Gregory Crewdson

Reception for the artist: Saturday, June 29, 6 – 8pm

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of twenty new photographs by Gregory Crewdson. Crewdson continues his ongoing series of elaborately staged, large-scale color photographs that explore the psychological underside of the American vernacular. The photographs combine a realist aesthetic sensibility with a highly orchestrated interplay of cinematic lighting, staging, and special effects. This collision between the normal and the paranormal produces a tension that serves to transform the topology of the suburban landscape into a place of wonder and anxiety.

Crewdson's recent photographs are increasingly dark and mysterious in tone as they move deeper into the psychological bedrock of social alienation, personal obsession, and sexual desire. The artist's narratives occur at moments of enigmatic transformation. Submerged in water, a lifeless woman stares blankly upwards, as she lies in a flooded living room. Sitting at a dinner room table with his father and sister, an adolescent boy witnesses his absent mother appear nude at the front door, wet with rain and mud, carrying uprooted flowers from the garden. Framed by a picture window, a lone man is viewed ascending a magnificent flowering vine that has mysteriously erupted from the front lawn of a nocturnal suburban street. Crewdson's brand of psychological realism is shaped by an American aesthetic tradition of art and film that explores the intersection of everyday life and theatricality.

In conjunction with this exhibition, Harry N. Abrams published a hardcover book of the complete Twilight series with an introduction by Rick Moody, available in bookstores.

Gregory Crewdson is an internationally exhibited artist. He is the subject of numerous monographs and articles. He is on the faculty of the Department of Photography at Yale University and lives in New York City.