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Press quotes


“Ihren ureigenen Reiz ... entwickelt die Ausstellung dort, wo sie belegt, wie er [Abe Frajndlich] sie [Künstlerkollegen] mitunter über Jahre hinweg immer wieder porträtiert, mal still, mal experimentell, aber stets überraschend.” (The exhibition develops its very own charm where it shows how he [Abe Frajndlich] sometimes portrays them [fellow artists] over and over again over the years, sometimes quietly, sometimes experimentally, but always surprisingly.)

Freddy Langer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 08.08.2023

Exhibition

ABE FRAJNDLICH. CHAMELEON

Duration: May 20 – September 17, 2023

Opening: Friday, May 19, 2023, 7 pm



ACCOMPANYING PROGRAMME


​​​​​​​Saturday, May 20, 2023, 3 pm

Gallery talk with Abe Frajndlich and Celina Lunsford, Curator and Artistic Director FFF


Sunday, May 28, 2023, 3 pm

Curator’s tour with Celina Lunsford, Curator and Artistic Director FFF


Sunday, June 25, 2023, 3 pm

Curator’s tour with Celina Lunsford, Curator and Artistic Director FFF


Wednesday, September 6, 2023, 5 pm

Curator’s tour with Abe Frajndlich and Celina Lunsford

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Friday, September 8, 2023, 6 pm

Performance with Butoh dancer Minami Azu

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Sunday, September 10, 2023, 3 pm

Abe Frajndlich in dialogue with author Peter Stephan Jungk

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Public guided tours

every Wednesday, 5 pm

He has portrayed creatives from music, art and show biz, icons of photographic history as “Masters of Light” and surreally depicted the limitlessness of the cosmopolitan city. With CHAMELEON, the FFF presents the iridescent diversity of the US-American photographer Abe Frajndlich (*1946, Frankfurt am Main).


He was born in a displaced persons camp in Frankfurt in 1946 and worked for major international media, including FAZ magazine, from the 1980s onwards. In his pictures, he repeatedly deals with creativity, hope and identity in a free world.


The photographer’s work is strongly influenced by his own biographical experience: Abe Frajndlich's childhood and early youth were marked by migration. His path – and that of his family – led from Germany to Israel, back to Germany, and then via France and Brazil finally to the USA.

Abe Frajndlich began taking photographs in 1970. The FFF retrospective presents photographs from all of the photographer’s creative years. Among others, Frajndlich’s experimental works, his street photography in various countries as well as his portraits of great artists such as Cindy Sherman, Leonard Cohen, Louise Bourgeois, Nancy Spero, Jack Lemmon or Aperture founder Minor White, staged images of Gordon Parks or Louise Dahl-Wolfe, as well as images from his emotionally dynamic book Eros Eterna can be seen.


The retrospective, curated by Celina Lunsford, together with Esra Klein (both FFF), reflects stations from Frajndlich’s historically moving biography, and is FFF's contribution to the 175th Paulskirchen anniversary.

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Gallery tour with Abe Frajndlich and Celina Lunsford through the exhibition “ABE FRAJNDLICH. CHAMELEON”

Abe Frajndlich has published numerous books, including Lives I've Never Lived: A Portrait of Minor White (1983, Arc Press, Cleveland), Eros Eterna (1999, Verlag Umschau Braus, Heidelberg), Portraits (2000, Prestel Verlag Munich), Penelope's Hungry Eyes (2011, Schirmer /Mosel, Munich). His work has been shown in exhibitions at renowned institutions, including Nicephore Niepce Museum of Photography, Chalon-sur-Saone/France; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Jewish Museum, Frankfurt; National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; In 1997 the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt showed the exhibition; Exiles, Abe Frajndlich in it’s Print Room. Today he lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

    An exhibition on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of Frankfurt’s Paulskirche and contribution to the festival programme “Democracy in the Making”.

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