Allen Schill, American, Lake, Sunday Morning, Bois de Boulogne, Paris, Photograph

Lake, Sunday Morning, Bois de Boulogne, Paris, 1986

3 Photographs, H 7 x W 29 x D 1 inches, H 7 x W 9.67 x D 1 inches each

Signed bottom right

Thin black frame, H 15.25 x W 41 x D 1.5 inches

Condition: Good

Provenance: Private Texas Collection

Allen Schill is an artist-photographer who has concentrated most of his efforts in highly-controlled studio still-life imagery, for years with the large-format view camera, and then with a digital studio camera. While influenced by many sources in art history and the other arts, and in some ways very traditional at first glance especially when compared to most contemporary art photography, his photographs are really not so conventional. They are not quick to take in. They don't explain themselves. They ask us to slow down, to observe and reflect, in a way we rarely do. They refer to an interior space; the images themselves are only invocations of this. With this ongoing body of work, Schill hopes to be somehow reinventing the still-life genre for our time, and would like to persuade us that such a thing could still be important, and why. In an age when we are inundated with images but have all but lost the ability to see or ponder, his is an art that avoids flashiness. These works are not engendered in theory, but in experience - seen, thought, felt, lived - earnest and resolutely visual, an offer to somehow commune with the viewer.