We are pleased to present Nathaniel Dorsky: Film and Film Stills. Surveying the experimental cinematic practice of the artist through film stills created from the 1960s-2010s, the online exhibition coincides with his newly published limited edition book of photographs, ECLOGUES: Letters and Correspondence, each signed and numbered by the artist and published by Peter Blum Edition. Please click "Inquire" below the artwork details to contact the gallery for more information.

Nathaniel Dorsky was born in New York City in 1943 and has lived and worked in San Francisco since 1971. The artist creates 16mm silent films and photographic stills that elicit poetic and contemplative moments of observation; they are occasions for meditations on light, landscape, time, and consciousness. Capturing oftentimes quotidian or verdant settings, the luminous film stills reveal everyday existence as profoundly stimulating and sublime.

Dorsky has presented his work at numerous institutions, including the currently on view exhibition, Private Lives Public Spaces at the Museum of Modern Art, NY. Others include the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Filmoteca Española, Madrid; Vienna Film Museum; Harvard Film Archive; Yale University; and the Whitney Biennial in 2000 and 2012. A complete retrospective of his films was shown at the 53rd New York Film Festival in 2015.

“In film, there are two ways of including human beings. One is depicting human beings. Another is to create a film form which, in itself, has all the qualities of being human: tenderness, observation, fear, relaxation, the sense of stepping into the world and pulling back, expansion, contraction, changing, softening, tenderness of heart. The first is a form of theater and the latter is a form of poetry.”

— Nathaniel Dorsky

“Hours for Jerome (as in a Book of Hours) is an arrangement of images, energies, and illuminations from daily life. These fragments of light revolve around the four seasons. Part 1 is spring through summer; Part 2 is fall and winter. This footage was shot and edited from 1966 to 1970 and then edited to completion over a two year period ending in July 1982.”

— Nathaniel Dorsky on Hours for Jerome

“What tender chaos, what current of luminous rhymes might cinema reveal unbridled from the daytime word? During the Bronze Age a variety of sanctuaries were built for curative purposes. One of the principal activities was transformative sleep. Variations speaks to that tradition.”

— Nathaniel Dorsky on Variations

"Nathaniel Dorsky’s decades-long exploration of celluloid’s poetic and expressive properties captures quotidian settings— domestic, street-side, verdant—revealing themselves through montage and rhythm as simultaneously energetic and sculptural, deeply sensorial and transcendent."

— Five Films by Nathaniel Dorsky, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2019

“Most filmmakers think about light when making films. All film is light, after all; every image in every film needs the light that illuminates it in order to exist – for capture, and for projection. Yet few think about it quite as much as artist-filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky. As he writes in his book-cum-manifesto Devotional Cinema, 'beyond everything else, film is a screen, film is a rectangle of light, film is light sculpture in time'; to not consider it deeply would be to disregard film’s most essential property.”

— Matt Turner, The Photosynthesis of Film, Sight & Sound Magazine, 2018

"In these small stills from Dorsky’s experimental silent movies at Peter Blum Gallery, people appear as reflections and shadows or obscured by a scrim. Like the films themselves, the pictures thwart narratives, but the meditative slowness of the moving images is hard to convey frame by frame. Dorsky’s best shots pinpoint the pleasures of absorbed attention—on an overblown rose, an orange lizard, a shoe falling apart under water. Trees and flowering branches, usually seen in double-exposed layers, are nothing less than an exploration of bliss."

— Galleries, The New Yorker, 2016

“Dorsky is now an extremely young 75 years old, and the Arboretum Cycle expresses this in both directions. It is astonishing to watch an artist, long a master of his craft, challenge himself to find new modes of articulation, as he has done here in building a new film grammar for himself from the ground up. Inversely, it is astonishing to see films of such formal vibrancy which radiate such wisdom regarding their scale as objects of art, as visions of the world.” 

— Phil Coldiron, Light on Leaves, Notebook MUBI, 2018