Gaze: Vision, Desire, and Difference in the Frye Collections

The Frye presents works from our Founding and Permanent Collections in the exhibition Gaze: Vision, Desire, and Difference in the Frye Collections. This exhibition explores the various kinds of gazes reflected in paintings from the Frye Collections, among them clandestine pleasure, voyeurism, and the artist’s or the subject’s gaze. Oscillating between evocations of desire and difference, clinical observation and psychological narrative, these works heighten awareness of our own position as viewers.

The exhibition features major works by nineteenth-century artists such as Gabriel von Max and Franz Xaver Winterhalter, as well as contemporary twentieth-century artists such as Robert McCurdy. In Sin, Franz von Stuck’s temptress looks back at the viewer in full knowledge of her sexual power; Tim Lowly’s large-scale Temma on Earth is a powerful portrayal of the artist’s daughter, physically and mentally disabled since birth; and Steven Assael’s IRT #7 examines both the anonymity and intimacy of urban life in his portraits of passengers on the New York subway. Each illuminates the complex dynamics of spectatorship.

The exhibition is cocurated by Frye Foundation Scholar Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker and Frye Curator of Collections Donna Kovalenko.