Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of a new body of work by Robert Adams. A Road Through Shore Pine focuses on a series of 18 never-before-seen photographs made in Nehalem Bay State Park, Oregon, in the fall of 2013. Concurrently, the gallery will present Robert Adams: The Complete Books 1970–2014, a survey of the artist’s deep involvement with the book form over a span of almost 45 years. Both exhibitions will be presented at Fraenkel Gallery from September 11 – November 15, 2014.
In A Road Through Shore Pine, Adams traces a contemplative journey, first by automobile, then by foot, along an isolated, tree-bordered road to the sea. As presented through Adams’s 11 × 14-inch prints, the passage takes on the quality of metaphor, suggestive of life’s most meaningful journeys, especially its final ones. For this group of photographs, all of which were printed by Adams himself, the artist returned to the use of a medium-format camera, allowing the depiction of an intense amount of detail. Through experience gathered over more than four decades, Adams’s trees, especially the tips of their leaves, are etched with singular sensitivity to the subtleties and meanings of light.
Adams writes of these photographs, “The road is one that my family traveled often and fondly. Many of its members are gone now, and Kerstin and I visit the road for the example of the trees.” Adams had stored this work in an archival print box on which he inscribed in pencil a line from the journal of the Greek poet George Seferis, “A marvelous road, enough to make you weep; pine trees, pine trees…”
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog, published by Fraenkel Gallery.
Robert Adams: The Complete Books 1970–2014, presents more than 60 of the artist’s influential monographs, including The New West, Denver, Prairie, From the Missouri West, Summer Nights, Los Angeles Spring, West From the Columbia, What We Bought, and the three-volume compendium, The Place We Live. Individual photographs from the books will also be on view, sketching a mini-retrospective of Robert Adams’s work from its beginnings to the present.