Portrait by Will Matsuda
“A lot of people had a lot more fun in the 1990s than we did.” This was one of the first things Jessica and Andrew told me when I sat down to talk with them about the 30 years they’ve run Fredericks & Freiser. Opened in 1996, the husband and wife were grinding it out as one of the first five galleries to sign a lease in Chelsea. They lived in the storefront and slept on a bed that rolled out from below their inventory.
In the recent “Yesteryear” issue of New York Magazine, Jerry Saltz shows us a decade where those who had already arrived in the artworld were busy riding the ride. The article shows the established scene snorting Rob Pruitt’s relational aesthetics, and showing face with future Uniqlo stars at the early incubation of our current mega-galleries. While this was happening, Jessica and Andy had finished the build-out of their space with 200 dollars left in the bank. Just three shows in, they credited selling a single piece (entrusted to them by the painter Richard Phillips) for keeping the lights on the rest of that summer. The picture was so large it barely fit out the gallery door.
Before opening the doors at her own gallery, Jessica came up in the back rooms of the New York art system. In her telling, she locates her role archiving slides at André Emmerich as the beginning of her career. There, she was “learning without being in the room.” Two years later, she moved to work at Gagosian and joined a staff of about a dozen. She specifically noted working with Robert Pincus-Witten, a dyed-in-the wool academic who made the move to retire from university life and lend his curatorial authority to the art market apparatus—an undoubtedly scandalous choice at the time. Pincus-Witten had spent 25 years as the dominant critical voice for postwar American art at Artforum, before crossing the critical-commercial rubicon in 1990. The announcement of his death in ArtNews credits him as minting Post-Minimalism as an art world sign post. He also positioned a generation of artists, including Eva Hesse and Brice Marden, around “work that pushes beyond the rigid, closed, impersonal nature of minimalism into the handmade and the process based…” His move to Gagosian brought the apparatus of institutional legitimacy into a commercial context, strategically lending curatorial gravity to a secondary market powerhouse still under construction. Jessica would work with Pincus-Witten on landmark shows, enshrining the estates of Warhol, Diebenkorn, and Beckman. She was on a factory floor where the craft of welding meaning and historic significance to a career and a body of work was being done at the highest level. A skillset that would be put to immediate use when she and Andrew opened Jessica Fredericks Gallery, later renamed Fredericks & Freiser, mounting the first New York show of Robert Overby’s work.
They turned their short runway into serious heat right out of the gate. They entered the arena with the trust of John Wesley, a category-defying picture maker beknighted by Donald Judd. Wesley was coveted by multiple generations of New York painters since before the collectors knew and a cult figure for those who’ve put themselves in the know. This was the foundation that allowed them to hang their own shingle. And betting on the quality and competency of Wesley and Overby early led to more of the same. The beginning of their press archive reads like a who’s who of the most wickedly smart and sincere thinkers in art writing. The list included Roberta Smith, Dave Hickey, Phong Bui, Hilary Harkness, and others whose credibility still stands as something money can’t buy. “I think our first ten or twelve shows might have gotten either the Times, Artforum, or Time Out,” Andrew recalled. “We did our Overby show and we sold work to Whitney. That show basically sold out and it just kind of changed our trajectory.”
Three years after his death in 1993, Jessica did Overby’s first-ever New York solo exhibition. By 1998 they were staging his second with a work already placed in the Whitney’s permanent collection. By 2015, multiple influential European institutions had shown the work, and back in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art had acquired Tone-bar Room Map (1972), a wall sized canvas work made by casting latex onto a hotel room’s interior wall, then tracing the impressions of the doorways, molding, and baseboards to create a scale map of the space. It was entered into the collection at the Met with an accompanying wall text explicitly describing the work as a precursor to postminimalist artists like Rachel Whiteread. Whether working to historicize the back catalog of an artist like Overby, elevate a working artist at a strategic moment, or discovering new talent, Andrew says it all goes back to the path laid out by those very first artists they learned and worked with. “We kind of saw how this long arc looked. It starts with acceptance, then being kind of uncategorizable, and then getting to the point where the trajectory surpasses the category.”
Jessica and Andrew knew from the outset that their model would be showing established artists alongside emerging ones. Aesthetically the through-line of the program is an eroticism split between facture and image. They held the tactile self-evidence of the object, inherited from New York minimalism, in tension against the cerebral weight of a life lived in the undertow of the cultural image bank. In 2003, they staged a key solo exhibition of new works by Marilyn Minter and it landed with the kind of critical double-tap that ratifies a career. Johanna Burton, writing in Artforum, brought the heft of the theory-adjacent critical establishment to the work. Roberta Smith’s review in the Times heralded Minter as the connective tissue between the canonical photorealists of the 1960s and the live contemporary argument about painting, mass media, desire, and identity. Fredericks & Freiser debuted an aesthetic language in New Paintings and Photographs—enamel on metal, the construction of desire through obsessive surface, gloss and grime splayed across paint and picture. That coupled with that critical ratification became the foundational grammar for a rapidly escalating career. Two years later, following the arc Fredericks & Freiser had set in motion with the John Wesley playbook, Minter was included in the SFMOMA’s New Work series, joining the company of Kara Walker, Christopher Wool and Matthew Barney, artists the series had similarly caught at a moment of institutional arrival.
This tension between the made thing and the mediated world that is so explicit in the work of Wesley, Overby, and Minter continues to run through the rest of the program and its younger generation of artists like Mary Reid-Kelley and Parick Kelley, Jocelyn Hobbie and Jenna Gribbon. Each of their contemporary practices plays along this same polarity, but with the addition of applying explicit pressure on language itself, using vernacular as poetic material with a haptic weight equal to that of latex, steel, or paint.
The MacArthur Foundation eventually agreed. Born out of studio logic and craft in the Yale painting program of the early aughts, Mary Reid-Kelley and Parick Kelley debuted their earliest video works with Jessica and Andrew—a daring first for the gallery. “For Andy and Jess it’s really about the work,” Mary told me. “When they took me out to lunch in 2008, or whenever it was, and said, ‘We really want to work with you, we want to give you your first show, we want to represent you,’ I didn’t fully understand it at the time. But it was them saying: we’re going to take what you’re doing extremely seriously and apply all of our ability and personal talents to putting it out in the world and helping other people understand it for what it is. And that is what they do. Everything else is secondary.”
Jenna Gribbon’s relationship with the gallery began in 2018 as part of a four-person group show while enrolled in the Hunter MFA program. From that seed grew a deeper critical engagement and institutional recognition. Gribbon had been making work in New York for years before officially hooking up with Fredericks & Freiser. Over a phone call from her studio, she described early 2000s Williamsburg as a pre-social media scene occupied with what would later be called zombie formalism and little interest in her unabashedly skilled figurative painting. Much as they had done with Minter over a decade earlier, Fredericks & Freiser provided scaffolding and patronage at a key moment. They connected the work to a critical legacy of painters working with the mediated image, the historic vocabulary of oil paint, and an urgent contemporary conversation on queer identity and representations of erotic love. Similar to the Kelly-Reids, Gribbon’s overtly queer approach to making a picture re-materializes language as part of her strategy. Perhaps like all successful great paintings, Gribbon’s operation hermeneutically charges the grammar of the painting tradition.
The same year as her solo debut at Fredericks & Freiser, Gribbon was part of the landmark group show at the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Paint, Also Known as Blood Women: Affect and Desire in Contemporary Painting, as well as a group show at Perrotin of queer figurative painters alongside Salman Toor, Doron Langberg and Louis Fratino. There was a flurry of media coverage. Two years later came another solo with Jessica and Andrew as well as a project at the Flag Art Foundation and other group shows. Then, in 2022, she rejoined Langberg and Toor in the Frick’s Living Histories series, where her work committed one of the art world’s last reliable heresies: displaying a living artist on equal footing with the canonized masters. Her portrait, titled What Am I Doing Here? I Should Ask You The Same, elicited consternation in the pews when it was hung as a replacement for Hans Holbein’s painting of Sir Thomas More and displayed on equal footing to his famed partner portrait of Cromwell.
As part of Gribbon’s ascent, Jessica and Andrew introduced her work to the collection of Hubert Neumann. Neumann was a longtime patron of their program and his collection hangs throughout the multi story home where he lives with his partner, Debra Purden. It is full of names like Picasso, Dubuffet, Tanguey, and includes a piece by Giacometti purchased directly from the artist after visiting him in his studio as a young man. More than any other single gallery or dealer, Jessica and Andrew have introduced countless artists to Hubert’s collection and he passionately hangs their roster toe-to-toe with modern masters, making the case that this is the visual vocabulary of our time. And it’s a persuasive argument.
A tour of Neumann’s home reveals paintings by Hobbie, Gribbon and Sam Mattax very happily hanging amid Miro and Mondrians, while Maria Calandra floras tease an interesting aesthetic assignation with Koons in the next room. But the air gets thinner as the tour continues upwards past preparatory works for Guernica on a staircase laden with steely lined etchings of minotaurs, Dora Maar, and more Picassos. As you walk into the bedroom there’s a mammoth Basquiat purchased by Hubert in the early days of the artist’s career, hanging side by side with a painting by Jenna Gribbon.
The Basquiat is an orchestrated storm of painterly language using a range of vocabulary that exceeds the scope of what the white western mouth or eye is trained to engage with. It emanates sheer wall power, as if designed to swamp anything the likes of Jacques-Louis David ever painted. Looking closely at the picture is an activity invaded by the historical weight of the word masterpiece, and a price tag of inestimable millions. Hubert himself describes Basquiat’s place in history as nothing less than the historical fulcrum between modernist painting and everything else that followed. Next to the New York master, Hubert and his partner have hung Gribbon’s deceptively diminutive Diana, her ochre pink flesh laid down as if flowing from the tip of a sword over a curtain of ivory and bone black redolent of Manet’s actors. Simultaneously real and artifice, the picture and the archer both draw very real power from the theatricality of their delivery. The painter’s lover, embodying the role of the mythical archer, is naked and meets the gaze of the viewer with an arrow drawn on a taught bow. The effect of the picture is reminiscent of John Berger’s famous description of what’s happening in Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing. Similar to Berger’s description, this figure of the painter’s love is anything but static. The contrast of real and artifice finds an echo in the contradiction of a body materially fixed in time while simultaneously giving the impression of being entirely in motion. Except Gribbons Diana isn’t taking a bath. If Basquiat’s painting is a monumental confrontation to the language that mythologized white western power, Gribbon’s is a demonstration and a declaration that “this is our turf now.”
By all accounts what makes Jessica and Andrew unique as gallerists is their ability to tend and cultivate an exceptional ecosystem that serves their artists and the art. These artists trust them to steward their work once it leaves the studio. Fredericks & Freiser draw thinkers, writers, and patrons who engage deeply and sincerely. Their field builds value not just on an asset schedule, but in the world, as part of the complex interplay of culture and in the historical record. At a time when we are collectively starved for competency, Fredericks & Freiser have spent thirty years laying out proverbial banquets. They over-deliver artistic and cultural nutrition with such consistency that it has rendered a worldview with a genuine aesthetic identity.
As collector, patron, and friends, Hubert and Debra have watched this up close. When I asked them what they see as the single most important thing a gallerist does for their artists, the answer was immediate. “Get them into collections, right? I mean they have to have the right relationships. How do they get the right relationships? By being very good at what you do. Consistently.” But for Hubert and Debrah, the Fredericks & Freiser story isn’t only institutional, it’s personal. “When I look at Jessica and Andy, they still… love each other. You totally see that. They completely rely on each other, they have their own language. If you watch them at an opening, they know what they are doing.” Then, almost as an aside that manages to say everything: “They’ve managed to keep their passion, and they are great at seating their dinners.”