Bing Wright. Broken Mirror / Evening Sky (Anscochrome), 2012 © Bing Wright. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Paula Cooper Gallery 534 WEST 21ST STREET NY 10011 New York France
NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent photographs, scrolls and an installation of custom wallpaper by Bing Wright. The exhibition will be on view at 521 West 21st Street from December 10 – January 18.
The exhibition presents the series, Broken Mirror / Evening Sky in which Wright photographs a setting sun seen through broken mirrors. Incorporating color for the first time in almost a decade, Wright’s new photographs are richly luminescent. Cracked glass seemingly generates doubled reflections, disjointed gleams and refracted light into shards of images. Fragmented glass is the subject of another recent body of work on view, Broken Mirror on Mirror, which extends the artist’s engagement with depth of field, scale, surface and materiality.
Wright’s attention to the physical within what is normally perceived as an immaterial process of image production is central to Silver on Mirror, a photographic series in the format of wallpaper. In this work, Wright considers the role of silver in the historical process of photographic printing. “With silver being the building block of photography,” Wright states, “I decided to focus on the subject of silver itself; making ‘silver prints’ that were literally images of silver.” Made in collaboration with the textile company Maharam, the wallpaper presents an expansive field of silver leaf flakes on glass. The metallic solids and soft shadows form a combination described as “elegy meets alchemy” by The New York Times art critic Karen Rosenberg.
A quietly elegiac and ephemeral quality also permeates Wright’s three scroll works on view. Fabricated to replicate those of traditional Chinese and Japanese origin, the scrolls present continuous photographic imagery of scattered remains as extended narrative.
Bing Wright was born in Seattle in 1958 and received a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Columbia University, New York. His work been shown in exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; White Columns, New York; the Queens Museum of Art, New York; and the Tang Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, among others. His work is in several public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Portland Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase Bank, and Citigroup. Wright recently curated an exhibition of 1970s photography from the collection of the Washington Art Consortium. He lives and works in New York City.