NEW YORK, NY.- Pace Gallery detailed its participation in the 2024 edition of Paris Photo. On view 7-10 November, works by Robert Frank will anchor Pace’s presentation in celebration of his centennial year. The booth (A36) will also feature works by pioneering artists such as Harry Callahan, William Christenberry, Peter Hujar, and Irving Penn. These will be presented alongside photographs from the gallery’s exciting contemporary program, including works by Yto Barrada, Emmet Gowin, Paul Graham, Nina Katchadourian, Josef Koudelka, Richard Learoyd, Richard Misrach, and Paolo Roversi.
Photographs by Robert Frank will figure prominently on Pace’s booth as part of a global program of events celebrating one hundred years since the artist’s birth. One of the most influential figures in the history of the medium, Frank will be represented at the fair by works ranging from 1949 to 1998. These include portraits of major 20th-century creative individuals, including Franz Kline – Mother’s Day – NYC (1949), Willem de Kooning (1961), and Jack Kerouac – NYC (1965), many of whom were Frank’s artistic collaborators.
After a decade-long hiatus from photography to focus on filmmaking, Frank returned to the medium with a new, looser approach, discarding the formal and classical unities of the single image. A selection of these later works, including The War is Over, Mabou (1998), will feature as part of Pace’s presentation. This work, with its titular epithet etched across a frenetic composite arrangement, exemplifies the personal and emotive tone of Frank’s later practice.
In New York, Frank is currently the subject of a six-decade career survey, including a complete retrospective of his videos and films, at The Museum of Modern Art. On November 15, Pace will open Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions at its 540 West 25th Street gallery, a multimedia exhibition exploring his work from the 1970s onward.
Artists who have expanded the boundaries of photography as a fine art medium will represent a central component of Pace’s presentation. Irving Penn’s Cigarette No. 69 (1972), an example of his mastery of platinum printing, will figure on the booth ahead of a solo exhibition of his photography curated by Hank Willis Thomas at the gallery’s location in New York. Thomas will also be represented in Paris by a retroreflective collage and will present an exhibition of new works at Pace’s London gallery in November.
Works by Nina Katchadourian, Lucas Samaras, Gillian Wearing, and Carmen Winant will also be featured, artists whose photography forms just one part of their diverse practices. Samaras will be represented by works from his Photo-Transformations (1973-76) series, in which he manipulated the wet dye emulsions of Polaroid prints to create distorted, surreal portraits that blur the lines between photography and painting. A photograph from Katchadourian’s “Sorted Books” (1993 – ongoing) series will also feature. For The Americans, from the series "Look Who's Talking" (2022), the artist constructed groupings of books from The Morgan Library & Museum in New York into poetic or humorous sequences. In this image, Frank’s 1958 publication The Americans sits atop a selection of titles by iconic American authors.
Paris Photo coincides with major institutional exhibitions of artists included in Pace’s presentation, including Yto Barrada, who is currently showing her first major outdoor sculpture at MoMA PS1, and JoAnn Verburg, who is the subject of a solo exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Verburg’s meditative OLIVE TREES (for Robert Frank) (2018)—on view in Paris—with its focus on the fleeting present, evokes a sense of suspended time and reflects Verburg’s fascination with the tension between stillness and potential energy. Barrada will be represented by works from her recent solo exhibition at the International Center of Photography. Turning her attention to the activities in the darkroom as a subject in and of itself, in this body of work Barrada employs alternative practices and mediums to examine social, political, and industrial structures. In January 2025, Pace will open an exhibition of works by Barrada at its 508 West 25th Street gallery in New York.
Further highlights include Document Soup (2009-2017), a photo-installation of twenty-two Fujifilm Instax prints by photographer and documentary filmmaker RaMell Ross, who, alongside William Christenberry, was the subject of a two-person exhibition at Pace in New York last year. Christenberry will also be represented at Paris Photo by three photographs from 1964, 1971, and 1978 that document the changing social and material landscape of Alabama, USA.
Alongside contemporary voices, Pace’s presentation will feature landmark works by Richard Avedon, including his 1969 portrait of Andy Warhol and members of The Factory. Gordon Parks will also be showcased with his intimate, cropped images of poignant yet everyday moments from across the U.S., following an acclaimed solo exhibition at Pace’s Los Angeles gallery this summer. Together, Avedon and Parks demonstrate photography’s dual capacity as both documentary and fine art, capturing pivotal moments while transforming them through their unique artistic vision.
