SOL LDN: Michael Kenna

Michael Kenna: ‘New Works From Japan’ presented by SOL LDN

SOL LDN is pleased to announce a pop-up exhibition of new Japanese landscapes by Michael Kenna. This will be the first UK exhibition to focus on Kenna’s work from Japan. Celebrated as one of the world’s most prominent landscape photographers, Kenna is known for his poetic black and white images from locations around the globe. This exhibition presents a set of new silver gelatin works, printed by Kenna this year, which have never been shown before.Kenna has photographed extensively in Japan since his first visit in 1987, and it is these landscapes that have come to define his vision of elegant minimalism. The photographs on view include scenes from Hokkaido, Honshu and Shikoku – many featuring the sculptural trees and snow capped hills that have become synonymous with Kenna’s work in Japan.

Born in Lancashire in the UK in 1953, Kenna is widely held to be one of the most influential landscape photographers working today. In the 1970s Kenna worked as Ruth Bernhard’s assistant and printer. Bernhard’s technical precision and esthetic creativity greatly influenced Kenna, and he continues to enjoy the “slow, unpredictable, complicated, and alchemical” nature of the traditional, non-digital, photographic practice. Kenna still makes all original prints, himself, in his own darkroom.
 
During Kenna’s fifty-year career, his work has been shown in almost five hundred solo exhibitions. Kenna’s prints are included in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris, and the Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai. Over ninety monographs and exhibition catalogs have been published on Kenna’s work. He has received an honorary Master of Arts, the Institute for Aesthetic Development Award, and the Imogen Cunningham Award. In 2022, the French Ministry of Culture decorated him with the Officer of Arts and Letters award. He lives in Seattle, Washington, USA.
 
SOL LDN is an online platform for photography, launched in January 2023 as the home of photography collecting online. Adopting an itinerant exhibition model, the platform will hold a number of pop-up exhibitions across the capital each year. New Works From Japan will pop-up for ten days at the start of July in Marylebone.
 
 
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Image credit: ‘Percy’s Perspective, Okhotsk, Hokkaido, Japan, 2023’ © Michael Kenna, image courtesy SOL . LDN.

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