Yancey Richardson

Known for his documentary approach to subjects that range from sublime to ironic, the California-based artist John Divola has mined the territory between photography and conceptual art for more than 40 years. Two of his best-known and iconic series from the 1990s will be on view at Yancey Richardson from June 1 through July 7, 2023. In "Isolated Houses" Divola uses the vernacular architecture of the California desert to explore existential themes of isolation and desire. "Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert" reveals the age-old chase between man and beast with a wry and philosophical edge. Photographed between 1995 and 1998, the images in "Isolated Houses" were all made in the high desert of Southern California, including the east end of the Morongo Valley Basin, Wonder Valley, and surrounding the town of 29 Palms. The small, simple box-like structures sitting alone on the vast desert plain are framed in square compositions, echoing the geometry of the flat landscape. They capsulize the artist’s career-long interest in the tension between specificity and abstraction in photography. Illuminated by the extraordinary western light, the structures wear their neglect with a dignity that elevates their humble existence. The artist notes, “The desert is not empty. However, it is vacant enough to bestow a certain weight to whatever is present. Add this to a heightened awareness of your own presence and the desert can take on an existential quality.” While traversing the desert region working on Isolated Houses, Divola frequently came across dogs who would chase his car. In 1996, he started to capture portraits of the dogs while in motion with a motorized 35 mm camera and high-speed film, evoking the spirit of Eadweard Muybridge’s exploration of stop motion photography. The work resulted in the now classic series "Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert," a collection of grainy, black and white images that look at the herding relationship between man and animal with a slightly comic approach. “With one hand on the steering wheel, I would hold the camera out the window and expose anywhere from a few frames to a complete roll of film,” Divola explained. “Contemplating a dog chasing a car invites any number of metaphors and juxtapositions: culture and nature, the domestic and the wild, love and hate, joy and fear, the heroic and the idiotic. Here we have two vectors and velocities, that of a dog and that of a car and, seeing that a camera will never capture reality and that a dog will never catch a car, evidence of devotion to a hopeless enterprise.” Born in Los Angeles in 1949, Divola earned a B.A. from California State University, Northridge in 1971 and an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles in 1974, where he studied under photographer Robert Heinecken. Since 1975, he has taught photography and art at numerous institutions including California Institute of the Arts (1978-1988), and since 1988 he has been a Professor of Art at the University of California, Riverside. Divola was featured in the 1981 and 2017 Whitney Biennials and was the subject of a three-museum retrospective in 2013 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Pomona College Museum of Art. His various projects have been published in 11 monographs. Since 1975, Divola’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in the United States, Japan, Europe, Mexico, and Australia, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center; Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Modern; and Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain. Divola’s work is held in numerous prestigious collections including multiple New York institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Tate, London; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Among Divola’s awards are multiple Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1976, 1979, 1990), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1986), a Fintridge Foundation Fellowship (1998), a City of Los Angeles Artist Grant (1999), and a California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship (1998).

Known for his documentary approach to subjects that range from sublime to ironic, the California-based artist John Divola has mined the territory between photography and conceptual art for more than 40 years. Two of his best-known and iconic series from the 1990s will be on view at Yancey Richardson from June 1 through July 7, 2023. In "Isolated Houses" Divola uses the vernacular architecture of the California desert to explore existential themes of isolation and desire. "Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert" reveals the age-old chase between man and beast with a wry and philosophical edge. Photographed between 1995 and 1998, the images in "Isolated Houses" were all made in the high desert of Southern California, including the east end of the Morongo Valley Basin, Wonder Valley, and surrounding the town of 29 Palms. The small, simple box-like structures sitting alone on the vast desert plain are framed in square compositions, echoing the geometry of the flat landscape. They capsulize the artist’s career-long interest in the tension between specificity and abstraction in photography. Illuminated by the extraordinary western light, the structures wear their neglect with a dignity that elevates their humble existence. The artist notes, “The desert is not empty. However, it is vacant enough to bestow a certain weight to whatever is present. Add this to a heightened awareness of your own presence and the desert can take on an existential quality.” While traversing the desert region working on Isolated Houses, Divola frequently came across dogs who would chase his car. In 1996, he started to capture portraits of the dogs while in motion with a motorized 35 mm camera and high-speed film, evoking the spirit of Eadweard Muybridge’s exploration of stop motion photography. The work resulted in the now classic series "Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert," a collection of grainy, black and white images that look at the herding relationship between man and animal with a slightly comic approach. “With one hand on the steering wheel, I would hold the camera out the window and expose anywhere from a few frames to a complete roll of film,” Divola explained. “Contemplating a dog chasing a car invites any number of metaphors and juxtapositions: culture and nature, the domestic and the wild, love and hate, joy and fear, the heroic and the idiotic. Here we have two vectors and velocities, that of a dog and that of a car and, seeing that a camera will never capture reality and that a dog will never catch a car, evidence of devotion to a hopeless enterprise.” Born in Los Angeles in 1949, Divola earned a B.A. from California State University, Northridge in 1971 and an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles in 1974, where he studied under photographer Robert Heinecken. Since 1975, he has taught photography and art at numerous institutions including California Institute of the Arts (1978-1988), and since 1988 he has been a Professor of Art at the University of California, Riverside. Divola was featured in the 1981 and 2017 Whitney Biennials and was the subject of a three-museum retrospective in 2013 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Pomona College Museum of Art. His various projects have been published in 11 monographs. Since 1975, Divola’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in the United States, Japan, Europe, Mexico, and Australia, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center; Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Modern; and Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain. Divola’s work is held in numerous prestigious collections including multiple New York institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Tate, London; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Among Divola’s awards are multiple Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1976, 1979, 1990), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1986), a Fintridge Foundation Fellowship (1998), a City of Los Angeles Artist Grant (1999), and a California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship (1998).

Water That Dreams, an exhibition of photographs by Czech born, German based artist Jitka Hanzlová, will be on view at Yancey Richardson in Chelsea from April 13 to May 26. Selected from Hanzlová’s extended project WATER 2013-2019, the 46 intimate color photographs will be presented for the first time in the U.S. Known for her poetic approach to landscape, portraiture and still life, in her series WATER 2013-2019, Hanzlová has turned her attention towards the essential and the elemental, exploring water in all its different states of being: liquid, gaseous, solid. The exhibition features selections from six chapters of WATER: Ur, Ice, Clouds, Human Dark, Human Light, and Silent Blue.

Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Morandi’s Books, photographs by Mary Ellen Bartley, on view from October 27 through December 23, 2022. Morandi’s Books springs from Bartley’s 2020 residency at Casa Morandi in Bologna, Italy, where she was invited to work with the personal library of Giorgio Morandi, the twentieth-century Italian artist whose quiet still life paintings have been an important source of inspiration from the beginning of her practice.

Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Albeit, an exhibition of photographs by Laura Letinsky. Comprised of photographic assemblages made in 2013 using a flatbed scanner and magazines, the exhibition demonstrates Letinsky’s innovative approach to still life. These early forays in substituting printed matter in place of objects in the studio are being exhibited for the first time, and display experimental methods later developed in her series: Ill Form & Void Full (2014), To Want for Nothing (2019), A Blind Promise Or, A Rash Boon (2020).

Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Screened Pictures X, an exhibition of photographs by Anthony Hernandez showcasing the most recent development in the artist’s career-long exploration of the urban landscape of his native Los Angeles.

Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Swimming Drunk, an exhibition of photographs by John Divola. The exhibition includes two photographic series that represent the breadth of the artist’s more than 40 year career: Zuma Series (1977-1978), and Daybreak (2015-2020). Both series are a result of Divola’s engagement with abandoned buildings, and his interest in transforming a situation through photography. Thus, the photographs do not serve as mere descriptions of the scenes depicted but instead are offered as artifacts from the artist’s physical and experiential interventions within these environments.

Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Awe Maaah!, an exhibition of new paintings and photographs by South African artist and visual activist Zanele Muholi. Internationally acclaimed as a photographer, this is the first large-scale exhibition of Muholi’s paintings and the artist’s fourth solo show with the gallery.

Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Naïveté, an exhibition of new photographs, collage and fabric sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist David Alekhuogie. Informed by his 2019 trip to Nigeria, the birthplace of his father, Alekhuogie’s recent work incorporates African sculpture and textiles to question the route through which African Americans become cognizant of their cultural heritage, authorship, and the hierarchy of art versus craft. A selection of works from the artist’s 2018 series To Live and Die in LA will be featured in the project gallery. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery.

Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Temporarily Censored Home, Guanyu Xu’s debut exhibition with the gallery. Since 2018, Beijing-born, Chicago-based artist Guanyu Xu has secretly created photographic installations throughout his childhood home in Beijing in order to queer his parents’ domestic space, transforming it into a scene of revelation, protest and reclamation. Using collected images from Western film and fashion magazines, photographs from family albums, as well as portraits of himself with other gay men, Xu enacts a deeply intimate and political performance.

Yancey Richardson is pleased to present East Meets West, a selection of photographic self-portraits made between 1979 and 1987 by Tseng Kwong Chi (1950 - 1990). Combining performance and photography, political satire and personal identity, Tseng’s pioneering series exemplifies the art of the eighties while anticipating the social, political and philosophical themes of the present day.

Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Itteki, an exhibition of new work by Japanese artist Yamamoto Masao. Focusing on Bonsai, the Japanese art of cultivating miniaturized potted trees, this series of toned, gelatin silver prints continues Yamamoto’s exploration of the emotional power of photography through landscape and his surrounding environment.