Fraenkel Gallery at Art Basel

CARRIE MAE WEEMS Slow Fade to Black (Josephine Baker, Lena Horne, Katherine Dunham), 2009-2011 three pigment prints
© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to return to Art Basel with works by Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Elisheva Biernoff, Sophie Calle, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Kota Ezawa, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Richard Learoyd, Christian Marclay, Wardell Milan, Richard Misrach, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Carrie Mae Weems, Garry Winogrand, and others.

Roberts Adams’s​ view of a Colorado Springs gas station ​compares the glow of the evening sky with the electric light illuminating the gas pump. In the recent monograph American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams, Sarah Greenough ​writes about such juxtapositions​ in Adams’s work. 

“​Drawing on insights Hopper had given him into the ‘poignancy of light,’ [Adams] also began to savor the cool light of dusk​… Probing the liaison between the natural and the artificial, he explored the contrast between this evocative, tender light of dusk with its fleeting radiance and the harsh but still haunting glow of neon signs and streetlights that punctuated the darkness for hours on end​,”​ Greenough​ notes.

DIANE ARBUS 42nd Street movie theater audience, N.Y.C. 1958 gelatin silver print © The Estate of Diane Arbus

As a lifelong moviegoer, Diane Arbus was attuned to the divergent ways a viewer responded to a photograph and a film. By turning her camera to the spectators of New York’s movie houses, marquee movie posters, and screened dramas, Arbus captured moments where people were able to escape reality, engaging with the grander fantasies presented to them on screen.

Elisheva Biernoff’s meticulously painted reproductions of found photographs are often small enough to fit into the palm of a hand. In Beyond Our, her recreation expands to encompass a photograph and a larger poster, as well as the wood-paneled wall on which they are displayed, all rendered in highly detailed acrylic. Together, the objects suggest questions about the mysteries that lie beyond the frame.

SOPHIE CALLE Portrait de Marie-Thérèse, 2022 pigment print © Sophie Calle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

“Second rendezvous at the Musée Picasso, during the lockdown. No visitors. The Picassos were under protection, wrapped up, hidden. Underneath — a ghost-like, less intimidating presence that I immediately photographed.”

SOPHIE CALLE

As part of a 2023 exhibition at the Musée National Picasso-Paris commemorating the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, Sophie Calle presented photographs of Picasso’s paintings kept covered by paper and linens during lockdown. Shown in tandem with Calle’s own work and possessions, which filled three floors of the museum, her photographs reckon with Picasso’s legacy and memory.

In The Simpson Verdict, Kota Ezawa animates original footage of the legal proceedings of the O.J. Simpson trial, reconstructing frames of the video to recreate the subtle motions and gestures of the participants. By simplifying the images, Ezawa forces the viewer to look more closely at nuances of expression and the issues of race and celebrity that the case evoked.

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO Brush Impression 0883 (Fire), 2023 unique gelatin silver print © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

For decades, Hiroshi Sugimoto has photographed bodies of water around the world, creating the breathtaking Seascapes series. Bay of Sagami, Enoura is the first seascape made at Enoura Observatory, the headquarters of the Odawara Art Foundation, the organization founded by the artist.

“Every time I view the sea,” Sugimoto writes, “I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.”

“As I wrote, I tried to concentrate on the invisible characters, focusing my mind on the place where the meaning of the characters would manifest itself.”

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO

To create the one-of-a-kind calligraphic photographs in his Brush Impression series, Hiroshi Sugimoto paints Japanese characters onto light sensitive paper using photographic chemicals. Each unique piece records the movement of his brush across the surface of the paper, producing gestural shapes as well as splashes, bubbles, and traces of bristles. The kanji characters he selects often represent words for elemental forces—here he paints the character for fire. The meaning of each word is heightened and reinforced by the expressive qualities of each piece.

PETER HUJAR Fran Lebowitz, 1975 gelatin silver print © 2024 The Peter Hujar Archive, LLC / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Peter Hujar often photographed his friends and fellow artists, emphasizing physicality and creating striking images of the body. These pictures encapsulated the relationships, music, and art that came to define the 1970s avant-garde scene in New York—as Hujar put it, he “liked people who dare.” Robert Levithan, a writer and one of Hujar’s lovers, was the subject of a series of nudes taken in the artist’s loft apartment turned studio.

Wardell Milan has often depicted figures, especially marginalized bodies, in safe spaces—a distinction he sometimes conveys with color. “I try to embody love using color,” Milan noted recently. Often, the color he turns to is blue. “The many different tones of this color have come to represent affirmation, love, resilience and advocacy.” Using it, “I’m signaling to the viewer that this person or group of people, are to be championed, validated, and loved.”

Christian Marclay’s single-channel video incorporates thousands of images taken during his daily walks through London, animating them into a frenetic, flickering sequence​. The piece recalls flip-books, early cinema, and animation devices of the late nineteenth century, such as the zoetrope used by Eadweard Muybridge.

RICHARD MISRACH Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels #26, 1988 pigment print© Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

An image from Desert Canto III: The Flood, one of the chapters from Richard Misrach’s long-running series focused on the American Southwest. The Flood depicts the Salton Sea, an artificial desert lake created in the 1900s, which grew into resort destination starting in the 1950s. Suffering from rising salinity and contamination from runoff, the lake became toxic, and by the 1980s many of the communities along its edges had been largely abandoned, leaving behind a surreal landscape.

Richard Misrach’s series Desert Canto XL – Art in the West examines the way artists work in the American desert. His subjects included Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, the 1973-1976 Land Art project she created in Utah’s Great Basin. Misrach’s photographs of the piece were featured in Blind Spot Folios 001: Nancy Holt & Richard Misrach, a book pairing Misrach’s photographs from the site with material from Holt’s archive, including photo studies and a self-interview. ⁠

Artists: Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Elisheva Biernoff, Sophie Calle, Kota Ezawa, Peter Hujar, Christian Marclay, Wardell Milan, Richard Misrach, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Carrie Mae Weems

For more information about Fraenkel Gallery during this year’s Art Basel, please visit the  Fraenkel Gallery’s website here and Art Basel’s website for further details here. Fraenkel Gallery can be found on Facebook, Instagram and Artsy.