Richard Misrach @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco - 'Rewind' A Retrospective Exhibition

Richard Misrach: Rewind

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

October 30 – December 20, 2025

RICHARD MISRACH 

Self-Portrait, 1975 

© Richard Misrach, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

RICHARD MISRACH 

Cargo Ships (January 8, 2025, 7:13 am), 2025

© Richard Misrach, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

With Richard Misrach: Rewind, Fraenkel Gallery presents a retrospective look at the artist’s career, spanning more than five decades. The exhibition is organized in advance of a full-scale survey of Misrach’s work at museums in the U.S. and Europe, planned for 2027 and 2028. Presented in reverse chronological order, the exhibition ranges from Cargo, Misrach’s newest series exploring the impact of global trade, to Telegraph 3 A.M., his earliest project, documenting street culture in Berkeley, California in the early 1970s. Highlighting ideas and themes that have consistently driven his work, the exhibition presents photographs made with an array of materials and techniques. Using everything from 35mm film to large-scale digital prints, the show traces Misrach’s development across the forefront of the medium. Fraenkel Gallery has shown Misrach’s work since 1985; this is seventeenth exhibition with the gallery. 

Whether photographing subjects as disparate as environmental disasters or cloud studies, Misrach has always pursued beauty. “I’ve come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyor of difficult ideas,” says Richard Misrach. “It engages people when they might otherwise look away.” The exhibition begins with a 2025 sunrise view of a freighter ship in the San Francisco Bay, printed at more than 5’ x 6’. Composed in vivid shades of pink, blue, and violet, the image from Cargo addresses the complex economic systems that shape modern life, and their far-reaching consequences. Other seductive but charged images document the U.S.-Mexico border wall, from the series Border Cantos; Louisiana’s highly polluted Cancer Alley, from Petrochemical America; and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, from a series shown here for the first time, 20 years after the storm. Several photographs come from Desert Cantos, Misrach’s long-running series examining humans’ multifaceted relationship with the landscape of the American West.

Since the start of his career, Richard Misrach has moved seamlessly between social concerns and more philosophical, experimental questions. “My work…has been about navigating these two extremes—the political and the aesthetic,” Richard Misrach writes. His first series Telegraph 3 A.M. used a medium format camera on a tripod. Working during the day and at night, Richard Misrach made portraits recording the effects of drugs and poverty in the wake of the Berkeley counterculture movement. In the series that followed, Richard Misrach began photographing in the desert, shooting at night but using a strobe to reveal the otherworldly shapes of cacti and sagebrush. The richly black, split-toned prints he made depict a near-mystical landscape visible only to the camera.

Later series push further into sublime encounters between nature and the camera. Starting in the 1990s, Richard Misrach photographed the Golden Gate Bridge, capturing variations in atmosphere and color that border on abstraction. Working from a single vantage point, Richard Misrach waited for the light and composition to align in front of his camera, an approach he returned to with On the Beach, his study of the ocean’s infinite surface, and most recently with Cargo. Abstraction in nature is also at the center of the series Notations, exploring the surreal hues found in color photographic negatives, digitally rendered. In these images, Richard Misrach inverts the tonalities of clouds or desert scrub brush, creating delicate studies of texture and form.

Richard Misrach (born 1949) has been photographing the American West for more than 50 years. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others. Border Cantos, a collaboration with the composer Guillermo Galindo, opened at the San Jose Museum of Art in California in 2016 and continues to travel throughout the U.S. His work has been featured in more than a dozen books, including Telegraph 3 A.M., Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West, Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach, On the Beach, Destroy This Memory, Petrochemical America, Border Cantos, Blind Spot Folios 001: Nancy Holt & Richard Misrach, On Landscape and Meaning, Notations, and most recently, Cargo. His photographs are held in the collections of major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. He is the recipient of numerous awards including four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

fraenkelgallery.com

Alec Soth: Advice for Young Artists @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Alec Soth: Advice for Young Artists

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

April 17 – May 23, 2025

ALEC SOTH

Katherine’s Drawing, 2024 

© Alec Soth, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

Fraenkel Gallery presents Alec Soth: Advice for Young Artists, an exhibition exploring the cultivation of creativity through playful and surprising photographs made at undergraduate art programs. Rather than offering the guidance promised by the show’s title, the series presents reflections on artmaking at different stages of life, exploring the connections between photography, time, and aging. Inspired in part by Walker Evans’s Polaroids of young people, the photographs range from bright still lifes made from art department props to enigmatic images of students and oblique self-portraits.

The series grew from Soth’s interest in portraits that Walker Evans made towards the end of his life, depicting young people at colleges and universities. Best known for his Farm Security Administration-era documentary work, in the 1970s Walker Evans began working with the new Polaroid SX-70 camera, recording signs and lettering among other subjects. Many of Evans’s celebrated Polaroids depict the vernacular subjects for which he was best known. But for Soth, “the work I love are his portraits of young people made while visiting universities,” he writes. The Polaroids “sparked something,” Alec Soth notes, and looking for similar encounters, he began visiting art departments around the U.S. Rather than giving lectures, Soth met with students and classes in exchange for access, writing that he “liked just hanging around and pretending I was an art student.” 

With humor and humility, Soth’s images sometimes suggest an unbridgeable distance between himself and the art school world he records. Artist Lecture presents Soth’s view of a lecture hall seen from the podium. The photograph captures seats filled with students and faculty, recording their amused, bored, or distracted reactions to Soth’s camera. In Katherine’s Drawing, pictured on the monograph’s cover, a pencil sketch of Soth’s face is framed behind cracked glass. Drawn by Soth’s intern at his request, the work’s shattered surface undermines any authority or self-seriousness it might otherwise embody.

Alec Soth: Advice for Young Artists

MACK, September 2024

Embossed linen hardcover

72 pages, 61 plates, 10.5 x 10.75 inches

ISBN 978-1-915743-76-3

More often, the images find Alec Soth at play, reclaiming the freedom and experimentation that belongs to beginners in any pursuit. Still lifes depict unexpected configurations of materials used to teach drawing and painting. In Still Life II, a colorful assembly of objects includes red apples and a scowling bust, and Alec Soth himself hidden at the back of the classroom. In a number of portraits, Alec Soth photographs art students framed by their work and their tools, peeking from behind canvases or holding a shutter release cable. In Ameerah, a young woman poses on a stool with her hands clasped. A study in blues, greys, and browns, the image also doubles as a self-portrait, with Soth’s own reflection visible in a smudged mirror.

ALEC SOTH is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Recent solo exhibitions include Alec Soth: A Room of Rooms at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, and Alec Soth: Reading Room at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, on view through May 4. His photographs have been featured in solo survey shows organized by Jeu de Paume, Paris; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and MediaSpace, London. In 2008, Alec Soth created Little Brown Mushroom, a multi-media enterprise focused on visual storytelling. His work is in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others. The artist’s monographs include Sleeping by the Mississippi, NIAGARA, The Last Days of W, Broken Manual, Gathered Leaves, Songbook, I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating, and A Pound of Pictures. Soth has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. He is a member of Magnum Photos. 

FRAENKEL GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108 

fraenkelgallery.com

Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited - Exhibition Organized by David Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery @ David Zwirner, Los Angeles

Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited

Organized by David Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery

David Zwirner, Los Angeles

April 24 – June 21, 2025

DIANE ARBUS

A very young baby, N.Y.C. [Anderson Hays Cooper] 1968

Image © The Estate of Diane Arbus

David Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery present Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited, on view at David Zwirner’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. Organized by both galleries, the exhibition debuted at David Zwirner New York in September 2022 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s momentous 1972 posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Cataclysm re-creates that iconic exhibition’s checklist of 113 photographs, underscoring the subversive poignancy of Arbus’s work even today while highlighting the popular and critical upheaval the original exhibition precipitated. This will be the first major survey of the artist’s work in Los Angeles since Diane Arbus: Revelations, which was presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art over twenty years ago.

In the fall of 1971, in the aftermath of Arbus’s death in July, her friend, colleague, and fellow artist Marvin Israel approached John Szarkowski, the legendary director of photography at The Museum of Modern Art, about the prospect of a retrospective exhibition of her work. Szarkowski, who had begun championing Arbus’s photographs in the late 1960s, quickly agreed to do the show. Though widely admired and respected by other photographers and artists, Diane Arbus was not well known at the time of her death. When the exhibition opened, on November 7, 1972, no one, not even Arbus’s most fervent supporters, could have predicted its profound impact on museum visitors, nor the impassioned—at times vitriolic—critical response the exhibition would generate among writers and thinkers. It was the most highly attended one-person exhibition in the museum’s history, with lines down the block to see it. Szarkowski later recalled, “People went through that exhibition as though they were in line for communion.” [1]

Even at the time, the retrospective was recognized for almost single-handedly helping to elevate photography to the status of fine art, paving the way for museums, collectors, and the public to embrace a previously unrecognized innate authority and power within the medium. As New York Times critic Hilton Kramer wrote of the exhibition, “What Diane Arbus brought to photography was an ambition to deal with the kind of experience that had long been the province of the fictional arts—the novel, painting, poetry and films—but had traditionally been ‘off limits’ to the nonfiction documentary art of the still camera.” [2] John Perreault, writing in The Village Voice, noted, “I don’t usually write about photography … but just this once I can’t resist. Diane Arbus was such a great photographer that her work breaks out of all categories. Her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art should be of interest even to those who are not usually at all interested in photography.” [3]

Such praise from some critics was countered with derision and ridicule by others. Susan Sontag disparaged the exhibition in the pages of The New York Review of Books: “Arbus’s work shows people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as horrible, repulsive, but it does not arouse any compassionate feelings.” [4] Jane Allen, writing for the Chicago Tribune, attacked the show: “[Arbus] shows us people, so locked into their physical and mental limitations, that their movements are meaningless charades. They are losers almost to a man.” [5] What seems to have enthralled some and enraged others about Arbus’s work was how she unflinchingly captured the singularity of her subjects, which—paradoxically—linked them to one another and by extension to the viewer. “This is what I love,” wrote Arbus at the age of sixteen, “the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life.… I see the divineness in ordinary things.” [6]

The exhibition’s title, Cataclysm, alludes to the immensity of the uproar spawned by the retrospective and the ferocity of the critical discourse around the artist that emerged then and continues to the present day.

Cataclysm coincides with Diane Arbus: Constellation, a major exhibition of more than 450 of Arbus’s images—the largest and most complete presentation of her work to date—which debuted at LUMA Arles in May 2023 and travels to the Park Avenue Armory, New York, from June 5–August 17, 2025. This unique presentation features an immersive installation that “allows viewers to find their own path to discover what lies between the pictures, what connects them to each other, and the imperceptible architecture underlying all creations: chance, chaos, and exploration.” [7]

Diane Arbus Documents

David Zwirner Books/Fraenkel Gallery

Hardcover, with exposed spine

8.5 × 11 in | 21.6 × 27.9 cm

496 pages, 69 texts in facsimile

ISBN 978-1-64423-065-7

$95 | $125 CAN | £75

Published September 2022

Texts by 55 authors, including Hilton Als, A. D. Coleman, Holland Cotter, Jacob Deschin, Germaine Greer, Hilton Kramer, Arthur Lubow, Janet Malcolm, Francine Prose, Sukhdev Sandhu, Peter Schjeldahl, Adrian Searle, Susan Sontag, Lynne Tillman, and Colm Tóibín

Foreword by Jeffrey Fraenkel and Lucas Zwirner

Edited by Max Rosenberg

The 2022 debut of Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited coincided with the release of Diane Arbus Documents. Through an assemblage of articles, criticism, and essays from 1967 to the present, this groundbreaking publication charts the reception of the photographer’s work and offers comprehensive insight into the critical conversations, as well as misconceptions, around this highly influential artist.

Best known for her penetrating images exploring what it means to be human, Diane Arbus is a pivotal and singular figure in American postwar photography. Arbus’s black-and-white photographs demolish aesthetic conventions and upend all certainties. Both lauded and criticized for her photographs of people deemed “outsiders,” Diane Arbus continues to be a lightning rod for a wide range of opinions surrounding her subject matter and approach. Critics and writers have described her work as “sinister” and “appalling” as well as “revelatory,” “sincere,” and “compassionate.”

Illuminating more than five decades in the evolution of art criticism, Documents provides a new template for understanding the work of any formidable artist. Organized in eleven sections that focus on major exhibitions and significant events emerging from Arbus’s work, as well as on her methods and intentions, the sixty-nine facsimiles of previously published articles and essays––an archive by any measure––trace the discourse on Diane Arbus, contextualizing her inimitable oeuvre. Supplemented by an annotated bibliography of more than six hundred entries and a comprehensive exhibition history, Documents serves as an important resource for photographers, researchers, art historians, and art critics, in addition to students of art criticism and the interested reader alike.

________________

[1] Quoted in Who Is Marvin Israel?, directed by Neil Selkirk and Doon Arbus (2005; www.neilselkirk.com/films).

[2] Hilton Kramer, “From Fashion to Freaks,” The New York Times Magazine, November 5, 1972, p. 38.

[3] John Perreault, “Art,” The Village Voice, November 23, 1972, p. 40.

[4] Susan Sontag, “Freak Show,” The New York Review of Books, November 15, 1973, p. 14.

[5] Jane Allen, “Charade of Losers in the Arbus World,” Chicago Tribune, April 8, 1973, p. 8

[6] Diane Arbus, high school essay on Plato, 1939. Quoted in Diane Arbus Revelations (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 70.

[7] Press release for Diane Arbus: Constellations, June 5–August 17, 2025, Park Avenue Armory, accessed online.

DAVID ZWIRNER

606 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles

www.davidzwirner.com

Sophie Calle Exhibition @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Sophie Calle

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

February 27 – April 12, 2025

Fraenkel Gallery presents an exhibition by Sophie Calle. For more than forty years Calle has made work that draws from her life, transforming elements from her public and private relationships into intimate narratives. The exhibition features several series exploring questions about legacy and loss, topics Sophie Calle approaches with her typical humor and candor. Making its U.S. debut, catalogue raisonné of the unfinished focuses on projects Sophie Calle previously conceptualized but didn’t pursue. Each piece pairs fragments from the project with Calle’s text about its failure. Another series, Picassos in lockdown, comprises photographs Sophie Calle made at the Musée National Picasso in Paris during the pandemic. Each shows a painting covered for protection while the museum was closed. The exhibition also features a selection of works looking at death and remembrance through the lens of Calle’s relationship with her parents. This is Sophie Calle’s fifth exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery, since 1994.

The series catalogue raisonné of the unfinished collects photographs, handwritten notes, comic books, and other documents, each paired with a short text describing the artwork Sophie Calle had originally imagined and how it came to (not) be. A red stamp across each text pronounces her reason for rejecting the work. The projects range from Calle’s request for museum visitors to propose ideas for her to enact (“Not exhilarating”), to an attempt to insert herself into a Mexican comic book collection that included the word “Calle” in the title (“Anecdotal”). Together, the series presents a sort of self-imposed salon des refusés, revealing glimpses of Calle’s process and celebrating the transformation of many dead ends into a final positive form.

In 2023, Musée National Picasso presented a solo exhibition of Calle’s work, timed to the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso. The deliberately retrospective exhibition, titled À toi de faire, ma mignonne, (“It’s up to you, my darling”) included photographs Sophie Calle made while the museum was closed during the pandemic, recording the cloth and paper coverings that shielded Picasso’s paintings from light and dust. Sophie Calle has described her encounter with the paintings: “The Picassos were under protection, wrapped up, hidden. Underneath — a ghostlike, less intimidating presence,” she writes. Titled after the works they conceal, the photographs in Picassos in lockdown encourage the viewer to recall the original painting.

A third gallery presents selections from Autobiographies and other elegiac, family-focused works, pairing photographs and texts in frames or urn-like wooden boxes. In Autobiographies (Morning), Sophie Calle awaits her father’s last words, while Autobiographies (My Mother Died) reproduces notes about death from Calle’s diary and her mother’s. A glass-fronted box titled Necrology presents the obituary Sophie Calle commissioned for herself, hidden behind pinned butterflies to remain unreadable. The piece incorporates Calle’s commentary about her decision to obscure the writing: “So as not to attract too much attention from death, I decided it was best to cover up what I did not want to read,” she notes. In these and other works, Sophie Calle addresses her own mortality with characteristic honesty and wit, taking on the question of how we remember and are in turn remembered.

Sophie Calle was recently featured in Sophie Calle: Overshare at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Absences: Sophie Calle & Toulouse-Lautrec at the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo. Her work was presented in the solo exhibition Finir en Beauté (Neither Give Nor Throw Away), held in the cryptoporticus at Arles as part of the photography festival Rencontres d’Arles in France. Her work has been shown in museums around the world and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Tate, London, among many others. Sophie Calle is the recipient of numerous awards, including most recently the Praemium Imperiale Award in 2024, as well as the Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal, an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, among others. 

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

fraenkelgallery.com

RELATED POST ON WANAFOTO

In English

Sophie Calle: Missing, Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, San Francisco, June 29 – August 20, 2017 

Sophie Calle: My mother, my cat, my father, in that order, FraenkelLAB (Fraenkel Gallery), San Francisco, June 23 – August 26, 2017

Sophie Calle, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, 29 October – 24 December 2015 

Sophie Calle, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark, 23 June - 24 October 2010

In French

Sophie Calle: À toi de faire, ma mignonne, Musée Picasso, Paris, 3 octobre 2023 - 7 janvier 2024 

Sophie Calle et son invité Jean-Paul Demoule - Les fantômes d’Orsay, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 15 mars - 19 juin 2022

Sophie Calle, Musée d'art moderne Louisiana, Humlabaek, Danemark, 23 juin - 24 octobre 2010

SOPHIE CALLE. M'AS-TU VUE, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 19 novembre 2003 - 15 mars 2004

Wardell Milan @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco - "Modern Utopia" Exhibition

Wardell Milan: Modern Utopia 

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco 

March 21 – May 24, 2024 

WARDELL MILAN

You Belong Here, 2023

© Wardell Milan, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery

Fraenkel Gallery presents Modern Utopia, an exhibition of new multimedia work by WARDELL MILAN. Ranging from intimate collages to large-scale narrative paintings, the artist depicts scenes of pleasure or violence, often imbued with a sense of unease. Long grounded in photography, his work is open-armed in its approach to materials. Images from photojournalism and news media often serve as references for figures in acrylic and oil pastel, and photographs by artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe are cut and recombined with graphite markings. This is Wardell Milan’s third solo show with Fraenkel gallery since 2019.

Several large works depict scenes of strife, pictured in human terms. In one, a couple embrace in a vivid red room while bombs explode outside. In another, children anxiously look to a sky filled with gunfire or rockets. As in much of his work, Wardell Milan bases his figures on photographs that he finds in newspapers, online news sites, and magazines, often using many different sources for a single piece. The technique connects his work to current events, including themes of war and migration, while focusing on the individual relationships between his subjects.

Other large works depict water, continuing Wardell Milan’s formal engagement with the color blue. In one, a group lounges at the edge of a pond. Their poses are relaxed, but a note of foreboding pervades the dark water and sky. In another, men and women stand knee-deep in ocean waves, reaching towards two figures that slip into or out of the water. In these works, Milan considers the role that large bodies of water have played in narratives of escape, while also serving as a site of leisure or celebration.

In many works, Wardell Milan draws and redraws faces or body parts, creating surreal heads that look in several directions, or legs that twist and bend. A female figure reclines, framed by at least two sets of arms. In drawings of female bodybuilders, women flex many limbs. With a nod to Cubism, the approach implies movement, but also suggests an echo of violence.

Wardell Milan began drawing bodybuilders more than fifteen years ago—in returning to the subject, he was interested in the dedication required to transform the human body, a theme he relates to gender transition. Milan connects the drawings to two delicate portraits in charcoal and oil pastel titled The Divine Feminine. The portraits present a vulnerable yet wary picture of fictional subjects who claim an identity between the masculine and feminine.

Wardell Milan has described his ongoing series of tulip paintings as a kind of self-portraiture. In the latest, paint partially covers the fine charcoal and graphite underdrawings, creating abstracted, pastel colored groupings of flowers. In other works, Milan continues his unorthodox depictions of Klan members, taking humorous aim at dark imagery with references to sadomasochism.

WARDELL MILAN has been featured in solo shows at the Bronx Museum of Art, New York, and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, Claremont, California. Group exhibitions include the three person shows Please Stay Home at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Boston, featuring the work of Darrel Ellis and Leslie Hewitt; and Dawoud Bey, John Edmonds, Wardell Milan at the Art Gallery of Ontario. His works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Denver Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; UBS Art Collection; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Milan’s work was the subject of the 2015 monograph between late summer and early fall, edited by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz and published by Osmos Books.

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

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Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco - "Ambient Jukebox & Other Stories" Exhibition

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller

Ambient Jukebox & Other Stories

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

January 11 – March 9, 2024

JANET CARDIFF & GEORGE BURES MILLER 

Suitcase theater, 2000-23 

© Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery

Fraenkel Gallery presents Ambient Jukebox & Other Stories, an exhibition of new work by multidisciplinary artists JANET CARDIFF & GEORGE BURES MILLER. Atmospheric, dreamlike, and theatrical, the duo’s work often explores how sound affects perception. This is the artists’ second solo exhibition with the gallery since 2018.

In "Cosmic Disco", tiny points of light reflected from altered mirrorballs fill a darkened room to create the illusion of slowly moving galaxies, accompanied by a soundtrack drawn from recordings of planets and moons made by NASA’s Voyager I and II. The piece immerses viewers in illusory reflections and otherworldly sounds, encouraging contemplation of the universe and humans’ place in it. In another room, Ambient Jukebox repurposes a familiar-looking 1960s jukebox. Rather than playing pop hits, it has been reprogrammed to spin drone-like tunes created by Bures Miller during the disorienting months of the global pandemic. As in many of their pieces, Cardiff and Bures Miller invite the viewer to activate the piece—selecting the tracks creates a singular experience of the work and transforms the iconic object into something unfamiliar and surprising.

A range of more intimate works populate the third gallery. Combining paintings, found materials, soundtracks, and audio musings, these works explore the ways in which narrative, music, and sound influence the viewer’s interpretation of visual elements. Playful sculptural collages, made in part from studio scraps left over from earlier works, are inspired by constructivist ideas. In one, a collage made from rough wooden shapes, pieces of torn paper, and a tuft of blonde hair spins on a round pedestal as speakers play a hypnotic soundtrack of layered voices. Other works juxtapose moody oil paintings with fragments of found text, exploring the power of words even when inaudible.

Suitcases appear in several works. A vintage suitcase is transformed into a theater, replete with curiously crafted doll-like characters and a range of scenarios that play on a small screen facing the ‘stage.’ Another suitcase is modified with a gramophone speaker through which Cardiff’s dreamlike voice quavers the World War I marching song Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag, and Smile, Smile, Smile by George and Felix Powell, a song which in time has been sung by forces on all sides of many conflicts.

JANET CARDIFF & GEORGE BURES MILLER recently opened the Cardiff Miller Art Warehouse in Enderby, British Columbia, a venue that showcases their immersive large-scale installations. The Killing Machine, an automated installation inspired in part by Franz Kafka’s story In the Penal Colony, is featured in the exhibition Kafka: 1924 at Villa Stuck in Munich, Germany, on view until February 11, 2024. Their solo survey exhibition Dream Machines was recently on view at Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland, following its premier at Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Germany. The exhibition was organized in honor of the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize, which was awarded to the pair in 2020. Cardiff’s celebrated sound sculpture Forty-Part Motet is on view in ongoing exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and Inhotim in Brumadinho, Brazil.

Their work has been shown in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tate Modern, London, among many others. Their work is in the collections of public institutions including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and others. In 2011 they received Germany’s Käthe Kollwitz Prize, and in 2001, represented Canada at the 49th Venice Biennale, for which they received the Premio Speciale and the Benesse Prize. 

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

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Hiroshi Sugimoto @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

October 26 – December 22, 2023

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO

Brush Impression 0897 (Fire), 2023

Gelatin silver print, 48-3/8 x 41 inches (framed) [122.9 x 104.1 cm]

© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO

Tateiwa, 2022

Pigment print on Japanese rice paper, 

mounted to folding screen, 71-1/4 x 279 inches (overall)

© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

Fraenkel Gallery presents the U.S. debut of two important new bodies of work by HIROSHI SUGIMOTO. In both series, the artist incorporates photographic techniques and materials into classical Japanese art forms, producing works that draw from the country’s spiritual history. Two immense folding screens, known as byobu, feature photographs of Japanese landmarks of sacred significance, delicately printed onto rice paper. The graphically striking series Brush Impression presents cameraless, one-of-a-kind calligraphic photographs made by painting Japanese characters onto light sensitive paper using photographic chemicals. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s ever-evolving artistic career has spanned nearly five decades, and this exhibition is his sixteenth with the gallery since 1991. Concurrently, the Hayward Gallery in London presents a major retrospective of the artist’s work, on view since October 11, 2023, until January 7, 2024.

Two large folding screens anchor the exhibition. Representing revered locations, these works feature photographic pigment prints made on traditional Japanese Washi paper. An eight-paneled screen, nearly 24 feet long, depicts a view of Tateiwa Rock, a volcanic formation in Kyoto Prefecture that has featured in folkloric legend. An 18-foot, six-paneled screen depicts wisteria vines in bloom at the Kasuga-Taisha Shinto shrine in the ancient city of Nara, where the exhibition Hiroshi Sugimoto – The Descent of the Kasuga Spirit, curated by Sugimoto, took place earlier this year. This screen was included in the exhibition, which paired Shinto and Buddhist antiques, some from the artist’s personal collection, alongside contemporary artworks.

In Brush Impression, Hiroshi Sugimoto creates kanji, the form of Japanese language based on Chinese pictograms, and hiragana, phonetic characters used in Japanese. Rather than using ink, Hiroshi Sugimoto paints with darkroom chemicals on silver gelatin paper to produce black and white or subtlety warm-toned works, which range in size up to nearly 40 by 30 inches. The study of calligraphy has long been an interest of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s—each unique piece records the movement of his large brush across the surface of the paper, producing gestural shapes as well as splashes, bubbles, and traces of bristles. The kanji characters he selects represent words for elemental forces such as fire and water, and the meaning of each word is heightened and reinforced by the expressive qualities of each piece. An orange glow suffuses Brush Impression 0810 (Moon), suggesting the rich color of a blood moon, while erratic splatters and drips surround the character for madness. Brush Impressions (IROHA Song), a set of 48 smaller works written in hiragana, transcribes an eleventh century Japanese poem. Famous in part for its pangramic inclusion of each symbol that makes up this form of the language, the poem has served as a sort of alphabet.

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO was born in Japan in 1948. Starting in the 1970s, he worked primarily in photography, eventually adding performing arts production and architecture to his multidisciplinary practice. In 2023, his 69-foot sculpture Point of Infinity was installed on San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Island, commissioned by the Treasure Island Arts Program in partnership with the San Francisco Arts Commission. The exhibition Hiroshi Sugimoto Honkadori Azumakudari is on view at the Shoto Museum of Art in Tokyo until November 12, 2023. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tate Gallery, London, among countless others. His work has been the subject of numerous monographs. In 2009, he founded the Odawara Art Foundation, dedicated to traditional Japanese and international contemporary performing arts. Hiroshi Sugimoto is the recipient of the National Arts Club Medal of Honor in Photography; The Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal; Isamu Noguchi Award; Officier de L’ordre des Arts et des Lettres; Praemium Imperiale Award for Painting; PHotoEspaña Prize; and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, among others.

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.fraenkelgallery.com

Martine Gutierrez @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco - ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS Exhibition

Martine Gutierrez

ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

May 24 – July 15, 2023

MARTINE GUTIERREZ

Aphrodite from ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS, 2021

Chromogenic print, hand-distressed welded aluminum frame, 

55-1/2 x 38-3/4 inches (framed) [141 x 98.4 cm], edition of 7

© Martine Gutierrez, Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

Fraenkel Gallery presents ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS, an ambitious new body of work by artist Martine Gutierrez. The series continues her exploration of identity across the cultural landscapes of gender, race, and celebrity. In 17 new works, Martine Gutierrez has transformed herself into a multitude of idols—a selection from the series comprises Martine Gutierrez’s second exhibition with the gallery. Costumed by the barest of essentials, Martine Gutierrez’s figure is the catalyst, reflecting dystopian futurism upon the symbols of our past. Through each metamorphosis, Martine Gutierrez re-envisions a diverse canon of radical heroines who have achieved legendary cultural influence over thousands of years in both art history and pop culture.

Still a patriarchal language, a determinative frame. Still a divisional boundary of womanhood, a categorization of the icon, a spiritual reality in mass production. The same face of currency made over and over again. What is an icon, a cult image? Rather, what is an image? What brings a symbol to power? Culture is history’s political influence, a pendulum of domination. What is power without resistance? The historical moment, and the figure that stands in opposition. Icon as fact, a perceived understanding of truth in the world, teaching us how to see. Image as instruction; see, when an aspiration finds meaning it exceeds its boundaries, it becomes momentous. Larger than life or death, but rather the cycle between lives. Not a vision, but the place we are at now, the inevitable new, the next civilization we are going to become. In refusal of deception, an encounter with unobfuscated femininity is revealed. If the icon shows humanity’s spiritual ideal, it is the anti-icon who refuses the delusion of man, his inflated self-conception. For the icon makes real the image, anti-icon must break through to reveal reality. What is a revelation? A proclamation of clarity, a veneer stripped away, a shattering. It feels like the world is ending, because it did; it has before, and it will again end. What is the world? In the progress of nihilism, creation becomes resistance; a new image of what the world was all along.

– Martine Gutierrez

The project’s cult following began in 2021 when first commissioned by Public Art Fund. Ten images from the original series were chosen to circulate on bus shelters normally used for advertising. Pedestrians encountered the larger-than-life figures on their daily commutes in 300 locations across New York, Chicago, and Boston. Martine Gutierrez adapted these images by veiling the publicly hung nude self-portraits, both delegating her autonomy and struggle in the ongoing political restrictions placed on women’s bodies in the United States.

This summer, Martine Gutierrez reveals ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS in three distinct selections set to preview across three venues: Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; RYAN LEE Gallery, New York; and Josh Lilley, London. The three-gallery exhibition are accompanied by a new artist book, published by RYAN LEE, entitled APOKALYPSIS. The full collection of 17 portraits is presented in its entirety for the first time in a traveling museum show, organized by Polygon Gallery, Vancouver slated for 2024.

Martine Gutierrez is the sole performer in the series, portraying all 17 groundbreaking figures: Aphrodite, ancient Greek goddess of love, desire and beauty, identified by the Romans as ‘Venus’; Ardhanarishvara, composite male-female figure of the Hindu god Shiva together with his consort Parvati; Atargatis, Syrian mother goddess of fertility and the moon; Cleopatra, Egyptian ruler famed for her influence on Roman politics; Queen Elizabeth I, England’s second female monarch when the country asserted itself as a major power in politics, commerce, and the arts in the 16th century; Gabriel, angel in the Abrahamic religions believed by many to be able to take on any physical form; Helen of Troy, Greek beauty seen as the cause of the Trojan war; Joan of Arc, sainted heroine of France, revered as a holy person for her faithfulness and bravery in battle, burned at the stake by the church; Judith The Slayer, courageous biblical widow who used her charm to save her people from an Assyrian general; Lady Godiva, bold noblewoman from the Medieval period who fought for justice for everyday people; Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mesoamerican Catholic title of Mary, who appeared to the Indigenous man Juan Diego and imprinted herself on his cloak as proof of her visitation; Mary Magdalene, ‘Magdalene’ means tower, as she is an early tower of the Christian faith, cited in the four canonical gospels as a follower and companion of Jesus Christ, a witness to his crucifixion and resurrection; The Virgin Mary, a young Jewish virgin from Nazareth, chosen by God to conceive Jesus through the Holy Spirit; La Madonna, Italian for ‘Lady, Virgin Mary’, central figure of Christianity, celebrated as the ‘Virgin Queen’ in processions of Semana Santa, throughout Spain and Latin America; Hua Mulan, famed warrior of Chinese folklore who disguised herself as a man to fight in battle; Sacagawea, Shoshone interpreter and guide of the expedition to discover routes through pre-colonial America, journaled by Lewis and Clark; Queen of Sheba, Ethiopian queen, known for her wit, power, and wealth, her romance with King Solomon is documented in the Kebra Nagast.

MARTINE GUTIERREZ (b. 1989, Berkeley, California; lives and works in New York) is a transdisciplinary artist whose practice includes photography, performance, music, and film. Her work has been featured in solo museum exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Photography, Darlinghurst, Australia; Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, Houston; Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, North Carolina; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma; and the Rockwell Museum, Corning, New York, among others. Her work is included in the collections of the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

FRAENKEL GALLERY

40 Geary Street, San Francisco 94108

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Nan Goldin Exhibition @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Nan Goldin

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

March 2 – April 29, 2023 

NAN GOLDIN:

Memory Lost, 2020 

Pigment print, 44 x 65 inches (framed) [111.8 x 165.1 cm]

© Nan Goldin, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

Fraenkel Gallery presents Nan Goldin’s fifth exhibition with the gallery since 1994. Memory Lost, the exhibition’s centerpiece, is a slideshow in which Nan Goldin explores the darkness of drug addiction through images and recordings from her extensive archive. The exhibition also features dreamlike photographs from Memory Lost, along with a recent series of intimate portraits made at home during the pandemic. 

Projected in a darkened room, Memory Lost presents a haunting and emotional narrative comprised of outtakes drawn from Nan Goldin’s archive of thousands of slides. Depicting scenes from her life and circle of friends, the 24-minute piece recounts the pain and fleeting moments of beauty in life lived through the lens of addiction. Presented for the first time on the West Coast, the piece includes a score commissioned from composer and musician Mica Levi, with additional music by CJ Calderwood and Soundwalk Collective, interwoven with Nan Goldin’s own voice, answering machine tapes from the 1980s, and contemporary interviews.

The still photographic prints from Memory Lost convey Nan Goldin’s distinct sensibility with mysterious depictions of skies, beaches, animals, and crowds. Often blurred or overexposed, the images suggest luminous fragments from a partially remembered past. 

The most recent works in the exhibition were made at home during quarantine in 2020-21, portraying writer Thora Siemsen, who moved into Nan Goldin’s apartment early in the pandemic. Tender, intimate, and quiet, the photographs exhibit the artist’s singular understanding of chiaroscuro, and mark Nan Goldin’s rare return to portraiture.

Nan Goldin’s slideshows are the subject of a major touring retrospective, This Will Not End Well, organized by Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and traveling to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. In 2017, Nan Goldin co-founded the group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), seeking to address the ongoing opioid epidemic by targeting the pharmaceutical companies that have profited from it. She is the subject of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the award-winning 2022 film directed by Laura Poitras, which follows the artist and P.A.I.N.’s fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for their role in the drug crisis. Her work has been the subject of major touring retrospectives organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and by Centre Pompidou, Paris and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and solo exhibitions at the Louvre, Paris, and Tate Modern, London, among others. Goldin’s work is in the collections of major institutions around the world. Awards include inclusion in the French Legion of Honor, the Hasselblad Foundation International Award, the Edward MacDowell Medal, and the Kathë Kollwitz Award. 

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, 4th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94108

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Martine Gutierrez @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco - Half-Breed

Martine Gutierrez: Half-Breed 

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco 

November 18, 2021 – January 29, 2022 

Martine Gutierrez

Neo-Indeo, Cakchi Lana Caliente, p29 from Indigenous Woman, 2018

© Martine Gutierrez, Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

Fraenkel Gallery presents Martine Gutierrez: Half-Breed, a new exhibition of photographs. Acting as both subject and producer, Martine Gutierrez explores the multiplicity and complexity of identity in a series of pop-influenced narrative scenes. The exhibition, which takes its name from Cher’s 1973 album, includes selections from three recent series, Body En Thrall, Plastics, and Indigenous Woman, the 124-page magazine for which Martine Gutierrez acted as muse, model, photographer, and art director, creating every element from fashion spreads and ads to an editor’s letter. A Berkeley native now based in Brooklyn, this is the artist’s inaugural show with Fraenkel Gallery.

Indigenous Woman presents images in the glossy, seductive style of fashion and advertising photography, reimagining the tropes of those genres with wit and nuance. In the project, which was shown at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Martine Gutierrez carves out a place for herself, trying on fluid identities that touch on race, class, gender, and sexuality. As she has noted, “No one was going to put me on the cover of a Paris fashion magazine, so I thought, I’m gonna make my own.” The exhibition includes selections from Neo-Indeo, a fashion editorial in which Martine Gutierrez wears Indigenous textiles, some of which belonged to her Mayan grandparents, paired with vintage and designer items in a personal, multicultural version of high fashion. In a 1960s-inspired ad, Identity Boots, Martine Gutierrez poses nude except for shiny white go-go boots and brightly colored gender symbols and glyphs, crudely taped to her skin. In a series of portraits titled Demons, Martine Gutierrez transforms herself into mythical women from ancient and indigenous cultures, adorned with sculptural hairstyles and extravagant jewelry. Together, the pages of Indigenous Woman present what Martine Gutierrez has called a celebration of “ever-evolving self-image.”

In the series Body En Thrall, begun as an editorial for Indigenous Woman, the artist stages photographs using herself as a model, posing with mannequins in charged scenarios. In the selection on view, Martine Gutierrez appears in the guise of a blonde persona she has referred to as “the bombshell,” and pictures provocative scenes that navigate questions about power, desire, and self-objectification.

In Plastics, Martine Gutierrez pulls plastic wrap tightly over her face while wearing messy blonde wigs and contact lenses, holding her breath as she embodies a series of archetypes. The transparent film pushes her features and smears her makeup, creating portraits that speak to the violence and artifice inherent in mainstream ideals of beauty.

MARTINE GUTIERREZ (b. 1989) was commissioned by the Public Art Fund to produce ANTI-ICON, a series of photographs installed on bus shelters throughout New York, Chicago, and Boston, on view until November 21, 2021. In 2023, her work will be included in Musical Thinking: New Video Artists in the Smithsonian American Art Museum Collection in Washington, D.C. Her work has been featured in solo museum exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Photography, Darlinghurst, New South Wales; Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, Houston, TX; Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, NC; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; and the Rockwell Museum, Corning, NY, among others. Her work is included in the collections of the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, among others.

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

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Carrie Mae Weems @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco - WITNESS

Carrie Mae Weems: WITNESS

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Through November 13, 2021

Carrie Mae Weems

Untitled (Playing harmonica), 1990-1999

© Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and 

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

“Art has saved my life on a regular basis.” 

— Carrie Mae Weems

Fraenkel Gallery presents a survey of the work of CARRIE MAE WEEMS examining her extraordinary achievement over four decades. WITNESS traces Carrie Mae Weems’s exploration of history, identity, and the structure of power, in photographs and video from many of her most important bodies of work. Carrie Mae Weems’s inaugural show celebrates the gallery’s recently announced representation of the artist.

The exhibition begins with early documentary-style photographs from the series Family Pictures and Stories, depicting Carrie Mae Weems’s own multigenerational family in a joyful and nuanced vision of Black family life. In her iconic Kitchen Table series, Carrie Mae Weems cast herself as a woman at the emotional center of an imagined domestic world, staging photographs that build a rich fictional narrative around her role as a lover, friend, and mother.

In the series Museums, American Monuments, and Roaming, Carrie Mae Weems photographed herself in front of institutions and public spaces around the world, dressed in black and facing away from the camera. Carrie Mae Weems has described the character she depicts as a witness whose presence invites the viewer to consider how power is inscribed in these spaces and which groups are welcomed and represented in them.

Carrie Mae Weems has often used performance marked by highly constructed artifice to explore how history is remembered and created. In Constructing History, Weems worked with college students to re-enact moments of social upheaval from the 1960s, building stage-like photographic tableaux. In the video People of a Darker Hue, Carrie Mae Weems addresses more recent history, pairing footage of buoyant city life and solemn protest with a stark, highly stylized vision of oppression, in commemoration of Black men and women killed by police.

In From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, one of Carrie Mae Weems’s best known and most powerful series, photographs of enslaved men and women and other Black subjects, collected from museum and university archives and other sources, are tinted red and overlaid with heartbreaking and poetic texts. Using important images in American photography to explore not only race, but rather race through the lens of American photographic history, the series takes on both photography and the racist structures it has supported.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS (b. 1953) has been featured in major exhibitions at museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain. This winter, the Park Avenue Armory will host an exhibition and convocation curated by Weems, and in 2022 her work will be exhibited in a solo show at Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, Germany, and in a two-person exhibition with Dawoud Bey at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. She has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including a MacArthur “Genius” grant, the U.S. State Department’s Medal of Arts, the Joseph Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, NEA grants, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. Herwork is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New  York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Tate Modern, London.

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

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Diane Arbus Curated by Carrie Mae Weems @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Diane Arbus 

Curated by Carrie Mae Weems 

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco 

June 3 – August 13, 2021 

DIANE ARBUS

Kenneth Hall, the new Mr. New York City, 

at a physique contest, N.Y.C. 1959

© The Estate of Diane Arbus

The thing that’s important to know is that

you never know. You’re always sort of

feeling your way.

          Diane Arbus

Fraenkel Gallery presents an exhibition of 45 photographs by Diane Arbus, curated by acclaimed contemporary artist Carrie Mae Weems. A long-time admirer of Arbus’s work, Weems has selected images spanning Arbus’s fifteen-year career, from 1956 until her death in 1971. The exhibition will be followed by an exhibition devoted to Carrie Mae Weems’s own work in September.

Weems has cited Diane Arbus, along with David Hammons, as artists of paramount importance to her. To inaugurate Fraenkel Gallery’s recently announced representation of Weems, the artist was invited to curate an exhibition of Arbus’s photographs, the sole directive being to focus on works that speak powerfully and directly to her. 

Weems’s selection begins with a single preliminary image from 1945, in which Arbus stands before a mirror, pregnant with her first child. It then leaps to 1956 when, at age 33, Arbus consciously began her career as an artist. The exhibition features three photographs from 1956, including Carroll Baker on screen in “Baby Doll” (with silhouette), N.Y.C. 1956 and Kiss from “Baby Doll,” N.Y.C. 1956, among several photographs in the show set in darkened movie theaters.

While the exhibition includes well-known images such as Two boys smoking in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1963 and A young waitress at a nudist camp, N.J. 1963, Weems’s selection focuses primarily on lesser-known works. Among them are Woman making a kissy face, Sammy’s Bowery Follies, N.Y.C. 1958, one of the earliest of Arbus’s photographs in which she places her camera strikingly close to her subject’s face, and Kenneth Hall, the new Mr. New York City, at a physique contest, N.Y.C. 1959, about whom Arbus noted, “he can wiggle his chest muscles separately and has developed a muscle on the back of his thighs which no one else has ever developed.” The photographs Weems has selected trace the evolution of Arbus’s technique and encompass a broad cross-section of her interests. The subjects depicted include couples, children, transvestites and female impersonators, nudists, families, and celebrities, often photographed in parks, bedrooms, and dance halls, in New York City and elsewhere.

DIANE ARBUS (1923–1971) is one of the most original and influential photographers of the twentieth century. In 1963 and 1966 she was awarded John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships and was one of three photographers whose work was the focus of New Documents, John Szarkowski’s landmark exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967. A year after her death, her work was selected for inclusion in the Venice Biennale, and from 1972 to 1975, the Museum of Modern Art hosted a major traveling retrospective. Her photographs are in the collections of numerous institutions around the world, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Tate Gallery, London, among many others. In 2022, Fraenkel Gallery and David Zwirner will co-publish Diane Arbus Documents, a compendium of reviews, articles, and other relevant commentary tracing the ways in which the understanding of Arbus's work has evolved over five decades.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS (born 1953) is a renowned artist whose work has been featured at museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain. She has won numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including a MacArthur “Genius” grant, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. Recent projects include directing The Baptism, a film commissioned by Lincoln Center; and Resist COVID/Take 6!, a public art campaign responding to the impact of COVID-19 on Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tate Gallery, London, among many others.

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

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Christian Marclay @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Christian Marclay

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

January 21 – March 26, 2021

CHRISTIAN MARCLAY

Untitled (Crying), 2020

© Christian Marclay, Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

Fraenkel Gallery presents new work by CHRISTIAN MARCLAY, incorporating collage, video animation, and photography. The exhibition continues Christian Marclay’s investigation into the relationship between sound and image through sampling elements from art and popular culture, and reflects the anxiety and frustration of the current global pandemic and political crises. The exhibition will be accompanied by a musical performance in which Christian Marclay’s collage No! serves as a score, on a date to be scheduled soon. 

The voice is at the center of the exhibition. In a series of photographs showing screaming faces, cut and torn fragments from comic books, movie stills, and images found on the internet are arranged into haunting, mask-like composites, and then recorded by the camera. Capturing the paper’s inherent creases and tears, the photographs mix analog and digital elements, and investigate the computer screen as a contemporary physical surface.

This exhibition marks the premiere of Fire, 2020, a hypnotic new animation. Using small pieces cut from comic books, the single-channel video work is an impressionistic representation of fire. Hundreds of photographs shown in rapid succession suggest a flip book, creating the illusion of a flickering, fiery mosaic in motion. Flames are also the subject of Raging Fire, 2020, a large collage made of paper cutouts from comic book illustrations of fire. The piece transforms representations of all manner of war, catastrophe, explosion, and arson into abstracted yellows, oranges, and reds in a variety of styles.

Also on view is No!, 2019, a set of 15 original collages made from comic book fragments, and No!, 2020, a graphic score for a solo voice that comprises a facsimile of the 2019 collages. While earlier works such as Manga Scroll, 2010, incorporated onomatopoeias disconnected from their generative action, No! uses vocal utterances, facial expressions, and body movements to prompt a performance. Writes Christian Marclay, “Like my earlier graphic scores dating back to the 1990s, the use of words that illustrate their sonic counterparts engages non-traditional visualizations of sound as a possibility for generating music.” As in his music and video works, which splice together found recordings and film footage, the comic book segments are culled and re-contextualized in vibrant, dynamic ways.

CHRISTIAN MARCLAY (born 1955) works in a sampling aesthetic, using fragments from the ephemera of popular culture to create new forms and meanings. Christian Marclay’s work has been shown in museums and galleries internationally, including recent major one-person exhibitions at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as Kunsthaus, Zurich; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Christian Marclay received the Golden Lion award for best artist at the 54th Venice Biennale for his 24-hour virtuosic video piece, The Clock, which has been shown widely to great acclaim. His work is in the collection of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthalle Zurich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

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Wardell Milan @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Wardell Milan

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Through 22 December 2020

WARDELL MILAN

1848, Venice, 2019, 2020

© Wardell Milan, Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery

Fraenkel Gallery presents new work by WARDELL MILAN. It is the gallery’s second solo show of the New York-based artist. Explore individual works in the show and watch a recent conversation between Wardell Milan and Elena Gross, the Curatorial Manager of Exhibitions at the Museum of the African Diaspora, by visiting the gallery's Online Viewing Room.

The exhibition features Wardell Milan’s ongoing series “Death, Wine, Revolt,” which combines photography, drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture to explore themes of over-indulgence, destruction, and revolution. While earlier series such as “Parisian Landscapes” looked inward, to personal questions of freedom and desire, Wardell Milan made the works on view in response to the turmoil of the global moment.

In several large-scale works, Wardell Milan uses enlargements of his own photographs of specific locations—the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where Martin Luther King was assassinated, or the city of Venice—setting his images in dialogue with historical sites of racist violence or political rebellion. Populating the works are a range of human figures, often nude, whose bodies are pieced together from fractured drawings and photographs, and overlaid with blue and white paint. Some groupings suggest erotic coupling or violent encounters, and many arrangements are based on photographic sources. In 2020, Los Feliz, Los Angeles, Wardell Milan positions five figures in white Ku Klux Klan hoods against his own photograph of the city’s hills. The arrangement of bodies is based on a found image of a Klan social gathering, and presents the white nationalists in a bland, contemporary California suburb. In The Parade, the arrangement of figures echoes Diane Arbus’s Untitled (7), from her final body of work made in a home for the developmentally disabled in New Jersey.

Also on view are a selection of smaller works, including white-on-white cut paper collages depicting hooded Klansmen, and paintings from Wardell Milan’s ongoing series of tulips. While earlier flower paintings were inspired by the 17th-century Dutch tulip craze, the new works deconstruct the flowers, transforming them into chaotic arrangements of petals and leaves, hinting at the dissolutions the past year has wrought.

Concurrent with the exhibition, in the third gallery, Wardell Milan has curated a selection of photographs from the gallery’s archives and beyond. The presentation, which includes works by Diane Arbus, Peter Hujar and George Dureau, is a collection of images that have inspired Wardell Milan’s own practice.

WARDELL MILAN (b. 1977, Knoxville, Tennessee) studied photography and painting at the University of Tennessee and Yale University. His works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Denver Art Museum; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; UBS Art Collection; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Wardell Milan’s work was the subject of the 2015 monograph between late summer and early fall, edited by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz and published by Osmos Books.

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

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Hiroshi Sugimoto @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco - Opticks

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Opticks
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Through August 15, 2020 - By appointment only

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO

Opticks 156, 2018

Chromogenic print

© Hiroshi Sugimoto, Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery

Fraenkel Gallery presents HIROSHI SUGIMOTO: Opticks, an exhibition of new large-scale photographs on view for the first time in the U.S. The images depict the color of light Hiroshi Sugimoto observed through a prism in his Tokyo studio. Using Polaroid film, he recorded sections of the rainbow spectrum projected into a darkened chamber, paying particular attention to the spaces and gaps between hues. The resulting works, each measuring approximately 5’ framed, are vivid, near-sculptural renderings of pure light. 

Hiroshi Sugimoto describes his process, which began before sunrise and depended on the clarity of the winter light: “First thing, I would check for hints of light dawning above the eastern horizon. If the day promised fair weather, next I would sight the ‘morning star’ shining to the upper right of the nascent dawn. Depending on how bright Venus appeared, I could judge the clarity of the air that day—Tokyo is clear almost every day in winter thanks to the prevailing seasonal west-high east-low pressure patterns. Only then did I ready my old Polaroid camera and start warming up a film pack from the long winter night chill,” he writes. In his studio, he used a mirror outfitted with a special micro-adjusting tilting mechanism, and projected light from the prism onto the mirror. By adjusting the mirror’s angle, he could separate individual colors of light. “I could split red into an infinity of reds,” he explains.

In his work, Hiroshi Sugimoto has explored the ways photography can be used to record traces of invisible but elemental forces. His philosophical approach asks questions about the human experience of these phenomena. Inspired by the writings and research of Sir Isaac Newton and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on the science and experience of light, the works in Opticks examine the infinite nature and dual status of color as a physical phenomena and an emotional force. Hiroshi Sugimoto titled Opticks after Newton’s 1704 book of the same name, which presented his groundbreaking experiments with prisms and light. More than 100 years later, in 1810, Goethe published Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors), a study of the physical basis of colors and human responses to them, which found Newton’s “impersonal scientific exposition wanting on artistic grounds,” Hiroshi Sugimoto writes.

Looking at light through his own prism, he notes:

I too had my doubts about Newton’s seven-colour spectrum: yes, I could see his red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet schema, but I could just as easily discern many more different colours in-between, nameless hues of red-to-orange and yellow-to-green. Why must science always cut up the whole into little pieces when it identifies specific attributes? The world is filled with countless colours, so why did natural science insist on just seven? I seem to get a truer sense of the world from those disregarded intracolours. Does not art serve to retrieve what falls through the cracks, now that scientific knowledge no longer needs a God?

The exhibition also includes a sculptural rendering of a mathematical model from Hiroshi Sugimoto’s series of conceptual forms, along with work from other series.

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO was born in Japan in 1948. Starting in the 1970s, he worked primarily in photography, eventually adding performing arts production and architecture to his multidisciplinary practice. His work investigates themes of time, empiricism and metaphysics. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tate Gallery, London; among many others. His work has been the subject of numerous monographs. In 2017, he founded the Odawara Art Foundation, dedicated to traditional Japanese and international contemporary performing arts. Hiroshi Sugimoto is the recipient of the National Arts Club Medal of Honor in Photography; The Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal; Isamu Noguchi Award; Officier de L’ordre des Arts et des Lettres; Praemium Imperiale Award for Painting; PHotoEspaña Prize; and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, among others.

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