Richard Mosse

Richard Mosse’s photography captures the beauty and tragedy in war and destruction. Mosse has shot abandoned plane wrecks in the furthest reaches of the planet and the former palaces of Uday and Saddam Hussein now occupied by US military forces. His Infra series captures the ongoing war between rebel factions and the Congolese national army in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Infra series is marked by Mosse’s use of Kodak Aerochrome, a discontinued reconnaissance infrared film. The film registers chlorophyll in live vegetation. The result is the lush Congolese rainforest rendered into a beautifully surreal landscape of pinks and reds. Mosse said in an interview with The British Journal of Photography "I wanted to export this technology to a harder situation, to up-end the generic conventions of calcified mass-media narratives and challenge the way we're allowed to represent this forgotten conflict… I wanted to confront this military reconnaissance technology, to use it reflexively in order to question the ways in which war photography is constructed."

Mosse is the winner of the 2014 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. In 2013, Mosse represented Ireland in the Venice Biennale with The Enclave an immersive six-channel video installation that utilized 16mm infrared film. The piece is an attempt, as Mosse explained on CNN.com, to bring “two counter-worlds into collision: art’s potential to represent narratives so painful that they exist beyond language, and photography’s capacity to document specific tragedies and communicate them to the world.” 

Mosse was born in 1980 in Ireland and is based in New York. He earned an MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art in 2008 and a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, London in 2005. Mosse has exhibited work at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro; the Bass Museum of Art, Miami; the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris; the Dublin Contemporary Biennial; FotoMuseum Antwerp (FoMu); FOAM, Amsterdam; and the Tate Modern, London.

Richard Mosse: The Enclave opened at Hafnarhús, Reykjavík Art Museum, Iceland, September 30, 2016 - January 1, 2017.  Mosse also had a major multi-channel video installation at The Curve, Barbican Art Gallery, London, opening February 15, 2017 - April 23, 2017.  Other recent solo exhibitions include The Enclave, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, August 27, 2015 - January 10, 2016; The Enclave, Portland Museum of Art, November 8, 2014 – February 8, 2015; The Enclave, DHC/ART, Montreal, October 16, 2014 – February 8, 2015; Richard Mosse: The Enclave, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, February 6 – May 25, 2015;  Richard Mosse: The Enclave, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, August 27, 2015 – January 10, 2016; Richard Mosse: The Enclave, National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, October 10, 2015 – February 28, 2016; and was invited to participate in Tu Dois Changer Ta Vie: Exposition Renaissance Lille 3000, France, September 26, 2015 – January 17, 2016.

Mosse's work is part of many public collections including the The National Gallery of Victoria, Australia; The Portland Art Museum; The Colby College Museum of Art; Rollins College/Cornell Fine Arts Museum; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; the Martin Margulies Collection, Miami; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City; The Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro; and the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. Mosse’s first monograph, Infra, was published by Aperture Foundation and Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in 2011. His most recent monograph, The Enclave, was also published by Aperture Foundation in 2013 to accompany his presentation at the Venice Biennale. 

Jack Shainman Gallery has represented Richard Mosse since 2008. He had his first solo exhibition, Airside, that same year. Subsequent solo exhibitions include The Fall (2009), Infra (2011), The Enclave (2014), and Heat Maps (2017).