Photographer Spotlight / Special Edition: FRIEZE ART FAIR 2014 (London) [VIDEO]

By Michael KurcfeldOctober 31, 2014

Photographer Spotlight / Special Edition: FRIEZE ART FAIR 2014 (London) [VIDEO]
Video: Frieze in a Minute

 

 



Video: Four Photographers at Frieze

 

Frieze is one of the world’s leading contemporary art fair franchises, and its London incarnation is arguably the best in Europe now — if you count the degree to which it energizes its host metropolis. For over a week in mid-October, London effervesces with art shows and events, packed parties, and cruising collectors. Frieze is actually a couple, a mother and daughter really. Frieze London is the rambunctious ingenue flaunting her newly matured visual powers — artists straining against conventions and showing off for the crowds in ever-louder tones. On the opposite side of Regent’s Park, Frieze Masters is the older dame (pre-2ooo is the official cut-off point in time), comfortable in her conquests and oft-celebrated virtues. There one strolls more serenely through aisles of ancient-to-late modern objets that are palpably rich with historical gravitas, and the price-tags to prove it.

Photography has in recent times insinuated itself seamlessly into the larger international art world. Although it has been a fertile tool for painters that goes back to the Renaissance as camera obscura, it is now as assimilated and pervasive as video and laptops. For Photographer Spotlight we’ve decided this year to focus on older photographers found in the Masters section: F. Holland Day (1864 – 1933), Heinz Hajek-Halke (1898 – 1983), Sherrie Levine (born 1947) channeling Alexander Rodchenko (1891 – 1956), and Lionel Wendt (1900 – 1944). Their respective art dealers — Bruce Silverstein, Alex Anthony for Eric Franck Fine Art, Stephen Henry for Paula Cooper, and Amrita Jhaveri — offer us fascinating glimpses of photographic pioneers we haven’t encountered in this series normally devoted to living artists. These innovators, and their fellow fathers of the medium, opened doors that many contemporary photographers have since walked through. Frieze wisely affords them a respectfully away-from-the-din showcase.

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More from the Photographer Spotlight Series:


STEPHEN WILKES


MATTHEW PILLSBURY


MONA KUHN


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SERIES PRODUCER / MICHAEL KURCFELD

LARB Contributor

Michael Kurcfeld is a journalist, originally from the print world, but since 1990 working in electronic media. Since founding Stonehenge Media, he has produced film and arts coverage for NYTimes.com, WSJ.com, Huffington Post, PBS, Bravo, Yahoo Movies, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, and Film.com. He produces the Photographer Spotlight series for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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