Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to return to FOG Design+Art with a selection of work by artists including Robert Adams, Sophie Calle, William Eggleston, Kota Ezawa, Lee Friedlander, Adam Fuss, Katy Grannan, Peter Hujar, Richard Learoyd, Wardell Milan, Richard Misrach, Irving Penn, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Carrie Mae Weems, and others. Click here to request a sales preview.
A Polaroid records the color of light Hiroshi Sugimoto observed through a prism in his Tokyo studio. Made from some of the last existing stocks of Polaroid film and encased in optical glass, the photograph becomes a rare, jewel-like object. “Projecting the colored beam from a prism onto my mirror, I reflected it into a dim observation chambre where I reduced it to Polaroid colors,” he writes.
Carrie Mae Weems’s Museums Series pictures the artist framed by art institutions around the world. The most recent additions to the ongoing project were made at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor. In the Court of Honor at the museum’s entrance, Weems positions herself in dialogue with the monumental Auguste Rodin cast bronze sculpture The Thinker, matching the statue’s scale with her own. Selections from the series and other works are currently featured in Weems’s solo exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery, on view through February 22.
Weems will speak at FOG Design+Art on Saturday, January 25, at 5pm, followed by a conversation with San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Director Christopher Bedford.
Encasing found pulp novels in vitrines, Sophie Calle recontextualizes these titillating paperbacks with a series of questions ruminating on grief, such as “How do you deal with your dead? In your address book, do you write ‘deceased’ next to their name?” Following formal and thematic motifs present throughout Calle’s oeuvre, Série Noire is textual and investigative—a playful series that knowingly embraces kitsch.
Calle is currently the subject of a solo exhibition, Sophie Calle: Overshare, the artist’s first major North American survey, on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis until January 26, 2025.
The fair will mark the debut of a new sculpture by Kota Ezawa. Referencing the iconic photograph from the cover of William Eggleston’s Guide, the groundbreaking 1976 book of color photography, Ezawa overlays his simplified rendering with pastel squares recalling Ellsworth Kelly’s color grids, reinforcing the ready-made colors and compositions of postwar America.
On Sunday, January 26, at 3pm, Ezawa will take part in a conversation at FOG with artist Miguel Arzabe, moderated by independent curator Natasha Boas.
Ezawa’s work is on view in the solo exhibition Here and There — Now and Then at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture from January 11 to March 9, 2025.
William Eggleston’s photographs are said to “re-invent” color photography, addressing color as a descriptive, rather than a decorative, element in the medium. John Szkarkowski, the former director of photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, writes that Eggleston’s images are “perceived in color.” They are “real photographs, bits lifted from the visceral world with such tact and cunning that they seem true, seen in color from corner to corner.”
Peter Hujar carefully records the texture and folds of a blanket that stands in for his human subject, imbuing it with traces of animate feeling. “The signature move in [Hujar’s] art is to lavish a portraitist’s attention upon a subject that defies it,” notes Joel Smith in his essay for the catalogue Peter Hujar: Speed of Life.
Richard Learoyd’s subjects, composed simply and directly, are described with the thinnest plane of focus, re-creating and exaggerating the way that the human eye perceives, and not without a small acknowledgement to Dutch Master painting. Cecilia after Subleyras is modeled after a female nude by French Neoclassical painter Pierre Subleyras, drawing a parallel to the often painterly quality of Learoyd’s figurative photography.
Lee Friedlander has photographed his own shadow throughout his career. Imposed over another person or playfully projected onto natural elements, he inserts himself into the scene his camera records—the photographer’s version of breaking the fourth wall. Writing in the seminal book Lee Friedlander: Like a One-Eyed Cat, Rod Slemmons notes that Friedlander seeks the “precise interactions between what we see and how the photograph represents what we see.”
Collage has long been an important component of Wardell Milan’s practice. A new series, Amerika: Cars and Curves, juxtaposes fragments of women’s bodies cut from magazines with imagery of muscle cars. The series continues Milan’s exploration of distinctly American iconography, including depictions of female bodybuilders, Klansmen, and the subjects of Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book.
In his seminal monograph, The New West, Robert Adams writes: “The subject of these pictures is, in this sense, not tract homes or freeways but the source of all Form, light. The Front Range is astonishing because it is overspread with light of such richness that banality is impossible. Even subdivisions, which we hate for the obscenity of the speculator’s greed, are at certain times of day transformed to a dry, cold brilliance.”
Richard Misrach’s Desert Canto III: The Flood (1983-85) is an ecologically engaged series focused on the Salton Sea, an artificial desert lake created in the 1900s. Stocked with fish in the 1950s to promote tourism, it became highly saline with toxic algae blooms and wildlife die-offs by the 1980s. As Misrach explains, “You look at landscape, but it’s not really landscape, it’s a symbol for our country.”
Katy Grannan has been recently living and working in Northern California’s Humboldt County—a place, it is said, where people go to disappear. There, Grannan meets people through ads she places in Craigslist and on local bulletin boards. Her subjects are eager to be seen, to collaborate with Grannan for reasons as varied as the individuals themselves: an autistic teenager, a circus performer, an actress, a queer farmer, a young couple and their cat, a man and his goat.
In the series Theia, Adam Fuss expands his exploration of botanical themes. Named for the hypothetical planet that may have crashed into the Earth and formed our moon, Theia invokes a calamitous occurrence that ushers in renewal and new beginnings. To create the images, Fuss positions fresh spring flowers onto a sheet of thick paper, flattens the arrangement with a metal plate, and presses it through a table-top etching press. The resulting hyper-realistic artworks appear deceptively as three-dimensional compositions, floating against a white space.
