John Gossage
Born 1946, Staten Island, New York
Lives and works in Washington, D.C.
The Border at the Pacific, 1995
Gelatin silver print, color element, tissue paper, and backing board
20 x 16 inches
Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Retail value: $6,500
SILENT AUCTION: This lot will close on September 27 at 5pm PDT.
John Gossage photographs overlooked elements of the urban environment—empty and abandoned patches of land, refuse and detritus, barbed wire, and graffiti—to explore themes as disparate as surveillance, memory, and the relationship between architecture and power. The critic Gus Blaisdell writes, “Gossage is always about the luxuriance of what goes unnoticed, what goes unseen until his pictures call your attention to it.” Through Gossage’s lens, the shadow of a fence over a Pacific beach takes on an abstract quality in The Border at the Pacific. The expansive space around the picture and the subtle markings on it emphasize the physical surface of the image, challenging the function of the photograph as an illusionistic window to the world.
Biography
A student of photographers Alexey Brodovitch, Bruce Davidson, and Lisette Model, John Gossage has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri. His work has been collected nationally and internationally by Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany. He has published numerous monographs, including The Pond (1985) and Who Do You Love (2014). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012.
