The Robert Miller
Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of photographs by
Graciela Iturbide. There will be a reception for the
artist on Thursday, January 8th from 6-8 pm.
The work of Iturbide has
been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions at the Museum of
Modern Art, San Francisco; The Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The
Philadelphia Museum of Art; Milwaukee Art Museum and the Parrish
Museum, Southampton, New York. This exhibition, the artist’s
first solo show in a New York gallery, will consist of fourteen
gelatin silver and platinum prints from her series Pájaros
(Birds).
Birds have long been
used as a metaphor for messengers of the spirit. According to Bruce
Wager, essayist for the book of Iturbide’s bird photographs
Pájaros (Twin Palms Publishers, 2002):
The birds of Graciela
Iturbide inhabit a space the photographer has created especially for
them…The birds are birds as we know them and are birds that
cannot be known; they are common and uncommon, whirling and blurred;
the birds are dead; the birds are gawking and gawky, tender and
woebegone; the birds are dirty and transient and religious and
encaged within effigies of themselves; the birds are man-made or they
swarm or are migratorily indifferent. The birds hover and soar and
loan themselves out for metaphorical exploitation…Very soon,
they will fly off the page. Graciela Iturbide has created a space for
these birds, and for the feelings they evoke too. For what is
ornithology but the spirit of man and his yearnings, the spirit of
infinity?
Photographer Graciela
Iturbide was born in Mexico City in 1942. From 1962-1972
she attended Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos
at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
switching from studying filmmaking to still photography after
taking a course from the famed Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez
Bravo, Mexico’s first Modernist Master. According to art
historian Vicki Goldberg, “His influence is palpable in her
lighting, in occasional compositions and in the general tenor of
sweet melancholy poetry, but she is far more committed to staged
tableaus and symbolic gesture than he, and her voice is her own.”
Iturbide’s own style has been described as “moving from
the real to the surreal,” allowing her to capture Mexico’s
complex mixture of modern-day consumerism and ancient cultural
rituals, as well as the pervading Spanish Catholicism.
Recent books on the
artist include Graciela Iturbide, Images of the Spirit,
(New York: Aperture Foundation, Inc., 1996), Graciela Iturbide
(Phaidon, Londres, 2001), and India-Mexico (DGE Ediciones,
2002) with photographs by the artist as well as Raghu Rai and
Sebastian Salgado.
The artist lives and
works in Coyoacán, Mexico. This will is the first exhibition
of Iturbide’s work at Robert Miller Gallery.
