NEW YORK, NY.- CLAMP will present “Bill Armstrong | All a Blur,” a retrospective exhibition spanning more than two decades of work by the New York-based artist. Bringing together seminal bodies of work from Armstrong’s ongoing “Infinity” series—including “Mandalas,” “Portraits,” “Film Noir,” “Renaissance,” “Falling Through History,” and others—the show offers a comprehensive view of a practice devoted to color, perception, transcendence, and the psychological charge of the image.
Since the early 2000s, Armstrong has developed a distinctive photographic process that begins with found imagery drawn from diverse sources, including Renaissance drawings, cinematic stills, and art-historical figures. Printed reproductions are reworked with paint and collage and photographed in close range with the camera lens set at infinity—a deliberate subversion of photographic convention. The resulting images are radically out of focus, dissolving form and de-materializing the subject. Hovering between representation and abstraction, Armstrong’s photographs occupy a liminal space—at once corporeal and spectral.
Across Armstrong’s work, recurring motifs of suspension, falling, and solitude function as metaphors for spiritual inquiry and human vulnerability. The early “Mandala” photographs are non-representational images of concentric circles that refer to central themes in Buddhism such as the Wheel of Life and the Map of the Cosmos. In “Renaissance,” appropriated drawings from the 15th and 16th centuries are transformed into lush fields of color, with isolated figures dramatizing and expanding epic themes from the original source material. Other bodies of work, such as “Film Noir,” introduce lone figures drawn from cinematic narratives, suspended in moments of ethical and psychological ambiguity.
The exhibition culminates with recent photographs such as those from “Falling Through History,” a series that assembles falling figures appropriated from across Western art history, extracting them from their historical moment and connecting them in a continuous stream that transcends period, style, and subject matter. Referencing subjects as varied as Icarus, acrobats, divers, and dancers, the work collapses distinctions between terror and joy, failure and grace. Some figures appear to plunge, others to levitate, suggesting that falling itself is not the problem—but rather the uncertainty of the landing. Created on the eve of global upheaval, the series resonates with contemporary anxieties while maintaining Armstrong’s enduring interest in transcendence and the possibility of a momentary state of grace.
Bill Armstrong is an internationally acclaimed fine art photographer. His “Infinity” series has been exhibited in over 30 solo and 100 group exhibitions over the past 25 years. Mr. Armstrong’s work was featured in “A Matter of Light: Inside the Vatican Museums,” a special project shot in the Sistine Chapel that is now a permanent installation at the foot of the stairs to the chapel in the Vatican Museums.
His work is represented in many other museum collections as well, including the Victoria & Albert Museum; The J. Paul Getty Museum; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Norton Museum of Art; Fogg Museum; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Photo Elysée; and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. His photographs have been published in more than 16 books on photography, including the cover of Lyle Rexer’s Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (Aperture). Mr. Armstrong is on the faculty of International Center of Photography and was on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts from 2003-2022.
The exhibition coincides with the publication of
Bill Armstrong: All a Blur—Photographs from the Infinity Series (Axiomatic Editions, a new imprint of ORO Editions).
