Andy Freeberg

Andrea Meislin Gallery is pleased to announce Andy Freeberg’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, Art Fare, which will be on view June 26 through August 8, 2014.

In Art Fare Freeberg continues his longstanding investigation of the junctions where art and people intersect. Roaming through international art fairs with his camera, Freeberg’s gaze pauses on the oddity of human behavior and frames the small moments in life as dramatic events. Quick and skillful with his lens, Freeberg captures what is most often overlooked; gallery workers setting up booths, dealers on their phones ignoring their colleagues or interacting with artists and collectors, and the sheer exhaustion of working at contemporary art fairs. In a conversation with art historian W. M. Hunt Freeberg says that he “found the lighting, the costumes, and set design excellent for photographing these living dioramas where the art world plays itself.”

Art Fare gracefully offers an ironic look at the way in which the art world practitioners perform their assigned roles. It is a witty and subversive body of work that contemplates on the performance aspect of the art market. Freeberg’s ability to recognize moments and construct them as thoughtful compositions presents both his aesthetic and psychological sensibilities.

Andy Freeberg was born in 1958 in New York City. After studying photography at the University of Michigan, he returned to New York, where he began making a living shooting portraits for various publications including The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and Time. His work has been exhibited internationally, with solo shows at the State Museum of History of St. Petersburg (Russia), Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle, WA) and Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center (Stanford, CA). His work is in several collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Portland Museum of Art, and the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography.