Frieze Masters

Peter Hujar

Past
Oct 15 – Oct 19, 2025
London

ART FAIR DETAILS

Frieze Masters
Booth F7
Regent's Park
Oct 15 – 19, 2025

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Above: Installation view, Pace at Frieze Masters, Booth F7, Oct 15 – 19, 2025 © The Peter Hujar Archive, LLC

At the 2025 edition of Frieze Masters, Pace Gallery will present a selection of photographs by Peter Hujar, highlighting the artist’s backstage portraits of performers in the theatres and nightclubs of 1970s and ’80s New York. Featuring a group of 15 works printed by Hujar, Pace’s booth will underscore the celebrated artist’s transformative photographic eye and his extraordinary darkroom technique.

In 1974, Hujar was introduced to the Palm Casino Revue, an experimental theatre in the East Village and hub of avant-garde drag. There, and in other venues, he began photographing performers in and out of costume, often in intimate backstage settings where they dressed, rehearsed, rested, and posed for his camera. Both participant and documentarian of a pivotal moment in queer cultural history, Hujar also made his home and studio above the Eden Theater on East 12th Street a gathering place for artists, performers, and other vital downtown figures. The idea of life as performance runs throughout his work, and, while not a formal series, the backstage was one of his enduring themes. Many of his subjects were also friends and collaborators, including Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Mario Montez, one of Andy Warhol’s superstars, and artist Sheyla Baykal, among others.

Capturing a wide range of offstage postures and moods, Hujar’s images are unified by their penetrating view of transitional moments. At the heart of many of these performers’ acts, and often their personal lives too, was a fluid and radical understanding of gender. In the photographs, this plays out in part through the elaborate garments and makeup they don. Plumes of feathers, crisp white collars, masks, sequins, satin folds, and lustrous eyelash extensions call attention to and celebrate gender expression though dress. Hujar’s treatment of his subjects—sometimes tender, sometimes gregarious, and always straightforward—reveled in the expressive possibilities of costume, staging, and lighting, constructing images that distilled the subversive essence of their context.

All the works included in the presentation are lifetime prints—made by the artist himself. Hujar, who was technically skilled in the darkroom, made multiple prints of the same image to arrive at his desired effect. The contrast between sharp tonalites and the gradations between them were manipulated by the artist to dramatic heights—as much part of the image as the composition and subject. His black-and-white photographs were often centered within the square frame, thus rendering all his subjects with classical dignity. As objects, the works are physical items of exquisite beauty; as images, they bring forth the decades of joy, pain, struggle, and ecstasy of the figures they depict.