Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to announce Cig Harvey: Blue Violet, the artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. Harvey’s work is rich with the emotion and awe she is able to elicit through her depictions of the natural world and the magic within it. Her photographs, abundant with color, implied texture, and even scent, explore the five senses, bringing the viewer to the brink of saturation. This collection of photographs is both emotional and celebratory, filled with intense color, light and shadows.
The series, infused with flowers, speaks to the procession of seasons and transitional times. In the image, Scout & The Disco Ball, Harvey plays with dramatic, yet somehow gentle, atmospheric light. The lights from the disco ball appear to dance against the rustic wood walls. Poppies (floating) plays with the delicate line between life and decay. The viewer witnesses the vibrancy of the red and white poppies floating in the river, but is extremely aware of their fragility.
This exhibition opens in conjunction with the release of Harvey’s highly anticipated new monograph, Blue Violet. Blue Violet is part art book, part botanical guide, part historical encyclopedia, and part poetry collection all coming together in one rich volume. The artist will be present to sign books on May 6th, please contact the gallery to schedule your visit.
Cig Harvey's work is included in permanent collections of major institutions including, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine. Harvey was named one of the 2021 recipients of the Farnsworth’s Maine in America Award and was named the 2018 Prix Virginia Laureate, an international photography award based out of Paris, among many other honors. Harvey has published three previous sold out monographs (Schilt Publishing) the first of which: You Look At Me Like An Emergency (Schilt Publishing, 2012), was accompanied by a solo museum show at the Stenersen Museum in Oslo, Norway in Spring 2012. The artist lives and works in rural Maine.
Please contact the gallery for viewing hours, or view the exhibition online, from May 6 - August 20, 2021. For additional information and press materials, please contact the gallery by email (mail@robertmann.com).
New & Noteworthy Visual Books, From Queer Love to the Soul of a Nation
BY The New York Times
Blue Violet, by Cig Harvey. (Monacelli, $60.) A British fine art photographer, Harvey celebrates the natural world through images, poems, diagrams — even recipes. This collection of her work is accompanied by text from Jacoba Urist, a journalist who covers art and architecture.
New reads for plant lovers
Leaf through these delicious botanical books
BY The Financial times
There is precedence for being drawn to colour and nature when dying or surrounded by death,” writes photographer and writer Cig Harvey in her new monograph. Josef Albers dedicated his last years to the study of colour, she continues, while Derek Jarman wrote Chroma, a garden journal, while dying of an Aids-related illness. To this history, Harvey has added her own contribution: a photographic meditation on flowers and colour that was born when a sick friend asked her to send her new pictures every day as she gradually lost her senses. The result is a glorious, sensual, poignant collection of botanical photographs, drawings and writings, which is part-art book, part-historical guide and part-poetry collection.