NEW YORK.-Arno Rafael Minkkinen: Self-Portraits from Four Decades will be on view at Barry Friedman Ltd, November 15–December 22, 2007. The exhibition is a survey of the Finnish American photographer’s striking images from 1971 to a broad selection of new works never seen before. An opening reception will be held on November 15 at the gallery's new Chelsea location at 515 West 26th Street. The artist will be signing copies of his new book, Saga: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen during the opening reception. The 168-page hardbound volume contains 128 tri-tone plates and essays by novelist Alan Lightman and critics A.D. Coleman and Arthur C. Danto. Signed copies will be available from the gallery at $75.00.

The forty-two images in the exhibition, thirty-five of which are murals measuring approximately 3.5 by 5 feet, trace Minkkinen’s highly original form of self-portraiture from the 70s, 80s, 90s, to the present decade. Minkkinen’s unmanipulated, remarkable, black-and-white pictures of his own naked body interacting with the physical environment constitute a unique contribution to contemporary photography and have been exhibited in numerous museums around the world. Literally immersed in nature, his images show him buried in snowdrifts, submerged under rapids, hanging over precipices, and striding the still surface of pristine lakes. Minkkinen’s photographs envision the human body as a powerfully unfamiliar form, transformed by its encounters with the world.

The photographs in the exhibition are arranged in groupings that stress the visual and poetic connections between works from different periods of time. Strongly abstract, Minkkinen’s images often focus on his disembodied arms or legs. Images of hands or fingers juxtaposed with the landscape can appear either isolated or reaching out to a tree or mountain that in reality may be far in the distance.

At times, Minkkinen’s entire body becomes a sculptural entity, a human presence relating to stark expanses of nature and time. One fine example in the exhibition is Birth Places, 2000, a triptych measuring seven and a half feet across. Each panel of the triptych shows one-third of the photographer’s stretched-out body—bridging from feet to hands over three bodies of water—seemingly balanced only by the tips of his fingers and toes. The images were shot on three successive frames and printed as one piece: the first in Finland, the second in Massachusetts, and the third in Japan. Together the three images represent the birthplace of the photographer, his son, and his father.

The thrust of the exhibition focuses on the last two years with Minkkinen in settings ranging from China to Mexico to Norway. These new works show a shift in his emphasis that began about a decade ago from photographs with a sense of timelessness to those with clear cultural and historical references. This work includes Minkkinen’s responses to urban life and architecture, both historical and modern, and to interiors and objects, as seen in the hands and feet on the whimsical, spiraling Nude Descending a Staircase, 2005. The images can be startling and surreal as much as lyrical or humorous, as in A Man and His Dog, 2007 in which the photographer’s shadow becomes his own canine companion.

The critic A.D. Coleman underscores the pleasure in encountering Minkkinen’s work: “Elegant, witty, inventive, and often stunningly beautiful, the pictures he creates in these circumstances stand first and foremost as acts of visual creativity ... these photographs form an astonishing account of one man’s primal engagement with the civilized and natural worlds, and with himself—both a physical odyssey and a psychological voyage of the human spirit.” Coleman’s essay appears in the large-format book, Saga: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen, published by Chronicle Books.

In 2005, a retrospective of his work opened at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA. The exhibition has toured through three European cities and China, and will continue to Italy and Canada. The artist has had more than 30 solo museum exhibitions, including at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne; Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona; Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Nice; Fotografiska Museet at Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Gallen-Kallela Museum, Helsinki. Minkkinen’s work is in the collection of many institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Arno Rafael Minkkinen was born in 1945 in Helsinki, Finland, and moved with his family to America in 1951. He received his MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. He is Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and Docent at the University of Art and Design Helsinki.