Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to return to FOG Design+Art with a selection of work by artists including Diane Arbus, Sophie Calle, Kota Ezawa, Lee Friedlander, Richard Learoyd, Christian Marclay, Wardell Milan, Richard Misrach, Irving Penn, Alec Soth, Carrie Mae Weems, and others. Click here to request a sales preview.
On Thursday, January 22, at 5:30pm, Jeffrey Fraenkel and Richard Misrach will take part in a conversation at the fair titled Long-term Relationships, along with dealer Xavier Hufkens and artist Sterling Ruby. The conversation will be moderated by Veronica Roberts, John and Jill Freidenrich Director, Cantor Arts Center.
Irving Penn’s photographs of flowers, begun in 1967 and continued through the 2000s, transform botanical subjects into elegant studies of form, texture, and color, isolating each bloom against a neutral background. Initially photographed for Vogue, the images capture both the vitality and—with flowers that have passed their prime—the impermanence of beauty.
Carrie Mae Weems’s newest project Preach intertwines early images from Harlem, San Diego, and Sea Island, Georgia, with new works that evoke the transcendental and secular realities of Black religious expression today. Using herself as both muse and guide, Weems invites us to join in this spiritual awakening and to condemn the persecution that has turned sacred spaces into sites of refuge and activism. Preach was commissioned for her solo exhibition The Heart of the Matter, curated by Sarah Meister, which premiered at Gallerie d’Italia in Turin in 2025 and will travel to FOMU, Antwerp in 2026, followed by C/O Berlin in 2027.
Unforeseen presents the obituary Sophie Calle commissioned for herself, hidden by pinned nocturnal Owl Butterflies, so as to remain unreadable. Silkscreened on the glass front, Calle explains her decision to obscure the writing: “So as not to attract too much attention from death, I decided it was best to cover up what I did not want to read,” she notes.
Wardell Milan’s mixed media work alludes to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1863 essay Nature, in which the poet describes the clear, expansive, highest part of the sky as a “blue zenith”—a symbol of transcendence, clarity, and the sublime. Continuing a practice of referential collage-making, Milan also calls to a 1983 George Dureau photograph titled Jordan Page, Emmitt Johnson, and Gloria Johnson, with a cluster of three figures gathered around a pole. Exploring the importance of community and gathering, Blue Firmament no.1 gives form to Milan’s interests in the euphoric possibilities of a collective.
In 1962, Diane Arbus traveled to Los Angeles and photographed Disneyland, among other subjects. In her notebook, she described what she found there: “Wonderful pseudo places at dawn in Disneyland,” including “false deserts…like a shrine for unbelievers.”
Honing in on richly textured details, Richard Learoyd refers to these smaller-scale camera obscura photographs as “fragments.” Pairing bent wire with a lit candle and carefully emphasizing a narrow focal plane, Learoyd creates a composition that questions illusion, and defines the empty space around the objects.
In Lee Friedlander’s celebrated series The Little Screens, two opposing emotions fill a television in a Nashville hotel room. Made in the 1960s in motel rooms and other anonymous spaces, the images in the series reveal the emerging omnipresence of screens in everyday life, a phenomenon that has only intensified.
Part of his long-running Desert Cantos series, Richard Misrach’s night view of Pyramid Lake was made on a Native American reservation in Nevada. In 2010, Apple featured the image as the background on the first iPad screen. More recently, a mural-sized version of the photograph was on view in Fraenkel Gallery’s 2025 exhibition Richard Misrach: Rewind.
The figure studies Irving Penn made in 1949 and 1950 represent a break from his acclaimed but highly controlled magazine work. Working at night and on weekends, “whenever there was time between assignments,” Penn created a series of nudes that he called “the major artistic experience” of his life. Captured in close-up and printed using experimental techniques, he bleached and redeveloped prints until they took on an ethereal quality. Penn described the work as his attempt to “undo [the] realism of the photographic print.”
Building a recognizable yet reimagined version of history, Kota Ezawa investigates the construction of shared experience through images. Referencing familiar works of art and cultural events, Ezawa has experimented with a range of materials including watercolor, digital animation, lightboxes, paper cutouts, and sculpture. In a new painted wood sculpture debuting at FOG, Ezawa recreates an iconic photograph from the 1964 World’s Fair by Fraenkel Gallery artist Garry Winogrand.
In a unique work on paper from a new series, Christian Marclay inks the sleeves from 7” vinyl records, printing them as monotypes. The process preserves traces of handling and use, capturing the folds, creases, and surface wear of these objects. The resulting one-of-a-kind print transforms everyday cultural artifacts into meditations on materiality, repetition, and the passage of time. Marclay’s work is currently on view at Fraenkel Gallery until March 7, 2026.
In the winter of 2016, Alec Soth spent a week traveling by train in Hokkaido, Japan, inspired by Masahisa Fukase’s mournful, critically acclaimed photobook Ravens, which is set on the island. To travel with him, Soth hired an assistant who did not speak English. Perhaps because of their limited communication, the portraits he made of her are distinct from his other work. “Looking at pictures of her now is like remembering a dream,” Soth wrote.
