Minkkinen’s Retrospective Extended

The exhibit “Arno Rafael Minkkinen: Self-Portraits from Four Decades” will be on view at Barry Friedman Ltd., through Jan. 26. The exhibition is a survey of the Finnish-American photographer's striking images from 1971 to a broad selection of new works never seen before. Minkkinen is a professor of photography at UML.

The exhibition, which includes 32 mural-sized pieces and seven smaller works, traces Minkkinen's original form of self-portraiture through his career. Minkkinen's unmanipulated, black-and-white pictures of his own body interacting with the physical environment have been exhibited in numerous museums around the world. Literally immersed in nature, his images show him buried in snowdrifts, submerged under rapids, hanging over precipices, and striding the still surface of pristine lakes.

The critic A.D. Coleman underscores the pleasure in encountering Minkkinen's work: "Elegant, witty, inventive, and often stunningly beautiful, the pictures he creates in these circumstances stand first and foremost as acts of visual creativity ... these photographs form an astonishing account of one man's primal engagement with the civilized and natural worlds, and with himself — both a physical odyssey and a psychological voyage of the human spirit." Coleman's essay appears in the large-format book, “Saga: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen,” published by Chronicle Books.

In 2005, a retrospective of his work opened at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln. The exhibition has toured through three European cities and China, and will continue to Italy and Canada. The artist has had more than 30 solo museum exhibitions around the world and his work is in the collection of many institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

The Barry Friedman Ltd. gallery is located at 515 West 26th St. in New York City. The phone number is 212-239-8600.