Alec Soth. Advice for Young Artists

About

Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Alec Soth’s fifth exhibition with the gallery, Advice for Young Artists which presents a curated selection of images from Soth’s recently completed body of work of the same name. Photographed during visits he made to twenty-five undergraduate art programs across the country from 2022 to 2024, the resulting pictures, interior studies, still-lives, and self-portraits depict Soth engaging with his subject while also reflecting, obliquely, on his life as an artist. There will be a reception on Thursday, March 6, from 6-8 pm. The artist will be present.

Although the title might suggest otherwise, Soth’s project is less about imparting his ideas to a younger generation and more about engaging with and learning from their creative energy. Instead of providing wisdom or guidance, he presents a fragmented and open-ended meditation on artmaking across different life stages, as well as the connections between photography, time, and aging. “I was just trying to be in the proximity of their energy,” Soth reflects. The photographs that emerged out of his visits are deeply empathetic. In his portraits of students at work or in their studios, he not only captures them as subjects but also positions them as artists in their own right. There is an implicit connection between the artist in front of the camera and the artist behind it. This is demonstrated by the ruminative and playful self-portraits that occur throughout the project: Soth situates himself not as an outside observer, but amongst his subjects.

Drawing inspiration from iconic American photographer Walker Evans’s late Polaroids, Alec Soth’s Advice for Young Artists marks a significant evolution in his practice, offering a fresh perspective two decades after the publication of his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, in 2004. Much like Evans, who visited universities in the 1970s and photographed extensively with a Polaroid camera, Soth embraces his encounters with students as a way to understand his work from a new perspective. As he describes it, “When I was at a school and totally focused on my work, I had the experience of age falling away.” Embedded in the environment of an art school, Soth taps into the zeitgeist and rediscovers his practice anew. In Advice for Young Artists Soth allows an easy humor to enter his photographs and finds surprising juxtapositions, he adapts and reinvents his visual language in response to the dynamic energy of his subjects. In this way, the series marks a moment of innovation in the career of one America’s foremost contemporary photographers.