Wood Chunk on Pieter Bruegel the Elder Book

This is the gallery’s first project with Abelardo Morell. The work presented now is a photograph of a found block of wood in front of a spread from a book with an illustration of one of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s paintings. When looking at Morell’s photo closely, one can see the differentiation of the half-tone pattern from the illustration in strong contrast with the weathered texture of the actual wood. By presenting these different realities, together, as a photograph, Morell, as he has done for many years, combines multiple realities to give a viewer the opportunity to see equality through time and space.

Abelardo Morell was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948. He immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1962. Morell received his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College and his MFA from The Yale University School of Art. He has received an honorary degree from Bowdoin College in 1997 and from Lesley University in 2014. His publications include a photographic illustration of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Room (1995) by Smithsonian Press, A Book of Books (2002) and Camera Obscura (1998) by Dutton Children’s Books, A Camera in a (2004) by Bulfinch Press and Abelardo Morell published by Phaidon Press, The Universe Next Door (2013), published by The Art Institute of Chicago, Tent-Camera (2005), (2018), published by Nazraeli Press and Flowers for Lisa (2018), published by Abrams Books. He has received a number of awards and grants, which include a Guggenheim fellowship in 1994 and an Infinity Award in Art from ICP in 2011. In November 2017, he received a Lucie Award for achievement in fine art. His work has been collected and shown in many galleries, institutions and museums, including MoMA, NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Victoria & Albert Museum and over seventy other museums in the United States and abroad. A retrospective of his work organized jointly by the Art Institute of Chicago, The Getty in Los Angeles and The High Museum in Atlanta closed in May 2014 after a year of travel. Most recently, his work was included in the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.