News/Events

DATE: February 4, 2009

Review: Aaron Siskind at Bruce Silverstein

This master of photographic abstraction always grounded his work in the real world—in peeling plaster, broken windows, paint-slathered walls, and tar on concrete.

When Siskind's sources aren't immediately recognizable, their gritty physicality gives them a nice visual traction, and when his subject is evident it's thrilling to watch it dissolve into nothing but form and texture. The hundred and one photographs in this museum-quality exhibition are organized by series to show Siskind working through variations on a theme: grasses as brushstrokes, seaweed as calligraphy, a distressed wall as an expressionist canvas. His inventiveness is casual, instinctive, and irresistible.

From The New Yorker.

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