Lynn Stern

Running counter to prevailing artistic trends, Lynn Stern's work ignores popular culture in favor of her own austere internal world. Frozen Mystery is a profound meditation on death and the human psyche, explored through works spanning three decades. Stern's imagery of skulls, which runs through five distinct bodies of work, is unique in contemporary photography (though certainly a tradition in art history). Stern works in series, exclusively in black and white and exclusively in natural, indirect light; the results are characterized by a luminosity that is at least as important as her ostensible subject matter. “My aim,” she writes, “is to de-literalize what is in front of the lens—to make it the expression of something unseen, something beyond the thing itself.” Exploring, in part, the relationship between photography and painting, Frozen Mystery accompanies a major retrospective of Stern's work at the Museo Fundación Cristóbal Gabarrón in Valladolid, Spain.