Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Apples and Olives from November 3 through December 30, 2005.
Lee Friedlander has confronted the urban, social and natural landscape in a manner that has reinvented new ways of envisioning the modern world. With Apples and Olives, an exhibition of photographs taken between 1997 and 2004, Friedlander has moved away from urban territories. He has chosen instead to investigate two of humankind’s oldest harvested crops: apples and olives. Photographing in Europe and New York state, Friedlander captures apple and olive trees in varying seasons and climates. In these medium format, black and white images Friedlander applies his signature wide-angle view technique best known within an urban context to a more natural setting. A rhythmic energy fills every inch of these photographs. Branches twist and turn to create leaping shadows on leaf-filled fields. Apples jut out at surprising angles to reveal surprising abstract forms. Friedlander’s photographs ask us to consider anew the endless sources of formal possibilities present in the natural world.
Lee Friedlander was chosen this year as the recipient of the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. This past summer, his work was the subject of a major traveling retrospective organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Apples and Olives will be accompanied by a fully illustrated book published by Fraenkel Gallery in collaboration with Hasselblad Center, Göteborg, Sweden.
Apples and Olives can be seen concurrently with Adam Fuss in the main gallery.
