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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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Avedon knew a good photograph when he saw one. Though he was far more interested in making pictures than collecting them, he lived surrounded by photographs of every kind, from the exalted to the unknown. “Neurotic women” (his words) were among his particular interests, though his curiosity was vigorous and his pursuits could not be predicted. The photographs in Avedon’s collection were acquired primarily by purchase, in some cases by gift. Several bear inscriptions of respect or affection from other artists, notably Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Henri Cartier-Bresson, photographers with whom he forged significant friendships.

Avedon was the first of only three people to purchase Diane Arbus’s landmark portfolio A Box of Ten Photographs, a gesture that signaled so much to the artist that she re-titled his portfolio to include an eleventh print. Avedon’s collections of portraits by Peter Hujar, of cigarette still lifes by Irving Penn, and of studies of the 19th century beauty, the Countess de Castiglione (1827-99), are unrivaled.  Other highlights of Avedon’s collection include works by Brassai, Julia Margaret Cameron, Nadar, and August Sander.

Eye of the Beholder is presented in cooperation with The Richard Avedon Foundation, New York, and will be accompanied by five fully illustrated catalogues in a slipcased box, published by Fraenkel Gallery.

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In a world of images that leans ever more to the digital, the venerable materials of ink and paper still have a place. The visual and tactile qualities of ink on paper appeal to the eye and hand in ways that a computer monitor cannot.

Fraenkel Gallery examines various aspects of ink and paper as they relate to photographic images in the exhibition A Gallery in Ink, which surveys the books, announcements, posters, and ephemera published by the gallery.  Since the first exhibition in 1979 we have recognized that there would be members of our audience who may know us solely through our announcements, and may never have occasion to visit the gallery.  We have always approached the design and implementation of the gallery’s published materials with care and consideration.

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Over the past twenty-seven years, Fraenkel Gallery has worked with a number of talented designers including Gail Taras, Tom Ingalls, Dimitri Levas, and Christine Taylor, among others to produce forty books, as well as announcements and posters from more than 300 exhibitions. From 1984 through 2005 we enjoyed a long and fruitful collaboration with Catherine Mills, who designed the great majority of announcements and publications included in this exhibition.. In the fall of 2005 we began working with Katy Homans. This exhibition is an expression of our appreciation.

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With the gallery walls transformed into a timeline, highlights of the exhibition include rare, special edition books such as Richard Avedon: Made in France and Lee Friedlander: The Little Screens in addition to a comprehensive selection of exhibition announcements.  Designed to reveal changes in the world of printing as well as the gallery’s increased interest in book publishing, A Gallery in Ink attests to Fraenkel Gallery’s burgeoning commitment to all things “inked”.

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This is the eighteenth installation of the exhibition known for its eclectic group of artists, some familiar and others unknown.  The exhibition provides an opportunity to study a provocative range of photographs that encompasses both flea market finds and historic treasures.

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Included in this year’s selection is an ethereal Carleton Watkins mammoth-plate view of the Mendocino coastline circa 1863, as well as a group of Loewy and Puiseux heliogravures of the moon made at the end of the nineteenth century.  These pictures come from The Photographic Atlas of the Moon, considered the astronomers’ greatest achievement.  Helen Levitt, typically known for her black and white street scenes, is represented by her later, color pictures, recently published in the book Slide Show.  Four of Peter Hujar’s black and white portraits will be included as well as an early diptych from the German artists Bernd & Hilla Becher.  Another highlight is a group of Mechanical Forms, a pristine study of form and structure by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Six pictures from Diane Arbus’s radical Untitled series will be on view.  The portraits made during 1970 and 1971, at a residence for the mentally handicapped in New Jersey, represent a courageous body of work made during the last year of the artist’s life.

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Khan creates multi-layered photographs, often of appropriated art and books, in a way that both augments the aura of the original and reveals the idiosyncratic trace of his own hand.  Khan’s work explores the history of photography and literature, the beauty of repetition, and the anxieties of authorship.  Whether his subject is the iconic typology of Bernd & Hilla Becher’s gas tanks, or the layers of each page of Vilém Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography, the power of cultural symbols are at the forefront of Khan’s oeuvre.

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Idris Khan’s photographs often project an aspect of human fallibility not usually associated with traditional photographic representation.  In the case of his photograph, every…Nicholas Nixon’s Brown Sisters, Khan layers each of the portraits the photographer Nicholas Nixon made of his wife and her three sisters over a twenty-year period, thereby creating an entirely new image.  The photograph suggests, among other possibilities, a complex charcoal drawing, and simultaneously hides and reveals the power of the original.

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In 2005 Khan’s work was seen in exhibitions at Victoria Miro Gallery and the Saatchi Gallery, London.  Idris Khan graduated with an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in 2003.  This is his first exhibition in the United States.

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This exhibition, which will occupy all of Fraenkel Gallery’s three spaces, spans the artist’s career.  The exhibition begins with Misrach’s influential black and white photographs made in the mid-1970s, which introduced the desert as his central motif.  Misrach’s switch to color photography is marked by the series of night landscape photographs made in Hawaii in 1978.  Traces of style and themes from these early series are evident in many of Misrach’s later bodies of work such as The Desert Cantos, Golden Gate, and On the Beach.  These complex, large-scale photographs captured with an 8 x 10 inch negative reflect Misrach’s continual reexamination of the political and social implications of an American landscape.

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Accompanying the exhibition is a new 280-page monograph, Richard Misrach: Chronologies.  This publication presents 125 photographs in the precise order in which they were made, spanning the artist’s career.  Classic images and never-before-seen pictures flesh out the photographer’s logic and complicate it at the same time.  Through fits and starts, reiterations and detours, the work evolves and matures, weaving the complex oeuvre for which Misrach has become known.

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Richard Misrach has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad.  His work is represented in many permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

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Katy Grannan’s striking, large-format, color portraits capture the desire of her subjects to offer themselves up to the camera lens.  Grannan’s previous series—Poughkeepsie Journal, Dream America, and Morning Call—began with a simple ad placed by Grannan in local newspapers: “Art Models.  Artist/Photographer (female) seeks people for portraits.  No experience necessary.  Leave msg.”  After an initial telephone conversation, Grannan travels to the caller’s home where she captures each element of their domestic settings: wood paneling, patterned wallpaper, and other mundane but often telling details.  In Grannan’s recent Mystic Lake series, she moves the exercise outdoors, using a public lake and its banks as her backdrop.  Even though the parkland that serves as her set brings the private encounters of her earlier series into the public landscape, she maintains a delicate —yet increasingly charged—sense of intimacy.

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Katy Grannan was awarded the Aperture Award to an Emerging Artist in 2005 as well as the Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers in 2004.  Model American, the artist’s first monograph, was recently published by Aperture.  This is the first solo exhibition of Katy Grannan’s work at Fraenkel Gallery.  The artist’s photographs are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

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