PARIS.- American artist Gregory Crewdson is unveiling his latest work in Paris this autumn with “Eveningside”, a series of black-and-white pieces created between 2021 and 2022. This final instalment in a trilogy he has been working on since 2012 features twenty panoramic photographs characterised by their disturbing clarity and twilight mood.
A pioneer of large-scale photography, Gregory Crewdson has been developing a unique photographic language over the last thirty years. Each shot is the result of a lengthy pre-production process involving storyboards, actors, set building, technicians, special effects and sophisticated lighting.
The “Eveningside” exhibition was held this summer as part of a retrospective at the Arles Rencontres de la photographie event (France). Gregory Crewdson uses it to push the boundary between reality and fiction even further. He invents ambiguous suburban landscapes where the motionlessness of the characters, frozen in the most ordinary of daily activities, is both fascinating and disquieting. A fictional portrait of an America in an unidentifiable era, the scenes depict solitary figures, often captured through a complex interplay of mirrors, storefronts or places of transition: bridges, porches, mini-markets and hardware stores. His black-and-white palette draws skilfully on a series of special effects – fog, smoke and rain – to create atmospheres as melancholy as they are gothic, bringing to mind classical cinema, film noir and the realism of Edward Hopper’s paintings.
Gregory Crewdson's work oscillates between the vulnerability of the human condition and the paradoxes of the American dream. The complexity of the monochrome tones and their strange beauty offer a powerful metaphor for the unendurable limits of our hyper-connected world, digital and blinded. Crewdson is never didactic, leaving the viewer free to imagine the stories hidden beneath the surface and dream of other possibilities.
Born in 1962 in Brooklyn, Gregory Crewdson lives and works in New York and Massachusetts. He studied at SUNY Purchase, New York, then at Yale School of Art, where he is professor and director of graduate studies in photography. His work has been widely exhibited and collected by numerous museums, including, in New York, the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. In Europe, he recently exhibited his work at the Rencontres de la photographie in Arles, France (2023), at Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, Italy (2022), the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń, Poland (2018), The Photographer's Gallery, London (2018) and FRAC Auvergne in Clermont-Ferrand (2017). Galerie Templon showed part one of his trilogy, “Cathedral of the Pines”, in 2017 and part two, “An Eclipse of Moths”, in 2020. He has been represented by Galerie Templon since 2004 and this will be his fifth exhibition with the gallery.
