Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce Topographies, an exhibition of drawings and photographic works by Michelle Stuart.  

Michelle Stuart is known for a rich and diverse practice, including site-specific earth works, intimate drawings, multimedia installations, paintings, sculpture and photographs all centered on a lifelong interest in the natural world and the cosmos.  

Her work questions conventional notions of drawing as it merges performative rubbing and frottage gestures with elements of the landscape itself. Stuart brings forth imagery by both adding natural materials and revealing the texture of the earth, combining the fundamentals of both drawing and photography.  

One of the exhibition highlights will be #9 Zena. This iconic scroll will be accompanied by a selection of works on paper ranging from early collages such as Traces, to more recent indexical works in which earth and seeds are pressed and merged into her paper supports.  

In the second gallery, a selection of her cinematic photographic grids contrasts Dark Energy's images of the cosmos with the walk-about narratives of The Beginning, Islas Encantadas and Past Shadows, Orkney.

Each work is a unique meditation on the nature of memory, composed of separate images digitally printed on sheets of archival paper. The individual panels feature untouched and altered elements, including appropriated vintage images and her own photographs, combined in a filmic manner. These dreamlike recollections of her past not only continue her life-long artistic engagement with specific locations but affirm the significance of place as a unique source of memory.  

Born in Los Angeles, Michelle Stuart lived in Mexico City and Paris before arriving in New York in the late 1950s, where she continues to live and work. Her most recent solo exhibition, Michelle Stuart: Drawn from Nature, originated in 2013 at the Djanogly Art Gallery, Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham, UK and traveled to the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, accompanied by a catalogue published by Hatje Cantz. Stuart’s work has also been the focus of solo shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; and many other major museums and galleries worldwide.

She has participated in numerous group shows and international surveys ranging from Documenta VI, Kassel in 1977 to Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Haus der Kunst, Munich in 2012. Stuart’s work was featured in Apparition: Frottages from 1860 to Now, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. This exhibition traveled to the Menil Collection in Houston in September, 2015.

Major works by the artist were recently acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and are also in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and many other distinguished institutions.