Exhibitions | 1992 | Fraenkel Gallery

The Larger View: 19th Century American Mammoth Plate Photographs

Erin Nelson — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 02:37:01 +0000

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Pictures from Perkins School for the Blind

Erin Nelson — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 02:30:06 +0000

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Post-Card Sculptures

Erin Nelson — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 09:44:06 +0000

For over twenty years the English artists Gilbert & George have worked together as one artist. They consider the creation of their lives as “living sculpture” essential to the meaning of their work. In the 1970s Gilbert & George commenced their exploration of the “Post-Card Sculpture” with groups of store-bought postcards assembled as grids in rich combinations of subject and form. “Modest yet seminal, the postcard pieces show the artists’ progress from witty nostalgia to seemingly random scrapbook-like arrangements to increasingly striking fusions of form and meaning,” (Roberta Smith, New York Times). The power of these works resides in the curious rapport between images; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

In the past decade issues of sex, religion, and nature have played a prominent role in the work of Gilbert & George. The large photocopies for which Gilbert & George are well known and the post-card pieces converge in the Post-Card Sculptures from the series collectively titled “Twenty-Five Worlds.” These large gridded pictures are composed of kaleidoscopic patterns created by the repeated use of no more than four different postcard images. In these more recent works Gilbert & George have taken their postcard collages to the extremes of scale, aggressive palettes, and evocative subject matter.

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History of the Universe

Erin Nelson — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 09:45:31 +0000

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Several Exceptionally Good Recently Acquired Pictures VI

Erin Nelson — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 02:54:47 +0000

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Photograms

Erin Nelson — Fri, 17 Jul 1992 09:57:23 +0000

British-born artist Adam Fuss constructs his photographs without the use of a camera. In his recent photograms, Fuss extends the camera-less tradition first explored by photography’s pioneers such as William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins, and later mined by artists of the 1920s such as Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, and Christian Schad. Fuss’s work is made from the simplest of means: light and a sheet of photographic paper. The current exhibition is comprised of two bodies of work. The spirals are based on a circular form of intense white light, surrounded by concentric rings like ripples from a stone dropped in water. The babies are formed by the dark silhouettes of infants swimming in what appear to be golden pools of light. Both series seem undeniably spiritual in nature; it is difficult when looking at Fuss’s images not to feel that aspects of both death and birth are being addressed.

Fuss’s work was included most recently in last year’s Whitney Biennial and will be shown in Vienna, Austria and at the Akron Art Museum later this month.

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Recent Work and 20 Year Old Photographs

Erin Nelson — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 09:59:33 +0000

William Wegman is perhaps most well-known for the photographs he has made of his Weimaraner dogs, Man Ray and Fay Ray. These perfectly staged portraits are often absurd juxtapositions, unlikely scenarios or clever, wry commentaries on famous works of art. Through these works, Wegman comments on art, portraiture, the mores of convention and the pathos of the human condition. For Wegman afficionados, this most recent exhibition will provide surprises on at least two fronts. While Wegman has worked at length in the studio with his canine muses, this exhibition will be the first in San Francisco to include some of his best work done with the 20×24” Polaroid camera outdoors at the artist’s summer cabin in Maine. In these pictures Fay Ray is accompanied by her protege Battina, and by several others of her progeny who reside in Maine. The outdoor pictures provided entirely new conceptual and technical challenges for Wegman. His characters are seen at various times as hunters, as cyclists, and simply as animals with an unerring sense for formal perfection (Span, for example, in which one model is stretched like a suspension bridge between two rocks, with the Maine landscape as horizon) as well as formal irony (2 X’s in which another model sits cross-legged atop a cross-legged picnic table. While it is often the laughter and comedy which observers first sense, at the core of these pictures is a poignant sense for the human condition. Scratch the surface of these oft comic visions and one finds the work of a conceptualist addressing questions of perception and preconception.

The second surprise for viewers will be the vintage black and white photographs included in this exhibition. Rarely seen, these early works explore questions of perception and underscore the conceptual basis of all of Wegman’s work. Vignette (1971), for example, is specifically concerned with the idea of ‘taking a picture.’ In another, Shaking Hand (1972) Wegman has fabricated a picture of himself greeting himself with one hand outstretched to embrace the other, however there is only one hand to be seen. Pictures of this flavor require scrutiny of the calibre once afforded the likes of Highlights Magazine, coupled with the relentless wit of a punster/wordsmith.

This exhibition is concurrent with the exhibition William Wegman: Paintings and Drawings at John Berggruen Gallery, 228 Grant Avenue, San Francisco CA 94108.

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Hiroshi Sugimoto

Erin Nelson — Thu, 02 Apr 1992 00:20:14 +0000

San Francisco, 18 March 1992 — Photographs from three series by Hiroshi Sugimoto will be on view at Fraenkel Gallery, 49 Geary Street, San Francisco from April 2 through May 9, 1992.

Tokyo-born Hiroshi Sugimoto has lived and worked in New York since 1974. Over these years he has devoted himself to three intensive studies each of which will be represented in the upcoming exhibition.

U.A. Walker, New York, 1978

gelatin silver print, 20 x 24 inches

Sugimoto’s “Dioramas”, made in natural history museums around the world, question the nature of photography “as witness,” as well as the way in which the medium represents the world in two dimensions. His “Theaters” concentrate on another type of “set stage,” the enormous movie palaces built during the nineteen-twenties and thirties. In this series Sugimoto places his 8×10” view camera at the most distant central spot of each theater, opening his lens as each film is screened. The reflected light of the screen therefore defines in meticulous detail the grandeur (and decline) of each theater’s interior. In his “Seascapes” (exhibited recently at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh as well as Sonnabend Gallery in New York) Sugimoto explores the nature of similarities and differences. With the horizon dividing each picture in half, and photographed both day and night from perches atop oceans all over the world (the North Atlantic, the Pacific, the Arctic and Mediterranean Seas, for example) his pictures are simultaneously abstract and entirely specific.

Concurrent with this exhibition Fraenkel Gallery will also be exhibiting Jay DeFeo: Photocollages.

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Photocollages

Erin Nelson — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 10:01:43 +0000

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House Pictures

Erin Nelson — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 10:08:06 +0000

For the past twenty years Henry Wessel has made doggedly unpretentious photographs of the way vernacular America looks. With this most recent work, made during 1990 and 1991 and his first sustained project in color, Wessel returns full force to the subject of his earliest interest. As a fourteen year old, in 1956, Wessel was fascinated by the polaroids and 8×10 glossies displayed in his mother’s New Jersey real estate office, made by the sales staff to pique clients’ interest in the homes’ “curbside appeal.” The pictures were no more or less remarkable than those that appear in countless realtors’ windows today, but Wessel remembers liking the directness of the photographs as well as their subject: houses that people live in.

Grounded in the familiar conventions of “real estate photography,” Wessel’s portraits of houses are records of ideals, ambitions, the exigencies of economics and hard-nosed pragmatism. Wessel respects the individuality of his subjects. Each has an explicit personality and every detail (or lack thereof) is acknowledged as the product of someone’s conscious decision. In Wessel’s view, the architecture of these houses reflects the human beings who built and live in them as distinctly as genetics define a face.

Wessel is the recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships and three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; George Eastman House, Rochester, and many others.

The gallery has published a thirty-two page catalog, with 25 color reproduction to accompany this exhibition.

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Mammoth Plate Gum Bichromate prints

Erin Nelson — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 10:11:33 +0000

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Portraits in a Corner, 1948

Erin Nelson — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 03:16:36 +0000

Sometime in 1948, Penn began making portraits in a small corner space made of two studio flats pushed together, the floor covered with a piece of old carpeting. To quote the photographer, “a very rich series of pictures resulted. This confinement, surprisingly seemed to comfort people, soothing them. The walls were a surface to lean on or push against. For me the picture possibilities were interesting: limiting the subjects’ movement seemed to relieve me of part of the problem of holding on to them.”

Penn’s subjects constituted a wide spectrum of writers, dancers, artists, socialites, musicians, political figures and other celebrities of the era. Among those who found their way into Penn’s corner were Noel Coward, the Duchess of Windsor, Marcel Duchamp, Joe Louis, the Gish Sisters, Duke Ellington, and Truman Capote.

Duchess of Windsor, New York, 1948

gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 inches

Penn had already begun to use the studio as an insistent environment in which the viewer is allowed to see the electrical cables, edges of backdrops, and the photographic detritus randomly scattered along the floor. This particular series, however, utilized the ruse of a sharper-than-90º corner in which the subjects position themselves. Some are wedged in as if suspended by their shoulders, others lean against it for compatible support, compressed and altered by the claustrophobic space. These are existential pictures; pictures in which “personalities” are isolated, posed in an abstract and artificial corner of the world. The pictures limn the unique and historic time in which they were made; the 1940s was a time of violent change and new beginnings, in which these daring intellects and talents thrived.

Irving Penn began his career in New York as a graphic artist in 1938, at age 17. After a year spent painting in Mexico he returned to New York City and began work at Vogue magazine where Alexander Liberman was art director. Penn’s photographs are included in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington. The publication of his most recent monograph, Passage (1991, Callaway), coincides with the current exhibition.

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