Gagosian has announced the global representation of artist, photographer, and filmmaker Tyler Mitchell. Mitchell’s work will be shown by Gagosian at Paris Photo in a curated presentation with photographs by Richard Avedon from November 6 to 10, 2024. New photographs by the artist will be featured in the catalogue accompanying Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, the Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. His first exhibition with the gallery following representation will take place in New York in the spring of 2025.
A leading artist of his generation, Mitchell is renowned for his vibrant, playfully theatrical compositions that foreground the style and beauty of Black subjects, often within pastoral landscapes and familiar domestic settings. His photographs and videos offer utopian visions of empowerment, self-determination, tenderness, and camaraderie.
Mitchell draws from the traditions of portraiture, fine-art photography, fashion, and filmmaking to create images of individuals whom he seeks to visualize as “free, expressive, effortless, and sensitive.” Works such as Untitled (Kite) (2019) and Riverside Scene (2021) envision scenes of leisure in idyllic summertime landscapes. Such personal expressions seamlessly blend with editorial projects in his wide-ranging practice; in commissioned works like Untitled (Twins I) (2018) and Untitled (Communion in a Landscape) (2023), Mitchell uses brilliant color and dramatic silhouettes to present images of alluring individuals. He often prints his photographs on unorthodox substrates, including mirrors and fabric hung from clotheslines or draped over frames, as in A Gradual Shining Light (2023). He also embeds them into mixed-media Altar sculptures that reference domesticity and vernacular photography, integrating his visions into physical reality.
Mitchell achieved global prominence when he photographed Beyoncé for the September 2018 issue of American Vogue, becoming the first Black photographer to shoot the magazine’s cover in its then 126-year history. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery acquired an image from the series the following year. Untitled (Hijab Couture) (2019), from another Vogue feature, pictures Somali-born model Ugbad Abdi wearing a headdress of glossy pink flowers. His photographs of the newly inaugurated Vice President Kamala Harris were commissioned for the cover of Vogue’s February 2021 issue. Mitchell has also collaborated with brands including Loewe, Louis Vuitton, Ferragamo, JW Anderson, Wales Bonner, and Marc Jacobs.
Mitchell’s first solo exhibition, I Can Make You Feel Good at Foam, Amsterdam (2019), was extended under the same title attheInternational Center of Photography, New York (2020–21), and accompanied by a monograph published by Prestel. His work was also featured in the group exhibition The New Black Vanguard, organized by Antwaun Sargent for Aperture in 2019, which traveled through 2023. In 2020, Mitchell was awarded a Gordon Parks Foundation fellowship, inspiring a series that considers the beauty and intimacy of domestic space and was exhibited as An Imaginative Arrangement of the Things Before Me (2021) at the foundation’s gallery in Pleasantville, New York.
Photo: Lucy Dawkins Courtesy Gagosian
In 2022, Gagosian Davies Street, London, presented Chrysalis, Mitchell’s debut exhibition with the gallery. Featuring photographs of Black men and women at leisure, in lakes and before painted landscape backdrops, scenes of repose and equilibrium such as A Glint of Possibility (2022) are contrasted with images like Flotation (2022), in which figures immersed in mud and turbulent water evoke the need for vigilance and resilience. Also in 2022, Mitchell presented works for London’s Frieze Masters conceived in dialogue with historical landscape motifs, the first time Frieze had commissioned contemporary artwork for the fair. In 2023, the Museum of Art at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia organized Domestic Imaginaries, an exhibition featuring Mitchell’s mixed-media works, on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston-Salem, through December 31, 2024.
Wish This Was Real, Mitchell’s first exhibition in Germany, was presented at C/O Berlin in 2024 with photographs, videos, and installations from the past decade. The exhibition will travel to four European institutions through 2026, with the next stop at the Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki, opening October 24, 2024. Idyllic Space is on view at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art though December 1, 2024. This homecoming project features photographs and video installations inspired by the artist’s years growing up in suburban Atlanta and addresses themes of portraiture, landscape, leisure, family, identity, and shared experience.
About the artist
Tyler Mitchell was born in 1995 in Atlanta and lives and works in New York. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Detroit Institute of Arts; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Foam, Amsterdam; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and National Portrait Gallery, London. Exhibitions include The New Black Vanguard, Aperture, New York (2019); I Can Make You Feel Good, Foam, Amsterdam (2019, traveled to International Center of Photography, New York, 2020–21); An Imaginative Arrangement of the Things Before Me, Gordon Parks Foundation, Pleasantville, NY (2021); Sunlight, Shadow, and a Rainbow: Matt Eich and Tyler Mitchell, Cleveland Museum of Art, OH (2022); Domestic Imaginaries, Museum of Art, Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia (2023, traveled to North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston-Salem, 2024); Wish This Was Real, C/O Berlin (2024, traveling to Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; Photo Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; and Foto Arsenal Wien, Vienna, through 2026); and Idyllic Space, High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2024).
