Flowers for Lisa: A Delirium of Photographic Invention

Abelardo Morell

Oct 2018 · Abrams

About this ebook

Best known for his surreal camera obscura pictures and luminous black-and-white photographs of books, photographer Abelardo Morell now turns his transformative lens to one of the most common of artistic subjects, the flower. The concept for Flowers for Lisa emerged when Morell gave his wife, Lisa, a photograph of flowers on her birthday. “Flowers are part of a long tradition of still life in art,” writes Morell. “Precisely because flowers are such a conventional subject, I felt a strong desire to describe them in new, inventive ways.” With nods to the work of Jan Brueghel, Édouard Manet, Georgia O’Keeffe, René Magritte, and others, Morell does just that; the images are as innovative as they are arresting.

About the author

Abelardo Morell was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1948 and immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1962. His work has been collected and shown in many galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, SFMoMA, The Houston Museum of Fine Art, The Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and more than seventy other museums in the United States and abroad. Morell is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York. His publications include A Book of Books, Camera Obscura, and The Universe Next Door.

LA-born Lawrence Weschler is the award-winning author of Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (about Robert Irwin), True to Life (about David Hockney), Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders, and Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, among many others. He lives in New York City.