ART BASEL MIAMI 2013

For Art Basel Miami Beach, Bruce Silverstein Gallery proposes an exhibition of rare vintage prints from the Equivalents series 1925-34, created by the artist and curator, Alfred Stieglitz.   

Stieglitz’s studies of the sky were made with a hand-held 4 × 5 inch camera. This small, lightweight camera gave him new mobility and enabled him to pursue evocative subjects like clouds that moved and changed too quickly to be captured by a cumber­some view camera. The resulting photographs were less composed, more spontaneous and emotional, than his previous work. He could point his camera in any direction, and so his cloud photo­graphs had no obvious orientation; as he wrote on the backs of several of them, “all ways are right.” With no horizon and no marker to suggest scale, these images were both disorienting and liberating. They were revolutionary and, despite their clear roots in the natural world, abstract.  Stieglitz saw abstraction as the “true medium.”  In his own work and in his promotion of other artists, he sought to prioritize visual and metaphorical abstraction—artworks which communicate the artist’s inner vision and lived experience though a universal, intuitive and spiritually expressive language.