Frieze Masters

Cheim & Read is pleased to make a special presention of William Eggleston’s Troubled Waters portfolio at Frieze Masters. The portfolio is comprised of 15 dye-transfer prints published in 1980 at the end of the artist’s most prolific decade.

Troubled Waters’ title was suggested by the first image in the group, the puddle with a mysterious ripple and oilcans nearby. A mildly ironic idea that seemed poetically appropriate considering the eerie allure and some sense of menace present in all of the images.

Eggleston pushes us to confront his seemingly banal subjects in new ways and causes one to ask, why would an artist focus on such subjects? His vision includes images such as a freezer packed with frozen foods, trash stacked high against a cinder block wall and a pinball machine (Eggleston has said there was a shade of sickly green in the image of the pinball machine that he had never seen in a photograph before).

Themes of the underside of Southern life are explored with roadside architecture, a neon Confederate flag, and a rural scene of barefoot children on a dirt path. The imagery suggests our impact on the natural and built environment. Eggleston confronts the New South from the Mississippi Delta where he grew up to his present home in Memphis, Tennessee.

In addition, we will have works by Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Louise Fishman, Hans Hartung, Al Held, Jenny Holzer, Joan Mitchell, Milton Resnick, Sean Scully and Pat Steir.