Very Pictorial Conceptual Art

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 bring together a set of images Cumming himself selected in his final years for his Large Print Project. The original 8×10 inch negatives of these works were all digitally scanned for the first time.

Cumming first came to photography in the 1960s as a means of photographing his sculptural works, but found that at a certain point he was happier with the photographs than he was with the sculptures themselves. He would go on to produce an archive of immaculate photographs of functional-looking yet perplexing constructions in and around his Los Angeles back yard.

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‘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