Andrea Meislin Gallery is pleased to announce Barry Frydlender’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery; Yaffo-Tel Aviv. The exhibition will be on view May 8 through June 21, 2014 and will be accompanied by a color printed catalogue with Essays by Leon Wieseltier, Ileana Selejan and Sharon Rotbard.
Yaffo-Tel Aviv will include eight large-scale color photographs created between 1998 and 2014, and presenting the view reflected from Frydlender’s studio window.
In this comprehensive body of work, Frydlender documents the gradual changes taking place in Tel Aviv-Jaffa’s cityscape in the past two decades. Digitally stitching together moments and events captured in his camera lens, Frydlender recounts the contrived tale of two cities now merged into one. Urban developments, geopolitical dynamics and socio-economic shifts are the threads weaving the story of this city’s urban fabric.
The location of Frydlender’s studio; on the former borderline separating Tel-Aviv from Jaffa, here achieves further significance and ties together economy with politics, urbanism with power struggles.
The title of the exhibition ‘Yaffo-Tel Aviv’ rather than ‘Tel Aviv-Jaffa’ helps to illustrate the significance of semantics in this convoluted setting, and to portray a complex reality in which past and present are confronted and where collective narratives are questioned.
While continuing his long-time exploration of the photographic medium, in this series Frydlender’s artistic language proves to be instrumental inasmuch as structural; the multiplicity of events and the respective discontinuities serve as a constant reminder that while seeming realistic, these events could never occur at one point in time. But, whilst the individual images defy linear construction of narrative, the series as a whole is a clear narration of a history unuttered.
About the Artist:
Barry Frydlender lives and works in Tel Aviv Jaffa. He is the recipient of the 2010 Sandberg Prize for Israeli Art at The Israel Museum and the 2001 Leon Constantiner Prize for Photography at The Tel Aviv Museum of Art. He has presented one-person exhibitions at The Jewish Museum, Paris (2008); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007); The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (2007); and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (1985). His work was featured in group exhibitions across the world and is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.