For Frieze Masters 2019, Bruce Silverstein will display a series of photographic masterworks from the 20th century including works by Brâncuși, Baldus, Kertész, Steichen, Model, and Bechers. The proposed exhibition will present works that utilize photography to create an equilibrium of documentation and artistry.
The gallery will feature a rare vintage typology of fifteen water towers by Bernd and Hilla Becher. The set will be shown alongside a group of Eduoard Baldus photographs of aqueducts made in the late 1860s. In their time, the prints by Baldus pushed the limits of scale within the medium and pioneered a modern aesthetic that had a profound influence on photographers like the Bechers. Both Baldus and the Bechers were part of a larger discourse seeking found sculpture in the landscape which this presentation of historical works will illuminate.
In contrast to the formal, evenly lit and systematic approach of the Düsseldorf-based artists, sculptures photographed by their modernist maker Constantin Brâncuși adopt a distorted, more Surrealist sense of scale. This exhibition will highlight one of the artist's most enduring works, Endless Column. In the mid-1920s, he carved an Endless Column for his friend, the photographer Edward Steichen that rose more than 23 feet. In 1937, a steel version in Tîrgu-Jiu, Romania, that soared more than 98 feet into the air. As homage to the artist's practice, the gallery will present a selection of images capturing this monumental work, as well as several rarely-seen images of the artist producing the piece in its various formations.
