David Maisel Works | Bio | Press | Exhibition Views
American, b. 1961
Lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, California
David Maisel’s photographs chronicle the complex relationships between natural systems and human intervention, often focusing on the physical transformation of the landscape caused by industrial efforts. Maisel’s aerial images of sites around the world initially appear abstract and painterly—offering detailed but open-ended visual information that operates as both documentary and metaphor, seducing viewers with a strange beauty that critics have dubbed “the apocalyptic sublime.”
Maisel’s photographs, multi-media projects, and public installations have recently been exhibited at Portland Art Museum, OR (2008); Somerset House, London, UK (2013); American Academy, Rome, Italy (2014); National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (2015); San Jose Museum of Art (2015); ZKM Museum, Karlsruhe, Germany (2016); HALLE 14 Center for Contemporary Art, Leipzig, Germany (2016); Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, CA; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA (2016); Denver Art Museum, CO (2018); the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea (2018); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2019); Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, UT (2019); National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C. (2020); Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand (2020); and Phoenix Art Museum (forthcoming, 2021). His works are included in many public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C; Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX.
Maisel was a Scholar in Residence at the Getty Research Institute, and Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018, as well as am Individual Artist’s Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (1990) and Investing in Artists Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation (2011). His work has been the subject of seven monographs: The Lake Project (Nazraeli Press, 2004), Oblivion (Nazraeli Press, 2006), Library of Dust (Chronicle Books, 2008), History’s Shadow (Nazraeli Press, 2011), Black Maps (Steidl, 2013), Mount St Helens: Afterlife (Ivorypress, 2018), Proving Ground (Radius Books and the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, 2020).