David Maisel and the Apocalyptic Sublime

For over forty years, David Maisel has made work that spans photography, painting, and video, situating himself above the surface—of the Earth, of the canvas—in such a way that his unmistakable sensibility transcends any given medium. His aerial photographs and video installations address the aesthetics and environmental impact of landscapes radically transformed by mineral extraction, natural resource reclamation, desertification, and military weapons testing.

Seen through Maisel’s lens, these sites become abstractions that pulse with other-worldly colors and geometries — endangered landscapes imbued with a disquieting allure. Across each series, Maisel uses beauty “as a tool, a device for helping us focus our attention.” His large-scaled, immersive abstract paintings respond to catastrophic climate change events such as wildfire and flood. In each of these mediums, Maisel’s images are spatially ambiguous and destabilizing, and describe a world wholly remade by human activity.

View from the Precipice, a new monograph published by Radius Books, is the most comprehensive survey of Maisel’s career to date and is the first to place his paintings and lens-based works in direct dialogue. The volume begins with a chronological primer offering both technical insight and anecdotal background information, provided by Maisel, for projects spanning four decades of his practice. Essays by art historian Alexander Nemerov and writer Geoff Manaugh and a conversation between Maisel and novelist Samantha Harvey weave through the visual chapters that comprise the second half of the book. Together, the images and texts offer an expansive account of one of the most distinctive artistic practices of the past several decades.

This evening’s event will bring Maisel, Nemerov, and Clio’s founder Timothy Don together in conversation around the themes of Maisel’s practice and the development of his new survey monograph.

DAVID MAISEL is a visual artist. He is the recipient of Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, among other awards and honors. His work is in the permanent collections of more than fifty museums internationally and has been the subject of eight monographs, the latest being a survey on his career, View from the Precipice, published by Radius Books in fall 2026. Maisel’s photographs were featured this year at the National Gallery of Art in Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography. His series Spiraling, on severe drought conditions at the Great Salt Lake, is being developed as a solo traveling museum exhibition by the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art and Environment.

ALEXANDER NEMEROV is the author of Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York (Penguin), praised by Vogue as one of its best books of 2021 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography that year. Nemerov’s most recent book, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s, has been called by the novelist Annie Proulx “one of the richest books ever to come my way…Deeply beautiful, achingly painful, and astonishingly tender.” Nemerov is featured in Nathaniel Kahn’s HBO documentary about the art world, The Price of Everything (2018). At Stanford University, Nemerov is the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities and served as chair of the Department of Art and Art History from 2015 to 2021.