“The concept of the landscape as architecture has become, for me, an act of imagination. I remember looking at buildings made of stone, and thinking, there has to be an interesting landscape somewhere out there because these stones had to have been taken out of the quarry one block at a time. I had never seen a dimensional quarry, but I envisioned an inverted cubed architecture on the side of a hill. I went in search of it, and when I had it on my ground glass I knew that I had arrived.”
—Edward Burtynsky
Nicholas Metivier Gallery is pleased to present a new series of Iberian quarry photographs by Edward Burtynsky. Photographed in 2006 these works are joined in the exhibition by previously unreleased images from earlier series in Xiamen, China; Carrara, Italy and Vermont, USA.
The new book Burtynsky—Quarries traces the artist’s in-depth exploration of landscape as transformed by industry. These works were realized over seventeen years within a career that spans over a quarter century. Through masterful technique and often dizzying compositions, the artist presents his magnificent colour images as thought-provoking studies of those deconstructed territories that are created as we dig into the earth for material in order to build our cities.
