CIG HARVEY
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CIG HARVEY (*1973, UK/US)
Bildhalle is proud to announce a new addition to the gallery, the renowned British born artist Cig Harvey, who lives in Maine, USA. We will celebrate our new cooperation with a presentation at Photo London in May and a solo show in Zurich opening on August 31st.
“Photography is about obsessions and Cig Harvey’s twenty-five-year career spans a compulsive relationship with the camera, her compositions rife with lush, saturated intimacy that has transfixed viewers from her adopted home state of Maine to the art world nuclei, New York and Paris. Her work has always incited a jolt, eliciting a reflexive gasp of awe, triggered by memory or emotion. In this regard, her fourth monograph “Blue Violet” is no exception. In fact, the images in the book aren’t about flora. They are however, as she notes compactly, of flowers. They are about living and dying —And most stunningly, Blue Violet is about empathy and the vast potential of beauty — if only for a heartbeat or two — to bridge what seems more and more like irrevocable chasms.
Indeed, Western artists have embraced bright colors and floriography to create symbolism coded within their canvases for centuries. Harvey extends this storied, painterly tradition through her photography, refracting notions of mortality and rebirth. But Cig Harvey pushes the language of flowers well beyond the art historical. Growing roses is an act of courage, Harvey has said. And there are many ways to be brave.
Artists, of course, never produce work or exist in a vacuum; their output is always personal, and thus political. Yet Harvey presents a question we’ve neglected as we ponder art in this period of extreme distance and uncertainty: Could the mere presence of beauty, simply by existing, unite us? Standing before Harvey’s flowers, can we conjure a connection through it, to one other — however fleeting — across this cavernous, dark divide? For Harvey, these photographs are a way to reclaim ownership and agency.”
Jacoba Urist
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Cig Harvey (b. 1973) is a British born artist and writer, who lives in Maine, USA, working in large-format color photography and poetry, whose practice seeks to find the magical in everyday life. She uses both images and language to explore sensory experiences and elevate the everyday. Rich in implied narrative, deeply rooted in the natural world, her work is devoted to the topic of what it is to feel.
She has published four sold out books: You Look At Me Like An Emergency (Schilt Publishing, 2012); Gardening At Night (Schilt Publishing, 2015); You An Orchestra You A Bomb (Schilt Publishing, 2017); Reveal (with Andrea Modica & Debbie Fleming Caffrey; Yoffy Press, 2020); her recent book is called Blue Violet (Monacelli / Phaidon, 2021) was just published in a second edition.
Cig is represented by Robert Mann Gallery (New York) and Jackson Fine Art (Atlanta) in the US, and Bildhalle (Switzerland & The Netherlands) in Europe. She has exhibited worldwide including at Paris Photo, Art Miami, Photo London, and AIPAD (New York) for the past fifteen years.
Her photographs and books are in the permanent collections of many museums across the world including The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); New York Public Library; Yale University; Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, Texas); the Farnsworth Art Museum (Maine, USA); and the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House (New York).
Cig had her first solo museum show at the Stenersen Museum in Oslo, Norway (2012), and a mid-career solo exhibition at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine, USA (2019).
She was awarded the Prix Virginia Laureate (2018), and the Maine in America Award by the Farnsworth Art Museum (2021). She was a nominee for the John Gutmann Fellowship, the Santa Fe Prize, the Prix Pictet, and a finalist for the BMW Prize, the Estee Lauder Collection, the Karl Lagerfeld Collection at Paris Photo, the Clarence John Laughlin Award, and The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize.
Cig Harvey lives in a farmhouse in Maine with her husband Doug and daughter Scout. The slow passing of time and the natural surroundings of her rural home has made her alert to the magic in the mundane.
