Lee Friedlander has pointed his camera at virtually everything one can imagine. In Sticks and Stones, he has turned to the buildings, streets, sidewalks and parking lots of everyday America. With a truly dizzying manner, Lee Friedlander has recorded the manic debris of the large cities of America and the quiet oddness of the suburbs. Friedlander has been photographing the buildings we inhabit with his square-format Hasselblad for the past twelve years. The strength of his work does not lie in the iconic, but rather with the mundane and forgotten elements of our day to day lives. Friedlander has brought the telephone poles, chain-link fences and the liners of the beds of trucks to the forefront of his complex compositions. Mailboxes, telephones and parking meters also play an important role in the understanding of the world around us.

Lee Friedlander has been a working photographer for over forty years, taking as his subject the urban, social and natural landscape. He is the recipient of countless awards and fellowships including a MacArthur Grant (1990) and the MacDowell Colony Award (1986). His photographs have been widely exhibited and published in monographs including Self-Portrait, Like A One-Eyed Cat, American Musicians and most recently Family. This exhibition marks the twelfth solo exhibition of Lee Friedlander’s work at Fraenkel Gallery. On May 31, 2005 The Museum of Modern Art in New York will open a career-long retrospective of Lee Friedlander, the first major solo exhibition in the museum’s new building.

Sticks and Stones will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog published by Fraenkel Gallery in collaboration with D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, New York.

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Visitors to the gallery will be greeted by an intense chromatic experience in two of Sol LeWitt’s new wall drawings. Wall Drawing #1136, described as “curved and straight color bands”, consists of a large curved band of nine stripes in seven different colors that weaves across three walls of vertical stripes in the same seven colors. The fourth wall in the main gallery will feature Wall Drawing #1137 (pictured above) of a cube drawn by trapezoidal shapes of multiple colors, encircled by a sphere of broken colored bands, which measures over nine feet in diameter.  Additionally, a new photographic work comprised of 28 black and white photographs of  A Sphere Lit From the Top, Four Sides, and All Their Combinations will be on display.

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A major force in the Minimal and Conceptual movements of the 1960s, Sol LeWitt has influenced a community of artists, designers, writers and musicologists with his work as well as his thinking. He pioneered the Conceptual art movement, emphasizing ideas rather than the finished work itself. His first one-person exhibition in New York was in 1965. Since then he has had major exhibitions at museums around the world including the Tate Gallery, London and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. The Museum of Modern Art, New York exhibited a mid-career retrospective in 1978 and a print retrospective in 1996. In 2000 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective which then traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Sol LeWitt: New Wall Drawings and Photographs is presented concurrently with the exhibition Nicholas Nixon: Recent Works, with offers a similarly complex visual experience.

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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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Garry Winogrand’s The Animals was first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1969. It was Winogrand’s first one-man exhibition and had a legendary impact on an entire generation of photographers that continues until this day. The catalog the museum published to accompany the exhibition has long since been out of print. MoMA has recently republished this classic from the history of photography. The gallery has gathered prints from a number of sources in order to convey the spirit of the original exhibition.

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Before his untimely death in 1984 Garry Winogrand was working on a book of photographs that he had made in airports over the prior two decades. The project sat in limbo until recently, when Lee Friedlander (Winogrand’s good friend and a monumental artist in his own right) selected the photographs for the book Arrivals and Departures: The Airport Pictures of Garry Winogrand. Apart from a few airport photographs that were included in Winogrand’s 1988 MoMA retrospective, this is the first time the photographs have been exhibited together.

Garry Winogrand began photographing in 1948, when he was twenty. He received many major awards for his photography including a grant from the NEA and two Guggenheim fellowships, and his work is included in virtually every major museum collection of photography around the world.

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Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present a survey of work by the influential Cuban-born American artist FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES (1957-1996). The range of this artist’s poetic touch across several media will be evident in his photostats, billboard, candy spill, “stack,” and light-string, several of which have been borrowed from private and institutional collections in the U.S. and Germany.

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Felix Gonzalez-Torres was not interested in making art that allowed the viewer to remain a spectator. His work offers the viewer an opportunity to contribute his or her own experiences, and to participate in the meaning of the work.  In Untitled (Lover Boys), 1991, (on loan from the Goetz Collection, Munich), an “endless” supply of candy lies shimmering on the gallery floor, gathered together at an ideal weight of 355 pounds – alluding to the combined weight of Gonzalez-Torres and his partner.  Without any sign stating so, the viewer is invited to take and eat a piece of candy.  Every night the “spill” is replenished and lives on in a constant cycle of loss and regeneration.  In Untitled (Republican Years), 1992, (from the collection of the Sprengel Museum, Hannover), a stack of paper, on which only a pair of black lines borders the perfect rectangle, sits on the otherwise empty floor.  The viewer has the choice to take a sheet of paper or leave it behind. Gonzalez-Torres understood that the audience’s ability to connect physically to his work gave it additional emotional and seductive force.

The photostat works, four of which will be exhibited, consist of two lines of white text, words and associated dates along the bottom of the black surface of the photostat paper.  For each viewer, the dates and words will conjure up different reactions or memories.  For Gonzalez-Torres, public events became private experiences and vice versa.  In Untitled (Tim Hotel), 1992, a single electrical cord holding 42 light bulbs hangs from a nail.  One of 24 light-string works made during the artist’s brief career, this piece poetically memorializes one of 24 important events in his life, transforming an otherwise ordinary object into something full of personal meaning.

Gonzalez-Torres’ work was the focus of several major museum solo exhibitions in his lifetime and after his death. Retrospectives of his work have been organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1995), the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany (1997) and the Serpentine Gallery in London (2000).

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Richard Misrach is among the most influential and internationally recognized photographers working today.  He is best known for his epic ongoing project, the Desert Cantos, which is an extensive and unique photographic exploration of place.  By addressing the political and social issues through the adaptaion of different photographic strategies, he has expanded notions of traditional landscape practice while building a complex and poignant document of American culture. A mid-career survey, Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach, was organized by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in 1996 and traveled nation-wide.

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Misrach’s recent series has the loose working title of On the Beach, inspired by Nevil Shute’s post-apocalyptic novel of the 1950s.  These color photographs deal with the human figure seen at a distance, on an unspecified beach or in the water, observed from an unsettling and difficult-to-identify point of view located high above. The photographs revel in the extreme detail yielded by Misrach’s use of an 8 x 10” negative.  Quite large in scale, the works measure as wide as ten feet. Two of the images are entirely empty of human presence, concentrating solely on footprints in the sand or the surface of the water.

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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, the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum of Art.  Misrach is a recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship, four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and most recently Germany’s Kulturepreis for Lifetime Achievement in Photography.

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Hiroshi Sugimoto has two recurring obsessions: history and time. He has described this new body of work as “architecture after the end of the world.” Sugimoto is known for taking years to work on his series of long-exposure photographs on themes ranging from museum dioramas, movie theaters, seascapes, and historical wax figures. The new architectural images run counter to the traditional sense of a photograph as capturing a moment in time.

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The architectural icons in his most recent series represent the fifth major theme that Sugimoto has explored in depth. With this series Sugimoto has essentially broken all the rules of architectural photography. Photographing great landmarks of modernist architecture around the world, Sugimoto has deliberately taken the images out of focus and at unusual angles, isolating the recognizable forms. The blurred forms evoke the passage of time, muting the architectural details and leaving the essence of the building; suggestive of the way in which our memories preserve images.

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Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture was recently seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and is accompanied by a major publication and essays by Francesco Bonami, John Yau, and Marco Di Michelis.

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