By Tabish Khan
FAD Magazine
Tabish Khan the @LondonArtCritic picks his Top 5 Art Exhibitions to see in London Post-Easter. Each one comes with a concise review to help you decide whether it’s for you. If you’re looking for museum exhibitions to visit, check out last week’s top 5 where all three remain open to visit.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Helen Gordon
Apollo Magazine
Crawford Lake is around an hour’s drive from Toronto, home of the photographer Edward Burtynsky. Scientists studying sediment layers in the lake have found samples of plutonium from hydrogen bomb tests, carbon particles from fossil fuel burning and nitrates from the mass application of chemical fertilisers. Some want the lake to become an international reference point marking the dawn of the Anthropocene – the period when the human species began to alter the planet irrevocably, becoming a geological force comparable to immense volcanic eruptions or the variations in the Earth’s orbit that drive glacial cycles.
Like these scientists, Burtynsky has long been fascinated by the effects of large-scale human activity on the landscape, especially industry and agriculture. His Anthropocene series (2012–17) and accompanying documentary of 2018 did much to popularise the term beyond the scientific community, and ‘Abstraction/Extraction’ – his sumptuous, thoughtful new retrospective at the Saatchi Gallery – continues this line of inquiry.
Read the full review here.
Read MoreBy Lauren Sproule
CBC News
On the second floor of the prestigious Saatchi Gallery in West London, small circular splotches of ruby, slate and marigold fill a large framed print hanging on the wall.
Passersby from a photography group remark that it looks like the work of 19th-century Austrian painter Gustav Klimt. But it's not a Klimt. In fact, it's not even a painting.
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Read MoreBy Bethany Minelle
Sky News
Landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky's work explores human impact on the surface of the planet, shooting the Coast mountains in the Canadian province of British Columbia, soil erosion in Turkey, and coal mines in Australia for his latest exhibition, New Works.
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Read MoreBy Joanne Shurvell
Forbes
Renowned Canadian photographic artist and filmmaker Edward Burtynsky has taken over two vast floors at London’s Saatchi Gallery to present Extraction/Abstraction, the largest exhibition of his 40 year career. His remarkable photographs and films of global industrial landscapes represent his dedication to bearing witness to the impact of humans have had on the planet.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Irenie Forshaw
Elite Traveler
At first glance, it’s hard to figure out exactly what you’re looking at when confronted with one of Edward Burtynsky’s works. The large-scale pieces appear almost like abstract paintings: strikingly beautiful canvases streaked with colorful paint splatters and geometric patterns. Look closer, though, and you’ll see they are, in fact, breathtakingly detailed photographs of plundered landscapes. From the diamond mines of Botswana to the salt pans of India, every image delves into the (often devastating) impact of human activity on the planet.
I’ve come to the Saatchi Gallery for the Canadian photographer’s largest-ever exhibition – BURTYNSKY: Extraction/ Abstraction. Running through May 6, 2024, the show is set across two floors of the gallery and features 94 of his photographs, alongside a collection of murals and an augmented reality experience.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Rachel Halliburton
Financial Times
The photographer’s spectacular images, on show in London, document the effects of human activity on the natural world.
Edward Burtynsky’s disturbingly beautiful photography brings a giant’s eye view to our ravaged planet, rendering mining sites as glimmering jewel boxes, desertscapes as geometric puzzles and dumping grounds as Jackson Pollock-like eruptions of chaos and colour. This fascinating exhibition covers his journey of more than 40 years — hanging out of Cessna planes, elevated by cranes and latterly deploying drones — to document the way large-scale industry and agriculture have impacted on the natural world.
Read the full review here.
Read MoreBy Ravi Ghosh
British Journal of Photography
Edward Burtynsky is standing in front of the most ambitious and labour-intensive photograph he has ever made. It is a blanket of golf-ball sized orbs and growths in pink, orange, green and brown, unfurling across an entire wall in London’s Saatchi Gallery.
Pengah Wall #1 is an underwater photograph – or rather, a digital image composed of around 200 individual shots – made off the coast of Komodo Island in Indonesia in 2017. Burtynsky stands back slightly and admires the coral, its fleshy, sprouting texture lending a sense of alien vitality. He mentions the work of painter Jackson Pollock; the idea was to emulate the motion and energy of his canvases in the image. “Abstract Expressionism was one of the things I loved in 20th-century art,” the Canadian photographer says. “That there is no singular central point in the images, and their all-overness, texture and modulation – the whole surface has been considered.”
Read the full interview here.
Read MoreAIPAD Exposure
AIPAD member galleries are supporting photographer Edward Burtynsky in enriching the current discourse on our changing planet.
Burtynsky is well known for his large format photographs of industrial landscapes that are on display in more than 50 museums, including the Guggenheim Museum, the National Gallery of Canada and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. His latest project, The Anthropocene Project, is a multidisciplinary body of work he completed with collaborators Nicholas de Pencier and Jennifer Baichwal. The project combines art, film, virtual and augmented reality, and scientific research to investigate human influences on the state, dynamic and future of the Earth.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Chris Waywell
TimeOut London
★★★★
Edward Burtynsky’s new show is dominated by a six-metre-long photograph of a quarry. A massive orange digger sits in the middle, but it looks like a toy in its surroundings. Burtynsky fans’ spidey senses go on high alert: EB is showing us the rape of the earth by man.
Read the full review here.
Read MoreBy Matthew Rudman
Studio International
In July 2017, construction workers were digging the foundations for a new fire and police station in the town of Thornton, Colorado, when they uncovered something unexpected: the fossilised remains of a triceratops dating back 66m years. “A lot of times these will be ploughed up and they won’t be recognised,” the curator of a local natural history museum said. Humans have been manipulating the natural world since the dawn of civilisation, but the past 100 years has seen an exponential and uncontrolled increase in disruption and destruction of delicately balanced ecosystems and geologies previously undisturbed for millions of years. We are all-too familiar with the consequences: crumbling ice caps, bleached coral reefs and rising sea levels threatening to engulf our settlements with acidified water.
In the mid-20th century, hundreds of atmospheric nuclear weapons tests were conducted, coating the Earth in a thin layer of radioactive particles. Many scientists are proposing using this layer of toxic dust as the indelible signature of a new geological age, the Anthropocene, an era defined by the impact of humanity on the Earth’s ecology. Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky (b1955) has long been preoccupied with the troubled intersection of human industry and natural ecosystems, and his most recent output, The Human Signature, on show at the Flowers Gallery, London, is part of his recently launched Anthropocene project, which explores the various manifestations of human mark-making on our planet.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Ari Stein
52 Insights Magazine
He’s spent most of his career unravelling this thread of human destruction, so much so we now have a word for it, The Anthropocene.
As a photographer he seeks to capture scenes of environmental devastation to educate and inspire us into action, the question constantly arising throughout his work is how did we get to this point? This is a pertinent question that motivates Edward to climb, rail and ascend some of the worlds farthest reaching places. Deploying his arsenal of drones, helicopters and assistants, he magically converts man-altered landscapes into images of sublime beauty.
What the world has gained from Burtynsky’s shock and awe images is the ability to piece together our every day withdrawal from the earth and put it into a whole new perspective. There is no doubt that our earth is experiencing a tipping point but only through the work of people like Edward Burtynsky can we be truly aware of what we are doing. In this exclusive interview, we sit down with Edward to ask not only how 35 years of shooting have changed him as a person but what has he learnt from doing it.
Read the interview here.
Read MoreBy Cameron Laux
BBC Culture
The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is a master of the post-industrial sublime. His sweeping point of view is, at the very least, ambivalent. His shots, most recently taken from the coolest possible standpoint of a helicopter and sometimes a satellite, are at first sight surreal and glorious, but they have an ominous documentary undertow.
His large-format photos aestheticise mining, deforestation, industrial waste and decay, monumental piles of garbage, plastic, rubber; expanses of new and decommissioned equipment so vast that they look like crystalline formations; dense human settlements which from an Olympian standpoint look like creeping mould or infestations.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreThe Guardian
Burtynsky’s unsettling large-scale images of industrial-scale extraction, urbanisation and deforestation reveal humanity’s devastating impact on the planet
The exhibition will run at Flowers Gallery Londonfrom 17 Oct - 24 Nov.
View the gallery here.
Read MoreBy Alistair Sooke
The Telegraph
Ahead of a new exhibition of his work, the Canadian photographer tells Alastair Sooke about the toxic allure of the world's most perilous places.
‘I’ve been to China a dozen times,” says the 61-year-old landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky, “but I’ve never visited the Great Wall.” He smiles. “I don’t go to tourist places. I enter into worlds behind chain-link fences and barbed wire.”
Read the full article here.
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