Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions

Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of work by the celebrated photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York, on view from November 15 to December 21. 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.

Robert Frank, Look Out for Hope, 1979 © The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation.

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. 

Robert Frank, Fire Below - to the East America, Mabou, 1979 © The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation

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. 

Robert Frank, (untitled), n.d. © The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation

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 For immediate release 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, and, as part of Art Basel Unlimited this summer, Pace, in collaboration with Zander Galerie, presented all 83 photographs in this iconic body of work—plus an eighty-fourth print, a triptych image, that the artist added to the end of the sequence for Aperture’s 1978 edition of The Americans. Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visisons.

Robert Frank, Look Out for Hopewill be accompanied by a new book from Pace Publishing, featuring an essay by Ocean Vuong.

Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions coincides with three other major presentations of the artist’s work: 

• Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, a survey tracing six decades of his career, as well as a complete retrospective of his videos and films, at The Museum of Modern Art in New York; 
• Robert Frank: Mary’s Book, an in-depth look at the personal scrapbook of photographs that Frank made for his first wife Mary Lockspeiser, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and 
• Robert Frank: Be Happy, a show of 34 photographs and select documents, at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany. 

Robert Frank (b. 1924, Zurich, Switzerland; d. 2019, Nova Scotia, Canada) redefined the aesthetic of both the still and the moving image via his pictures and films. Soon after his emigration to New York in 1947, Alexey Brodovitch hired Frank as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. The position brought many occasions for travel, and Frank’s impressions of the United States, in comparison to other places, impacted his work. After receiving his first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955, Frank embarked on a two-year trip across America during which he took over 28,000 pictures. Eighty-three of those images were ultimately published in Frank’s groundbreaking monograph The Americans, first by Robert Delpire in 1958 in Paris, and a year later by Grove Press in the United States. Frank’s unorthodox cropping, lighting, and sense of focus attracted criticism. His work, however, was not without supporters. Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg felt a kinship with Frank and his interest in documenting the fabric of contemporary society. Eventually The Americans jettisoned Frank into a position of cultural prominence; he became the spokesperson for a generation of visual artists, musicians, and literary figures both in the United States and abroad.