Abelardo Morell

In the Company of Monet and Constable

November 23, 2024–February 17, 2025

Abelardo Morell

Tent Camera Image: The Epte River #1

2023
archival pigment print
Courtesy of the artist and Edwynn Houk Gallery

In recent years, Cuban-American photographer Abelardo Morell (b. 1948, Havana; lives and works in Boston) has used his signature tent-camera technology to capture the places where leading nineteenth-century landscape painters John Constable (English, 1776–1837) and Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926) made their iconic works. Abelardo Morell: In the Company of Monet and Constable showcases over a dozen of the artist’s large-scale photographs.

​Walking in the paths of Constable and Monet to make pictures in their spirit, Morell has traveled to locations in England and France with a tent-camera, a device that allows him to unite in a single photographic image the features of a landscape view with whatever happens to be underfoot—leaves, blades of grass, pebbles, cobblestones, and so on. Combining picturesque vistas with ground-level natural details, Morell’s luscious color photographs reflect on one’s relation to art as well as nature through their complex fusion of the historical and the contemporary, the transitory and the lasting, the pictorial and the photographic.

Abelardo Morell: In the Company of Monet and Constable is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Anne Leonard, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. 

Generous support for this exhibition is provided by the Troob Family Foundation.