Tania Franco Klein: RAGE™ — Tania Franco Klein

Yancey Richardson is pleased to announce RAGE™, an exhibition of new work by Tania Franco Klein, the artist’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. Continuing her examination of the anxieties, stresses and types of psychological response that present-day history elicits, Franco Klein has taken rage to be the talismanic emotion of our time, something widely felt in response to world events just as it is manufactured, manipulated and even deliberately produced by both media and political elites. In her new photographic series, Franco Klein considers the multivalent nature of rage—as collective action, personal choice and cultural fabrication—through images that cite advertising and news reporting, cinema and photography, while at the same time remaining suffused with an emotion that, while referential, is still tangibly, even urgently, felt. The exhibition will be on view from September 10 through October 17, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 10 from 6–8PM. Franco Klein is known for her visually evocative and conceptually intricate photographic series that explore emotion, psychology and subjectivity as social constructions rather than personal realities. Through her multidisciplinary immersive installations that combine photographs, murals and videos, Franco Klein considers how each individual psychological landscape is formed through experience with the world at large, and is as much a site of collective experience as it is a solitary one. In her constructed images female subjects are regularly depicted in states of tension and ambiguity. Key details and important objects within each composition are imbued with the visceral charge of light and color inside open-ended narratives that function as cinematic fragments as much as they do self-contained worlds. In RAGE™, emotion and psychology form the structure of each picture as Franco Klein examines the contradictions of rage: its creative potential and capacity for destruction, its perceived irrationality and absolute necessity, its tendency to be genuinely felt even when deliberately stoked. Key for Franco Klein is the way that rage is manufactured and weaponized by political and cultural forces alike, a process she invokes by applying the trademark to the exhibition title. Rather than understand it simplistically, Franco Klein understands rage dialectically, as both an appropriate response by ordinary people to the conditions of contemporary life and also as an emotional state that those in news and advertising find desirable for the way it drives engagement and activity. In her photographs and video works, Franco Klein represents this two-sided phenomenon rather than sidestepping entirely.

Each work appropriates a different representational and symbolic language from the history of art and mass media, from canonical paintings to iconic advertising campaigns. Through their referentiality, the images reinforce one of Franco Klein’s core beliefs that the emotions we feel deeply, or the thoughts we mull intently, are ones we absorb rather than generate ourselves. Alongside her characteristically surreal and evocative photographs are works that confront the challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence to representation and interpretation. In other works Franco Klein examines the role that subtitling plays in recontextualizing—at times even manipulating—the meaning of images that might otherwise carry with them clear and incisive emotions. Whether using photography or video, Franco Klein shows how rage can be a circular experience that consumes itself just as it remains full of political possibility. 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. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Getty Center, Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; and the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL. Her first publication, Positive Disintegration (2019), was nominated for the Paris Photo Aperture Foundation First Book Award. Franco Klein lives and works in Mexico City.