Join us on Thursday 15th September for the public opening of two solo exhibitions by Edward Burtynsky. The artist will also be signing copies of his new monograph published by Thames & Hudson. 

Edited and curated by William A. Ewing, Edward Burtynsky: Essential Elements provides an overview of Burtynsky’s work across four decades, including both iconic images and many previously unpublished photographs. Relinquishing the project-based lens through which the photographer’s work has previously been presented, this book presents Burtynsky’s photographs in five free-flowing sections that combine and contrast work from throughout his career. This original approach provides a sense of both his visual language and his exploration of the dilemmas at the heart of our globalized world. Each section is interspersed with selected texts that work in concert with the images, to provide a fuller understanding of Burtynsky’s view of the world.

In the ground floor gallery, Burtynsky conveys both the sublime aesthetic qualities of the industrialised landscape and the unsettling reality of depleting resources on the planet, through a series of geometric compositions photographed from the air above the Little Rann of Kutch in Gujarat, India. Titled Salt Pans, this exhibition explores an “ancient method of providing one of the most basic elements of our diet; as primitive industry and as abstract two-dimensional human marks upon the landscape.” In the upper gallery, Essential Elements comprises of a selection of photographs weaving an evocative journey through Burtynsky’s past projects, China, Manufactured Landscapes, Quarries, Oil and Water, drawing together the visual and thematic threads that connect throughout his oeuvre.