mary Mattingly: night gardens
December 12, 2024 - February 22, 2025
PRESS RELEASE | images | Press
GOINGS ON: Art
BY THE NEW YORKER
Mary Mattingly’s photographs of moonlit gardens turn the Robert Mann gallery into a hallucinatory hothouse. Vivid and wild with masses of real, handmade, and computer-generated flowers, Mattingly’s compact landscapes are at once otherworldly—sci-fi at its most seductive—and as familiar as natural-history dioramas. But they’re not just pretty pictures. The artist has long been known for work (including site-specific sculpture) that takes on environmental issues with engaging subtlety. Here, the gardens often appear to be sinking or submerged as rising seas threaten to turn earthly Edens into swampland. In one image, translucent, jewel-like jellyfish caps float like a squadron of U.F.O.s above a darkened field of flowers, invaders from our own mutating planet.
—Vince Aletti
bathing in nature
By Aesthetica Magazine
There is no question that spending time in nature is good for your physical and mental health. Mary Mattingly’s (b. 1978) extensive photographs bottle the transformational quality of nature. The artist drew inspiration from a moonlit walk around Socrates Sculpture Park, New York. Informed by the blossoming and changing flora, Night Gardens considers the wild and shifting relationships between different lifeforms, humans included.
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9 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows This Season
BY Magnifissance Magazine
In this mesmerizing series, Mattingly invites viewers into a world where the natural and the surreal collide. The exhibition features twelve meticulously crafted images that explore gardens as evolving ecosystems, brimming with texture, color, and life. By blending physical elements such as plants, flowers, and fabric with digital manipulation, Mattingly creates magical environments that transcend the ordinary.
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Floral Dreams by Artist Mary Mattingly
By MSN
Anyone traveling into New York City from one of the nearby airports can see that here is a natural wetland—one that happens to support millions of people. Rivers and waterways define the lay of the land, feeding into the very close Atlantic Ocean. So photographer Mary Mattingly’s Night Gardens (now showing at Robert Mann Gallery on 26th Street), in which groupings of plants are imagined in a riparian environment, is very much connected with reality.
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Mary Mattingly: Night Gardens
by Musée Magazine
The exhibition invites viewers to discover the hidden beauty of gardens at night—an otherworldly realm where the textures, colors, and life of these plants flourish in a way never seen before.
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Night Gardens
By Meer
Flower blooms at night invite us to delve into enchanting gardens after dark. Gardens require attention and care, slowly growing and evolving. The gardener must listen and negotiate the vast will and system of its universe. Each plant carries histories, symbolisms, mysteries, and mutations, emerging in these collages as emblems of adaptation.
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