Pace and Pace/MacGill are honored to inaugurate their representation of the legendary American photographer Lee Friedlander in New York with Nudes and Mannequin, a two-venue presentation on view on the second and ninth floors of 32 East 57th Street, New York, from October 26 through December 22, 2012. The artist will be present at an opening reception on Saturday, October 27 from 2 to 4 P.M. For more than five decades, Lee Friedlander has captured the American social landscape through his camera lens. Friedlander is known for hi... Read more

Pace and Pace/MacGill are honored to inaugurate their representation of the legendary American photographer Lee Friedlander in New York with Nudes and Mannequin, a two-venue presentation on view on the second and ninth floors of 32 East 57th Street, New York, from October 26 through December 22, 2012. The artist will be present at an opening reception on Saturday, October 27 from 2 to 4 P.M.

For more than five decades, Lee Friedlander has captured the American social landscape through his camera lens. Friedlander is known for his dynamic formal compositions and poignant visual juxtapositions of subjects drawn from American vernacular culture. A seminal figure in the history of photography, his lighthearted and ironic portrayals of the modern world explore the medium’s most central motifs, ranging from street scenes, landscapes and interiors to nudes, portraits, self portraits, and still lifes.

Pace will present a selection of over fifty of Friedlander’s iconic black-and-white nudes from 1977 to 1991 in the second floor gallery of 32 East 57th Street. The images, taken with a hand-held Leica camera, range from closely framed figure studies to full-body shots that include elements of his subjects’ personal environments, who were almost always photographed in their homes. Friedlander’s nudes will be juxtaposed alongside Bill Brandt’s graphic and dramatic depictions of the female form and Edward Weston’s photographs of his wife and muse, Charis Wilson. Friedlander began photographing nudes in 1977 while teaching at Rice University in Texas at the casual suggestion of his friend and colleague George Krause, who was employing artist’s models for his own photographs at the time. Fifty-two images from this body of work were exhibited together for the first time in 1991 at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. A new edition of the Nudes monograph, originally published in 1991, will be released in the spring of 2013 by Distributed Art Publishers.

Pace/MacGill will feature the first New York presentation of over twenty photographs from Friedlander’s newest body of work, Mannequin, on the ninth floor gallery of 32 East 57th Street. Taken between 2003 and 2011 with a hand-held 35-millimeter camera that Friedlander used earlier in his career, the new body of work depicts storefront windows in Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco. In Mannequin, Friedlander employs the reflective surface of urban display windows as a compositional device, returning to a technique he utilized in his street scenes of the 1960s. In the resulting visual hybrids, building facades and skylines are superimposed on mannequins’ bodies and vice versa, with the dim presence of the photographer’s own reflection often entering the frame. The low vantage point of the photographs monumentalizes the plastic figures, emphasizing society’s obsession with fashion and consumerism. A monograph devoted to Mannequin was published this year by Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco.