Tyler Shields Rose Lips For Sale

About this work

Tyler Shields' Rose Lips (2025) is a chromogenic print issued as an edition of 3 and available in four sizes from 18 × 18 to 60 × 60 inches. One of the artist's most recent works, it continues his sustained exploration of the relationship between the human body—specifically, the mouth—and the natural world, here bringing together the lips and the rose in an image of exceptional sensory and symbolic richness. The rose and the lips share a long history of symbolic association in the visual arts: both are emblems of beauty, desire, and the fleeting nature of perfection; both carry within them the possibility of pain—the thorn, the wound. Shields draws on this shared symbolic territory to create an image simultaneously decorative and psychologically charged, a photograph of extraordinary visual beauty that rewards sustained attention with increasing layers of meaning. The rose is at once adornment, metaphor, and compositional element—a bloom that speaks the language of desire as fluently as the lips it accompanies. As a 2025 chromogenic print, Rose Lips represents Shields at the height of his craft—an artist who continues, after more than two decades, to find fresh and compelling visual propositions within the subjects and themes that have defined his practice. The chromogenic process lends the image a warmth and luminosity particularly well-suited to the reds of rose and lip, creating a work of genuine chromatic distinction and sustained sensory appeal. Chromogenic printing—requiring precise chemical processing and exceptional quality control—produces photographs of extraordinary color fidelity and archival permanence, making it the preferred medium of photographers who demand the highest possible standard of image quality.