Robert Klein Gallery, in collaboration with Penumbra Foundation, is pleased to present Flat Earth, a solo exhibition by renowned New York City-based artist Lois Conner, showcasing a selection of twenty-three multi-panel landscapes and seventeen vintage platinum prints.
Inspired by Chinese hand-scroll paintings and seduced by the exquisite tonal and quality reproduction of the platinum printing process, Conner’s meticulous contact-printing practice suggests simplicity. Yet it conceals the complex technical and formal decisions she makes with remarkable clarity of purpose. The selected images have been intentionally decontextualized from their original bodies of work to offer a reading of a universal landscape. Through their physicality, visual rhetoric and silent narrative, the images make visible a profound understanding and respect for the genre, the medium (photography) and the documented places (with their particular cultures and histories). Conner’s photographs invite us to slow down and look carefully. And it is in this way that we might discover, in the space between the subject and object, her persistent gesture of searching.
