Sally Gall “Heavenly Creatures”

Julie Saul Gallery

[Image: Sally Gall "Medusae" (2018)]

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Julie Saul Gallery presents Heavenly Creatures, our thirteenth solo exhibition with Sally Gall during our thirty-two year representation of her work. The exhibition marks the publication of her third monograph, Heavenly Creatures. Both exhibition and book combine her most recent work Heavenly Creatures (2016-2018) with her related and previous series, Aerial (2014-2016.) A “meditation” by Eric Fischl accompanies the monograph that features 45 plates and will be released by Powerhouse in January 2019. Fischl notes “this book…weaves together two stories, both having to do with wind, air and colorful shapes, but to this she brings a new perspective: these stories can only be seen from below.”

Heavenly Creatures are kites, billowing in the air, as observed at festivals in Italy, Denmark, Washington and New Jersey. She records the skyward movement of cloth and paper flying machines, fragile objects connected to earth by tenuous strings - and like laundry, a universal human occupation. As in Aerial, these images are transformative, a celebration of color and suggestive abstract form. Both Aerial and Heavenly Creatures continue Sally Gall’s lifetime investigation of the sensual properties of the natural world; light, air, wind, and sky. Abstracted by composition, context, and color, these anthropomorphic photographs suggest sea creatures, constellations and other planetary forces, blooming flowers, microscopic amoebas.

Gall states “…I’m drawn to abstract painters that reference a landscape just by a few strokes of paint…” Indeed, the abstract forms against bright and atmospheric sky evoke Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky, Georgia O’Keefe and Howard Hodgkins, among others. Both Aerial and Heavenly Creatures embody Sally Gall’s search for poetry in the everyday, the miraculous in the ordinary, and as Fischl observes “capturing the elusive distractions of fleeting beauty.”

Sally Gall received a BFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1978. She has taught and lectured internationally including at the School of Visual Arts, and the International Center of Photography, in New York. She has been the recipient of two Macdowell Colony Fellowships, a Rockefeller Foundation Residency, Bellagio Study Center, and a Director’s Guest at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Her two previous monographs are The Water’s Edge, Chronicle Books, 1995, and Subterranea, Umbrage Editions, 2003.