Fraenkel Gallery

About the Gallery
Since 1979, Fraenkel Gallery has presented almost 400 exhibitions exploring photography and its relation to other media. The gallery exhibits and publishes significant works of art in a variety of media spanning two centuries. We believe that to understand photographs it helps to see them in light of other objects, and vice versa.

About the Presentation
Fraenkel Gallery will present work by BJ Newton and Ralph Eugene Meatyard in a duo presentation at Independent 20th Century. Incarcerated in California for most of his adult life, B.J. Newton (1926–1994) created fantastical, thickly painted works chronicling glory and destruction with a Biblical sense of scope. Forceful and singular, his paintings are populated with dreamlike creatures, symbols, and landscapes. A self-taught artist, Newton's work was offered at the Folsom Prison store in the 1960s and 1970s, which exhibited art and crafts created by prison inmates. His work is virtually unknown outside of a small circle of artists, curators and admirers. For the Independent, Newton’s paintings are paired with genre-spanning photographs from the 1950s and ‘60s by Ralph Eugene Meatyard, the visionary photographer from Lexington, Kentucky who made his living as an optician. The pairing brings together artists who share an engagement with the metaphysical and mysterious.