On view from 23 November 2024 - 17 February 2025
Abelardo Morell: In the Company of Monet and Constable is a solo exhibition at The Clark Art Institute that showcases over a dozen of the artist’s large-scale photographs. The show in particular focuses on Morell's signature tent-camera artworks that capture and reinterpret the places where leading nineteenth-century landscape painters John Constable (English, 1776–1837) and Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926) made their iconic works, in dialogue with masterpieces from the Clark's permanent collection.
Walking in the paths of Constable and Monet to make pictures in their spirit, Morell has traveled to locations in England and France with a tent-camera, a device that allows him to unite in a single photographic image the features of a landscape view with whatever happens to be underfoot—leaves, blades of grass, pebbles, cobblestones, and so on. Combining picturesque vistas with ground-level natural details, Morell’s luscious color photographs reflect on one’s relation to art as well as nature through their complex fusion of the historical and the contemporary, the transitory and the lasting, the pictorial and the photographic.
