Major installation coincides with the creation of new large-scale wave photographs from Nazaré, Portugal.

At a pivotal moment in his career, Clifford Ross presents the largest indoor installation to date of his Digital waves in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art. Rising twenty five feet high and created specifically for the museum’s classical rotunda, the monumental computer generated video immerses viewers in an awe inspiring light storm composed of millions of tiny LED bulbs. Developed over more than a decade and first introduced at MASS MoCA in 2015, before subsequent presentations at the Parrish Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, San Francisco, the National Gallery of Art installation represents the culmination of Ross’s lifelong engagement with the sea. The Digital waves follow a path established by his well known Hurricane Waves photographs, made off the shores of Long Island while tethered to an assistant on land and immersed in the roiling surf, translating those direct encounters with nature into a dynamic, computer- generated experience that evokes both the serenity and tumult of the ocean.

Ross’s work extends a tradition of the sublime associated with artists as diverse as J.M.W. Turner and Jackson Pollock, while embracing contemporary technology to reimagine the experience of nature at enormous scale. Ross has described his approach as “an effort to move beyond literal depiction toward what filmmaker Werner Herzog has called the ecstatic truth—an attempt to capture not only what is seen, but what is felt when confronting the overwhelming force of the sea.”

Coinciding with this reimagining of his Digital waves to fit the architecture of a major museum, Ross has produced a new body of photographs capturing the monumental 100-foot waves breaking off the coast of Nazaré with the aid of a custom 7’ drone and an international crew of six. He has developed a new printing method to create 8x12-foot prints of stunning clarity, creating a “you are there” experience akin to encountering the work at the National Gallery. The 30 Nazaré Waves in Ross’s new series mark a significant new development in his practice, where the viewer is confronted by works that appear painted, tactile. Only two images from this series have been publicly presented —two stories high on the façade of the Asia Society in New York. Together, the National Gallery and the Nazaré photographs position Ross at a moment of unique achievement, as decades of experimentation across photography, painting, and digital media converge in two intertwined bodies of work that confront viewers with the scale, beauty, and power of the Atlantic Ocean.

Ross’s work is held in major museum collections world- wide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art.