Robert Frank

Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of work by the celebrated photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank.

This presentation, titled Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions, marks the centenary of Frank's birth and coincides with several other major exhibitions of his work around the world. Pace's Frank exhibition—organized in collaboration with The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation—will be accompanied by a new book from Pace Publishing, featuring an essay by Ocean Vuong.

Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions will focus on Frank's later work from the 1970s onward: the decades he spent experimenting with various cameras, printing methods, and media. Curated by Shahrzad Kamel, Director of The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, the exhibition takes its title from a sketch Frank made of his work Fire Below—to the East America, Mabou (1979), which was included in a bequest the artist made of his photographs and papers to The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation upon his death in 2019, and one of many discoveries that inspired this presentation of previously unseen works from his oeuvre.

Pace's show will feature groupings of multimedia works based on various motifs that Frank revisited throughout his career, offering a new way of seeing his work that will deepen viewers' understanding of his artistic processes and motivations. The photographs on view, some of which feature multiple frames in a single image, hand-drawn etchings, and inscribed phrases, will showcase his long-standing interest in re-presenting older photographs from his past as new compositions, or ‘variants.' Frank's 2004 autobiographical short film True Story will also be presented in its entirety at the gallery. The atemporality of his photography and filmmaking—for which he pieced together fragments of not only images but also his own memories, dreams, and ideas—will be on full view in the exhibition.

The artworks in the presentation will be complemented by a selection of archival materials, including glass plates with etchings, journal pages, sketches, and other rarely exhibited pieces. Enriching viewers' experience of the photographs on the gallery walls, these objects will invite a holistic and personal view of Frank's life and his inventive, genre-defying approach to image-making.

Early in his career, after receiving his first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955, the Swiss-born photographer embarked on a two-year trip across the United States during which he captured over 28,000 candid, poignant images of American life in the mid 20th century. Eighty-three of those images were ultimately included in his groundbreaking monograph The Americans, first published by Robert Delpire in 1958 in Paris (as Les Américains) and the following year by Grove Press in New York, with an introduction by Jack Kerouac.

Aperture is re-releasing Frank's seminal photobook in this anniversary year.