Greer Lankton in a Fashion Pose (I), 1983
For the 2026 edition of Basel Unlimited, Ortuzar and Fraenkel Gallery will restage the now-legendary 1986 exhibition, “Peter Hujar: Recent Photographs” at Gracie Mansion Gallery, which was the artist’s eighth and final solo show before his death in 1987. Both Ortuzar and Fraenkel Gallery have previously recreated the exhibition in their own galleries, but this marks its first presentation in Europe.
For the exhibition, Hujar presented seventy photographs arranged in a long, two-row grid. Portraits of friends and fellow artists appeared alongside nudes, landscapes, animals, and images of abandoned buildings, with genres and subjects freely intermingled. In honor of its fortieth anniversary, the presentation at Unlimited offers a version of the original 1986 layout, offering contemporary viewers a chance to experience Hujar’s work as he conceived it, with its non-hierarchical sequencing encouraging open-ended associations and offering rare insight into how he understood the relationships between his images.
