Heatwave

Edwynn Houk Gallery is pleased to present Heatwave, a group exhibition on view from June 19 – August 1. The show brings together works by Lillian Bassman, Elliott Erwitt, Lalla Essaydi, Robert Heinecken, Sally Mann, Joel Meyerowitz, Abelardo Morell, Erwin Olaf, and Herb Ritts.

The exhibition explores heat not simply as temperature, but as sensation, atmosphere, and memory. In several works, its physical effects are rendered with immediacy and sensual intensity. Lillian Bassman’s Touch of Dew (1961), Herb Ritts’ Jump, Paradise Cove (1987), and Sally Mann’s Luncheon in the Grasses (1991) each offer distinct visions of summer’s elemental charge—sunlight on skin, wind in hair, the charged stillness of long afternoons. Mann has described the context of her Immediate Family series as inseparable from the Southern summer, writing: “The time is summer. It’s any summer, but the place is home and the people here are my family... The slow, wet air of southern Virginia in July and August exerts a hold on me that I can’t define – nothing happens during the other seasons.” In contrast, Joel Meyerowitz’s 1970s dye transfer print registers a different kind of heat: the weight of the city, where color becomes oppressive, and saturation mirrors the density of urban summer.

While this sense of environment courses through the exhibition, Heatwave moves beyond climate. It approaches heat as a metaphor and a condition—a heightened state of perception, pressure, and transformation. In several works, this tension is enacted through the construction of the image itself. Robert Heinecken’s Recto/Verso series collapses surface and meaning, fusing front and back pages of mass-market magazines into layered compositions that are seductive, disruptive, and difficult to resolve. Abelardo Morell’s tent-camera photographs offer a quieter, optical intensity: projecting the outside world onto the ground beneath it, his images blend interior and exterior in a single, refracted vision inspired by Monet’s gardens and post-Impressionist light. For Erwin Olaf, heat is emotional and theatrical. His meticulously staged interiors from Palm Springs hold time in suspension—composed yet volatile, where gesture is restrained and mood simmers just beneath the surface. Lalla Essaydi’s photographs, by contrast, burn more slowly: their tension lies in the layering of visual codes. Through textiles, calligraphy, and gaze, she reclaims and reconfigures the historical terms of representation. 

The works in Heatwave come together to show that photography, like heat, is not neutral. It has the power to shape, reveal, distort, and intensify. Across the exhibition, each artist uses the medium to transform perception into form, whether capturing atmosphere, reframing cultural narratives, or reimagining surface and space. Taken together, they reflect the sensory richness of photography and its ability to convey not only how the world looks, but how it feels.