Twilight: Photographs by Gregory Crewdson

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Deeply influenced by film and literature, Gregory Crewdson is currently one of the most technically meticulous and surreal Contemporary photographers of the recent decade whose works have left an indelible mark on the world of photography. Crewdson was born in 1962 in Brooklyn, New York City, where he schooled at John Dewey High School. Gregory Crewdson saw his early career in music after he joined a band called The Speedies, who released their hit song Let Me Take Your Photo in 1979. In some photographs, the subjects seem occupied with peculiar domestic activities such as carving holes in the middle of a standard bedroom. In others, a bunch of brightly colored butterflies seems to escape from a garden. Gregory Crewdson – Untitled (Bedroom tree) from Twilight, 2001 – 2002 Gregory Crewdson – Untitled (Ophelia) from Twilight, 1998-2002 Analysis Imperfect Innocence, The Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Lake Worth, USA In the series Twilight, Crewdson explores the iconography of the American suburban landscape and nature, revealing psychological anxieties, fears, and longings. Domestic settings (denoted by all their traditional trappings of soap boxes, milk containers, detergent boxes, etc.) are often shown on the edge of nature, threatening to disrupt its fragile balance. These scenes of the twilight hour, when both natural and artificial lights are present, suggest a moment of metamorphosis.

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of twenty new photographs by Gregory Crewdson. Crewdson continues his ongoing series of elaborately staged, large-scale color photographs that explore the psychological underside of the American vernacular. The photographs combine a realist aesthetic sensibility with a highly orchestrated interplay of cinematic lighting, staging, and special effects. This collision between the normal and the paranormal produces a tension that serves to transform the topology of the suburban landscape into a place of wonder and anxiety.Ranging in appearance from avant garde installation pieces of gloom and organic matter to stills from a lost David Lynch movie, this collection's constructed photographic art pieces reverberate with one theme:

What I am interested in is that moment of transcendence, where one is transported into another place, into a perfect, still world. When I was 10, my father brought me to a Diane Arbus exhibition. He was a psychoanalyst and those pictures have a certain psychological quality, so somehow I made a connection between what he did as a job and Arbus looking for secrets. It wasn’t like I decided I was going to be a photographer exactly then. But that was the first time I understood the power of photographs and so I probably filed that away somewhere as a defining memory. Crewdson’s emblematic series Twilight (1998–2002) ushers the viewer into a nocturnal arena of alienation and desire that is at once forbidding and darkly magnetic. In these lush photographs, the elements intervene unexpectedly and alarmingly into suburban domestic space. Crewdson’s psychological realism is tempered in these images by their heightened theatricality, while themes of memory and imagination, the banal and the fantastic, function in concert with a narrative of pain and redemption that runs through American history and its picturing. This area of pristine terrain has served as a retreat for Crewdson throughout his career and provided him with a model of American life. Finding his Style Most of the photographs challenge the viewer to construct a narrative from the visual clues delivered in these moments of stasis which seem to precede or follow a dramatic event, some sort of violence that contrasts sharply with the stillness of the scene portrayed;With a budget similar to that of an independent movie, Crewdson transforms his real, suburban settings into entirely fictional worlds. Contemporary Photography in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, USA Ed Rucha. Photographs: Recent Aquisitions Paintings and Sculptures, Fisher Landau Center for Art, Long Island City, USA

His work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art. New York, New York: Fifty Years of Art, Architecture, Photography, Film and Video, Grimaldi Forum, Monaco Contemporary American Photography 1970-2000, From the Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Samsung Museum of Modern Art, Seoul, KoreaThe settings are all suburban, and the spectrum of wrongness extends from just a hint of tone to the nightmarish: Crewdson’s photography became a convoluted mix between his formal photography education and his experimentation with the ethereal perspective of life and death, a transcending mix of lively pigmentation and morbid details within a traditional suburbia setting. Crewdson was unknowingly in the making of the Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art, earning him a following both from his previous educators and what would become his future agents and promoters of his work. The grotesque yet beautifully created scenes were just the beginning of Crewdson’s work, all affected with the same narrative mystery he was so inspired by in his childhood and keen eye for the surreal within the regular. Fireflies, has become a standout amongst his collections known for their heightened emotion and drama compared to its simplicity of color and spontaneity. the exploration of form within his own work was evident within his transformation of how the photo was taken rather than just focusing on the subject. A Thousand Hounds. A Walk with the Dogs Through the History of Photography, UBS PaineWebber Art Gallery, New York, USA During this time, Crewdson worked at Aperture magazine and also did an internship at the Daniel Wolf Gallery in Manhattan. In this series of photographs, Crewdson does a great job of employing a directorial and cinematic mode of photography that can only occur due to weeks of planning and behind the scenes organization and production.