Artist: Clifford Ross

Schoelkopf Gallery, one of the world's most trusted authorities in American art, presents Clifford Ross | What Remains..., a solo exhibition showcasing a powerful new series of graphite and ink paintings from 2020–21. This remarkable body of work marks Ross’s return to painting which started in 2013, even while he continued his well known work in photography. The return to painting after more than 20 years allowed for a deep exploration of the interconnection between photography and painting, nature and abstraction—which have always been the main parameters of Ross’s decades-long pursuit of the sublime.

Ross, widely known for his pioneering work in photography and computer-generated animation, began his career as a painter in the slipstream of Abstract Expressionism. His artistic path took an unexpected turn in the mid-1990s when photography became, in his words, a necessity—a visceral need to capture the elemental forces of nature in real-time.

However, painting remained an integral part of his artistic vision, even as a photographer. By 2013, he felt an urgency to return to painting, feeling it was a counterbalance to his work with digital media. This realization led to an entirely new body of work, where photography exists in dynamic conjunction with painted abstract imagery.

What Remains... draws its starting point from Ross’s 2003 high-resolution photograph of Mount Sopris, Colorado, Mountain XIII. This image served as the basis for multiple other artworks including Harmonium Mountain I, a computer-generated video with an original score by Philip Glass (2010), a stunning 28 by 28-foot stained-glass installation, Austin Wall (2012), in the U.S. Federal Courthouse, Austin, Texas, and Sopris Wall, a large-scale print on wood for MASS MoCA (2015). Elements of all three artworks are interwoven underneath the surfaces of his new paintings, creating a rich dialogue between different media and allowing the artist to respond to the natural world with the emotional power of abstraction. As Ross worked on the entirely abstract painting Conversation with a Silent Man, the underlying imagery of Mount Sopris was eliminated, not as an embrace of Rauschenberg's famous work when he erased a de Kooning drawing, but declaring his own belief in abstraction's ability to express our experience with the natural world. The lush and simmering graphite surface evokes the instances of mystery and quiet that he finds in nature.

Ross's process of layering source material from multiple media—photography, computer- generated animation, and stained glass—with lavish applications of liquid graphite creates works that explore both the sublime and the abstract. Ross is inspired by art and literature, and in the process of painting, found this body of work had common cause with Wallace Stevens’s oblique use of language – hence, the titles of the majority of the work in the exhibition derive from Stevens's poetry. Stevens’s poem, An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, explores the tension between the half that is illuminated and the half that remains in shadow—concepts that resonate throughout Ross’s What Remains..., where nature’s grandeur coexists with its mysteries.

Ross has spent decades immersed in nature, from photographing mountains to capturing hurricane waves by camera while neck-deep in the surf. “Nature provides a symphonic and complex experience,” says Clifford Ross. “Cacophony and silence, clarity and obscurity, stillness and tumult. It's an endless source of wonder, and a never-ending job express it. Artists like me have job security.”

Ross’s last solo painting exhibition took place in 1994. Now, three decades later, What Remains... marks a profound return, merging his multi-media practice with the immediacy of graphite and ink.

“Seeing this body of work is revelatory,” said Alana Ricca, Managing Director of Schoelkopf Gallery. “Ross’s iterative and relentless pursuit of abstraction has this sense of incredible urgency and stillness at the same time, just as is our experience of nature. Schoelkopf Gallery is delighted to present this exhibition, as we expect it will be equally as surprising to those familiar and unfamiliar with Ross’s work.”

Clifford Ross’s What Remains... is an immersive exploration of nature’s continuous transformation—through light, color, and form—and a testament to the artist’s unwavering commitment to reimagining the world around him.