LIK Fine Art

LIK Fine Art sits at 400 Duval, Suite A, in the heart of Old Town, and it is Peter Lik's Key West gallery. Lik is an Australian photographer who taught himself the craft, spent years driving the United States in a van photographing all fifty states, and built a career on large-format panoramic landscape work. The gallery is built around the prints rather than around the furniture: Brazilian ebony floors, low light, large pieces given room.

For a visitor standing in Key West, the pieces to look for are the local ones. Tranquil Blue is his tribute to the water here. Midsummer Dream and Keys to Paradise both put weathered wooden jetties over the turquoise shallows that are the reason people come down the highway in the first place. Seeing an image of the water you swam in that morning, printed at scale under gallery lighting, is a different experience from seeing it on a postcard rack, and it is the best argument for walking in.

The credentials behind the work are real and specific, which is worth knowing because photography galleries are not all the same. Lik holds Master of Photography from the Professional Photographers of America and from the Australian Institute of Professional Photography, and Fellowships of both the Royal Photographic Society and the British Institute of Professional Photography. He has twice won Windland Smith Rice International Awards, for Ghost in 2010 and Japanese Maple in 2011, and Ghost was exhibited at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in 2011.

Beyond the Keys images, the gallery carries the broader catalogue, from slot canyons to city nightscapes, in limited and open editions at a range of sizes. The gallery is open daily from 11:30am to 9:00pm, which makes it one of a handful on Duval you can visit after dinner rather than instead of the beach.