Spandita Malik Wins The V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography 2025

An annual initiative dedicated to identifying, supporting, and championing innovative women artists working in the field of contemporary photography

This year the V&A Parasol Prize for Women in Photography invited photographers to respond to the concept of 'unity'. 

In Jāḷī—Meshes of Resistance, artist Spandita Malik continues her work within rural women's communities in her home country of India. Against a backdrop of gendered violence, Malik works with the women to capture intimate, self-directed portraits which she prints onto local cloth, echoing Ghandi's khadi and India’s fight for independence. The women then add delicate embroidery, shaping the ways they wish to be seen or obscured. Malik says that together the women are 'enmeshing themselves in a stronger fabric of resistance, one stitch at a time.'

To read the full article please visit V&A's website.

Virginia Quarterly Review | Beauty Is the Only Language Worth Speaking

Photography and Essay by Cig Harvey : A Color Manifesto

Deep inside our eyes, next to the dark velvet lake of the aqua vitreous, are cones and rods. The rods allow us to see in the gloaming, but only in grayscale. The cones are responsible for color, but they need light to work.

The camera sees things differently than our eyes do. This is the reason photographing at night is so addictive. The camera becomes the youthful eye. The camera is an owl. We are shown something outside of typical human perception.

We have three types of cone receptors in each eye: red, green, and blue. If you stare at a slice of red velvet cake for one minute and then look at a white wall, you will see that cake projected in a verdant bluish green. This is because your red cones are now exhausted. Certain animals have more cone receptors than humans do and can see well beyond our red-to-violet light spectrum. Butterflies have at least five kinds of cones. Mantis shrimp have as many as sixteen. This means that a mantis shrimp—an animal that lives in the shallows, not the deep—has the potential to see millions more variants of colors than humans do. Mantis shrimp practically speak color. A few people, primarily women, have four types of cones. These women are tetrachromats, so seeing color is one of their many superpowers. But some people, primarily men, only have two cone variations, making them blind to the color they are missing. If you are missing red, then a juicy strawberry appears beige. No wonder some men overcompensate.

Read the entire article on Virginia Quarterly Review’s website.

The New Yorker | GOINGS ON: Art

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

New Representation - Spandita Malik

Robert Mann Gallery is thrilled to announce the representation of Spandita Malik

Malik’s photo-based work focuses on issues of gender-based violence against women. Working with non-profit organizations across India which provide support to survivors of domestic and gender-based violence, Malik works with women to make collaborative works that empower the women depicted to have control over their own image by employing elaborate and intricate embroidery techniques - the type of embroidery distinct to the area where the piece is made, and working on traditional khadi fabric.

Spandita Malik’s work will be featured in a solo show opening at the gallery in April, and at the upcoming Photography Show Presented by AIPAD.

Special Viewing of New Video Works by Salyer/Morris

The Old American Can Factory
232 3rd St., Brooklyn, NY
Feb 6, 2025
6-8 pm (screening of work at 7 pm)

XØ Projects Inc & The Old American Can Factory in association with Robert Mann Gallery

As month-long resident artists at the Old American Can Factory, Sayler/Morris will show new and in-progress pieces from Crystal Forest, a body of work that considers how to represent the Amazon in light of its multiplicity of refracted meanings.

The artist duo have used their residency to experiment with methods of displaying Prophecy of Butterflies, a large-scale animated video work originally commissioned by The Momentary at Crystal Bridges, as well as other video work from Crystal Forest. They will show an in-progress experimental short film titled The Amazon is Elsewhere and some new collages that will show at Robert Mann Gallery in the fall.

The Amazon, of course, is impossible to represent fully as it is the name of a vast region of diverse ecosystems, climates, people and other beings. The very word, “Amazon” acts on the imaginaries of myriad people and cultures throughout the world. For many, Amazon symbolizes “the lungs of the earth” or “nature” itself. However, for someone like Werner Herzog the Amazon is “obscene,” as he said in a famous interview. For the indigenous people of the region, many of whom have no separate word for jungle or forest, it is simply home.

Artist Giesla Gamper will be showing a new video work as part of this open studio evening. Painter Doug Argue will also have an open studio in adjoining space as part of the evening.  

Magnifissance Magazine: 9 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows This Season

Robert Mann Gallery presents Night Gardens, a solo exhibition by Mary Mattingly, running through February 7, 2025. 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.

Artnet: How This Photographer Is Turning Illicit Urban Exploration Into an Art

The artist spent 140 days in jail because of his risk-taking photography

"High above cities around the world, artist Isaac Wright has illicitly taken photographs from perches that few people will ever grace. The self-taught artist and urban explorer has climbed New York City skyscrapers, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and even the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The resulting images are nothing short of awe-provoking, like the photographs he took of the RAMS in September, as the graffiti artist rappelled down a 43-story abandoned New York City skyscraper to spray paint his name across the construction shed high up on 45 Park Place.

RAMS’s piece was stunning, but Wright’s documentation of the ephemeral work showed off not only its bold lettering, but the beauty of the surrounding skyline, the sky gradually lightening as night wore into morning. RAMS clearly was at work for hours, giving Wright time to take photos from various different vantage points atop neighboring buildings."

Visit Artnet for the full article.

View Drift's photography page.

Experience Our New Gallery Space in Chelsea - Visit by Appointment

We are delighted to invite you to the reopening of Robert Mann Gallery in the vibrant neighborhood of Chelsea, by appointment at 508 West 26th Street, Suite 9F, New York.

View a beautiful selection of our represented artists through mid-October and be among the first to explore our gallery space. We look forward to welcoming you to our new home and sharing this next chapter of our journey.

Head to our Contact Page to make an appointment to visit.

MUSÉE MAGAZINE REVIEW: School's Out For Summer

The exhibition draws on the ecstasy of summer and the freedom the season embodies once individuals are no longer confined to the soul-crushing fluorescent lights of school classrooms.

Summer is a season where connecting back with yourself is green-lighted, and the urge to succumb to the beauty of nature is achievable through warmth and the ability to consent to the naturality surrounding individuals. Summer is a time to disconnect and bloom into a newer and more organic version of yourself, and this is achieved through the connotation that summer can adhere to. The online exclusive exhibition runs from June 18 - through September 2, 2024. We invite you to visit the online exhibition and immerse yourself in the beauty of summer captured in these photographs.

Malibu Beach, captured by Joe Deal, transports individuals to an era where comfortability and quietness seemed to exist seamlessly together. This photograph is a testament to his ability to freeze moments in time and evoke a sense of tranquility. The viewer's eyes are drawn to multiple places all over the photograph. From the naked couple soaking in the summer sun like a couple of reptiles in their glimmering skin to individuals setting up their beach day, an older couple read peacefully while listening to the meditative lapping waves. The photograph can highlight the quiet and tranquility experienced, and the more tranquil beach exudes isolation and the need to reset.

Visit Musée Magazine for the full article.
View the Online Exhibition.

PHOBLOGRAPHER: "THIS SUMMER’S BEST EXHIBIT"

SANDRA CATTANEO ADORNO
Águas de Ouro I, 2016
Archival pigment print

It’s the summer here in the northern hemisphere — and for many younger folks, school is out!

To celebrate this, the curators over at Robert Mann Gallery have put together a special online exhibition all about school being over. It’s called School’s Out for Summer — and it’s an online group showing of images from various photographers. For many people, it’s a celebration of the fact that they don’t need to do much work and be on a set schedule. Instead, they’re embracing freedom.

We can see several images in either a very warm tonality or in black and white. The black and white photographs often remind of very classic times during the summer long gone. At the same time, the warmer images give us the feeling os summer sunsets — often considered universally to be amongst the best time for people to be out. The exhibit will appeal to those who like street photography, urban geometry, cityscapes, etc.

Visit Phoblographer for the full article.
View the Online Exhibition.