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.
Several Exceptionally Good Recently Acquired Pictures XXI provides viewers with an opportunity to examine, side by side, an unpredictable and eccentric selection of photographs spanning the medium’s history. The exhibition includes anonymous photographs from the 19th and early 20th century, as well as contemporary photographs made by some of the medium’s most innovative practitioners.
This year’s highlights include new work by Idris Khan, created by photographing and layering Arabic texts of the mystical Sufi poet, Rumi; new color portraits by Katy Grannan, made along Sunset Boulevard in the searing sunlight of Los Angeles; and the British artist Richard Learoyd’s large, intense color portrait, “Jasmijn, to the Light,” made without a negative, using methods based on the camera obscura. Also included are four 1960’s photographs by Ed Ruscha, of rooftops in southern California that mysteriously transcend their banality through Ruscha’s observation.
