Edward Burtynsky

Sundaram Tagore had his first taste of the Venice Biennale as a graduate student, when a scholarship from the Italian Ministry of Culture landed him in the city to study museology at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Now, 26 years on, with eponymous galleries in New York, Singapore, and Hong Kong, Tagore has returned to mount his own exhibition to run alongside the 56th Venice Biennale.

Edward Burtynsky’s large-format colour photographs document the ramifications of human industry on the natural world in a perversely beautiful manner.

Burtynsky pulls no punches in his work. His photographs in his recent exhibition in Hong Kong entitled Water, and his latest feature documentary entitled Watermark speak to earth’s anguish around the world with an eloquence and directness that few artists match.

Photographer Edward Burtynsky talks about his latest and most ambitious project, Water.

Edward Burtynsky's Water photos document the way mankind is changing the planet.

Known worldwide for his beautiful imagery of industrial landscapes, Edward Burtynsky’s most recent series of color photographs titled Water will go on display at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in Central. The series, which began in 2007, is the artist’s largest and most ambitious project to date.

Edward Burtynsky tells Chean Ui-Hoon that he wanted to photograph nature but wished to do it with a different angle.

As award winning Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky makes his solo SIngapore debut this month, he shares some of the best shots from his latest series, Water.

Sundaram Tagore Gallery has been named one of the top galleries in the world by Blouin Artinfo and Modern Painters magazine.

"Firstly, you should look at photographers that you value and only acquire the very best piece the photographer is producing – the top of the line. Just the name of the photographer alone is not enough. The piece itself has to be breathtaking."

While packing the usual stars, including Cartier-Bresson, Burtynsky, Hirst, Liebovitz and Polidori, the show tries also to speak to the Southeast Asian region via an ambitious sound installation by the American Taylor Kuffner.

Edward Burtynsky spent most of the past decade with his lens on the oil industry. Now he is shifting his focus to what he calls "the next great liquid": water.

The Sundaram Tagore Gallery is expanding to Singapore, opening its fifth location within the new Gillman Barracks art district on September 14th. It beat out 30 other applicants to make the cut as one of the 13 galleries selected by a government-appointed committee to open what is touted to be the next big destination for contemporary art in Asia.

Former military compound Gillman Barracks is now home to some of the world's top gallery brands.

What's the connection between racing car driver Lewis Hamilton, Michelin-starred chef Joel Robuchon and New York gallery owner Sundaram Tagore? The answer is Singapore.

This thematic show features nearly 50 large-format images that tell the story of oil, from its origins, extraction, and processing in the tar sands of Alberta or the first offshore platforms in Azerbaijan, through the spaghetti junctions and motorcycle rallies that represent oil's spatial, infrastructural, and cultural footprint, all the way to oil's afterlife in mountains of compacted barrels and broken tankers in the Bay of Bengal.

The impact of oil has consistently reappeared in the work of Canadian photographer Ed Burtynsky for well over a decade. Burtynsky’s photographs often soar into the air, freeing us from our limited perspective, offering us the ability to better understand the scale and impact that this material has on contemporary life. It is only through this expansive perspective that we begin to understand the magnitude and consequence of our complicit actions.

Globalization has a recording angel. For two decades, Edward Burtynsky large-format color photographs of mining in Australia, shipbreaking in India, and manufacturing in China have documented how extraction, production and consumption collaborate to alter the environment to degrees almost entirely unprecedented in human history.

For centuries India has held a grip on the Western imagination. Sundaram Tagore Gallery’s exhibition at this year’s India Art Fair in New Delhi (January 26 to 29) traces the country’s influence on a group of notable photographers.

Meet Sundaram Tagore, a New York-based gallerist, art historian and now award-winning director.

Sundaram Tagore Gallery has supported Fine Art Asia since the fair started in 2006. It has branches in Hong Kong, New York and Beverley Hills. The gallery specialises in artwork that interweaves the modern, the cultural and the abstract.

For his second solo exhibition in Hong Kong, California-based American painter Lee Waisler presents a series of moving portraits of historical and contemporary figures. Having practiced abstraction for decades, Waisler returned to figuration full-force six years ago, making what he calls "dimensional portraits," combining strips of wood and blocks of color to create nuanced faces and figures.

Edward Burtynsky's photographs are a document of our modern world. From oil-scarred landscapes and the dream like monotony of manufacturing plants, to the booming industrial backdrop of modern China, his work represents the stark and very real repercussions of our modern way of life. But despite the socio-political nature of his subjects, Burtynsky maintains that he is 'not an activist', he is, at the core, an artist.

"Every viewer will see in Burtynsky's work the aspects of nature, and of man's engagement in nature, that seem most significant to him at the time. It may be the beauty of color; it may be the magic of pattern; it may be the bizarre juxtaposition of beauty and industry, or the betrayal of nature or of man that often results from uncontrolled industrial exploitation. Burtynsky's work can generate this diversity of appreciation due to its accessibility, its universality, and its honesty. The artificial is made natural, and man's attack on nature is made beautifully clear."

"Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky's first solo exhibition in Hong Kong offers works made between 1985 and 2008. His longtime preoccupation with the effect that industrial operations have on the earth is apparent: The large-sale photographs show how various industries currently dominate landscapes around the world, from oil fields to highways, electronics factories to car lots."

"After following the construction of the Three Gorges Dam [documented in the film Manufactured Landscapes], I'm now doing a series on dams further up the Yangtze as part of a series on water. The kind of meditation I did on oil [in a book published in 2008], I'm doing on water. I see them both as having huge human implications."

"If aliens wanted to understand modern civilization as it is today, they would probably look at Ed Burtynsky's photographs. His large-scale works show monstrous quarries, poisonous metal tailings, spaghetti highways and sprawling oil fields."

"Gallery directors are optimistic about the Singapore art market... New York-based Sundaram Tagore... said: 'The Singaporean community in the artistic context has matured. You see so many more museums, and the Government is taking a greater interest in art.'"

"Famous for his panoramic color photographs of natural landscapes that teem with mining, industrial and building activity, Edward Burtynsky is finally getting a one-man show in Asia."

"Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is famous for his visually striking and disarmingly beautiful large-format photographs of industrial landscapes. During his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, he talks to Penny Zhou about his industrial background and the messages behind his images."

"As an industrial designer, the profession presents me with an intrinsic irony.
It celebrates the possibilities of producing beautiful things. But it also exposes the disarming reality of where things come from."

"Back in 1984 when the HSBC tower was first being built, planes still landed in Kai Tak Airport and the jetfoil ride to Macau was considered a long trip, photographer Edward Burtynsky arrived Hong Kong. It was the first place in Asia the Canadian had traveled to. We caught up with Burtynsky before he jetted off to Fuijian province, and chatted about being detained by Chinese police, getting access to Saudi Arabian oil fields and that first trip to Asia"

"Vast. Intricate. Awe-inspiring. Depressing. Momentous. Stagnant. These conflicting words come to mind when gazing on the universally acclaimed works of Edward Burtynsky. The Canadian photographer is best known for capturing a global panoply of images featuring breathtaking scenes with a man-and-environment theme"

World-renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky, known for his disarmingly beautiful images of industrial landscapes, is to have his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. The Canadian artist presents large-scale photographs shot in Hong Kong, China, India, Azerbaijan, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, and the United States.

"From the mid-1980s to the present, photographer Edward Burtynsky has made beautiful images of landscapes we'd rather not see. He photographs sites that are essential to our worldwide energy consumption: open-pit mines, refineries, quarries, and uranium tailings. More recently, he has photographed landscapes we couldn't imagine without his camera: China's relocation of millions of citizens to make way for the Three Gorges Dam, E-waste recycling, tire dumps, and ship- breaking. For two decades, Burtynsky's environmentally conscious photographs have grown from picturing quiet, seemingly benign hillsides with houses and dogs to the flagrantly poisonous, in the red river tailings of Sudbury, Ontario."

"On his way to document the Gulf spill, the Canadian photographer talks to Edmund Lee about his fascination with the imageries of urban and industrial transformation. It is with the industrial landscapes created by mankind that one can best judge its progress and failings, and Edward Burtynsky has been taking a front row seat in these spectacles of environmental disasters for nearly three decades. The 55-year-old Canadian artist's large-format colour photographs have drawn worldwide acclaim for the sublime beauty they captured."

"Over the last three decades, Edward Burtynsky has created a body of images he describes as tracing "the man-made transformations our civilisation has imposed upon nature". This is a modest formulation with which to describe landscape photographs of often vast scale and stunning ocular power. Burtynsky's camera surveys terrain apparently subject to Promethean forces: quarries sit like mammoth inverted buildings, gouged out according to an unnatural symmetry. A mine tailing spreads luminous poison across blackened countryside, a suppurating geological sore. Oil derricks stretch like advancing robots as far as any human eye can see."

"As a recipient of the TED prize, Burtynsky received his wishes, becoming a founding member of an exclusive club that includes the likes of Bono and Bill Clinton. Make no mistake, however; this is not a prize to be wasted on the self indulgent. Upon acceptance, the winner is charged with saving the world of its ills, armed only with their reputation, a sharp mind and a purse of $100,000."

"He has photographed slag heaps in Sundbury, marble quaries in Italy and disintegrating cities along the Yangtze. How a miner turned entrepreneur conjures beauty from devastation, changing the way we see the world"

"Edward Burtynsky's grandly scaled photographs of industrial wastelands and detritus radiate a beauty as fearsome as it is spectacular. His recent retrospective confronted viewers with the true (but not quite hidden) cost of fulfilling our consumerist desires"

"Uncomfortable ironies abound in Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky's large color photographs of ravaged natural terrain. Burtynsky's subjects have consistently been landscapes in which the process of industrialization has resulted in spectacles that dwarf the likes of Michael Heizer's sprawling City, 1970-99. Burtynsky's work is undeniably gorgeous yet maintains connections to the documentary"

"Edward Burtynsky views the world through a large-format camera and finds beauty in highly improbable places. For nearly 20 years his subject has been the ravages of heavy industry, seen at a scale so vast as to be unimaginable."

"Edward Burtynsky wants to start a conversation about change. His photography documents the massive impact of human beings on the earth's landscape. He has filled his view finder with nickel mines in Sundbury, marble quarries in Italy and the demolition of the Yangtze River vallery in China. The enormous, deeply colorful prints he produces are both sublime and horrible."