SACRED FORMS: PHOTOGRAPHS BY PAUL CAPONIGRO AND DAVID HEALD
April 20 – May 31, 2013
Photography dealer Kathy McCarver Root and her gallery, KMR Arts, proudly announce the opening of its latest show of fine art photography, “Sacred Forms: Photographs by Paul Caponigro and David Heald.” The exhibition will open April 20 with a reception with the artists from 5-7pm and will continue through May 31, 2013.
On April 20, KMR Arts will open a magnificent exhibition by two renowned photographers: Paul Caponigro and David Heald. The exhibition, entitled, Sacred Forms, focuses on two complementary bodies of work by these internationally known photographers who interestingly have direct connections to northwest Connecticut.
Paul Caponigro’s photographs of the natural world explore the mystical nature of the gelatin silver print. Whether the subject is landscape or still life, Caponigro's engagement with the natural world is both palpable and poetic. Caponigro's fascination with the spiritual world began with his initial interest in the medium of photography at the age of thirteen. After attending Boston University to study piano, he again became attracted to photography and between the years of 1955 and 1957, he studied with Minor White, the enormously influential photographer and teacher. In Caponigro’s work, the inner eye and the outer world are interconnected in a basic, almost primal way. And that primacy is conveyed in Caponigro's silver prints, which possess a tactile quality that is all too rare. Paul Caponigro's work will be the subject of a one man show at the Yale Museum for British Art in 2014. Paul Caponigro's work is in the Museum of Modern Art, the Center for Creative Photography, the Getty Museum, the Chicago Art Institute among others and he has influenced numerous photographers through his extensive teaching. In 1966, Caponigro was the recipient of the first of two Guggenheim Foundation grants and he has also been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts grants. Caponigro lived in Redding, Connecticut from 1967 to 1970. In an interview in 2006, Caponigro stated, “For me, photography provides an intersection of time, space, light, and emotional stance. One needs to be still enough, observant enough, and aware enough to recognize the life of the materials, to be able to 'hear through the eyes.”
David Heald’s photographs of Cistercian abbeys in France convey the silent beauty of these fascinating edifices. Heald's photographs appeal to a wide audience, whether the interest is architecture, history, culture, or the simplicity of photography's essential definition, that is, painting with light. These photographs of the Cistercian abbeys were the subject of an award winning monograph, published by Harry Abrams in 2000 and reprinted in 2002. David Heald began in the photography studio at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Since 1985 Heald has been the Chief photographer for the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Heald’s photographs are in the collections of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. Copies of Architecture of Silence by David Heald will be available for sale at KMR Arts.
Kathy McCarver Root says, “Paul Caponigro and David Heald are both masters within the world of photography. I have admired Paul Caponigro’s work for many years. He is a vastly influential artist as well as a teacher whose work reaches far beyond the boundaries of the medium of photography. David Heald’s photographs are balanced, beautiful and inspiring.”