Toward What Sun?
Philip Van Keuren’s decade-spanning photogravure project, collectively titled “Toward What Sun?” is a collection of forty photogravure prints that together form a singular artistic meditation on time, memory, and place.
For many years, Philip Van Keuren has pursued photography as a quiet, contemplative practice—guided by everyday observations that reveal the world as both sublimely beautiful and fundamentally unknowable. His images unfold not in fleeting moments but across decades, tracing the passage of time through nuanced light, shadow, and stillness.
Van Keuren began collaborating with Manneken Press in 2009 to transform his original 35mm camera negatives into photogravure plates. The result is a luminous archive of forty hand-printed copperplate photogravures that both honor and extend the expressive potential of this historic printmaking process.
Each volume of “Toward What Sun?” features ten images, printed in limited editions of 12, on 18 × 14-inch Hahnemühle Copperplate paper, with image dimensions of 12 × 8 inches. The works are hand-printed in black ink. The prints are available both as individual impressions and as complete portfolio sets housed in custom cases with letterpress-printed title pages and colophons. Vol. I was released in 2016, followed by Vol. II in 2019, Vol. III in 2025, and Vol. IV completing the cycle in 2026.
Photogravure
The photogravure process, developed in the 1870s, is a hybrid of photography and intaglio printmaking. Unlike halftone reproduction methods, photogravure renders images in continuous tones rather than breaking them into dots, allowing for exceptional depth, subtle gradations, and fine detail. Printed from inked copper plates, photogravures possess the tactile richness and tonal range prized by photographers of the Photo-Secession and Pictorialist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the context of contemporary digital photography, photogravure has experienced a renewed relevance, offering a materially grounded and historically resonant alternative which illuminates the dialogue between photographic image and printmaking tradition.
Philip Van Keuren
Born in Dallas, Texas in 1948. Lives and works in Dallas, TX.
He received his B.F.A. (1974) and M.F.A. (1977) degrees in studio art from the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. He currently serves as Professor of Art. Van Keuren was the director of the Pollock Gallery for the Division of Art at the Meadows School from 1991 through 2012, where he curated a number of notable exhibitions.
Van Keuren attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York in 1975 and is a 1978 and 2009 Fellow of The MacDowell Residency in Peterborough, New Hampshire. During the early 1980s Van Keuren constructed architectural models for the renowned American architects I. M. Pei, Henry Cobb and Philip Johnson, among others, and was a visiting artist at Brown University in 1989.
Van Keuren completed a poetry residency at the Vermont Studio Center in March 2007. His book Monody: Selected Poems 1978–2009 was published in conjunction with the exhibition Philip Van Keuren: Forty Years of Works on Paper 1969–2009 at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary (The MAC) in Dallas, TX. As an artist he has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions since 1971, including one-person shows at the IPA Gallery/Islensk grafik, Reykjavík, Iceland in 2011, and the Robert and Elaine Stein Galleries at Wright State University, Dayton, OH in 2025.
Distinctions
American Academy in Rome: Visiting Artist Residency, 2023
Nominee: The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, 2009
Fellow: The MacDowell Residency, Peterborough, NH, 1978 and 2009
Patricia and Jerre Mangione Fellowship, The MacDowell Residency, Peterborough, NH
Fellow: Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, New York, NY, 1975