Lot 221: BARRY FRYDLENDER

Friday
Signed in ink on a label affixed to the reverse of the flush-mount. Number 3 from an edition of 5.

16.5 x 74 in. (41.9 x 188 cm).

Color coupler print, flush-mounted, printed later.

2002

Art of the State: Contemporary Photography and Video from Israel, Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam, 27 June- 30 November 2008; Barry Frydlender: Down Here, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, 2007;
Barry Frydlender: Place and Time, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 17 May- 3 September 2007; Barry Frydlender: The Fourth Dimensions, Andrea Meislin Gallery, New York, 9 September- 23 October 2004; Hugging and Wrestling: Contemporary Israeli Photography and Video, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, 12 September 2009- 10 January 2010; for all, another example exhibited

Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Barry Frydlender: Down Here, pp. 179-180; The Museum of Modern Art, Barry Frydlender: Place and Time, pl. 1; The New Yorker, 4 June 2007, pp. 24-25

Andrea Meislin Gallery, New York

Barry Frydlender’s panoramic vistas of everyday life evoke an ambiguous reaction that swerves between comfortable cognizance and confounding alienation. Each work is comprised of a surfeit of images that had been individually shot over a period of months and then meticulously collated to present an alternate view of a familiar scene. In doing so, Frydlender diffuses the differentiating parameters between painting and photography, and his ?nal images, as a social narrative, resonate greater with the Social Realism movement in their poignant reverence of the quotidian and the commoners, than with the objective documentarian approach historically ascribed to photography. Nonetheless, working in a Post Modern context, Frydlender’s vistas, like Friday, disclose their constructed nature with a number of clues: shadows are eliminated; multiple perspectives crowd the same image; and the same ?gure appears multiple times. The image appears to hint that even an allegedly natural and objective scene such as that of a leisurely afternoon may be the product of arti?ce and carefully guided manipulation.