FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Opening reception: Saturday, January 12, 6-8 pm

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce its exhibition of new work by Andrea Fraser. The exhibition will open on January 12th and run through February 9th . There will be an opening reception from 6-8 PM on Saturday the 12th. With her concurrent exhibition at the Pat Hearn Art Gallery, this will be Fraser's first gallery show in New York since 1997.

On view will be three new performance-based video works. A monitor placed at the entrance to the exhibition will show "Little Frank and His Carp." Filmed with hidden cameras at the Guggenheim Bilbao, in "Little Frank and His Carp" Fraser reverses her well-known role as museum docent, performing instead the position of a museum visitor listening to the official audio guide- which advises visitors, among other things, to caress the building's "powerfully sensual" curves. "Little Frank and His Carp" was produced by Consonni, Bilbao.

"Kunst muß hängen" ("Art Must Hang") (2001) is an installation consisting of a 30 minute, single channel video projection over a painting. The videotape documents an event at the Christian Nagel Gallery in Cologne, where Fraser performed a transcript of a drunken, impromptu speech by the late Martin Kippenberger, which she memorized in German. The effect is an ambivalent tribute to artistic ambivalence.

"Exhibition" (2002) is a two-channel rear-projection video installation about artistic appropriations of popular cultural spectacle and its displacement into the art context. The video juxtaposes footage of Fraser dancing in Carnival in Rio de Janeiro with footage shot in the non-site of black-box studio. The life-size, rear projections create a tension between the space of the studio and the gallery—a tension interrupted by overwhelming lights and crowds of the Passarela do Samba.
For further information, please contact the gallery at info@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.