NEW YORK, NY.- Pace is presenting an exhibition of work by the celebrated photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York, on view from November 15 to December 21.
This presentation, titled Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions, marks the centenary of Franks birth and coincides with several other major exhibitions of his work around the world. Paces Frank exhibitionorganized in collaboration with The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundationis accompanied by a new book from Pace Publishing, featuring an essay by Ocean Vuong.
Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions focuses on Franks later work from the 1970s onward: the decades he spent experimenting with various cameras, printing methods, and media. Curated by Shahrzad Kamel, Director of The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, the exhibition takes its title from a sketch Frank made of his work Fire Belowto the East America, Mabou (1979), which was included in a bequest the artist made of his photographs and papers to The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation upon his death in 2019, and one of many discoveries that inspired this presentation of previously unseen works from his oeuvre.
Paces show features groupings of multimedia works based on various motifs that Frank revisited throughout his career, offering a new way of seeing his work that will deepen viewers understanding of his artistic processes and motivations. The photographs on view, some of which feature multiple frames in a single image, hand drawn etchings, and inscribed phrases, showcases his long-standing interest in re-presenting older photographs from his past as new compositions, or variants. Franks 2004 autobiographical short film True Story is also being presented in its entirety at the gallery. The atemporality of his photography and filmmakingfor which he pieced together fragments of not only images but also his own memories, dreams, and ideasis on full view in the exhibition.
The artworks in the presentation are complemented by a selection of archival materials, including glass plates with etchings, journal pages, sketches, and other rarely exhibited pieces. Enriching viewers experience of the photographs on the gallery walls, these objects invite a holistic and personal view of Franks life and his inventive, genre defying approach to image making.
Early in his career, after receiving his first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955, the Swiss-born photographer embarked on a two-year trip across the United States during which he captured over 28,000 candid, poignant images of American life in the mid 20th century. Eighty-three of those images were ultimately included in his groundbreaking monograph The Americans, first published by Robert Delpire in 1958 in Paris (as Les Américains) and the following year by Grove Press in New York, with an introduction by Jack Kerouac.
Aperture is re-releasing Franks seminal photobook in this anniversary year, and, as part of Art Basel Unlimited this summer, Pace, in collaboration with Zander Galerie, presented all 83 photographs in this iconic body of workplus an eighty-fourth print, a triptych image, that the artist added to the end of the sequence for Apertures 1978 edition of The Americans.
Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions coincides with three other major presentations of the artists work: Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, a survey tracing six decades of his career, as well as a complete retrospective of his videos and films, at The Museum of Modern Art in New York; Robert Frank: Marys Book, an in-depth look at the personal scrapbook of photographs that Frank made for his first wife Mary Lockspeiser, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Robert Frank: Be Happy, a show of 34 photographs and select documents, at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany. This fall, ahead of the opening of Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions, Pace will spotlight a selection of works by Frank on its booth at Paris Photofurther details about the gallerys presentation at the fair will be revealed in due course.
