The Brown Sisters, Cambridge, 1977
Gelatin Silver Print
Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of photographs by Nicholas Nixon entitled Life and Times. The exhibition will open on December 1 and close on January 21, with a reception for the artist on Thursday, December 8, from 6 to 8 pm. This is Nixon's first exhibition at the Yossi Milo Gallery.
Life and Times focuses on Nicholas Nixon's investigation of the components of the human life cycle: birth, childhood, sex, family, illness, aging and death.
The exhibition will feature the entire Brown Sisters series to date, from 1975 to 2005. Seen together, the series of portraits underscores the gradual aging of the women, as well as subtle changes in their demeanor and relationships to one another. Working within strict formal parameters (8″ × 10″ photographs of the same four women grouped in the same configuration), Nixon creates an ongoing conceptual project about the passage of time.
Work from other series pinpoint moments in life, both significant and incidental. Whether the subject is an intimate portrait of an infant nursing, a nude couple embracing, a family bound together by one member's illness or the arthritic hand of an elderly woman, Nixon's photographs unite these themes along the same continuum. Also included in the exhibition are cityscapes of Boston and New York from 1974 and from 2005, demonstrating that places, as well as people, undergo cycles of destruction and renewal.
Nixon's work has been exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, including solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C; Musée de L'Art Moderne, Paris; Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany; San Diego Art Museum, San Diego, CA; St. Louis Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and, in his first solo exhibition in 1971, at The George Eastman House, Rochester, NY. Three museums are concurrently exhibiting complete sets of The Brown Sisters from their collections: The Museum of Modern Art (September 14 - July 3); The National Gallery of Art (November 13 - February 20) and The George Eastman House (October 22 - February 5).
His work is part of many public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the J. Paul Getty Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum; and the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris. His numerous awards include the George Gund Foundation Fellowship; National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowships, and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships. Nixon was born in Detroit in 1947. He currently lives and works in the Boston area and has taught photography at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, since 1974.