Mike + Doug Starn were born in New Jersey in 1961. Identical twins who first received international attention at the 1987 Whitney Biennial, they defy categorization, effectively combining traditionally separate disciplines, such as photography, sculpture, architecture and site-specific projects.
Big Bambú: You Can’t, You Don’t, and You Won’t Stop, their recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ranked fourth in the world in 2010 for total attendance of contemporary art exhibitions and was the ninth most attended exhibition in the museum’s history, with a total of 631,000 attendees over the six-month show. Throughout the exhibit, the Starns and their crew of 10-16 rock climbers continuously lashed and sculpted over 7,000 bamboo poles, a performative architecture of randomly interconnected vectors forming a section of a seascape, with a 70-foot cresting wave, above Central Park. Big Bambú suggests the complexity and energy of an ever-growing and changing living organism. In 2011, Big Bambú continued as an official collateral exhibition of the 54th Venice Biennale. New iterations of the series are being developed internationally.
At the former Tallix foundry, their laboratory studio space in Beacon, New York, the Starns continue to build the first Big Bambú. This studio space allows Mike and Doug to explore in depth the dialogue Big Bambú has with early works such as Stretched Christ, Siamese Twins, Sphere of Influence and Amaterasu, while pursuing their most recent investigations from their Absorption of Light concept, through alleverythingthatisyou, their photomicrographs of snow crystals, and their revival of the late 19th-century color carbon printing process.
In spring of 2009, the Starns completed their first permanently installed public commission for the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority. See it split, see it change, a 250-foot-long artwork, up to 14 feet in height, presents the artists’ iconic tree photographs and a leaf transposed onto fused glass. Marble mosaics and a waterjet cut, stainless steel fence punctuate the South Ferry subway terminal. It is the recipient of the 2009 Brendan Gill Prize.
Gravity of Light, a solo exhibition by the Starn brothers, featuring seven monumental photographs illuminated by a single, blindingly bright carbon arc lamp, is scheduled to open in the U.S. in fall 2012.
A series of artists’ books accompanies the exhibition, as well as a new monograph. Attracted to Light, To Find God, not the Devil’s Insides and alleverythingthatisyou are the Starns’ most recent monographs. The Starns are preparing a new artist book based on their iconic photograph of Guanyin, and a new monograph on Big Bambú.
They have received critical acclaim in the New York Times, Corriere della Sera, Le Figaro, The Times (London), Art in America and Artforum, amongst many other notable media.
Mike + Doug Starn’s art has been the object of numerous solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide. The Starns have received the following honors: two National Endowment for the Arts Grants in 1987 and 1995; the International Center for Photography’s Infinity Award for Fine Art Photography in 1992; and artists in residency at NASA in the mid-nineties. Major artworks by the Starns are represented in public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (NYC); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NYC); The Jewish Museum (NYC); the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC); the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne); Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC); Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan; La Bibliotèque Nationale, Paris; La Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, amongst many others.
