Yancey Richardson is pleased to announce its representation of Mexican artist Tania Franco Klein. Known for her visually evocative and conceptually intricate photographic series that explore emotion, psychology and subjectivity as social constructions, Franco Klein brings an innovative and incisive new voice to the gallery’s roster. Her work will be included in New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging, the 40th anniversary edition of the Museum of Modern Art, New York’s celebrated New Photography series, scheduled to open in September of this year.
In her dramatically staged photographs that blend together references to contemporary film, photography and social theory, Franco Klein creates psychologically charged spaces where self-understanding is linked to an awareness of the collective gaze. A key emphasis within her work is the contemporary experience of being oversaturated by images and information alike, with an understanding of how this experience shapes our perception of the world and even fuels our anxieties. Just as the pace of historical change continues to accelerate, so too do the characters in Franco Klein’s photographs seem to alter their interiority in response to the shifting world around them. The malleability of identity is further expressed by Franco Klein serving as both model and subject in many of her series, in which she embodies new personas that each respond to the experience of being seen.
For Franco Klein’s most recent and on-going series, Subject Studies: Chapter I, she photographed 106 people of different ages and backgrounds, each within the same group of scenes, to highlight how people instinctively profile and assign meaning based on appearance alone. In Mercado de Sonora, she photographed her mother and grandmother as an extended form of self-portraiture to capture the ways in which beliefs are passed down from generation to generation. The photographs in the series’ Break In Case of Emergency, Proceed to the Route and Positive Disintegration each in their own way address forms of social isolation, psychological exhaustion and the breakdown of communication that have become consistent features of our moment in history.
Born in 1990 in Mexico, Tania Franco Klein received her BA in Architecture from Centro Diseño, Cine y Televisión in Mexico City and her MA in Photography from the University of Arts London. She was the recipient of the Artproof Schliemann Award supporting Artist Residencies in Arles, France and her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Getty Center, Los Angeles and the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach. Her first publication Positive Disintegration (2019) was nominated for the Paris Photo Aperture Foundation First Book Award. Franco Klein lives and works between Mexico City and the United States.
photo: Kovi Konowiecki
