Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to announce Nicholas Nixon: Self & City, an exhibition of recent large-format self-portraits and cityscapes. Concurrent with the Nixon exhibition will be Several Exceptionally Good Recently Acquired Pictures XXI, the gallery’s 21st exhibition of recent acquisitions. Both exhibitions will be on view from July 9 to August 15, 2009.
Nicholas Nixon: Self & City is comprised of thirty intensely detailed black and white photographs made over the last two years with an 11 x 14 inch view camera. The camera is so large and cumbersome that few artists have been able to master it. Perhaps best known for his yearly portraits of his wife and her three sisters, Nixon in this case has turned the camera on himself, resulting in close-up studies of various body parts: face, hands, neck, and chest. These details are depicted several times larger than they are in actuality, and alternate in the exhibition with the artist’s new cityscapes, surveying from above the details of Boston architecture. The building surfaces, window reflections, and shadows, interwoven with details of Nixon’s body, result in a meditation on one’s own place in the urban thicket.
