Flowers for Lisa: A Delirium of Photographic Invention - Hardcover

Morell, Abelardo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1419732331 ISBN 13: 9781419732331

Publisher: Abrams, 2018

Synopsis

Best known for his surreal camera obscura pictures and luminous black-and-white photographs of books, photographer Abelardo Morell now turns his transformative lens to one of the most common of artistic subjects, the flower. The concept for Flowers for Lisa emerged when Morell gave his wife, Lisa, a photograph of flowers on her birthday. Flowers are part of a long tradition of still life in art, writes Morell. Precisely because flowers are such a conventional subject, I felt a strong desire to describe them in new, inventive ways. With nods to the work of Jan Brueghel, Édouard Manet, Georgia O Keeffe, René Magritte, and others, Morell does just that; the images are as innovative as they are arresting.

About this title

Review:

"Abelardo Morell's Flowers for Lisa makes love visible. His photographs have always reached for a new kind of vision and here it is, a completely original point of view, transforming and mysterious and nothing less than fantastic."--Alice Hoffman "author of Practical Magic, The Marriage of Opposites, The Dovekeepers, and The Rules of Magic "

"Astonishingly beautiful--simply jaw-dropping--a world of original wonders with a subject that one might have thought had been exhausted long ago."--Steven Pinker "Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the author of How the Mind Works and Enlightenment "

"The astonishing images in Flowers for Lisa, with their painterly explosions and surprising deconstructions, refract the world anew. Morell has captured the paradoxical: the essence of the things themselves (in this case, flowers as you've never seen them before); and the ineffable, tactile, full complexity of love. Bravo!"--Cristina García "author of Here in Berlin "

". . . . the most exhilarating photo book of the year . . . . The book is a tour de force, a sustained burst of emotion, and a transferable unit of joy."
--The New York Times

From the Author:

Abelardo Morell was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1948 and immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1962. His work has been collected and shown in many galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, SFMoMA, The Houston Museum of Fine Art, The Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and more than seventy other museums in the United States and abroad. Morell is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York. His publications include A Book of Books, Camera Obscura, and The Universe Next Door.
 
Lawrence Weschler is the award-winning author of Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (about Robert Irwin), True to Life (about David Hockney), Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, and Domestic Scenes: The Art of Ramiro Gomez, among many others. He lives in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: Abrams
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1419732331
• ISBN 13: 9781419732331
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144