Frances Stark

I’m not making a syllabus but rather capturing these haptic engagements with (mostly) American voices critical of empire. And then there’s the choice to paint, the re-orientation/transposition of long-form thought, my own battle with an inability to write and utter failure to feel stabilized by any sense of value or agency — an unmoored mind, trapped in the market, confused about what constitutes community and the social... The title of the show is snatched from Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library”:

“It is a frequent occurrence that someone gets stuck with a high purchase price because he kept raising his bid – more to assert himself than to acquire the book. On the other hand, one of the finest memories of a collector is the moment when he rescued a book to which he might never have given a thought, much less a wishful look, because he found it lonely and abandoned on the market place, and bought it to give it is freedom – the way the price bought a beautiful slave girl in The Arabian Nights. To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.”

— Frances Stark, 2019

Galerie Buchholz announces the fifth solo exhibition by Frances Stark since 2000, and her second in our Berlin gallery. Frances Stark (*Newport Beach, California, 1967, lives and works in Los Angeles) has had recent survey exhibitions including “Uh-Oh: Frances Stark 1991-2015” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015-2016) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2016-2017, and “Intimism” at the Art Institute of Chicago (2015). Her works have been presented in major international exhibitions, including “Censorship Now!” in the Whitney Biennial, New York (2017), “Bobby Jesus’s Alma Matter...” at the Carnegie International, Pittsburg (2013), “Put a Song in your Thing” at Performa, New York (2011), and her digital video “My Best Thing”, first shown at the 54th Venice Biennial (2011). Additional solo exhibitions by Frances Stark include the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2013); MoMA P.S. 1, New York (2011); the M.I.T. List Center, Cambridge (2010); Portikus, Frankfurt (2008); FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon (2007), and the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2007), among others. She was a 2018 nominee for the Hugo Boss Prize, and the 2015 recipient of the Absolut Art Award. Her work is included in the collections of the MoMA, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, SFMoMA, San Francisco, Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, and others.