Known for his surreal sequences and witty storytelling across media, Duane Michals’s portraits of other artists turn the tables upon his subjects by adopting elements of their characteristic visual styles. This exhibition features over twenty of Michals’s portraits of other artists, including Marcel Duchamp, David Hockney, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and Robert Rauschenberg. Each image speaks to the particularities of the sitter, channeling the aura of their work while maintaining Michals's own idiosyncratic vision.
Duane Michals (b. 1932, McKeesport, PA) first made significant, creative innovations in the field of photography during the 1960s. In an era heavily influenced by photojournalism, Michals manipulated the medium to communicate narratives. Over the past five decades, Michals’ work has been exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, hosted Michals’ first solo exhibition in 1970. In 2008, Michals celebrated his 50th anniversary as a photographer with a retrospective exhibition at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, Greece, and the Scavi Scaligeri in Verona, Italy. In 2019, The Morgan Library and Museum in New York exhibited a career retrospective of Michals' work, The Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan. Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals originated at The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2014-2015), and traveled to The Peabody Essex Musuem, Salem, MA (2015). The recent touring exhibition, Duane Michals: The Portraitist, originated at DC Moore Gallery in 2015 and traveled to The Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, CA (2018-2019), The Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY (2019), The Lowe Art Museum, Miami, FL (2021), Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Sweden (2022), University of Richmond Museums, Richmond, VA (2022), and The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki, Finland (2023).
Over forty monographs of Michals’s work have been published, including Storyteller: Duane Michals (2014), Duane Michals: Empty New York (2018), and, most recently, Texas (2022).
For press inquiries, please contact Caroline Magavern at cmagavern@dcmooregallery.com.
