Artist
Gregory Crewdson
(1962) American
Biography
Gregory Crewdson was born in Brooklyn in 1962. Crewdson received a B.A. from the State University of New York at Purchase in 1985 and an M.F.A. in photography at Yale in 1988. He has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe and is represented by Gagosian Gallery in New York and White Cube in London.
Crewdson is recognized for his elaborately staged scenes of small town American life. His photographs have dramatic and cinematic qualities, and he often has an extensive support crew on site for proper staging and lighting. In describing his intentions, Crewdson states:
“In all my pictures what I am ultimately interested in is that moment of transcendence or transportation, where one is transported into another place, into a perfect, still world. Despite my compulsion to create this still world, it always meets up against the impossibility of doing so. So, I like the collision between this need for order and perfection and how it collides with a sense of the impossible. I like where possibility and impossibly meet.”
Crewdson's work has been included in many public collections, most notably the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A retrospective of his work from 1985–2005, was shown at major museums around Europe from 2005–08. Another exhibition of his work opened at the Kulturhuset Museum, Stockholm, in February 2011, followed by Sorte Diamant, Copenhagen and c/o Berlin, among others. Crewdson has received numerous awards including the Skowhegan Medal for Photography, the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship and the Aaron Siskind Fellowship. Crewdson is Professor Adjunct in Graduate Photography at the Yale University School of Art and lives and works in New York.
Rose Mathies
Crewdson is recognized for his elaborately staged scenes of small town American life. His photographs have dramatic and cinematic qualities, and he often has an extensive support crew on site for proper staging and lighting. In describing his intentions, Crewdson states:
“In all my pictures what I am ultimately interested in is that moment of transcendence or transportation, where one is transported into another place, into a perfect, still world. Despite my compulsion to create this still world, it always meets up against the impossibility of doing so. So, I like the collision between this need for order and perfection and how it collides with a sense of the impossible. I like where possibility and impossibly meet.”
Crewdson's work has been included in many public collections, most notably the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A retrospective of his work from 1985–2005, was shown at major museums around Europe from 2005–08. Another exhibition of his work opened at the Kulturhuset Museum, Stockholm, in February 2011, followed by Sorte Diamant, Copenhagen and c/o Berlin, among others. Crewdson has received numerous awards including the Skowhegan Medal for Photography, the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship and the Aaron Siskind Fellowship. Crewdson is Professor Adjunct in Graduate Photography at the Yale University School of Art and lives and works in New York.
Rose Mathies