Robert Cumming, VERY PICTORIAL CONCEPTUAL ART, 2023

Robert Cumming was an American artist who defied easy classification. A painter, sculptor, photographer, and printmaker he is perhaps best known for his painstakingly constructed conceptual photographs. This new publication edited by David Campany explores Cumming’s highly influential photographic works from the 1970s.

Cumming first came to photography in the 1960s as a means of photographing his sculptural works, but a found that at a certain point, he was happier with the photographs than he was with the sculptures themselves. Cumming would go on to produce an archive of immaculate photographs of functional-looking yet perplexing constructions with an 8×10” camera from his Los Angeles studio. Each entices the viewer to look ever deeper into the image to define its elusive intention.

‘Robert Cumming was an artist so self-possessed, so unlike any other, and so consumed by his own unique set of concerns, that what he made could have come only from him. There is an entire universe of thinking, making and picturing that is pure Robert Cumming’. – David Campany