Richard Avedon (American, 1923–2004)
*The Chicago Seven, Chicago, November 5, 1969*
Gelatin silver prints 10ft.2in.x20ft.17/8in.(309.9x614.4cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of the artist, 2002 (2002.379.4a–c)
© The Richard Avedon Foundation

The MET | Jan. 19 - Oct. 1, 2023

To celebrate the centennial of Richard Avedon’s birth in 1923, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present a selection of the photographer’s most innovative group portraits in the exhibition Richard Avedon: MURALS, opening January 19, 2023. Although Avedon first earned his reputation as a fashion photographer in the late 1940s, his greatest achievement was his stunning reinvention of the photographic portrait. Focused on the short period between 1969 and 1971, this exhibition will explore a critical juncture in the artist’s career, when, after a hiatus from portraiture, he began working with a new camera and a new sense of scale. The exhibition will be organized around three monumental photomurals in The Met collection (the largest measures 10 x 35 feet) that depict groups of the era’s preeminent artists, activists, and politicians. Uniting the murals with session outtakes and contemporaneous projects, the exhibition will track Avedon’s evolving approach to group portraiture, through which he transformed the conventions of the genre.

The exhibition is made possible by Joyce Frank Menschel.

ALEX PRAGER
*Run*, 2022
Film still
linen box set, USB drive, blu-ray DVD, poster and film stills, white gloves, studio letter
11 x 21 inches (image)
Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London.

Lehmann Maupin | Jan. 19 - Mar. 4, 2023

Lehmann Maupin presents Part Two: Run, an exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based artist Alex Prager, marking the debut of Prager’s ambitious new film, Run and featuring a selection of new photographs and sculptures. Directly responding to a period of cultural ambivalences and uncertainties, the exhibition urgently examines human perseverance and explores the opportunities for empathy, participation, and action present both within art and everyday life.

The New York exhibition presents Run in dialogue with photographs and sculptures that further complicate and enrich the film’s fundamental concerns. Prager’s photographic work Sleep (2022) shows the intricately staged mass of people from Run, as they momentarily lay on the ground, after each colliding with the accelerating mirrored ball. Sleep humorously deconstructs the conventions of the film still, and Prager unveils the absurdist potential of suspending a single moment in time. Dramatizing the scene’s ambiguities, the work offers a narrative with a multitude of possible conclusions. Directly engaging the film’s central image, Prager’s sculpture Ball (2022) shows a hyper-realistic figure of a woman, whose head appears to be crushed by the mirrored sphere. As viewers approach the object, they are likewise confronted by their reflections, and they, too, become enfolded within Prager’s lively narratives. Here, as throughout the exhibition, Prager invites viewers into her visually and symbolically saturated works, suggesting that they, too, have critical parts to play.

Tacita Dean, *One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting*, 2021. © Tacita Dean, Courtesy the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris

ICP | Jan. 27 - May 1, 2023

The International Center of Photography (ICP) will exhibit Face to Face: Portraits of Artists by Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe and Catherine Opie from January 27 through May 1, 2023. Organized by renowned writer and curator Helen Molesworth, the exhibition presents portraits of luminaries in the arts by three of the most prominent portraitists of our time. Face to Face will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by ICP and MACK, London, with essays by Molesworth and writer and curator Jarrett Earnest.