David Maisel*

Lot #46
The Fall (Borox 9), 2013
Archival pigment print
48 x 48 x 1 in.
Edition 2/6
Courtesy of the artist, Haines Gallery, San Francisco, and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

About the Artwork

For more than three decades, David Maisel (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘08) has created rigorous, captivating aerial photographs capturing a bird’s eye view of our world’s radically human-altered environments: open-pit mines, clearcut forests, water reclamation zones, militarized landscapes. Despite the political underpinnings of these images, Maisel’s work refuses didactic interpretation, arriving instead at a surreal and abstracted intersection of beauty, mystery, and horror that the artist has referred to as the “apocalyptic sublime.” The Fall depicts Spanish landscapes between Toledo and Madrid; Maisel’s powerful photograph of the silvery extraction zones in Borox convey a sense of striking beauty—and its inevitable decay. A member of Headlands’ Board of Directors from 2011–19, Maisel was the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Center for Cultural Innovation. His work is exhibited internationally and is held in more than fifty public collections.

Retail Value: $24,000