Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present the twentieth installment of the summer exhibition Several Exceptionally Good Recently Acquired Pictures, on view from July 10th through August 16th, 2008.
For twenty years, this annual exhibition has provided viewers the rare opportunity to examine, side by side, a wide range of photographs spanning the entirety of the medium’s history. From anonymous photographs and historic treasures dating back to the 19th century, to contemporary photographs made by some of the most innovative photographic artists today, the exhibition creates a unique dialogue between an eclectic set of photographs examining the persistent role of the fixed image.
Among this year’s highlights is a group of recently discovered photographs by Diane Arbus, including Nudist man and his dog in a trailer, N.J., an unabashed image of a nudist interior decorator in his trailer home in 1963. New work by Idris Khan will be exhibited including Rembrandt…By Himself, created by the artist through a process of layering photographic reproductions of each of the Dutch painter’s renowned self-portraits. A mesmerizing group of anonymous, aerial photographs depicting World War II bombings on European sites circa 1944 will be on view, in addition to Richard Misrach’s newest series in which digital images of land and seascapes are inverted to produce a negative image. Also included are I.W. Taber’s astonishing 1893 mammoth-plate of Huntington Falls in Golden Gate Park; Hiroshi Sugimoto’s 1977 depiction of the ancient Kegon Waterfall near Tokyo; and a selection of works by Richard Avedon, including Blue Cloud Wright, Slaughterhouse Worker, a haunting, large-scale black and white portrait from the artist’s influential series In the American West.
