Clifford Ross

Clifford Ross (born October 15, 1952) is an American artist who has worked in multiple forms of media, including sculpture, painting, photography and video.

His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Born in New York City to Arthur and Gloria Ross, Ross earned a Bachelor of Arts in Art and Art History from Yale University in 1974, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1973.

After his college years, his painting was influenced by Abstract Expressionism and the Color Field School, which included his aunt, Helen Frankenthaler.

Between 1974 and 1979, Ross's painting and sculpture work was entirely abstract.

He determined that the only way forward was to find his own way into abstraction with a proper base in realism like the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field artists whom he admired.

Ross stopped exhibiting for four years, studying figurative painting and sculpture at the National Academy of Design, and then continued on his own.

In 1980, he broke off his relationship with Clement Greenberg and many of the artists around him, with the exception of his aunt, with whom he maintained a close relationship throughout her life.

By 1987, he was producing paintings that were tied to landscape imagery, but with a high degree of physical materiality and abstraction.

In order to explore the landscapes that served as inspiration for his painting and sculptural works, Ross often took photographic studies, at times even using them as collaged elements to create imaginary scenes.

Ross is a contributing editor for BOMB magazine and edited the book Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics (Abrams, 1990).

He served as chair of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation for 8 years upon Frankenthaler's death and is currently president of the Foundation.

His work has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States, as well as in Europe, Brazil, and China.

Eventually, Ross's use of photography took over and by the mid-1990s he began to produce his first serious works in the medium.

Following his early career in painting and sculpture, Ross began his photographic work in 1995.

A major milestone in his work is the Hurricane series, begun in 1996.

The black and white images in the series depict large-scale ocean waves shot by Ross while in the tumultuous surf, often up to his chest, and tethered to an assistant on land.

The series was originally photographed from 1996 to 2001 and was then extended by Ross in 2008, when he chose to capture the imagery with a digital camera instead of film.

All the waves in the series were generated by hurricanes.

Among his influences is J. M. W. Turner, with whom Ross shares a fascination with the violence of the sea.

Ross has said, “[w]hen I’m shooting, the wind is often howling, the water is churning and pulling at me… A still image doesn’t move.

But I have to try and deliver the wonder of movement through its absence—to find ways to telegraph the anxiety and delight of movement through a fixed image.” His drive to share the power of ocean waves with the viewer is not limited to his extreme efforts in capturing the image, but is central to Ross's obsessive and innovative printing methods as well.

In 2002, in order to photograph Mount Sopris in Colorado, Ross invented the R1 camera, with which he made some of the highest resolution large-scale landscape photographs in the world.

In 2005, he designed and built the R2 360 degree video camera and the i3 Digital Cyclorama with Bran Ferren and other imaging scientists at Applied Minds, Inc.

Ross's artistic output is defined by an ongoing embrace of realism and abstraction.

Ross has described this process stating, "I can never quite reach the essence of my subject with a camera, so my artistic cycle shifts to a wide range of media and strategies, moving from realism to abstraction. It is a creative loop of dissatisfaction. After using a variety of abstract means, I revert back to using a camera. And so on. Making art is an endless chase."

Ross's more recent collaborations include Harmonium Mountain I with an original score by Philip Glass, a site-specific, multi-screen production with the Orchestra of St. Luke's at Celebrate Brooklyn!, a multimedia installation in Beijing with Pan Gongkai, President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and a 3.5 ton, 28' x 28' stained glass wall with Franz Mayer of Munich, and architects Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam for the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Austin, Texas.

He spent a decade in the darkroom printing silver gelatin prints, and since 2009 has printed on wood veneer, pushing the photographic medium past its existing limits.

He is known for his efforts to communicate the sublime in the Hurricane series, and in most of his other work as well.

The Hurricane series led to two other bodies of work, the Horizon series and Grain series.

The Horizons are small images of a placid ocean with a low horizon line, which show minimal waves in the foreground and large expanses of sky above.

They reflect his appreciation of the ocean's calmer moments, when it is not buffeted by harsh weather.

In the Grain series, photography was reduced to pure tonality, the subject reduced to light and the 'grain' of the film's emulsion, becoming not a picture, or a picture of nothing, but an almost pure abstraction.

The resulting images may be the most abstract photographs ever made, but evoke the hypnotic and meditative power of the sea.

The transition from his Hurricane photographs to the Horizon and Grain series is a good example of Ross's constant shifting between realism and abstraction.

Taken as a group, the Hurricanes, Horizons and Grain series compose a trilogy known as Wave Music.

Typical of Ross’ dialectical working process, he found his next subject, far from the ocean in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado: Mount Sopris.

Landscape Seen & Imagined, a major mid-career survey of Ross's work, was held at MASS MoCA in 2015 through early 2016.

It included a massive, multi-screen outdoor installation of his Harmonium Mountain I video world with twelve 24' x 18' screens.

The exhibition was the first to feature new work in both the Wood and Digital Wave series including 24' high x 114' long photograph on wood veneer that spanned the length of MASS MoCA's tallest gallery and the artist's Wave Cathedral, which presented a large-scale immersive environment on LED walls.