Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present new work by Nicholas Nixon, his fourteenth solo exhibition at the gallery. Comprised of approximately thirty works dating solely from 2012 and 2013, this will be Nixon’s first exhibition to interweave photographs made both in black-and-white and color.
Known for penetrating portraits of couples, the ill and elderly, and an ongoing annual portrait (begun in 1975) of his wife and her three sisters, Nixon is a master of rich, telling detail. His new work is comprised of intimate self-portraits with his wife, Bebe, and landscape views made in France and his neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Grounded in a vocabulary of precision resulting until now solely from large format black-and-white negatives, Nixon here also introduces digital photographs made with a high-resolution hand-held camera. The primary setting is home life; the subtle register of daylight on skin, a close crop of backyard grass, detailed studies of eyes, faces and hair. Other views from further afield also appear—swaths of grass and sweeping wheat fields echo his close-up studies of tangled hair, and underscore a sometimes-overlooked connection to the natural world.
