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Alec SothRiverview Motel

2005

pigment print, 49-1/8 x 41-1/8 inches (framed) [124.8 x 104.5 cm]

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How I Learned to See is organized by six sections or “chapters” on the subjects of loneliness, love, aging, solitude, beauty, and discovery. Yanagihara has selected an idiosyncratic mix, with iconic and less familiar works by 12 artists: Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Elisheva Biernoff, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Katy Grannan, Peter Hujar, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Richard Misrach, Nicholas Nixon, Alec Soth, and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

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Robert AdamsColorado Springs, Colorado

1968

gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 inches (sheet) [36.5 x 27.9 cm]

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As a preface, the exhibition begins with an early work by Peter Hujar, Girl Throwing Ball, Southbury (I), 1957, which depicts a girl playing in a field at a state facility for adults with intellectual disabilities.

The first chapter, on loneliness, features The Backwards Man in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1961 by Diane Arbus; a photograph of a desolate motel at night by Alec Soth; Robert Adams’s picture of a solitary figure in a suburban home; a Nicholas Nixon photograph of an AIDS patient; and an affecting recent portrait by Katy Grannan.

The second section of How I Learned to See explores love, including couples by Arbus; erotic works by Nan Goldin; Elisheva Biernoff’s painting based on a found photograph; and two pictures from Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s Lucybelle Crater series (1970-72), showing pairs posing contentedly in humorous and disfiguring masks.

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Nan GoldinClemens and Jens embracing in my hall, Paris

2001

Cibachrome print, 28-1/2 x 41 inches (framed) [72.4 x 104.1 cm]

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Chapter 3, on aging, begins with a photograph by Arbus of a former beauty, heavily made up while smoking in bed (Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, 1938 Debutante of the Year, at home, Boston, Mass. 1966). Another highlight of this section is a group of eight works from Nixon’s series The Brown Sisters, for which he has photographed his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters annually over the course of 41 years.

The following section explores solitude through works by Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, and Arbus, as well as Adams’ celebrated photograph of an illuminated gas station at night (Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs, 1969).

Beauty is the theme of the Chapter 5, for which the curator has selected two seldom seen portraits by Hujar from the late 1950s; Callahan’s iconic portrait of his wife in the water, with her eyes closed and hair floating on the surface (Eleanor, Chicago, 1949); and a luminous work by Goldin (Pawel on the beach laughing, Positano, 1996).

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Richard MisrachUntitled (Hawaii XV)

1978

pigment print, 56-1/2 x 69-1/2 inches (framed) [143.5 x 176.5 cm]

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The final chapter features work that suggests the position of an outsider coming upon an unfamiliar subject and milieu, including Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Mandrill, 1980, from his Diorama series; Soth’s photograph of a single light bulb hanging above a mysterious clearing in the trees; as well as a pair of pictures by Richard Misrach, shot in Hawaii at night, in which a harsh flash captures the odd tangle of vegetation against the shadowy background of a dense tropical forest.

The post How I Learned to See: An (Ongoing) Education in Pictures, Curated by Hanya Yanagihara appeared first on Fraenkel Gallery.

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Nicholas NixonBebe, Cambridge

1980

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To present the world as he sees it Nixon has consistently used large, unwieldy cameras, with negatives measuring 8 x 10 inches or 11 x 14 inches, to describe life in precise, compelling detail.

His recurring themes—portraits of the very young and the very old, cities seen up close and afar, people on their porches, etc.—at first may appear to be unrelated strands. But, in retrospect, the photographs are woven together by the artist’s singular sensibility: a feeling of intimacy gained by clear-eyed, lucid description.

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Nicholas NixonElm Street, East Cambridge

1981

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Whether photographing landscape, couples making love, extreme close-ups of hair and skin, or family groups, Nixon’s work captures fleeting moments and gestures in an extended pause. His photographs seem to suspend time while evidencing a palpable consciousness of its passage.

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Nicholas NixonView of Essex Street, Near the Massachusetts Turnpike, Boston

1976

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Though well known for The Brown Sisters, the continuing annual portrait of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters, Nixon’s wider body of work has been less well documented. The new book About Forty Years features 100 exquisitely reproduced images and will present the most thorough view yet of Nicholas Nixon’s expansive contributions to photography.

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Known for penetrating portraits of couples, the ill and elderly, and an ongoing annual portrait (begun in 1975) of his wife and her three sisters, Nixon is a master of rich, telling detail. His new work is comprised of intimate self-portraits with his wife, Bebe, and landscape views made in France and his neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Grounded in a vocabulary of precision resulting until now solely from large format black-and-white negatives, Nixon here also introduces digital photographs made with a high-resolution hand-held camera. The primary setting is home life; the subtle register of daylight on skin, a close crop of backyard grass, detailed studies of eyes, faces and hair. Other views from further afield also appear—swaths of grass and sweeping wheat fields echo his close-up studies of tangled hair, and underscore a sometimes-overlooked connection to the natural world.

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Several Exceptionally Good Recently Acquired Pictures XXI provides viewers with an opportunity to examine, side by side, an unpredictable and eccentric selection of photographs spanning the medium’s history. The exhibition includes anonymous photographs from the 19th and early 20th century, as well as contemporary photographs made by some of the medium’s most innovative practitioners.

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This year’s highlights include new work by Idris Khan, created by photographing and layering Arabic texts of the mystical Sufi poet, Rumi; new color portraits by Katy Grannan, made along Sunset Boulevard in the searing sunlight of Los Angeles; and the British artist Richard Learoyd’s large, intense color portrait, “Jasmijn, to the Light,” made without a negative, using methods based on the camera obscura.  Also included are four 1960’s photographs by Ed Ruscha, of rooftops in southern California that mysteriously transcend their banality through Ruscha’s observation.

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Nicholas Nixon: Self & City is comprised of thirty intensely detailed black and white photographs made over the last two years with an 11 x 14 inch view camera.  The camera is so large and cumbersome that few artists have been able to master it. Perhaps best known for his yearly portraits of his wife and her three sisters, Nixon in this case has turned the camera on himself, resulting in close-up studies of various body parts: face, hands, neck, and chest.  These details are depicted several times larger than they are in actuality, and alternate in the exhibition with the artist’s new cityscapes, surveying from above the details of Boston architecture. The building surfaces, window reflections, and shadows, interwoven with details of Nixon’s body, result in a meditation on one’s own place in the urban thicket.

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Begun in 2005, Patients presents a look at the lives of the people Nicholas Nixon met in the palliative care units of four different hospitals in Boston. These black and white portraits made with a large-format camera portray the artist’s confrontation with the subjects of life and death. Through his lens, we witness the challenges and struggle of the patients and their families, who are oftentimes photographed in the final stages of their lives. Nixon photographs his subjects close-up, sometimes filling the entire frame with their image. In other photographs, a face is framed in the corner, leaving an expanse of space before it. The rich tonality and complex considerations of form offer a sensitivity to the human condition that is a defining element of Nicholas Nixon’s work over three decades.

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Patients is the continuation of Nixon’s long-term work in portraiture.  Nixon began his investigation of portraits with his “porch pictures” in the early 1980s. He pursued this study in other varying forms including his series “The Brown Sisters” in which he has made a portrait of his wife and her three sisters every year since 1976. As in each of Nicholas Nixon’s many portraits, time and the human life cycle remain prominent themes in the series Patients.

Nicholas Nixon’s work is represented in many permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. His photography is currently the subject of an exhibition on view at the St. Louis Museum of Art through May 17^th, 2007 entitled Nicholas Nixon: 30 Years of Photography.

Nicholas Nixon: Patients can be seen concurrently with Robert Adams: Trees 1965-2005.

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Nothing and Everything investigates one of art’s oldest mysteries: how an artwork may simultaneously contain elements of emptiness and fullness, void and profusion.  These qualities may appear contradictory but they do not have to be so.  Several works, including Peter Hujar’s 1975 photograph of the Hudson River and Ellsworth Kelly’s drawing Light Reflecting on Water (1950), explore connections between the banal and the sublime, particularly in nature.  Diane Arbus’s photograph Clouds on a Screen at a Drive-in, N.J. (1960), for example, blurs the line between the mundane and the transcendent with its image of a billowing cloud on the movie screen against the evening sky.  More than a statement of modern man’s distance from nature, the photograph captures a moment of the sublime bounded by the everyday.

To some eyes the works in the exhibition may appear fraudulent; to other eyes they will seem profound.  Piero Manzoni’s Achrome (1963), made of kaolin and polystyrene beads on canvas, expresses the hyperbolic relationship between zero and infinity.  Vija Celmin’s Untitled (1994-95) drawing of a starry expanse, and Nicholas Nixon’s Black, a recent photograph of a dog’s fur, conflate infinite expansion with close cropping.  Recit de Terre, a 1960 work by Dubuffet uses an unusual paint medium to materially echo the barren landscape it depicts, while a rarely seen 1953 Rauschenberg, Pink Clay Painting (To Pete) is actually made of mud.

Nothing and Everything was organized in collaboration with Peter Freeman, Inc., New York.

A fully illustrated, hardcover catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

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This is the seventeenth installation of the exhibition known for its eclectic group of artists, some familiar and others unknown.  This exhibition provides the gallery with an opportunity to present a lively showing of recently acquired photographs that span a range inclusive of both flea market finds and historic treasures.

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Among this year’s highlights is Eugene Atget’s surrealist Fête du Trône, made in 1926, the year before his death.  This print’s history includes possession by Tristan Tzara, the poet and essayist best known as a founder of Dada.  Lee Friedlander, whose work is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, will be represented in a group of early and recent pictures.  Also on view will be several little-known imperial plate photographs by Carleton Watkins, made in California and Oregon circa 1880; an extraordinary study of clouds over Santa Monica by Edward Weston, from 1936; a curious selection of anonymous photographs from both the 19th and 20th centuries and two new portraits by Katy Grannan, one of the most noted artists in last year’s Whitney Biennial.  Other works from Grannan’s series Mystic Lake will be exhibited at Fraenkel Gallery this coming January.

Several Exceptionally Good Recently Acquired Pictures XVII can be seen concurrently with the exhibition, JOHN GUTMANN at 100.

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Nicholas Nixon’s recent work is a return to a subject he first photographed in the mid 1970s, the city view, specifically that of Boston and New York.  These images of the vast city landscape, at once both ordered and chaotic, were shown at one of the most influential exhibitions of the seventies, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House.

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Today, with the presence of the “Big Dig” project and rapid urban expansion outwards and upwards, Nixon has found new issues to photograph in the Boston city view.  Unlike his earlier images, the new photographs are not landscapes in the traditional sense as they are often devoid of the natural elements of earth, scenery, and sky.  In Cutaway View of Expressway, Boston, buildings rise out of car-lined freeways suspended above train tracks forming complex levels of a city that resemble the layers of the earth’s crust.

The images, incredibly sharp at all depths, have been made with an 8 x 10 camera.  By using this camera none of the image’s information or tonal richness is lost.  This clarity creates the illusion of being able to see more than the eye could see if you were there, such as the detail of the American flag that hangs on the wall of a cubicle in an office building in View of State Street Bank, Boston.

Nixon has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as two Guggenheim Fellowships. His work is included in many important collections including: the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among others.

NICHOLAS NIXON: Recent Work is presented concurrently with the exhibition SOL LEWITT: New Wall Drawings and Photographs whose intense chromatic complexity parallels the complicated levels of Nixon’s city views.

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Nicholas Nixon has long led a revival of interest in the large format  8 x 10 camera and contact printing, unencumbered by the traditional boundaries of this camera. For the last two decades he has photographed people, and produced pictures with a spontaneity and suppleness uncommon in large format camera photographs.

Nixon’s recent work is comprised of pictures of a diverse group of lovers, all previously unknown to Nixon. In some images, the lovers’ bodies are abstracted, transformed into shapes and curves. Here Nixon focuses on the many textures of skin, and the complicated composition of tangled limbs. Other images are more explicit, confronting viewers with their own conceptions of intimacy. As Peter Galassi writes in Nixon’s monograph Pictures of People, “Nicholas Nixon’s work of the past decade embraces the idea that sympathetic photographs of ordinary people can address the deepest of human values.”

Nixon has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as two Guggenheim Fellowships. His work is included in many important collections including: the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among others.

This exhibit runs concurrently with Several Exceptionally Good Recently Acquired Pictures XIV.

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This year’s highlights include new work by Adam Fuss, Richard Misrach, Nicholas Nixon, Irving Penn, Catherine Wagner, William Wegman and Henry Wessel; rare and classic images such as Joel-Peter Witkin’s Studio of the Painter (Courbet), Paris, Robert Frank’s 1950s print of teenagers waiting in line outside of a television studio in Hollywood, a vintage print of Paul Outerbridge’s 1923 image Ethiopian Form and Ken Moody with his Eyes Closed by Robert Mapplethorpe; unlikely surprises such as Felice Beato’s Review of Fire Brigades (1860), Edouart & Cobb’s San Francisco Fusiliers, San Francisco (1878), Helen Levitt’s portrait of Walker Evans with a drape on his head and Diane Arbus’ Woman with a Floppy Hat. Some of the quirkiest images are by anonymous photographers such as a large-scale hand-colored family portrait from the 19th century and a picture of two tiny ants in the snow.

Also exhibited will be work of Diane Arbus, E.J. Bellocq, Christopher Bucklow, Harry Callahan, Sophie Calle, Gary Fabian-Miller, Nan Goldin, Lewis Hine, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Nadar, Eadweard Muybridge, August Sander, Charles Sheeler, David Smith, Alfred Steiglitz, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Garry Winogrand.

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Nicholas Nixon has been photographing his wife and children, in tightly-cropped, closely examined 8 x 10″ contact prints, since the birth of his daughter in 1985. In this exhibition of new photographs he has turned his large-format camera on its side, working for the first time in a vertical format and, also for the first time, turning the camera on himself. Always interested in the aging process, Nixon takes a hard look at himself and his wife as they reach mid-life: the way they are transforming physically and in their relationship with each other.

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Since the mid-1970s, Nixon has helped to lead a revival of the old-fashioned view camera with its precise photographic description. Nixon’s work has included early group portraits of the poor and working class in Boston, annual portraits of his wife and her sisters, portraits of the elderly, people with AIDS, and students in a variety of classrooms settings. Many of these projects have documented change over time in the lives of their subjects, and together they have described people of all ages.

Nixon has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as two Guggenheim Fellowships. One of the most influential contemporary photographers, his exhibition history includes one person shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among many others.

This exhibition runs concurrently with Irving Penn: The Small Trades.

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