At Andrea Meislin Gallery in New York, an exhibition of recent and new photographs by Barry Frydlender. The exhibition features seven large-scale color pictures which record Frydlender’s passage through four major cities and one small town in northern Israel. All explore the interpretation of visual facts collected on the move, addressing at the same time larger social questions. The digitally reconstructed scenes from Los Angeles, Paris, New York, London, and Nazareth reveal timely issues of ethnicity, migration, class, consumption, culture, race and, finally, the question of what remains of the promise of “redemption.”
This continues the core of Frydlender’s practice: that of creating a visual record based on the physical and metaphorical combination of reportage and interpretation, one which allows a link to works of historical fiction and seeks to connect the history of the pictorial tradition to social structures of contemporary life.
Distinguishing the elements that characterize his constructed photographs, the artist says in an interview: “One of photography’s great limitations is that because a picture is taken in an instant, you can consume it instantly.… Since my photographs are not made like that, you can’t consume them all at once,” he continued. “They delay understanding.”
Barry Frydlender received the 2011 Sandberg Prize for Israeli Art at The Israel Museum and the 2001 Leon Constantiner Prize for Photography at The Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His work was featured in a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2007, and his work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Getty Museum, The Israel Museum, The Tel Aviv Museum, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. He was born in Israel in 1954 and currently lives in Tel Aviv.
Through until June 18, 2011
Andrea Meislin Gallery
526 W 26TH ST # 214
NYC NY 10001
TEL. 212. 627. 2552
