michael kenna
oh the places you'll go!

DECEMBER 11, 2014 — JANUARY 31, 2015
press release   images

From China to France to New Zealand, Michael Kenna has sought out the earth’s splendid and sublime. In his intimate portraits of place, the artist’s keen sense of light, form, and balance transcend the “where” and “what” and invite us into moments of permeating tranquility, commanding grandeur, or effervescent whimsy. Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to announce Oh The Places You’ll Go!, an exploration of the wonderful wide world captured by Michael Kenna’s prodigious lens.

Coinciding with the release of his new monograph, France, the exhibition will feature a number of recent photographs spanning the breadth of the nation’s iconic and lesser-known sites. The Louvre glows luminescent and majestic across the Seine, a disconnected dock in Nice floats hauntingly from its foggy moor, and a filigree of vines envelop an old country home. New snowscapes from Kenna’s classic Japan series inhabit a spare abstraction as dotted snowtracks, slim fence poles, and sloping hillsides irrupt the smooth white canvas. And closer to home, a bevy of hot-air balloons float buoyantly in the New Mexico sky, sailing off to a new adventure.

Michael Kenna is one of the most widely exhibited and beloved photographers working today. Recent retrospectives of his work include those at the the Tacoma Art Museum, 2012; Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2011; Palazzo Magnani Museum in Reggio Emilia, Italy, 2010; and Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 2009. Kenna's photographs are included in many public collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Shanghai Art Museum; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; the Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Born in Widnes, England in 1953, Kenna currently lives and works in Seattle, Washington.