Von Lintel Gallery is thrilled to announce our fourth solo exhibition with photographs by Carolyn Marks Blackwood. The following text was written by Shana Nys Dambrot.
In Carolyn Marks Blackwood’s photographs, nature and abstraction are understood as a continuum, their operations of unseen forces sharing a fractal and essential momentum of constant change. Blackwood works daily from her studio perched above the Hudson River, distilling transient phenomena—light glancing off mist, vapor clinging to glass, reflections rippling across water—into compositions that hover between painterly invention and forensic field notes. Across bodies of work spanning two decades, Blackwood has cultivated a visual vocabulary that is at once gently restrained and kaleidoscopically luminous. Her process is not additive but subtractive—her post-capture process pares away clues of context like perspective, pictorial space, and horizon line in favor of pure sensation and mathematical musicality.
In Condensation I and II (2024), for example, as rivulets of water track the surface in radiant veils, striations reminiscent of lyrical color-field painting are instead shot through with atmospheric specificity. Evening Mountain and Morning Mountain compress landscape to gradient and silhouette, revealing how subtly the sky performs its daily dramas. What we perceive as non-representational presents instead, arguably, a heightened realism, as for example the jagged shards of light (black and white ice) in General Relativity (2014) float in an austere monochrome field, defying orientation—moon or ice, macro or micro, Blackwood prefers not to say.
What unites these works is a technical approach rooted in close-range, in-camera observation. Working with minimal intervention, she waits for the world to arrange itself into compositions of staggering formal and chromatic intelligence. Her palette is electric—ceruleans, rusts, magentas, opal greens—yet not fantastical. Blackwood’s art is a discipline of attention, not a surrealist gesture. That her primary muse is the Hudson River places Blackwood in a long lineage of American landscape artists captivated by its picturesque and sublime wild lushness, but her vision resists nostalgia. Instead, she feels along the edge of the unknown, reminding us that the delights of strangeness are never far away—if you know how to look for them. – Shana Nys Dambrot
Blackwood’s photography has been exhibited nationally and internationally for over 15 years. Her work is held in multiple public collections, such as the Museo de Corpo in Spain, the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC, the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, NY, and the Albany Museum of Art, among others.
For additional information or visual material please contact the gallery at 310.559.5700 or by email at gallery@vonlintel.com.