Higher Pictures unveils never-before-seen experimental cyanotypes from the 1970s by Sheila Pinkel

Higher Pictures presents Sheila Pinkel: Early Works, 1974–1977, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. This is the first time these bodies of work have been shown. The exhibition features twelve cyanotypes spanning body prints, abstracted compositions, and early incorporations of computer- generated imagery. Together, they reveal the experimental foundations from which Pinkel’s decades-long investigation of light, form, and materiality grew. In the Body Cyanotypes, the body becomes a site of transformation. Working with the sun as her light source, exposing at midday for maximum contrast, the results are unmistakably surrealist: the figure floats and contorts, limbs multiply, the body grows unfixed—a record of light moving across and through form. As Pinkel recalls, “this (medium) allowed me the latitude to evolve new images using many different approaches as they occurred to me.” The same logic of accumulation and transformation carries thr