ROBERT FRANK: HOPE MAKES VISIONS

Pace is pleased to present Hope Makes Visions, an exhibition of work by the celebrated photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank.

November 15 – December 21, 2024

Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions focuses 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 features 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 is also presented in its entirety at the gallery. 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—is on full view in the exhibition.

The artworks in the presentation are complemented by a selection of archival materials, including glass plates with etchings, journal pages, sketches, and other rarely exhibited pieces. Enriching viewers’ experience of the photographs on the gallery walls, these objects invite a holistic and personal view of Frank’s life and his inventive, genre defying approach to image making.