Bryan Schutmaat: River Sun

Primarily comprised of Schutmaat’s portfolios made across central Texas: County Road and Good Goddamn, along with prints from Vessels and the award-winning Grays the Mountain Sends, the exhibition celebrates the artist’s uniquely honest and poetic visual stories from the American West. The installation will occupy both exhibition spaces while the gallery's library will again function as an ancillary space for generational dialogue with vintage prints on view by Robert Adams, Aaron Siskind, John Szarkowski, Walker Evans and Lawrence McFarland. 

As the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (2020), an Aaron Siskind Fellowship, and the Aperture Portfolio Prize, Bryan Schutmaat (b. 1983) is regarded as one of America’s preeminent photographers working today. Through his projects ranging from contemporary documentary, narrative and formal portraiture, a consistently powerful yet delicately rendered aesthetic persists. A majority of his photographs are executed with the patient approach of large-format, analog film resulting in both an intense clarity and a timeless, nuanced study of his subjects. 

The main gallery hosts a curated installation of forty prints merging two recent portfolios of black and white work as well as a selection of additional new works made across central Texas over the past five years. While the geographic origin is the element anchoring the two projects, their mutually pensive and humble views of the artist’s home territories graphically unite the presentation. 

Good Goddamn (2017) tells the humble story of one man’s final day of freedom before fulfilling a prison sentence and asks the viewer to consider their priorities in the face of critically limited time. The contemplative moments from County Road(2020) are more open-ended, perhaps intentionally, as the vast empty canvas of Texas’ endless roadways seems to present spaces outside of time while remaining quintessentially American by their vernacular architecture and windswept flora. Here one feels the influence of Robert Adams’ photographs and Wendell Berry’s poetry most acutely. 

In 2013 Schutmaat published Grays the Mountain Sends to immediate critical acclaim, a selection from which will hang in the gallery’s back room. An epic and sincere testament to the geologic and social scars of bygone mining towns across the West, the project earned him the Aperture Portfolio Prize (2013) and continues to be exhibited internationally across galleries and leading institutions. The humanist-forward work provides a raw look at an industry and people that helped build a nation and who, by many measures, have been left behind by the pace of new technologies and societal shifts. Despite the solemn views of abandoned homesteads and weathered citizens, signs of hope permeate through pristine alpine lakes and valley views rendered in the soft palette that only large-format color film can provide. 

Following another period of trans-continental travel, work from Vessels  (2014-ongoing) provides an updated view of the American roadside and the individuals who traverse and often live along these desolate margins of society. This time in monochrome, the spaces and faces he has found again echo the transformational identity and contradictions of America in the 21^st Century; An enormous interstate sign partially destroyed reads either GAS or GOD as an implied metaphor, and portraits of glassy-eyed drifters reveal their simultaneous dignity and dire reality. Through this combination of projects, the exhibition provides a singular overview of Bryan Schutmaat’s impressive work to date as a leading figure in contemporary photography.

Bryan Schutmaat's work has been widely exhibited and published, and his prints are held in many collections, such as the Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Pier 24 Photography, Rijksmuseum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He co-founded the publishing imprint, Trespasser, several titles from which will be available for purchase at the exhibition. 

For press or related inquiries, contact info@marshallgallery.art or 310-413-3987.