Flower blooms at night invite us to delve into enchanting gardens after dark. Gardens require attention and care, slowly growing and evolving. The gardener must listen and negotiate the vast will and system of its universe. Each plant carries histories, symbolisms, mysteries, and mutations, emerging in these collages as emblems of adaptation. Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to present Night Gardens, a solo exhibition of works by Mary Mattingly on view from December 12, 2024 through February 22, 2025.
Gardens produce food, medicine, fragrances of the earth—flowers, mulch, compost—textures, colors, and life. Birds, insects, and hidden movements stir in the dark, reminders that a garden is a world of its own. In this vibrant exhibition, Mattingly creates hyper-detailed images merging physical and digital realms into magical worlds.
The twelve images in this exhibition are set in riparian zones where biological life responds to shifting water levels; the stories of these precious ecosystems go back to ancient times. In some myths, lotuses and water lilies rise from waters. Similarly, the thistle, both cursed and cherished, embodies resilience, even dispelling melancholy with its roots.
Walking around Socrates Sculpture Park at twilight, the artist became inspired by the moonlit gardens. Mattingly took cuttings, scanned plants, painted and drew flowers, experimented with using fish tanks and mirrors, made flowers out of fabric, and used a digital program to further shape the subjects of her collages. Through these garden scenes, Mattingly “explores how disparate elements—ancient symbols, mythic blooms, evolving plants—come together to speak of survival, imagination, and transformation in a time of environmental upheaval. Night Gardens is an inquiry into the wild and shifting relationships between lifeforms, the self included.” In these images, Mattingly cultivates a garden that begins in reality and transforms into an ethereal myth of what could be. “The garden becomes a miniature world, echoing Foucault’s idea of a symbolic and even sacred enclosure—a universe in-between, where time and space, nature and artifice, history and future all overlap.”
Mattingly’s work has been exhibited at locations including the International Center of Photography, the Seoul Art Center, the Bronx Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Museo National de Belles Artes de la Habana, and the Palais de Tokyo among other venues. Her writings were included in Nature, edited by Jeffrey Kastner in the Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art series. She is a recipient of support from the Guggenheim Foundation, A Blade of Grass, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Art Matters Foundation.
View the exhibition in person and online starting December 12, 2024 - February 22, 2025. Public visiting hours are Tuesday - Friday, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m, with additional Saturday hours on the closing date, February 22, from 12 - 5pm. For additional information and press materials, please contact the gallery by email (mail@robertmann.com).
GOINGS ON: Art
BY THE NEW YORKER
Mary Mattingly’s photographs of moonlit gardens turn the Robert Mann gallery into a hallucinatory hothouse. Vivid and wild with masses of real, handmade, and computer-generated flowers, Mattingly’s compact landscapes are at once otherworldly—sci-fi at its most seductive—and as familiar as natural-history dioramas. But they’re not just pretty pictures. The artist has long been known for work (including site-specific sculpture) that takes on environmental issues with engaging subtlety. Here, the gardens often appear to be sinking or submerged as rising seas threaten to turn earthly Edens into swampland. In one image, translucent, jewel-like jellyfish caps float like a squadron of U.F.O.s above a darkened field of flowers, invaders from our own mutating planet.
—Vince Aletti
bathing in nature
By Aesthetica Magazine
There is no question that spending time in nature is good for your physical and mental health. Mary Mattingly’s (b. 1978) extensive photographs bottle the transformational quality of nature. The artist drew inspiration from a moonlit walk around Socrates Sculpture Park, New York. Informed by the blossoming and changing flora, Night Gardens considers the wild and shifting relationships between different lifeforms, humans included.
Visit Aesthetica Magazine for the full article.
9 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows This Season
BY Magnifissance Magazine
In this mesmerizing series, Mattingly invites viewers into a world where the natural and the surreal collide. The exhibition features twelve meticulously crafted images that explore gardens as evolving ecosystems, brimming with texture, color, and life. By blending physical elements such as plants, flowers, and fabric with digital manipulation, Mattingly creates magical environments that transcend the ordinary.
Visit Magnifissance Magazine for the full article.
Floral Dreams by Artist Mary Mattingly
By MSN
Anyone traveling into New York City from one of the nearby airports can see that here is a natural wetland—one that happens to support millions of people. Rivers and waterways define the lay of the land, feeding into the very close Atlantic Ocean. So photographer Mary Mattingly’s Night Gardens (now showing at Robert Mann Gallery on 26th Street), in which groupings of plants are imagined in a riparian environment, is very much connected with reality.
Visit MSN for the full article.
Mary Mattingly: Night Gardens
by Musée Magazine
The exhibition invites viewers to discover the hidden beauty of gardens at night—an otherworldly realm where the textures, colors, and life of these plants flourish in a way never seen before.
Visit Musée Magazine for the full article.
Night Gardens
By Meer
Flower blooms at night invite us to delve into enchanting gardens after dark. Gardens require attention and care, slowly growing and evolving. The gardener must listen and negotiate the vast will and system of its universe. Each plant carries histories, symbolisms, mysteries, and mutations, emerging in these collages as emblems of adaptation.
Visit Meer for the full article.