Pace Gallery will present a selection of photographs by Peter Hujar at Frieze Masters
Peter Hujar, Drag Dress with Fan (backstage at the Palm Casino Revue), 1974 © The Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace Gallery.
LONDON.—
At the 2025 edition of Frieze Masters, Pace Gallery will present a selection of photographs by Peter Hujar, highlighting the artist's backstage portraits of performers in the theatres and nightclubs of 1970s and '80s New York. Featuring a group of 15 works printed by Hujar, Pace’s booth will underscore the celebrated artist’s transformative photographic eye and his extraordinary darkroom technique.
In 1974, Hujar was introduced to the Palm Casino Revue, an experimental theatre in the East Village and hub of avant-garde drag. There, and in other venues, he began photographing performers in and out of costume, often in intimate backstage settings where they dressed, rehearsed, rested, and posed for his camera. Both participant and documentarian of a pivotal moment in queer cultural history, Hujar also made his home and studio above the Eden Theater on East 12th Street—a gathering place for artists, performers, and other vital downtown figures. The idea of life as performance runs throughout his work, and, while not a formal series, the backstage was one of his enduring themes. Many of his subjects were also friends and collaborators, including Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Mario Montez, one of Andy Warhol’s superstars, and artist Sheyla Baykal, among others.
Capturing a wide range of offstage postures and moods, Hujar’s images are unified by their penetrating view of transitional moments. At the heart of many of these performers’ acts, and often their personal lives too, was a fluid and radical understanding of gender. In the photographs, this plays out in part through the elaborate garments and makeup they don. Plumes of feathers, crisp white collars, masks, sequins, satin folds, and lustrous eyelash extensions call attention to and celebrate gender expression through dress. Hujar’s treatment of his subjects—sometimes tender, sometimes gregarious, and always straightforward—revealed the expressive possibilities of costume, staging, and lighting, constructing images that distilled the subversive essence of their context.
All the works included in the presentation are lifetime prints—made by the artist himself. Hujar, who was technically skilled in the darkroom, made multiple prints of the same image to arrive at his desired effect. The contrast between the tonal qualities and the gradations between them were manipulated by the artist of his own rights—as much part of the image as the composition and subject. His black-and-white photographs were often centered within the square frame, thus rendering all his subjects with classical dignity. As objects, the works are physical items of exquisite beauty; as images, they bring forth the decades of joy, pain, struggle, and ecstasy of the figures they depict.
Earlier this year, Hujar was the subject of Eyes Wide Open in the Dark, a landmark exhibition at London’s Raven Row, co-curated by Gary Schneider and John Douglas Millar, who is also writing a forthcoming biography of the artist. This October will see the London premiere of Peter Hujar’s Day, a film directed by Ira Sachs and based on the book of the same name by Hujar’s friend Linda Rosenkrantz.
Pace represents The Peter Hujar Archive alongside Maureen Paley Gallery, London; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich.
Peter Hujar (b. 1934, Trenton, New Jersey; d. 1987, New York) photographed his subjects with penetrating sensitivity and psychological depth. Unflinching and at times dark, he captured intellectuals, luminaries, and members of New York City subculture in moments of disarmed vulnerability. Hujar unabashedly embraced male sexuality and was unafraid to examine death and dying. In his introduction to Portraits in Life and Death, Susan Sontag wrote, '...meditate[d] and most-eyed friends and acquaintances stand, sit, slouch, mostly lie—not made to appear at their most forceful or most mortal.' Peter Hujar knew that portraits in life are always also, portraits in death.' Hujar was in the foreground of a group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers in downtown New York in the '70s and early '80s. In 1987, he died aged 53 from AIDS-related pneumonia, leaving behind a complex and profound body of work that has become posthumously celebrated.
