Nailya Alexander Gallery is honored to celebrate the eighty-fourth birthday of George Tice with the online exhibition George Tice: An Ode to a Tree. Born October 13, 1938, in Newark, New Jersey, Tice stands today as one of the foremost fine-art photographers working in the United States. Our exhibition focuses on Tice’s early work, from the mid-1960s and 1970s, which addresses an image of the tree. For thousands of years, all around the world, trees have been seen as the embodiment of holiness, knowledge, and interconnectedness; above all, they have been seen as symbols of life, growth, and rebirth.
Tice’s rendering of trees reveals their simultaneously formal and poetic beauty in its many connotations. He reveals trees in their graphic form, as symbolic icons, as testaments to spiritual presence, and through the natural mystery of forest interiors.
Tice creates exquisite and elegant lace-like images in Tree #12 and Tree #14, both taken in New York in 1965; and a stark composition of the bare, dark vertical line abstraction against a background of snow in Tree #8, New Jersey, 1964.
In the platinum palladium print Aspen Grove, Colorado, 1969, the luminous trunks of Aspen trees echo against a dark forest. Similarly, both unusually evocative power and majestic natural architecture are depicted in Oak Tree, Holmdel, New Jersey, 1970.
George Tice’s photographs can be found in the permanent collections of over 150 museums and institutions around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. He has received numerous fellowships and commissions, including the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the National Media Museum (UK).
Tice's essential new book Lifework: Photographs 1953 - 2013, published this year by Veritas Editions, is available through the gallery. This slipcased hardcover book contains over 300 photographs from all of Tice’s major bodies of work, as well as images that have never before been published.
