Rhode Island School of Design, and he remained in Providence for the rest of his life.

The museum’s decades-long relationship with Siskind resulted in extensive holdings of his works, nearly 100 of which are featured in Aaron Siskind: Abstractions . Beginning with Siskind’s new attention to the power of a single object in the 1940s, the presentation continues through formally graphic series inspired by the forms of barely touching rocks in Martha’s Vineyard, seaweed shapes on sand, and divers silhouetted against the sky at Oak Street Beach. The show culminates in increasingly flat and abstract images of walls with peeling and dripping paint, including a series in homage to the painter Franz Kline alongside one of Kline’s large-scale black and white paintings from the Art Institute’s permanent collection.