Gallery Luisotti is delighted to be returning to Frieze New York, Spotlight, for the third consecutive year. The gallery will present vintage works by Catherine Wagner from her incisive and beautifully printed 1970s series California Landscapes and Moscone Center.
For four decades, Bay Area artist Catherine Wagner has rigorously investigated social constructs in the built environment and how identity is formed in American culture. In California Landscapes (1972–79), Wagner observes the rapid development of California and the striking formal and spatial qualities of residential and commercial construction. These works are in conversation with the pivotal New Topographics movement. Concomitant with the boom of sprawling suburbs was urban redevelopment. In 1978, she turned her lens onto San Francisco’s economically depressed South of Market district, where the Moscone Center was being constructed despite fierce opposition from long time residents. The photographs convey a vastness—even within the dense confines of the SF peninsula—and the soaring forms of construction machinery and materials. This series reveals the tension between what was and what was yet to come.
The gallery is thrilled to be presenting these stunning works and the conversations they provoke that are more relevant than ever.
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Catherine Wagner is the recipient of the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, NEW Fellowships and the Ferguson Award. Her works are in major public and private collections, including the LA County Museum of Art, San Francisco MOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY MoMA, the MFA Houston and the Yale University Art Gallery. Publications of her work include American Classroom, Art & Science: Investigating Matter and Cross Sections.