Artist Reception: Friday, September, 5 – 8 PM
Tayloe Piggott Gallery is pleased to present “A HORSE SHOW,” featuring the work of the renowned
contemporary photographic artist Michael Eastman. The exhibition, running from August 29 through
October 19, 2013, will be celebrated with an artist reception from 5 to 8 p.m. on Friday, September 6,
which coincides with the Palates & Palettes Gallery Walk, a signature event of the Jackson Hole Fall
Arts Festival. “A HORSE SHOW” is Michael Eastman’s second solo show with Tayloe Piggott, who
showed the artist’s previous horse portraits as JH Muse Gallery.
A self-taught and highly acclaimed contemporary photographic artist, Michael Eastman creates
large-scale photographs that are unified by their visual precision, monumentality, and painterly use
of color. A purist to his large format camera, negative film and natural light, Eastman fills his images
with jewel-like tones and dramatic highlights. Long exposures and a wide-angle lens create farreaching
visual clarity, rich colors and lavish detail. The range of his oeuvre is diverse, including
such themes as horses, sublime landscapes and urban and European architecture.
“I never felt quite finished with the horses and horses do not seem to be finished with me. All
animals are wonderful, but horses are truly mythic.” – the artist, Michael Eastman
This most recent body of work marks a return to the horse as the primary subject, though the
execution of the prints is wholly new. Eastman says of this work, “I have always been a printmaker
and this new body of work culminates a lengthy exploration into creating prints that take
advantage of several centuries of photography, printmaking and painting processes. By applying
multiple coats of the oil glaze formulas of Rembrandt and then painting multiple lacquer finishes on
the digital prints made on watercolor paper, the resultant prints are rich in ways that I have always
strived to produce.” He is able to capture each animal’s complexity, strength, and mythic beauty in
this series of prints that are striking in their depth of color and scale.
The artist’s publications include Havana, Vanishing America (Rizzoli, 2008), and Horses (Knopf,
2003), and his photographs are featured in Rainer Maria Rilke’s book Auguste Rodin, published by
Archipelago Press. Eastman has been a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts grant, and
has been published in Time, Life, and The New York Times. His photographs are included in
numerous public and private collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston; The Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum; and the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art. Eastman was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1947, and currently resides in the
same city. He studied at the University of Wisconsin and is represented by the Barry Friedman
Gallery in New York City and the Tayloe Piggott Gallery.
For further information regarding the exhibition and Tayloe Piggott Gallery, please visit us online at www.tayloepiggottgallery.com