Retrospective of S (A Project by Jonathan Safran Foer and Sam Messer) – 2012

Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce Retrospective of S, a collaborative project conceived by writer Jonathan Safran Foer and artist Sam Messer. The exhibition brings together ten artists: Njideka Akunyili, Caitlin Cherry, Rochelle Feinstein, Natalie Frank, Chie Fueki, Jackie Gendel, Judith Linhares, Francesca Lo Russo, Josephine Messer, and Jennifer Packer whose works collectively imagine, interpret, and complicate the figure known only as “S.”

Rather than depicting a single subject, the artists approach “S” as an open structure: a site for biography, projection, memory, and invention. Working across painting, drawing, and mixed media, each artist constructs a different version of the character, generating a shifting composite of identities that overlap, contradict, and reframe one another.

Foer and Messer’s concept creates a framework in which the fictional and the personal converge, inviting the artists to respond not to a fixed narrative but to the possibilities of a subject continually in flux. The exhibition highlights a wide range of sensibilities from gestural abstraction to narrative figuration, and underscores the power of portraiture to operate beyond likeness and toward psychological and symbolic space.

Fredericks & Freiser is located at 536 West 24th Street. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm. For further information, please contact the gallery at (212) 633-6555 or visit www.fredericksfreisergallery.com.

Retrospective of S

A Project by Jonathan Safran Foer and Sam Messer

Njideka Akunyili, Caitlin Cherry, Rochelle Feinstein, Natalie Frank, Chie Fueki, Jackie Gendel, Judith Linhares, Francesca Lo Russo, Josephine Messer, Jennifer Packer

June 21 – July 27, 2012

Press Release