Photographer David Burdeny, whose photo of a towering iceberg we featured last month, has been working on another large-scale photography project. Burdeny began the series SALT: Fields, Plottings and Extracts in 2015, using aerial photography to explore some of the world’s most vibrant salterns in Utah, Mexico, and Australia. Gazing upon the images it’s difficult to determine whether the expressive boxes of color are produced with a camera or paintbrush, or if the gestures were made by hand or nature.

“In their use of amorphous shapes, elongated fields of color and vertical, jagged and sinuous lines, Burdeny’s images suggest the painterly expressiveness of Rothko, Still, Newman, Diebenkorn and late career Willem de Kooning,” explains an essay written about the project. “The effect is less intentional than it is available—Modernism’s abstracted reordering of the visual landscape…permits a non-objective reading of these compositions.”

These works, along with a selection of Burdeny’s aerial photographs from Dutch flower fields, will be included in the solo exhibition Salt and Veld opening December 15th at Gilman Contemporary. The exhibition runs through January 20, 2017. You can see images from Burdeny’s SALT series, as well images from Cuba, Russia, and Brazil on his website.

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