DAVID WOJNAROWICZ | Frieze London 2026 | The Mount and the Mask
Photographs by The New Rare, taken at Frieze London, October 2026, while visiting The Modern Institute (Booth B22).
A studio portrait, renamed
The label calls it a postcard. "Untitled Postcard, n.d.," it reads, under David Wojnarowicz's name. The object above it is laid out differently. It is a photograph pasted to a stiff card mount, with the studio's name pressed into the lower margin: J. ALLEVY on the left, 5, Rue des Petits Champs, PARIS on the right. That layout belongs to a studio portrait, not a postcard.
David Wojnarowicz, Untitled Postcard, n.d. Drawn and painted over a mounted studio photograph. The Modern Institute, Booth B22, Frieze London, 14–18 October 2026.
The name on the mount can be traced. Alcide Louis Allevy was making daguerreotypes in Paris by 1844, and seven of his sons became photographers. According to the family history compiled by Portrait Sépia, Jules Allevy (1864–1895) took over the studio at 5, rue des Petits-Champs after his brother Charles died in 1890. The "J." on this mount is Jules. The sitter stood in front of that camera in the first half of the 1890s.
The sitter is a young man with a moustache, in a buttoned jacket and a stiff high collar. Wojnarowicz left his face alone. Out of the top of his head he drew a second head in thick black line: an animal's, long-jawed, teeth bared, one eye ringed. He scrubbed the background red to the edges of the print. Below a ruled line, a skeletal creature lies on its side, its eyes filled in red.
The sitter kept his face. Wojnarowicz gave him another one.
A face withheld
On the same linen hangs a small colour photograph, its corners rounded, the print lifting slightly from the board. A figure in a denim jacket and striped shirt stands against a curtain. His whole head is bagged in red cloth. Held up beside him is a doll's head, porcelain-pale, with painted eyes.
David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (David under red hood with doll head), c. 1980.
The photograph does not say who is under the hood. The title does. Every means of recognising the man has been covered, and the label supplies the name the picture withholds.
Below the label, the top edge of another sheet carries a line of handwriting, cut off in our photograph: "N.Y.C. June 19 198–". The last digit is lost. We cannot say what that sheet is. But it dates itself to the day, while the label beside it can manage only "circa".
Around the same time, Wojnarowicz was working with borrowed faces. In 1978–79 he made Arthur Rimbaud in New York: friends photographed in New York locations wearing a photocopied mask of the poet's face, according to the Whitney Museum's 2018 retrospective. An essay published by Moran Moran gallery places the idea for the mask in Paris, along the Seine, in late 1978. In that series a famous face is worn by other men. In the hood photograph, by its title, it is his own face, and nothing of it shows.
The framed black-and-white image shown with the presentation belongs to the same thread, and it was made in Paris. Untitled (Arthur Rimbaud in Paris), 1980, shows Wojnarowicz's Parisian lover, Jean Pierre Delage, in front of the Eiffel Tower, wearing a life-size Rimbaud mask and holding a burning newspaper, according to Primary Information. The Wojnarowicz Foundation's timeline dates it to August 1980, when he visited Jean Pierre in Montmartre and "creates an 'Arthur Rimbaud in New York' image at the Eiffel Tower."
The series kept its New York title. This picture was taken in Paris.
David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Arthur Rimbaud in Paris), 1980. Jean Pierre Delage at the Eiffel Tower.
Pictures of things
A second label reads, in full: "Two pairs of David Wojnarowicz's eyeglasses." Above it is a photograph of two pairs of eyeglasses on a white ground, one heavy black frame and one fine tortoiseshell-and-metal frame, each casting a soft shadow. On this panel the glasses are present only as a picture.
The label for Something from Sleep IV (Dream) gives the work's medium as "Silver gelatin print, acrylic and collaged paper on Masonite, 1988–89". The Whitney's retrospective listed the same work at 16 × 20½ inches, lent from the collection of Luis Cruz Azaceta and Sharon Jacques. What hangs above the label has a white paper border and a printed surface. It is a reproduction. The label describes the painting; the linen holds a picture of it.
A black-and-white photograph of bare feet on sunlit paving hangs on the same linen, unlabelled in our photographs. The feet are Jean Pierre Delage's. Everything above the ankles is a flat dark mass, glossy in our picture where the paving is matte. It may be dark trousers in shade. It may be something laid over the print. A phone photograph cannot settle it. What the image keeps is the feet and a long shadow.
One object on the stand is a made thing rather than a picture. The Modern Institute's announcement for the fair pictured Untitled (Map Wasp) from America: Heads of Family, Heads of State, 1990, papier-mâché, 30.5 × 44.5 × 10.2 cm. On the stand, a winged figure hangs below a bare branch. Its body is a ball printed with a world map; its wings are long blue blades. This is that work.
David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Map Wasp), from America: Heads of Family, Heads of State, 1990. Papier-mâché.
What the labels do
Taken one at a time, these are small discrepancies. Taken together, they describe how the presentation works. The labels name things by what they were: a postcard, a pair of glasses, a painting on Masonite, a man called David. What sits above each label is a mount, a photograph or a print.
The Modern Institute, which showed the work on Booth B22, framed its presentation around the Hudson River piers. Its announcement says the piers "formed a central pillar of his social and sexual life and his visual practice." The labels we photographed do not mention the piers. The gallery's argument and the objects on the linen sit side by side. On our reading, what holds the wall together is smaller and stranger.
Read this way, the wall is less a display of works than an archive laid flat. Some of what it holds is original. Some is a picture standing in for an object that is elsewhere. The labels do not always say which is which.
One thing complicates that reading. "Postcard" may be the presenter's word or Wojnarowicz's own, and it may describe use rather than format. His letters to Jean Pierre Delage, 1979–82, were published with his postcards and drawings as Dear Jean Pierre (Primary Information, 2023). We have not seen the back of this card.
Back to the mount
Look again at the Allevy card. The red stops at the edge of the print. The marker lines stay inside it. The lower margin, with the studio's name and address, is untouched.
Whatever Wojnarowicz did to the man, he left the address.
That margin is the only part of the wall that says where a picture was made. It was printed in Paris in the early 1890s, as the studio's signature. It is now the most precisely placed thing in the frame: a family of photographers, a street, a decade.
The drawing changed what the portrait shows. The mount kept what the portrait was. The drawn head and the hood photograph both turn on what can be covered. The Allevy imprint is what stayed visible.
Sources
The Modern Institute, Frieze London announcement
Portrait Sépia: the Allevy family
Whitney Museum: David Wojnarowicz, History Keeps Me Awake at Night
Whitney Museum audio guide: Arthur Rimbaud in New York
Moran Moran: David Wojnarowicz, I is Someone Else
Primary Information: Untitled (Arthur Rimbaud in Paris)
Wojnarowicz Foundation: August 1980, Paris
Dear Jean Pierre, Primary Information, 2023