Hamiltons is delighted to announce New York – all seasons & Summer Still Lifes I-V, the second solo show of photographs by Philippe Garner at Hamiltons.The exhibition comprises vibrant colour images taken between 2000 and 2018 inNew York – ‘the American city that has proved my most frequent and insistentsubject’, says Garner – and Summer Still Lifes taken in the south of France in thesummers of 1983 and 1984, presented for the first time in the gallery.
Garner took his first US pictures in October 1973 in Richmond, Virginia. In 1976, he
made his first pictures in Miami, then in 1977 in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. ‘Like
others of my generation,’ he explains, ‘I was inspired by an idea of this vast country,
an idea fuelled by the movies, music, magazines, TV, radical art, and certain strands
of literature. I nurtured my version of the American Dream and have endeavoured
through half a century to fix traces of that fiction in my open-ended portfolio of
pictures.
In marked contrast to these spontaneous observational pictures, we discover the
lovingly contrived symbolism of Garner’s suite of five Summer Still Life
compositions. As he tells us, ‘I am delighted by the way people have responded to
these images. These intimate still lifes – made for my own amusement forty-plus
years ago – are intensely personal yet capable, it would appear, of engaging an
audience across the generations.’
Philippe Garner, Liberty, New York, June 2012 © Philippe Garner
