Printed Matter at Frieze

Printed Matter is pleased to be participating in the first Frieze Viewing Room taking place May 8—May 15, as part of Allied Editions, offering accessible works alongside other NY and UK-based nonprofit organizations. Frieze Viewing Room is a new mobile app and web-based platform, showcasing more than 200 galleries selected to participate in Frieze New York 2020.

We are debuting a new edition by Farah Al Qasimi, produced on the occasion of Frieze New York 2020.

As part of Frieze Viewing Room 2020, a selection of Printed Matter Fundraising Editions are being offered at a 20% discount off their original listed price through the final day of the Fair, May 15. This includes limited edition artwork by: Katherine Bernhardt, Walead Beshty, Petra Cortright, Roe Ethridge, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Landon Metz, Laura Owens, Richard Prince, Sterling Ruby, and Ed Ruscha, among many others.

Registration to explore the Frieze Viewing Room is free and open to all.

Farah Al Qasimi

Flower Lenticular (Language and Prayer Stickers) is a new photographic edition by artist Farah Al Qasimi. The image shows a re-worked cover of a lenticular notebook, the kind used by the artist in her youth, covered with educational stickers showing English-Arabic translation and prayer instruction. In this recreation, the collaged elements suggest a suspended reality in which Al Qasimi’s childhood lives between two cultures.

“Al Qasimi’s photographs conjure up all this skeuomorphic frisson, that pleasurable feeling of knowing a surface is trompe l’oeil but needing to give it a quick, suspicious rub all the same.”
- Rahel Aima, on the occasion of Al Qasimi’s postponed solo exhibition, Funhouse, at Helena Anrather Gallery.

Farah Al Qasimi is an artist working in photography, video and performance. Al Qasimi studied photography and music at Yale University in 2012 and received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2017.

Selected exhibitions include LIST Projects: Farah Al Qasimi at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2019), Helena Anrather, New York (2017), The Third Line, Dubai (2016). Shewas recently awarded the New York NADA Artadia Prize and the Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship (2018). Al Qasimi’s work is housed in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; MACBA, Barcelona, Spain; Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE; and Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE.

Cauleen Smith

Charm and Hex is a nine-color screen print produced on the occasion of Printed Matter’s 2019 Spring Dinner Party. Cauleen Smith (b. 1967 in Riverside, California), an American interdisciplinary filmmaker and artist, describes her work as reflecting the everyday possibilities of the imagination.

“The process of thinking about the intangible qualities of colored light, both in nature and in cinema, gave me a strange kind of optimism about the possibilities of disorientation and borderless thought in the current American culture of divisiveness. [...] When we think about our origins, how is it that we are merely defined by national borders? What else might distinguish us from one another? What else might link us?”

Addressing topics ranging from social activism and protest, Black feminism and literature, to the environment, Smith’s work engages with the politics of Black identity, history, and experience, drawing on influences such as science fiction, the music of Sun Ra, and the parade culture of New Orleans.

Lucas Blalock

The butter and the money for the butter is a new limited edition artwork by Lucas Blalock, produced on the occasion of the 2019 NY Art Book Fair. The work is constructed of 8 individual photographs printed on aluminum and bound with cloth to create a book-like sculptural object. In it Blalock is playing with both a flatfooted literalization of still life as “things-on-a-table” and with cinematic montage of different image relationships produced through the viewer’s movement around the work. Through the use of ambiguous objects, extreme surface tension, and yet oddly familiar characters, the work offers a glimpse into the uncanny and a perpetually shifting universe.

The butter and the money for the butter is comprised of 8 dye-sublimation on aluminum prints bound with cloth, with custom clamshell box.

Suellen Rocca

The Mother and the Bed is Suellen Rocca’s first screen print edition, produced on the occasion of the 2019 NY Art Book Fair.

“This print was inspired by the discovery of my 1950’s doll house furniture found tucked away in a sturdy box in a corner of my basement. It is based on a series of drawings I made to explore the worldly and un-worldly connections between plastic doll house “Mother” — rigid, hinged, perfectly coiffed, wearing a coral-colored dress with sturdy black heels — and the plastic doll house “Bed.” Using line and flat shapes, this diagrammatic, chart-like poster records ten of their encounters."

The artist, who passed away last month, is highlighted in Frieze’s Chicago Tribute section, curated by Julie Rodrigues Widholm. Suellen Rocca’s Pictorial Freedom is a tribute to the iconic artist, with words from Michelle Grabner, Sarah McRory, and Jeannette Pacher, who is organizing a survey of Rocca’s work at Secession in Vienna for later this year. Lynne Warren of MCA Chicago writes, “Often unheralded both as an artist and curator, recent years saw much-deserved recognition, which she clearly cherished, acknowledging it with her modest smile and always a twinkle in her eyes. She emerged as not only the important artist she always was, but a proud spokesman for the Hairy Who group which had launched her back in the 1960s. The Mother and the Bed is a charming addition to her long career.”