Gregory Crewdson (b. 1962)

Gregory Crewdson (b. 1962)
Production Still (Brightview #2)
signed, numbered and dated 'Gregory Crewdson 9/20 2003' (lower right margin)
digital c-print
image: 12 x 16in. (30.5 x 40.6cm.)
sheet: 14 x 18¼in. (35.6 x 46.2cm.)
Executed in 2003, this work is number nine from an edition of twenty

Provenance:
Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York.
Anon. sale, Phillips New York, 8 April 2006, lot 151.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

Specialist Notes:

Gregory Crewdson's Production Stills form part of the visual material foro the artist’s decade long project, Beneath the Roses. Situated in Western Massachusetts, Crewdson’s use of film production techniques succeeds in creating moments of tension, where the viewer feels something has just happened or is about to, the atmosphere heavy with possibility. ‘In all of my photographs I’m very much interested in creating tension; between domesticity and nature, the normal and the paranormal, or artifice and reality, or what’s familiar and what’s mysterious’ the artist explains, ‘We could call that an interest in the uncanny: the terrifying and the familiar. I intentionally ground all these mysterious or unknowable events within a recognizable and iconic situation, which is the domestic American landscape’ (G. Crewdson, quoted in B. Morrow, ‘Gregory Crewdson’, in Bomb, no. 61, Fall 1997). It is a quality that the artist calls a ‘sense of in-between-ness’ that he finds proliferates his art most eloquently at twilight, as evidenced in the present work. Indeed in much of Crewdson’s art, twilight acts figuratively and literally as a backdrop to the possibility of the inexplicable or even disturbing to proliferate in the American suburban landscape.

Indeed, the American landscape often seems to be the ultimate protagonist of Crewdson’s art. Speaking of his art, Elisabeth Donnelly notes ‘His work has to the power to linger in the brain long after seeing it: on days when the light filters just so through the trees, when an average, mundane moment takes on the qualities of eerie, ethereal beauty, it’s very easy to identify it as a Gregory Crewdson moment, a particular alchemy of the earthbound and the spectral’ (E. Donnelly, ‘Magic Hour: An Interview with Gregory Crewdson’, in The Paris Review, 27 September 2012).

Please note this lot is the property of a consumer. See H1 of the Conditions of Sale.