Photographs of Nocturnal Landscapes by Robert Adams at Matthew Marks Gallery

NEW YORK, NY.- Matthew Marks Gallery presents “Robert Adams: Summer Nights, Walking”. The exhibition consists of 50 photographs of nocturnal landscapes Robert Adams made between 1976 and 1982 near his home in Longmont, Colorado, on the eastern ridge of the Rocky Mountains.

Robert Adams leads the viewer outwards in these photographs from the populated center of the suburban town towards the rustic plain and distant Rocky Mountains. During his evening perambulations the photographer captured trees and houses, mountains and streets, fields and sidewalks between dusk and approaching dark. Lit by the setting sun, street lamps, and moonlight, his compositions are never conventionally beautiful. They vacillate between quiet foreboding and tranquil domesticity and, as the photographer has expressed in his own writing, attempt to capture the timelessness and peace of warm summer evenings.

Robert Adams, "North Edge of Denver, Colorado", c. 1980. Gelatin-silver print. Image: 7 x 7 inches; 18 x 18 cm. Sheet: 14 x 11 inches; 36 x 28 cm. Courtesy: Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Robert Adams first showed photographs from this series in 1985. Recently, he said of editing his night pictures that “when I have looked again at the photographs that I might have chosen but did not, it has seemed to me that if I had included a wider variety, the result would have been, though less harmonious, more convincing, closer to our actual experience of wonder, anxiety and stillness.” The expanded group of images in this exhibition is at times unsettling, conveying the menacing and occasionally hostile attitudes of suspicious onlookers the photographer encountered while walking and evoking a sense of unease that is often part of our nighttime experience.

Robert Adams (b. 1937) has been photographing the American landscape for almost 50 years. In 1989 the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized a retrospective of Adams’s work, and in 1997 his photographs were included in Documenta X. The Yale University Art Gallery, which holds Adams’s complete body of work to date, has organized a new retrospective exhibition of his work that opens at the Vancouver Art Gallery in September of this year before traveling to several international venues. Adams was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1994 and received the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in 2009.

This exhibition celebrates the publication of ‘Summer Nights, Walking’, co-published by Aperture and the Yale University Art Gallery, a revised and updated version of the 1985 book, Summer Nights.

“Robert Adams: Summer Nights, Walking” will be on view at the Matthew Marks Gallery, 523 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues) through April 17, 2010. Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 to 6:00 pm.

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