Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent work by Richard Misrach from February 5 through March 27, 2004.
Richard Misrach is among the most influential and internationally recognized photographers working today. He is best known for his epic ongoing project, the Desert Cantos, which is an extensive and unique photographic exploration of place. By addressing the political and social issues through the adaptaion of different photographic strategies, he has expanded notions of traditional landscape practice while building a complex and poignant document of American culture. A mid-career survey, Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach, was organized by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in 1996 and traveled nation-wide.
Misrach’s recent series has the loose working title of On the Beach, inspired by Nevil Shute’s post-apocalyptic novel of the 1950s. These color photographs deal with the human figure seen at a distance, on an unspecified beach or in the water, observed from an unsettling and difficult-to-identify point of view located high above. The photographs revel in the extreme detail yielded by Misrach’s use of an 8 x 10” negative. Quite large in scale, the works measure as wide as ten feet. Two of the images are entirely empty of human presence, concentrating solely on footprints in the sand or the surface of the water.
Richard Misrach has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad. His work is represented in many permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum of Art. Misrach is a recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship, four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and most recently Germany’s Kulturepreis for Lifetime Achievement in Photography.
