Winston Wächter Fine Art is pleased to present Vertical World, an exhibition of new large-scale photographs by Sally Gall, which continues her decades long exploration of the natural world. In her second solo show with the gallery, Gall examines the most elemental of earth’s raw materials: rock.
During a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon in 2021, Gall was thrilled by the monumental walls of rock seen at eye level. She describes the experience: “I was dwarfed by a massive alien world, a world that was writhing, a beautiful world that felt very alive.” Thus began her photographic investigation of rock walls that have been shaped over time by rain, erosion, mudslides, earthquakes, geothermal activity; natural phenomena continually and often imperceptibly, transforming the planet.
Subsequently, she made several photographic trips to the Colorado Plateau, investigating rock with variegated texture and color. By eliminating context and through her compositional means, Gall’s photographs become abstract. Emphasizing the unique markings on the surface of the rock, she references frescoes and painted murals. Referencing eroded “ruins” seen in her travels (cave churches in Anatolia, Turkey, Hindu temples in Khajuraho, India, Mayan temples on the Yucatan Peninsula,) Gall photographed walls of rock which seem from certain vantage points to be architectural, human built.
“I set out to make photographs that would encompass the changing nature of this landscape, this skin of the earth. My goal was to photograph the earth in action; a sculptural world created by wind and rain and time. Actions which are infinitesimally slow, and conceptually hard to embrace, as they bear no relationship to our human time.” – Sally Gall
Vertical World invites viewers to consider the extraordinary in the ordinary, and to connect with the natural world as a place that is continually transforming, and alive.
Sally Gall lives and works in New York City. Her work is held in numerous museums and private collections worldwide, notably the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Sally is the recipient of prestigious fellowships, including two MacDowell Colony Fellowships, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency, and a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist’s Fellowship. She has published three books of photographs: The Water’s Edge, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1992, Subterranea, Umbrage Editions, New York City, 2003, and Heavenly Creatures, powerHouse Books, New York City, 2019.
