Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to return to Art Basel with works by Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Sophie Calle, Kota Ezawa, Lee Friedlander, Adam Fuss, Katy Grannan, Martine Gutierrez, Peter Hujar, Richard Learoyd, Wardell Milan, Richard Misrach, Irving Penn, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Richard T. Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Garry Winogrand, and others.
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes span more than four decades, recording the most elemental scene—sky and water bisected by the constant line of the horizon, a view that Sugimoto associates with the dawn of consciousness. In Lake Superior, Esrey, from a 2003 trip to the Great Lakes, an minimalist expanse of white water mirrors the white sky above, encouraging focus on the point where they meet. Such a monochromatic scene proved harder to print than seascapes with more visual contrast, and few images of this view were released by the artist.
Carrie Mae Weems’s series of large-scale color photographs titled Painting the Town records swathes of paint used by local authorities to cover up anti-racist graffiti in Portland, Oregon, the city where she was born.
“Domesticating fire marks humankind’s ascendancy over other species,” writes Hiroshi Sugimoto about his series In Praise of Shadows. “For tens of thousands of years, we have illuminated the night with flames. Reflecting upon this, I decided to record ‘the life of a candle.’”
Many works in the series are long-exposure black and white photographs of candles burning for hours. This rarer color image was made in connection with a 1998 exhibition of the series at the Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu in Japan. A variant appears on the cover of the show’s catalogue.
To create a new series of photographs depicting massive, bare-branched trees in the English countryside, Richard Learoyd printed multiple layers of pigment onto hand-gessoed canvas, leaving a section of the surface raw. In part, the images draw inspiration from the work of 19th-century artists William Henry Fox Talbot, inventor of the salted paper and calotype processes, and Romantic landscape painter John Constable, whose pencil sketches of willow trees have been a longtime interest of Learoyd’s.
In 1979, as one of her first artistic experiments titled The Sleepers, Sophie Calle invited twenty-seven people to sleep in her bed. Among them were a baker, a babysitter, an actor, a journalist, a seamstress, a trumpet player, and several painters. Over the course of eight days, Calle photographed them every hour as they slept, secretly recording any private conversations once the door closed. Calle noted each encounter with her typical humor and candor. On Gerard Maillet’s departure from her bed, she wrote, “He says he’s slept very well. Before he leaves he takes a bath and lingers around the house for a long time. I accompany him to the door and thank him for coming. I forget to pay him.”
To create the lush and sometimes uneasy multimedia works he is known for, Wardell Milan works in an expansive range of mediums. His mixed media work JB was commissioned for one of the covers of the tenth anniversary edition of Hanya Yanagihara’s celebrated novel A Little Life. Comprising four slipcased volumes, the new collector’s edition will be published by Vintage Books in October 2025.
Diane Arbus made several portraits at parades and demonstrations, including this image of American patriotism. “I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present,” Arbus wrote in her 1963 Guggenheim application. “These are our symptoms and monuments. I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary.”
On the Beach is an ongoing exploration of the minutiae of human gesture against the massive scale of the sea. Here, the shimmer of light on water connotes the glimmer of stars, suggesting a solitary figure in edgeless space. Following the artist’s continued engagement with environmental crises and their repercussions, Richard Misrach offered a detail of The Swimmer, Cosmic Sea as a benefit print with all proceeds contributing to Los Angeles wildfire relief.
Drawing on themes from Dutch Golden Age painting, Richard Learoyd’s photograph captures the subtle sheen and iridescence of feathers, a focus on optical qualities also found in memento mori paintings. Precisely transcribing the various ways that light falls onto natural materials, Learoyd’s photographs often emphasize the ambiguity between dead and living things.
Martine Gutierrez’s ever-evolving practice of self portraiture catalogs a confluence of seemingly disparate modes and influences, conveying her limitless capacity for reinvention and reinterpretation. Sphinx was created for the third iteration of Swarovski’s Book of Dreams, a biannual publication featuring works by various artists that showcase the famed crystals. Gutierrez conceptualized a vision of herself as a galaxy, and connected with her childhood dreams of being in outer space.
Peter Hujar documented the vibrant cultural scene in downtown New York throughout the 1970s and 1980s, photographing artists, musicians, writers, and performers. He pictured New York artist Darrel Ellis in repose, as light fell softly across his shoulders and face. Ellis, whose work merged painting, printmaking, photography, and drawing, would later revisit this image and others made by Hujar, using the photographs as the basis for his own self portraits.
