Aaron Siskind: Abstractions

April 18 - August 14, 2016 - This exhibition, featuring 100 photographs drawn exclusively from the Art Institute’s extensive holdings of Siskind’s work, examines some of his most influential abstract photographs and series. Beginning with Siskind’s new attention to the power of a single object in the 1940s, the presentation continues through formally graphic series such as barely touching rocks in Martha’s Vineyard, seaweed shapes on sand, and divers silhouetted against the sky at Oak Street Beach. The show culminates in increasingly flat and abstract images of walls with peeling and dripping paint, including a series in homage to the painter Franz Kline. Twenty-five years after Siskind’s death, this exhibition demonstrates his ongoing relevance for a new generation of photographers embracing abstraction.