Whitney Biennial 2017

Floor 5

Born 1949 in Santa Monica, CA
Lives in Riverside, CA

Since the 1970s, John Divola has used photography to explore themes of neglect and disuse in his native Southern California. The series Abandoned Paintings was inspired by the artist’s discovery of a trove of discarded student paintings in a dumpster near the University of California, Riverside, where he is a longtime professor. Divola incorporated the salvaged paintings into his work, hanging the aspirational, often-unfinished canvases on the walls of abandoned buildings. In the resulting photographs, the paintings seem both out of place and uncannily suited to their surroundings. In Abandoned Painting B, for instance, the subject of a portrait appears to glance out of an adjacent window, reflecting photography’s capacity to frame and transform reality rather than simply record it.