Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to announce Mannequin, an exhibition of new photographs by Lee Friedlander. Made over the past three years, and exhibited here for the first time, Mannequin presents photographs by one of the medium’s living masters working at the height of his powers. The exhibition will be accompanied by a 112-page hardcover catalog.
Friedlander [b. 1934] is one of the rare artists in any medium to have sustained a body of influential work over five decades. To make the photographs in Mannequin, he returned to the hand-held, 35-mm camera that he used in the earliest decades of his career. Friedlander roamed the sidewalks of New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco, focusing on storefront windows and reflections, which speak to marketplace notions of sex, fashion and consumerism, while recalling Atget’s surreal photographs of Parisian windows made one-hundred years earlier. Thoroughly straightforward, their unsettling and radical new compositions suggest photographs that have been torn up and pasted back together again in near-random ways.
Friedlander first came to public attention in the landmark exhibition New Documents, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967. The range of his work since then—including portraits, nudes, still lifes, and studies of people at work—is anchored in a uniquely vivid and far-reaching vision of the American scene.
Lee Friedlander began photographing in 1948. More than forty books about his work have been published since the early 1970s. His career was the focus of a major traveling retrospective organized by the Museum of Modern Art, NY, in 2005. His work can be found in depth in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art, among many others.
