About this item
Best known for his surreal camera obscura pictures and luminous black-and-white photographs of books, photographer Abelardo Morell now turns his transformative lens to one of the most common of artistic subjects, the flower. The concept for Flowers for Lisa emerged when Morell gave his wife, Lisa, a photograph of flowers on her birthday. "Flowers are part of a long tradition of still life in art," writes Morell. "Precisely because flowers are such a conventional subject, I felt a strong desire to describe them in new, inventive ways." With nods to the work of Jan Brueghel, douard Manet, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ren Magritte, and others, Morell does just that; the images are as innovative as they are arresting.
About the Author
abelardomorell.netAbelardo Morell was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948. He immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1962. Morell received his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College and his MFA from The Yale University School of Art. He has received an honorary degree from Bowdoin College in 1997 and from Lesley University in 2014.His publications include a photographic illustration of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland(1998) by Dutton Children's Books, A Camera in a Room(1995) by Smithsonian Press, A Book of Books(2002) and Camera Obscura (2004) by Bulfinch Press andAbelardo Morell(2005) , published by Phaidon Press. The Universe Next Door(2013) , published by The Art Institute of Chicago. Tent-Camera (2018) , published by Nazraeli Press. His most recent body of work Flowers for Lisa will be published by Abrams in October 2018.He has received a number of awards and grants, which include a Guggenheim fellowship in 1994 and an Infinity Award in Art from ICP in 2011. In November 2017, he received a Lucie Award for achievement in fine art.His work has been collected and shown in many galleries, institutions and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York, The Chicago Art Institute, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Houston Museum of Art, The Boston Museum of Fine Art, The Victoria & Albert Museum and over seventy other museums in the United States and abroad. A retrospective of his work organized jointly by the Art Institute of Chicago, The Getty in Los Angeles and The High Museum in Atlanta closed in May 2014 after a year of travel. This November, he will have a show of his work Flowers for Lisa on display at Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York City.
