Exhibition: Sally Gall - The Poetics of Place

Robert Klein Gallery is pleased to present Sally Gall: The Poetics of Place, a compositionally vast and technicolor ode to evocations of the summer season, wherever in the world you may find yourself. This online retrospective includes works from seven of Gall’s series, spanning over four decades of her dynamic career. Whether directed heavenward or to the terrains we traverse day by day, the photographs featured in The Poetics of Place retain Gall’s ever-pervasive enchantment with natural spaces and their inhabitants.

... I have photographed the beauty and mystery of the natural world - its elemental and sometimes terrifying aspects, its silence, its persistence. To immerse viewers in a visceral and sensual contemplation of nature and our place within it, I have photographed gardens, cultivated fields, swimmers, jet contrails, the twilight zone in caves, blossoming trees, dramatic skies, and the ground level kingdom of things that creep and crawl.  I photograph with an ever deepening appreciation for how this place shapes us, even as we shape it with our passage.

Sally Gall, born in Washington, D.C. in 1956, earned her BFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1978. Her work explores the intricate relationship between the natural world and humanity, evoking mystery, longing, and trepidation through her portrayal of terrestrial and avian creatures, as well as their environments. In two of her later series, Aerial and Heavenly Creatures, Gall extends her lifelong inquiry into the sensual aspects of nature while adjusting her focus from animate subjects to vibrant garments and kites. Abstracted by composition, context, and color, these zoomorphic images of synthetic materials evoke marine life, celestial bodies, blooming flora, and microscopic organisms. Her newest body of work, entitled Planet, considers the most elemental of the earth's raw materials: rock. In this series, Gall set out to apprehend "richness and movement in what had seemed to [her] before to be an inert world of hardness... this skin of the earth."

Gall has garnered international acclaim, exhibiting across the United States, Canada, Europe, South America, and Asia. Her prestigious awards include two MacDowell Colony Fellowships, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency, and the Director’s Guest Honor at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Her work is held in esteemed collections such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.