Edward Burtynsky is considered one of the most important contemporary photographers, and has been devoting his art to testifying man’s impact on the planet for over forty years. Helping to draw us to his global message was the large retrospective exhibition Burtynsky: Extraction/Abstraction, which after debuting at the Saatchi Gallery in London, was hosted at M9 – Museum of the 20th Century in Mestre, enhanced by the production curated by Alvisi Kirimoto. The whole corpus of the Extraction/Abstraction series has been brought together in a prestigious volume published by the German publishers Steidl (2024), which has a number of books on Burtynsky in its catalogue.
InExtraction/Abstraction Burtynsky’s work focuses on what the Canadian photographer describes as “large-scale industrial raids on the planet”. He invites us to look at the recycling sites, the mines, the refineries: “All spaces that are beyond our normal experience, but the production of which we use every day”. Those places offer the resources that meet the needs of our present.
His is an ethical observation of landscapes that become “metaphors of the dilemma of our modern existence; they seek dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are attracted by the desire, the opportunity to live well, but we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering. Our dependence on nature and our worries for the health of the planet place us in a difficult contradiction”. This contradiction is made clear by his fascinating works: the landscapes – apparently perfect, surreal, abstract, touching – are both aesthetically attractive and frightening. They uncompromisingly place us before changes in the climate, changes in the territory, structural changes in the Earth. Burtynsky’s inquiry urges us to understand how far humans have already exploited our natural resources and seek a sustainable future.
Curated by Marc Mayer, former director of the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montreal, the exhibition Burtynsky: Extraction/Abstraction includes over 90 large-format photographs, 13 high-definition murals, an augmented reality experience and a section, called Process Archive, that shows the equipment and cameras used over the years by Burtynsky during his relentless navigation of the world.
