Lewis Baltz, Portfolios and Selections from the Collection of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft

Lewis Baltz Portfolios is an opportunity to experience the artist’s early work in its intended form, in grids of serialized images. This will be the first solo exhibition of Baltz’s photography in Vancouver. Baltz’s work is presented alongside Selections from the Collection of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft, a concise group of works that further explores the stark photographic mode that, along with Baltz, gained attention through the 1975 exhibition New Topographics.

Acclaimed for his serial investigations of the industrialized landscape, Lewis Baltz shot the America of the 1970s and ’80s with an objective cool that found its reductive method in the deliberate, formal approach of minimalism. By serializing his images in grids, he was able to achieve a near cinematic experience. This deliberate shift from the individual shot was, at the time, a major innovation in the presentation of photography. Baltz’s art takes serious looking, moving from one small-format image to the next, each as formally charged as the last. Every incident takes digesting before we take on another, the sum accumulating in a complex take on that moment, that site. We are freed from the romantic revelry of the singular image, presented with the multifarious actuality of place.