SALLY MANN – REMEMBERED LIGHT
2016-09-12Mann is known and regarded for her images of intimate and familiar subjects rendered sublime and disquieting: children, landscape, family, and the nature of mortality. In previous projects, she explored relationships between parent and child, husband and wife, brother and sister, nature and history. In her latest exhibition of photographs spanning more than a decade, she records in fleeting impressions the working habitat of the late Cy Twombly, her close friend and mentor.
Twombly and Mann are both natives of Virginia. The landscape to which Twombly returned each year is also the memoryscape of Mann’s connection to him. This was documented in her recent and celebrated memoir Hold Still, in which she recalls his elemental nature, his southern courtesy, his wry and gentle humor. Recalling her time with Twombly, Mann writes, “Our part of the South, remote, beautiful, and patinaed with the past, allows us such a remove, the distance of another time.”
Under Mann’s gaze, and the warm light of Virginia, the accumulations and ordinary objects in Twombly’s studio reveal themselves not only as evidence of a richly imaginative and cultivated life lived and marked by tactility, but also as the overflow of his general modus operandi—in Simon Schama’s words, “the leftovers, smears, and stains, and an absence turned into a presence.” In images such as Remembered Light, Untitled (Angled Light) (1999–2000), the unremarkable passage of time is evoked, as well as the willed quietude that surrounded Twombly’s creative existence. With Remembered Light, Untitled (Squat White Sculpture and Paint Edges) (2012), Mann indicates the haptic processes leading to the creation of one of his sculptures. Even without the artist’s actual presence, Mann is able to vividly evoke the human traces evident in daily life and work.
Opposite – Untitled (Slippers and Flare), 2005
Exhibition runs through till October 29th, 2016
Gagosian Gallery
976 Madison Avenue
New York
NY 10075
