Flowers for Lisa (Limited Edition): A Delirium of Photographic Invention
By (Author) Abelardo Morell
Contributions by Lawrence Weschler
Abrams
Abrams
16th October 2018
United States
General
Non Fiction
Photography and photographs
Nature in art
Individual photographers
Hardback
144
Width 254mm, Height 305mm
300g
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, douard Manet, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ren Magritte, and others, Morell does just that; the images are as innovative as they are arresting.
"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 "
"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 Garca "author of Here in Berlin "
Abelardo Morells photographs have been collected and shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and more than 70 other museums worldwide. Lawrence Weschler is the award-winning author of True to Life (about David Hockney), Mr. Wilsons Cabinet of Wonder, and Everything That Rises, among many other books.