Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of acclaimed photographer Lee Friedlander, opening in our Chelsea location on September 12. The exhibition is Friedlander’s first with Luhring Augustine and his first New York gallery show since 2013. On view will be a survey of the artist’s career, representing over six-decades of his poignant and often humorous observations of the American social landscape.
The exhibition will be an expansive chronology, from Friedlander’s earliest photographs from the 1960s up to the present day. The selection will underscore the artist’s singular compositional style, offering an overview of the wide-ranging subjects on which the photographer has trained his lens. From cityscapes and portraiture, to still lifes and landscapes, the images reveal the overlaps and intersections between these motifs which Friedlander skillfully and deliberately merges within a single frame. Highlighted in the exhibition will be the first comprehensive presentation in New York of a large grouping of images from his Western Landscapes series, produced after his major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2005.
Friedlander’s vast oeuvre is marked by a voracious and nonhierarchical cataloguing of visual information. His focus is expansive, encompassing photos of intimate familial moments and self-portraits to strangers passing on urban streets; dense, sprawling cities to uninhabited desert environs; suburban window displays to signs spotted from car windows; and everything beyond and in-between. Through his highly distinguished approach to composition, often incorporating off-kilter framing and disorienting reflections that also foreground shadows that signify his own presence, Friedlander simultaneously reveals and capitalizes on photography’s limitations and possibilities.
Friedlander (b. 1934) began taking photographs in 1948 and in 1970 his iconic and groundbreaking Self-portraits was published, the first of many books that the artist has produced in his prolific career. In fall 2019 Powerhouse Books published, Friedlander First Fifty, a compilation of Friedlander’s first 50 books. In 2005, he was the recipient of the prestigious Hasselblad Award as well as the subject of a major traveling retrospective and catalogue organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Friedlander’s work is held by major collections including Art Institute of Chicago; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. Friedlander is co-represented with Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA.