Bruce Silverstein Gallery is pleased to announce Brâncuşi’s Flowers, organized in collaboration with Kasmin. The exhibition will be on view at 529 West 20^th Street between May 16 – June 28, 2019, and presented concurrently with Brâncuşi: The Photographer at Kasmin, on view at 293 Tenth Avenue.

Brâncuşi’s Flowers offers an unprecedented opportunity to view seven of the sixteen known images on the subject matter, each photographed and printed by the artist in his darkroom in the 1920s and 1930s.  These still life photographs depicting “nature’s readymades” served dual purposes for the artist.  Firstly, they were created as gifts for friends and lovers as lasting objects of his affection, rather than the gifting flowers destined for decay.  Secondly, they were a further extension of Brancusi’s explorations into photography, fixing flora and fauna at the pinnacle of their sculptural beauty.

Constantin Brâncuşi’s photographs evolved, as did the artist’s sculptural practice, moving rapidly from early straight images documenting the artist’s interest in realism, to more interpretative representations featuring modernist masterworks such as Sleeping Muse, Eve, and the iconic Bird in Space.  It was within these later works, starting around 1917, where the artist focused on those more ephemeral elements — those that could not be “made permanent” without the camera — such as light, shadow, reflection, and particularly in his studio views, special orientation and negative space. Photographing flowers was a natural extension for the artist, as with his camera he was able to capture these forms in a state of natural flux, transforming them into sculptural objects frozen in a state of perpetual life.

Brâncuşi’s Flowers marks the third exhibition at Bruce Silverstein to feature Brâncuşi’s photographs.