David Altmejd: Prélude pour un nouvel ordre mondial

Photo Credit : Thomas Merle

In Prélude pour un nouvel ordre mondial, Canadian artist David Altmejd unveils a body of new sculptures and drawings. For the first time in his career, Altmejd combines these two mediums, exploring their connections and revealing how past and new ideas in his work come together. As the title implies, this exhibition marks the beginning of fresh trajectories in Altmejd’s ever-evolving artistic realm. From the celestial heavens to the depths of the earth, the natural world is the lifeblood of David Altmejd’s oeuvre. In his new sculptures, Altmejd introduces an expanded pantheon of hybrid, anthropomorphic beings that allude to the multi- faceted power of animals in various cultures and belief systems. The works are rich in symbolism and evoke a transcendent quality that surpasses the boundaries of the physical world. Rams, an orca, snakes, a panther, birds, rabbits and swans have all made their way into the oeuvre, serving as metaphors and companions since time immemorial, with their wisdom often pointing the way to spiritual enlightenment. Consider, for instance, the Bible, the Koran, the Dhammapada, the Analects of Confucius, or Aesop’s fables.

Installation View: David Altmejd Prélude pour un nouvel ordre mondial, 22 November 2024 —8 February 2025 courtesy Xavier Hufkens and Allard Bovenberg

Among the variety of animals Altmejd explores, swans take centre stage in his new body of work. The swans have metamorphosised into musical instruments, through which the artist draws parallels between nature and music, highlighting their shared qualities of order and disorder. The seven colours of the instrument’s keys here are not coincidental, symbolising various references across different eras and cultures1. In numerology, seven represents the union of the spiritual (3) and material (4) worlds, while in music, there are seven notes in a musical scale. Conversely, the figures playing swan instruments wear helmets that conceal their vision, suggesting a sense of detachment from their surroundings. The idea that they might hail from another dimension is further supported by the presence of space-time grids in the artist’s drawings. It is also worth noting that, human eyes— which Altmejd once emphasised or even replicated—have now vanished, along with any reference to the artist himself. In these new works, the focus moves from self- portraiture to visored beings.

Altmejd’s fused forms evoke metamorphosis, growth and decay, and often visualize transformation processes. Animals and humans frequently mutate, as in Nocturne no 1, where human hands mould the whale’s flesh, a creature that features in many ancient mythologies. The unctuous, carbon-like matter of the body is akin to the prima materia, which is the primitive formless base of all matter, similar to chaos, the quintessence or aether. This sculpture seems to embody the regenerative force of nature, with a cosmic egg embedded in its back and a diamond–carbon in a different state–illuminating the world. It can be read as a metaphor for the splendour and enigma of the cosmos. Other enigmatic beings emerge, like the figure Ève, with its shimmering and venomous green face, evocative of witches, ogres, goblins and trolls. This green also resembles the iridescent colour of scarab beetles, revered in Ancient Egypt—creatures that also find their way into the artist’s drawings. Blending reality and imagination, Altmejd often employs myths and legends to explore nature. These allusions tap into ancient human perceptions of nature as a powerful and unpredictable force.

Le don, 2024.

The intertwining of humans and animals also echoes the ideas of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875-1961), who held that animals are exalted beings, or the ‘sacred’ part of a person’s mind. He believed that they were much closer to a secret, natural order than humans, and thus nearer to the ‘absolute knowledge’ of the unconscious. Unlike people, who are bound by moral constructs of good and evil, animals adhere to natural laws, which Jung considered a form of superiority. He explored how our ‘animal nature’ could serve as a psychic source of renewal and wholeness.

These themes are reflected in the artist’s mixed-media drawings, which are neither preparatory studies nor working sketches. The matrixes reference space-time grid distortions and the theory of special relativity, while also invoking, in another sense, the transfer techniques of classical sculpture. But by virtue of being hand- drawn, the grids are imperfect. At times, they are punctured, caught in a vortex or distorted, creating glitches in the space-time continuum. The images in the drawings are fantastical and uncanny, arcane and vivid. Cryptic, undecipherable symbols represent the ‘language of the unconscious’.

L’accord universel, 2024.

Altmejd’s work, through its synthesis of seemingly opposing elements, reveals a deep interconnectedness between nature and the human form, life and death. The tension between organic and synthetic forms creates a dynamic that blurs the line between nature and artifice, evoking a sense of “unsettling familiarity”—a haunting blend of the known and unknown. In this paradoxical realm, the ordinary world is transformed, inviting us to reconsider our perceptions of reality.

David Altmejd (b. 1974, Montreal, Canada) lives and works in Los Angeles. His work was the subject of a major survey exhibition entitled Flux at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France which travelled to the MUDAM in Luxembourg and the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Canada (2014-15). In 2007, he represented Canada at the 57th Venice Biennale. Public collections include Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Long Museum, Shanghai; and MUDAM, Luxembourg, among others.

1 _ It is both a lucky number and a prime one; there are seven days of the week, each named after a different ancient god or planet; Shakespeare wrote about the seven stages of life; the lunar cycle lasts around seven days; and breaking a mirror is said to bring seven years of misfortune. There are seven energy centres, or chakras, each associated with a distinct shade, just as there are seven colours in a rainbow.

For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit Xavier Hufkens’s site here.  The gallery can also be found on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

BODY BUILDINGS BY ANTONY GORMLEY

Body Buildings, exhibition views, Galleria Continua / Beijing, 2024, Courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA, Copyright: © the Artist, Photographer: Huang Shaoli

Galleria Continua is pleased to present ‘Body Buildings’, Antony Gormley’s third solo exhibition at the 798 Art District in Beijing following ‘Another Singularity’ (2009) and ‘Host’ (2016). ‘Body Buildings’ interrogates our species’ relationship to the built environment, an increasingly high-rise world we rarely escape. In a significant group of recent sculptures and drawings, Gormley uses clay and iron, two ubiquitous materials of the built world, ‘to think and feel the body in this condition’. 

Body Buildings, exhibition views, Galleria Continua / Beijing, 2024, Courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA, Copyright: © the Artist, Photographer: Huang Shaoli

The central work in the exhibition, Resting Place II, conjures a dense labyrinthine terrain that viewers are invited to enter and navigate. This field of 132 life-size bodies, each built from fired clay bricks stacked atop one another, investigates the body at rest as our primary dwelling place. For the artist, the brick is a ‘physical pixel’ that plays an important role in Chinese culture.

Constructed in different orthogonal yet precarious positions, the bodies evoke a range of conditions, from splayed relaxation to foetal self-protection. When viewed from the gallery’s first and second-floor balconies, the interplay between moving visitors and horizontal clay bodies creates a dynamic field in which the particularity of subjective experience is at work.

Body Buildings, exhibition views, Galleria Continua / Beijing, 2024, Courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA, Copyright: © the Artist, Photographer: Huang Shaoli

As Gormley has said: ‘Resting Place II evokes the human body’s relationship to the ground, the surface of the earth. It refers to two very different kinds of abandonment: the relaxed abandonment of the body on the beach, the place to which we return in childhood play and relaxation, and another, that of the migrant who has either forcibly or freely sought a new home. What at first looks like a chaotic display of building materials might resolve into the model of a city and further resolve into the invitation to empathise with the body as a place of indwelling, some evoking states of deep relaxation and contentment, others of retreat and defence.’ 

Body Buildings, exhibition views, Galleria Continua / Beijing, 2024, Courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA, Copyright: © the Artist, Photographer: Huang Shaoli

Accompanying Resting Place II are sculptures cast in iron, such as Circuit and Ally, which explore parallels between urban infrastructure—roads, electrical circuits, plumbing—and human relationships. Circuit transforms these networks into a circulatory system shared by two bodies, while Ally uses stacks of massive cast iron blocks to test how two bodies can find mutual stability through a shared centre of gravity. These explorations of proximity and intimacy ask to what extent the urban environment shapes and mirrors human connections.

On either side of Circuit are Short and Shame, two works that treat the body as an independent energy field in which the body veers from its centre of gravity, purposefully avoiding the stability associated with statues of power. In a series of tight knots, Shame identifies places of tension within the body—ankles, knees, pelvis, head and hands—while Short escapes the bounding condition of the skin as the iron lines move from inside the body to beyond its apparent surface.

Body Buildings, exhibition views, Galleria Continua / Beijing, 2024, Courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA, Copyright: © the Artist, Photographer: Huang Shaoli

On the gallery’s top floor, Rule III and Buttress transform body space into latticed scaffolding, familiar to us in the skeletons of contemporary high-rise architecture. In doing so, the works materialise the way that having made a world, it now makes us. The two rusting bodies are placed directly against the walls, implicating the architectural context and making visitors aware of their relationship to the built environment. 

Body Buildings, exhibition views, Galleria Continua / Beijing, 2024, Courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA, Copyright: © the Artist, Photographer: Huang Shaoli

The sculptures are accompanied by a series of drawings. Singularity X and Event VII evoke the luminous beginnings of astral matter. They are complemented by a series of layered ‘Lux’ drawings that refer to apertures or sources of light glimpsed from within interiors. Other drawings made using inkcap mushroom ink as well as carbon and casein examine darkness as experienced inside the body and in proximity to another. 

‘Body Buildings’ is an interrogation of the state of our species. Gormley offers these sculptures as diagnostic tools to examine our present condition.

Body Buildings, exhibition views, Galleria Continua / Beijing, 2024, Courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA, Copyright: © the Artist, Photographer: Huang Shaoli

The exhibition opened on November 14, 2024, and will close on April 15, 2025 at the Galleria’s location / Beijing,798 Art Dst. 2 Jiuxianqiao Rd. Chaoyang Dst, Beijing. For more information about this exhibition and others at Galleria Continua please visit their site here. Galleria Continua can also be found on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Artsy.

Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation

Mark Armijo McKnight, Without a Song (solo ii) , 2024. 16mm film transferred to video, black and white, sound; 11:19 min. Courtesy the artist. © Mark Armijo McKnight

Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation features new and recent black-and-white photographs by Mark Armijo McKnight (b. 1984, Los Angeles, California; lives in New York, New York) and focuses on his ongoing body of work, “Decreation.” The concept, originated by the French philosopher, activist, and mystic Simone Weil (1909–1943), describes an intentional undoing of the self, a process Armijo McKnight explores in images of bodies and landscapes in intermediate states, such as anonymous nude figures engaged in erotic play amidst harsh environments. These photographs convey a sense of both ecstasy and affliction. A new 16mm film in the gallery plays a cacophonous symphony of gradually unwinding metronomes set within the dramatic geological formations of the Bisti Badlands/De-Na-Zin Wilderness in New Mexico. Two large limestone sculptures, which double as seating, suggest the forms of a pair of ancient sundials. As a whole, Decreation simultaneously evokes tumult and quietude, darkness and light, isolation and togetherness.  

Mark Armijo McKnight, The Black Place (ii), 2024. Gelatin silver print, 48 x 60 in. (121.9 x 152.4 cm). Courtesy the artist. © Mark Armijo McKnight

This exhibition is on view in the Lobby gallery, accessible to the public free of charge as part of the Whitney Museum’s enduring commitment to supporting and showcasing emerging artists’ most recent work.

Mark Armijo McKnight, Ez Ozel (or: Father Figure), 2023. Gelatin silver print, 48 x 60 in. (121.9 x 152.4 cm). Courtesy the artist. © Mark Armijo McKnight

Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation is organized by Drew Sawyer, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, with Nakai Falcón, Curatorial Assistant.

Review accessibility information before visiting Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation.

Generous support for Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation is provided by the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation.

Additional support is provided by David and Carol Aronowitz, David Dechman and Michel Mercure, Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia, and Graham Steele.

Th exhibition is on view until January 12, 2024. For more information about this exhibition and others at the Whitney Museum of American Art, please visit their website. The museum can also be found on Instagram, YouTube, X, TikTok, Threads, and Facebook.

Phyllida Barlow. unscripted

Installation view, ‘Phyllida Barlow. unscripted’, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 2024 © Phyllida Barlow Estate. Courtesy Phyllida Barlow Estate and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Ken Adlard

The work of Phyllida Barlow (1944 – 2023) takes over Hauser & Wirth Somerset in a celebration of the British artist’s transformative approach to sculpture; marking the gallery’s 10th anniversary that was inaugurated by Barlow’s solo exhibition ‘GIG’ in 2014. Over a career that spanned six decades, Barlow took inspiration from her surroundings to create imposing installations that can be at once menacing and playful. Barlow’s restless invented forms stretch the limits of mass, volume and height as they block, straddle and balance precariously. The audience is constantly challenged into a new relationship with the sculptural object, the gallery environment and the world beyond.

Curated by Frances Morris, ‘Phyllida Barlow. unscripted’ brings together a collection of the artist’s signature elements from several major installations, as well as a number of free-standing sculptures ranging from the early 1970s to work made in the last year of Barlow’s life. The landscape, courtyards, and garden beyond the galleries are animated and disrupted by a selection of sculptures, including ‘PRANK’, a series of seven wonderfully—and deliberately—ungainly sculptures Barlow made for New York’s City Hall Park in 2023, shown for the first time In the U K. The exhibition also features previously  unseen smaller-scale works, including drawings and maquettes. These works reinforce the important role the studio played in Barlow’s practice whilst conveying the restless energy, endless curiosity, and unabated ambition which are as much a part of Barlow’s legacy as the works themselves.

‘Over the last 10 years, Phyllida Barlow kept her fans and followers on the edge of their seats as she brought new and ever more audacious projects to life in venues across the world. Unfolding as a running commentary on the tragedies and absurdities of our time, each work formed part of an ongoing and intensely experimental investigation into the techniques and materials of art making, seeking visual equivalents to her own personal experience of living and looking.’—Frances Morris, 2024

The title ‘unscripted’ refers to the experimental and iterative nature of Barlow’s working process, allowing each project to evolve through a process of making, unmaking and remaking, involving chance and mishap as well as changes of mind. She saw this working practice as akin to processes of growth, decay and renewal in nature. Barlow was aware of the forthcoming exhibition and had begun to think seriously about bringing her interest in painting to the fore.

The Bourgeois gallery opens the exhibition with singular works that span almost four decades of Barlow’s career, ranging from the remake of ‘Shemesh, 1975 – 2020’ (1975 – 2020), to two of the artist’s last works, ‘untitled: hollow; 2022’ (2022) and ‘untitled: modern sculpture; 2022’ (2022). These works are part of a continuous investigation of the language and possibilities of sculpture, which emerged as Barlow found her voice as a student through exploring the legacy of British and European post-war sculpture. Key works in this display make references to other artists who became part of her internal conversation for many years, notably Alighiero Boetti, Eva Hesse and Tony Smith. These works engage critically with the grid and cube of minimalism, post-minimalism’s resistance to geometry and the materiality of Arte Povera.

Installation view, ‘Phyllida Barlow. unscripted’, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 2024 © Phyllida Barlow Estate. Courtesy Phyllida Barlow Estate and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Ken Adlard

In contrast, the Rhoades Gallery combines large-scale elements originally conceived for several different installations including ‘folly’ (2017), Barlow’s acclaimed British Pavilion for the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. This gallery engages with the artist’s ongoing interest in states of urban destruction and unrest, reflecting on Barlow’s fascination for natural and human-driven disaster, stretching back to her memories of bomb-damaged London, as well as her interest in fallen monuments. During her final years, Barlow was increasingly recycling elements of one project into another, or enabling individual items a future life liberated from its original context. This gallery takes this habit as its methodology; key gatherings of works are inspired by juxtapositions Barlow made from disparate parts which can be found in photographic documentation of her exhibitions. Other choices and sequences take care to respect some of Barlow’s key principles and preferences, for example she preferred to block entrances and exits, inducing curiosity in the viewer. She often placed obstacles in the way of visitors, in their pathway or disturbing their line of sight.

Phyllida Barlow PRANK: mimic; 2022/23 2022-2023 Steel, fiberglass, lacquer 457.2 x 411.5 x 325.1 cm / 180 x 162 x 128 in Installation view, ‘Phyllida Barlow. unscripted’, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 2024 © Phyllida Barlow Estate. Courtesy Phyllida Barlow Estate and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Ken Adlard

There were periods in Barlow’s life where her principal activity as an artist took place in the studio. This was the case for months and years during her teaching career when significant exhibition opportunities were harder to come by, whilst raising a young family, and more recently during lockdown. The Pigsty gallery focuses on these more private aspects of Barlow’s practice and speak to forms of ‘open’ experimentation. ‘TORSO’ and ‘LOAF’ (1986 – 1989) are among the earliest works included, alongside maquettes and drawings that have never been shown in public. The works represent motifs repeatedly explored in her sculpture, including several works on display elsewhere in the exhibition, while others touch on primary themes and interests in her art and life. Barlow’s first and last group of paintings on canvas are also on display. Small-scale and captivating, the painterly experiments were part of a move to larger-scale canvases that were to be debuted in this very exhibition.

Phyllida Barlow untitled: stacked chairs 2014 Timber, plywood, cement, paint, sand, PVA, varnish 150 x 640 x 455 cm / 59 x 252 x 179 1/8 in Installation view, ‘Phyllida Barlow. unscripted’, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 2024 © Phyllida Barlow Estate. Courtesy Phyllida Barlow Estate and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Ken Adlard

Over the course of a long career there were images and forms, materials and subjects that occurred over and over in Barlow’s work and held a special significance for her. The Workshop gallery foregrounds ‘untitled: double act’ (2010), and combines two adjacent spheres each speared by a vertical intrusion, one in the form of a ring, the other a disc. The reference to theatre in the title evokes Barlow’s longstanding interest in theatre and the staging of her work for audiences. Here the double act, was effectively an ‘in conversation’ with Nairy Baghramian who she exhibited alongside at the Serpentine Gallery the same year, and point to Barlow’s continuing interest in and responsiveness to her peers.

 Alongside the exhibition, Hauser & Wirth’s learning team has developed a new Education Lab, ‘Open Art School’, in partnership with Bath Spa University. Taking Barlow’s life-long engagement with arts education and notably her ethos of there being ‘no right or wrong way’ to be creative, the Education Lab will draw on the latest thinking within creative pedagogy and experimental learning. ‘Open Art School’ will provide an interactive space for new ideas, experiments and working methods, inviting a multitude of voices and communities to engage through making. In addition, the gallery’s summer artist residency program will welcome guest artists, Jessie Flood-Paddock, Young In Hong, Jack Killick and Hamish Pearch, to spend time living and working in Somerset. Selected by curator Frances Morris, and in the spirit of Phyllida Barlow, the artists will be invited to seek inspiration from the exhibition, landscape and architecture of Somerset, as well as conversations that develop between the group.

Installation view, ‘Phyllida Barlow. unscripted’, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 2024 © Phyllida Barlow Estate. Courtesy Phyllida Barlow Estate and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Ken Adlard

Roth Bar in Somerset was held from Wednesday – to Sunday, from 10 am to 11 pm, to coincide with the launch of ‘Phyllida Barlow. unscripted’, and as part of Hauser & Wirth Somerset’s 10th anniversary celebrations, we welcome visitors back to a new site-specific artwork and fully functioning Roth Bar in the Threshing Barn.

Artist Oddur Roth, grandson of the late German-born Swiss artist Dieter Roth, lived and worked in Bruton as artist-in-residence from January - March 2024, alongside his team, Einar Roth, Bjarni Grímsson, Sigrún Holmgeirsdottir, Thrandur Gíslason Roth and Gudmundur Oddur Magnusson. Björn and Oddur Roth were one of the first artists-in-residence in Somerset in 2014, creating the original bar that formed an integral part of the gallery’s on-site restaurant. First conceived by Dieter Roth in the late 1970s, the bar is a dynamic and changing installation and is a continuing element in the Roths’ cross-generational practice.

Inspired by the history of Durslade Farm, Roth Bar is composed of salvaged materials and objects from reclamation yards in the surrounding area. The new bar also features an interactive installation conceived as a functional Revolving Door by Björn and Oddur Roth, inspired by the work ‘Allerweltsbild’ Dieter Roth created between 1982 and 1985 together with Björn Roth, Dominik Steiger, Ómar Stefánsson and André Thomkins. Furniture throughout the wider Roth Bar space has been curated in collaboration with Paris-based international architecture firm, Laplace.

Phyllida Barlow  untitled: megaphone 2014 Steel, timber, plywood, wire netting, sand, polyurethane foam, polystyrene, paint, varnish 600 x 235 x 290 cm / 236 1/4 x 92 1/2 x 114 1/8 in Installation view, ‘Phyllida Barlow. unscripted’, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 2024 © Phyllida Barlow Estate. Courtesy Phyllida Barlow Estate and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Ken Adlard

The Roth Bar’s drinks list is a celebration of the bar’s location at Durslade Farm as well as Somerset and the wider area. Using honey from the farm’s hives, flowers from the estate’s walled garden and seasonal foraged wild ingredients, guests are invited to discover a cocktail list deeply rooted in the South West. Alongside the drinks list is an accompanying bar food menu featuring freshly baked pastries, sharing boards featuring locally made cheeses and a selection of charcuterie, and re-imagined Roth Bar favorites. A separate on-site restaurant will compliment Roth Bar, opening late summer 2024. Further details to follow.

The exhibition opened on 25 May 2024 and will close on 5 January 2025. More information about this title and others with Hauser & Wirth Publishing, please visit their site here. For more information about the exhibit and other artist’s exhibitions, please visit the Hauser & Wirth site. Also, follow the gallery on Instagram, Facebook,  X, and YouTube for more updates on this exhibit. The magazine did a highlight on her book, which can be found here.

Shifting Landscapes

Hiram Maristany, Hydrant: In the Air, 1963, printed 2021. Gelatin silver print, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Photography Committee 2022.61. © Hiram Maristany

New York, NY , Shifting Landscapes, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art on November 1 and will be open until January of 2026.  The exhibition explores how evolving political, ecological, and social issues motivate artists and their representations of the world around them. While the traditional art historical landscape genre has long been associated with picturesque vistas and documentary accounts of place, artworks drawn from the Whitney’s collection for this exhibition, most on view at the Museum for the first time, suggest a more expansive interpretation.

Shifting Landscapes features 120 works by more than 80 artists, including Firelei Báez, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jane Dickson, Teresita Fernández, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Purvis Young, spanning the 1960s to the present. Photographs, installations, films, videos, sculptures, paintings, drawings, prints, and digital artworks depict the effects of industrialization on the environment, grapple with the impact of geopolitical borders, and give shape to imagined spaces as a way of destabilizing the concept of a “natural” world. Organized in thematic sections, these works bring the many meanings embedded in land and place into focus, foregrounding how we shape and are shaped by the spaces around us.

Alison Saar, Fall, 2011. Bronze, 134 × 48 × 42 in. (340.4 × 121.9 × 106.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Robert E. Hayden and Richard Silver 2024.335. © Alison Saar. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

“Shifting Landscapes reflects the Whitney’s ongoing commitment to telling diverse stories in American art, ” said Jennie Goldstein, Jennifer Rubio Associate Curator of the Collection; Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator; and Roxanne Smith, Senior Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney. “Landscape—in its formal, social, and political implications—feels like a particularly dynamic and urgent subject today, and we are excited that over half of the works in this exhibition are new to the collection and on view at the Museum for the first time.

John Ahearn, Miss Kate, 1982. Acrylic on plaster, 26 1/2 × 30 × 8 1/4 in. (67.3 × 76.2 × 21 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee 2019.326. © John Ahearn, courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York

”Shifting Landscapes is on view from November 1 through January 2026 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition is organized by Jennie Goldstein, Jennifer Rubio Associate Curator of the Collection; Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator; Roxanne Smith, Senior Curatorial Assistant; with Angelica Arbelaez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow; with thanks to Araceli Bremauntz-Enriquez and J. English Cook for research support.

Exhibition Overview – Shifting Landscapes

Spanning the Museum’s entire sixth floor, Shifting Landscapes is organized according to distinct thematic sections. Some groupings are inspired by materials and approaches: sculptural assemblages formed from locally sourced objects, ecofeminist approaches to land art, and the legacies of documentary landscape photography. Others are tied to specific geographies, like frenzied cityscapes of modern New York and the experimental filmmaking scene of 1970s and 1980s Los Angeles. Others show how artists invent fantastic new worlds where humans, animals, and the land become one.

Altered Topographies

The exhibition opens with an examination of the term “New Topographics, ” which describes the stark style of landscape photography that debuted in the 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. Documenting the effects of industrialization and suburbanization in America, Robert Adams’s Outdoor Theater, Colorado Springs, Colorado (1968–71), for example, records the residential sprawl along the Rocky Mountains in a straight-on and detached style. Recent photographs of the North American landscape by contemporary artists such as LaT oya Ruby Frazier, An-My Lê, and Piliāmo’o carry on this aesthetic tradition with more pointedly political undertones. These works center on the impacts of colonization, war, and pollution to invoke the lived consequences of these intrusions on the body and the land, serving as ethical acts of resistance through documentation.

Salman T oor, Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug, 2019. Oil on canvas, 43 × 35 ¾ in. (109.2 × 90.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee 2020.121. © Salman Toor

New York Cityscapes

New York City serves as a subject in this section where works range from the early 1970s to 2020. Artists document and reflect on how the city has changed in the aftermath of significant economic, political, and catastrophic events. Examples of artistic experimentation amid the economic decay and social turmoil of the 1970s include Hiram Maristany’s photograph Hydrant: In the Air (1963, printed 2021) and Anita Steckel’s painting Skyline on Canvas #1 (Woman Pressing Finger Down) (c. 1970–74). In the 1980s and 1990s, as New York became more globalized, works such as John Ahearn’s sculpture Miss Kate (1982) and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting Untitled (1980) depict neighbors and the theater of daily life. A final group of works considers the unsettling images of tragedy and alienation in the wake of the September 11 attacks and COVID-19 pandemic: Keith Mayerson’s painting 9-11 (2007), Salman Toor’s painting Man with Face Creams and Phone Plugs (2019), and Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s video 2 Lizards (2020), among others.

Leslie Martinez, A Sublime Concealment of Time, 2023. Paint rags, studio clothes, dried paint chips, charcoal, coarse sawdust, pumice, acrylic on canvas, 60 × 75 × 8 in. (152.4 × 190.5 × 20.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; promised gift of Avo Samuelian and Hector Manuel Gonzalez P .2024.2. © Leslie Martinez. Image courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photograph by Paul Salveson

Borderlands

Rather than accepting the border between the U.S. and Mexico as a fixed and immutable geopolitical line, artists working in the region, whose works are displayed in this section, propose that this part of the American landscape is an herida abierta, or open wound, where loss and regeneration coexist. Enrique Chagoya, for example, employs a satirical approach in his codices, made in the tradition of ancient Mesoamerican manuscripts to tell the history of Western civilization from the perspective of the colonized. Leslie Martinez draws inspiration from the rugged geography of their native south Texas by sewing rags and other recycled materials to their canvas A Sublime Concealment of Time (2023), evoking a landscape marked by pain but also healing. The works gathered here, including those by Laura Aguilar, Teresita Fernández, and James Luna, consider political, cultural, and spiritual borderlands as manifestations of a landscape straddling two realities at once, revealing the creative forces that can grow from the grief of historical trauma, erasure, and omission.

Carlos Villa, My Roots, 1970-71. Acrylic and feathers on canvas, 93 1/2 × 94 1/4 × 7 ¾ in. (237.5 × 239.4 × 19.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Neysa McMein Purchase Award 72.21. © Carlos Villa Art Estate

Earthworks

Earth art and ecofeminism—artistic and philosophical movements of the 1960s and 1970s—proposed new frameworks for how we experience our shared planet. Works on view in this section explore the interconnectivity of the natural world and humanity’s place within it. While Earth art marked a conceptual turn toward engaging directly with the land, ecofeminism put forward ideas about appreciating and protecting the environment from anticolonial and feminist perspectives. Here, artists celebrate nature’s vastness and ephemerality in worksranging from the 1960s to the present day that stand as artistic counterpoints to human-centered thinking. Some artists, including Carlos Villa, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Michelle Stuart, deal directly with natural forms, using organic materials or the landscape itself in diverse ways. Nancy Holt offers more embodied ways of experiencing the world, while Carolina Caycedo and Maya Lin, among others, draw attention to regionally specific environmental concerns.

Suzanne Jackson, It is our woods, 1973. Acrylic on canvas, 60 3/8 × 60 1/2 in. (153.4 × 153.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee 2023.93a-b. © Suzanne Jackson

Southern Assemblage

Working with materials sourced from their local environments, the self- and community-taught Black artists from the southeastern U.S. featured in this section have produced hybrid collage paintings, complex sculptures, and abstractly patterned textiles derived from their lived experiences. Martha Jane Pettway, one of a group of quiltmakers from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, makes her art from functional remnants like scraps of relatives’ clothes and sugar sacks, as seen in Sweep (1980). Similarly, Joe Minter’s assembled sculpture The First Fireplace (1998) shares a visual vocabulary with the African Village in America, the immersive sculptural environment he began working on in his Birmingham, Alabama, backyard in 1989. In Angel, City, and Eye Assemblage (c. 1990–95), Purvis Young portrays the occupants of his historically segregated neighborhood in Miami on pieces of locally scavenged wood. Alabama artist and musician Lonnie Holley, who since the late 1970s has practiced what he calls “improvisational creativity, ” makes sculptures and installations out of salvaged objects, while Bessie Harvey credits her sculptures, made from found wood and branches, to divine inspiration. Through these artists’ visions, everyday materials are transformed into something enduring, carrying the stories of their origins forward.

Ulysses Jenkins, Without Your Interpretation, 1983. Video, color, sound, 13:53 min. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Film, Video, and New Media Committee 2014.105. © Ulysses Jenkins, "Without Your Interpretation", 1983

Los Angeles in Film and Video

Two works by Los Angeles film and video makers Melvonna Ballenger and Ulysses Jenkins depict complex representations of Black life in contrast to the film industry’s detrimental stereotypes. In the late 1960s, a critical gathering of African and African American students formed at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, loosely grouped under the moniker L.A. Rebellion. Their films—including Ballenger’s 1978 narrative short Rain (Nyesha)—centered Black stories and experiences. Made five years later, Jenkins’s Without Your Interpretation (1983) documents a performance staged along the LA River that used movement to critique American obliviousness to global societal ills.

Dalton Gata, I Don't Need You To Be Warm, 2021. Acrylic on linen and cedar frame, 83 × 70 in. (210.8 × 177.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Avo Samuelian and Hector Manuel Gonzalez 2022.221a-b. © Dalton Gata

Another World

Uncanny and imagined landscapes propose alternative geographies where humans, animals, and nature inhabit one another. Mundo Meza’s painting Merman with Mandolin (1984) and rafa esparza’s sculpture New American Landscapes. Self Portrait: Catching Feelings (Ecstatic) (2017) exemplify how some artists decenter an anthropocentric worldview by rejecting any traces of an identifiable landscape. In other artworks, like Dalton Gata’s painting I Don’t Need You To Be Warm (2021), shape-shifting figures appear in fellowship with their environments. On the nearby sixth-floor terrace, Alison Saar’s bronze sculpture Fall (2011) embodies a woman of the harvest with a head of branches bearing pomegranates, a symbolic representation of autumn. Together, these works signal ways of resisting hierarchical power structures to advance new visions of the future and the beings that populate it.

Hiram Maristany, Juan Gonzalez, Minister of Education of the Young Lords, at original storefront office headquarters, 1969, printed 2021. Gelatin silver print, 12 5/8 × 18 1/8 in. (32.1 × 46 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art; purchase with funds from the Photography Committee 2022.68. © Hiram Maristany

Free Public Programs A series of free in-person and virtual public programs will be offered in conjunction with Shifting Landscapes. More information about these programs and how to register will be available on the Museum’s website as details are confirmed.

For more information about this exhibition and others at the Whitney Museum of American Art, please visit their website. The museum can also be found on Instagram, YouTube, X, TikTok, Threads, and Facebook.

Rick Lowe: In Search of Light

Rick Lowe Refuge Studies 1, 2024 Acrylic and paper collage on paper 12 5/8 x 41 5/8 inches (31.9 x 105.6 cm) © Rick Lowe Studio Photo: Thomas Dubrock Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

GSTAAD,—Gagosian is pleased to announce In Search of Light, an exhibition of new works by Rick Lowe in Gstaad. The artist’s debut presentation in Switzerland, it introduces new series of drawings and paintings on paper and features Lowe’s latest large-scale painting.

Lowe’s practice centers on interpreting and transforming shared structures and sites, using community-based projects to catalyze change. Drawn, painted, and collaged, his abstractions complement these initiatives, taking games of dominoes as starting points from which to consider relationships between people and places. Paper is a key material for Lowe, whose works on paper function both as autonomous artworks and as a way to explore varied modes of abstraction. In search of light, Lowe explores the dynamic and associative effects of color and tone in works that are distinguished by a bright, saturated palette and emphasize dramatic contrasts of light and dark.

Rick Lowe Lycabettus Hill, 2024 Acrylic and paper collage on paper 44 x 60 inches (111.8 x 152.4 cm) © Rick Lowe Studio Photo: Thomas Dubrock Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

The works on paper exhibited in Gstaad were completed this year, developing previous motifs and introducing new ones. In the Glyph Studies drawings, made with graphite on collaged paper, Lowe assembles collections of fragmented linear structures into abstract lexicographies. Intersecting, arcing paths are a key element of Inferno, with its fiery palette, and Becoming, which adds equally vivid cool blues and greens to those warm hues, creating spatial effects that suggest active growth. With nested forms and dynamic boundaries, the Refuge Studies series reflects on taking shelter. Begun as a nonrepresentational work, Lycabettus Hill approximates the profile of the titular Athens landmark illuminated by the rising sun. A series of Finding Form works is composed with a dense grid of colorful brushstrokes interrupted by patches of white that reveal the paper support.

Rick Lowe Becoming, 2024 Acrylic and paper collage on paper 44 x 60 inches (111.8 x 152.4 cm) © Rick Lowe Studio Photo: Thomas Dubrock Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Spanning 18 feet (5.5 meters) in length, Ragtag-ish (2024) is the latest of Lowe’s large-scale paintings. This expansive work is traversed by meandering curves enmeshed within intricate networks of linear shapes, bringing together elements developed through his works on paper.

Rick Lowe Finding Form 1, 2024 Acrylic and paper collage on paper 30 x 22 1/2 inches (76.2 x 57.2 cm) © Rick Lowe Studio Photo: Thomas Dubrock Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

The exhibition in Gstaad is preceded by The Arch within the Arch, an exhibition on view through November 24, 2024, at the Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice, which included works rooted in the artist’s consideration of the arch in architecture and on spatial, temporal, and social relationships inspired by historical architecture and the urban dynamics of Venice. In Search of Light also directly follows Lowe’s time as the Roy Lichtenstein Artist in Residence at the American Academy in Rome from October 8 to November 27, 2024. Lowe has taken the opportunity to explore the city’s built environment and study the central role that the Tiber plays in its geography and civic life.

Rick Lowe Untitled, 2024 Acrylic and paper collage on paper 28 x 28 inches (71.1 x 71.1 cm) © Rick Lowe Studio Photo: Thomas Dubrock Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Rick Lowe was born in 1961 in rural Russell County, Alabama, and lives and works in Houston. Collections include the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Columbus Museum, Georgia; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; Menil Collection, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate, London; and the UBS Art Collection. Solo exhibitions include Art League Houston (2020–21); Notes on the Great Migration, Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago (2022–23); Hic sunt dracones (Here Lay Dragons): Mapping the Unknown, Benaki Museum / Pireos 138, Athens (2023); and The Arch within the Arch, Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice (2024). He also participated in Documenta 14, Athens (2017). Among Lowe’s numerous community art projects are Project Row Houses, Houston (1993–2018); Watts House Project, Los Angeles (1996–2012); Borough Project (with Suzanne Lacy and Mary Jane Jacob), Charleston, South Carolina (2003); Small Business/Big Change, Anyang Public Art Program, Korea (2010); Trans.lation: Vickery Meadow, Dallas (2013); Victoria Square Project, Athens (2017–18); Greenwood Art Project, Tulsa, Oklahoma (2018–21); and Black Wall Street Journey, Chicago (2021–). In 2013 President Barack Obama appointed Lowe to the National Council on the Arts, and in 2014 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. Lowe is currently a professor of interdisciplinary practice at the University of Houston.

Rick Lowe In Search of Light, 2024–25, installation view © Rick Lowe Studio Photo: Annik Wetter Courtesy Gagosian

There was an  opening reception held on Saturday, December 21,  from 11am to 6pm. The exhibition opened on December 21, 2024 and will be on view until January 26, 2025 Promenade 79, Gstaad

For more information about this exhibition and others presented by Gagosian please visit the gallery’s site here. The gallery can also be found on Pinterest, X, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Artsy.

Callum Innes: Where to Start

Callum Innes Untitled Lamp Black / Magenta, 2024 Oil on linen 47 1/4 x 46 7/16 inches

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Callum Innes: Where To Start, an exhibition of new works by Scottish painter Callum Innes. This show marks Callum Innes’ first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show opened on  November 15, 2024,  and will be on view through January 9, 2025. The gallery hosted a reception for the artist on Friday, November 15, from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m.

Callum Innes Untitled Lamp Black / Titanium White, 2024 Oil on Linen 32 1/4 x 31 1/2 inches

Where To Start exhibits a series of major works by Callum Innes grappling with themes of time, space, and fragility. Featuring work from his acclaimed Exposed Painting series, Innes' alchemical color process of layering paint and dissolving it with turpentine, reveals unpredictable and often unreplicable colors onto canvas and wood. What appear to be works of monochrome and precision, contain buried veils of pigmentation - traces of color emerge, change, and are obscured under layers of painting and repainting. Marks of color twist over the sides of each work mirroring the way paint spills onto the floors and studio walls during Innes’ process. The works expand into the spaces around them both in process and upon completion. Likened to the shutter of a camera, Innes’ works of abstraction freeze a moment of time, the fateful moment when the process concludes, and the painting stops.

From Left to Right: Callum Innes, Exposed Painting Bluish Violet Red Oxide, 2019 Oil on Linen 77 x 75 inches, Untitled Lamp Black / Caribbean Turquoise, 2024 Oil on Linen 40 3/16 x 39 3/8 inches, Untitled Lamp Black / Alizarin Claret, 2024 Oil on Birch Ply 47 1/4 inches in diameter

Callum Innes was born in Edinburgh and currently works between Edinburgh and Oslo. Innes studied Painting and Drawing at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, and did a postgraduate degree at Edinburgh College of Art. In the mid to late 1980s and early 1990s, Innes began exhibiting in major public galleries such as the ICA, London, and The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Beginning his career as a figurative painter, Innes transitioned to abstract painting after an experiment sinking an image into corrugated cardboard led to a desire to create work in which material and image became one. He was the recipient of The Natwest Prize for Painting (1998), and The Jerwood Prize for Painting (2002), and was shortlisted for The Turner Prize. He has shown internationally in galleries and museums around the world including at the Guggenheim, New York; Center Pompidou, Paris; the Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland; Kode Bergen Art Museum, Norway; Fort Worth Museum, Texas; TATE, London; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Innes was the subject of a major one-person survey exhibition and monograph in 2016 called I'll Close My Eyes, at the De Pont Museum in Tilburg Netherlands.

About Berggruen Gallery

Berggren Gallery, established in 1970, has been a member of the Art Dealers Association of America since 1975. The gallery specializes in the exhibition and sale of contemporary art and 20th-century American and European paintings, drawings, sculpture, and limited edition prints. Berggruen Gallery exhibits the works of major American post-war artists as well as established and emerging contemporary artists, such as Diana Al-Hadid, Heather Day, Peter Halley, Jane Hammond, Barry McGee, Joan Mitchell, Georgia O’Keeffe, Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, and Stanley Whitney.

Callum Innes: Where To Start, November 15, 2024 – January 9, 2025. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and previews are available upon request. For more information about exhibitions and fairs featuring artists from Berggruen Gallery, please visit their site here. The Gallery can also be found on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. 

Diana Al-Hadid: Wild Margins

Installation View: Diana Al-Hadid: Wild Margins, November 15, 2024 – January 9, 2025. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105 Photo Courtesy of  Berggruen Gallery and artist

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Diana Al-Hadid: Wild Margins, an exhibition of panels, works on paper, and works on mylar by Syrian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Diana Al-Hadid. This show marks Al-Hadid’s second solo exhibition with the\ gallery and opened on November 15, 2024,  and will be on view through January 9, 2025. The gallery will hosted a reception for the artist on Friday, November 15 from 4:00 to 7:00pm.

Diana Al-Hadid Watching the Watcher (Purple Hills), 2024 Polymer gypsum, fiberglass, steel, plaster, metal leaf and pigment 58 x 64 x 3 1/2 inches

Wild Margins exhibits Diana Al-Hadid's first career exploration of works produced and inspired by techniques of hand papermaking learned during her year-long residency at Dieu Donné. As a Lab Grant Resident, an invitation only residency that allows mid-career and established artists to explore the art of papermaking, Al-Hadid worked with expert paper makers to master new processes such as pulp painting, blowout, and stenciling. Calling the paper process “one of the most revolutionary pieces of her practice recently,” Al-Hadid approaches making these paper pulp works in a similar fashion to her larger mixed media works, blending layered materials and substrate until completely cohered. Al-Hadid's experimentation with paper coincided with the construction of her upstate New York studio leading to a body of work steeped in the inspirations of nature and its boundaries. Al-Hadid is known to weave threads between historical, architectural, cosmological, and folkloric themes, probing the disjunctive and investigating allegories. A truly immersive and emotive artist, Al-Hadid embodies her work.

Installation View: Diana Al-Hadid: Wild Margins, November 15, 2024 – January 9, 2025. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105 Photo Courtesy of  Berggruen Gallery and artist

As she drew more from landscapes, skies, caves, and florals, her marks became increasingly frenzied, with inks more layered, allowing denser and thicker images to emerge. These works reflect the uninhabited and chaotic elements of wilderness and their effects on an artist in process. For a panel work inspired in part by Jan Brueghel’s Allegory of Tulip Mania, Al-Hadid was led into her own tulip mania. She collected swathes of bulbs, planted shrubs, and flowers, letting the habits of her newfound environment imprint upon her practice. Her references are never obvious to the viewer; she hints at works that move and intrigue her, obscuring the narrative but letting the foundations remain. A deeply intuitive artist, Al-Hadid may alter her work based on temperament, creating compositions imbued with the emotionality of their inspirative stories, histories, and physical gestures. Al-Hadid often looks at outsider histories – her work asks what it means to be at the periphery. In this case, to observe nature from the outside, to be at the margins of the natural world – to examine that which encroaches from an edge, or sneaks in from the corner. Like nature's untamed edges, Al-Hadid's works in Wild Margins embrace the unruly and wild edges of paper – while their complex sea of details and masterful fine lines create a body of work so layered and storied it transcends far beyond the physical realm it occupies.

 From Left to Right: Wild Lover in a Lilac Bloom, 2024 Linen pulp paint and cotton blowout on abaca base sheet Approximately: 40 x 30 inches, Watching the Watcher (Watch Back), 2024 Polymer gypsum, fiberglass, steel, metal leaf, pigment 49 1/8 x 70 x 4 3/4 inches, Untitled (Free Mountains), 2024 Acrylic on mylar 16 x 18 inches,  Allegory of Spring in a Midnight Moment, 2024 Linen pulp paint and cotton blowout on abaca base sheet Approximately: 40 x 30 inches

Born in Aleppo, Syria, Diana Al-Hadid's family immigrated to Cleveland when she was five years old. Al-Hadid received a BA and a BFA in sculpture from Kent State University, and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2007, she was resident of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and in 2009, she was a USA Rockefeller Fellow and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. She was the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2007), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2011), and The Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award (2020). In 2021, she was awarded a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship to conduct research at the Freer Gallery of Art. Her mosaic murals for NYC’s Penn Station were among 100 finalists for COD awards, an international competition honoring public commissions that integrate interior, architectural, or public spaces. Al-Hadid was one of four artists commissioned for a site-specific work at the Princeton University Art Museum. She has given lectures at the Nasher Sculpture Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, The Hammer Museum, Yale University, Carnegie Mellon University, to name a few. For her first major public art project Al-Hadid was commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy, New York and exhibited by Mad. Sq. Art, the contemporary art program of the Madison Square Park Conservancy and later installed on the campus of Williams College. She has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, Art21, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. Her work can be found in numerous museums and private collections.

About Berggruen Gallery

Berggren Gallery, established in 1970, has been a member of the Art Dealers Association of America since 1975. The gallery specializes in the exhibition and sale of contemporary art and 20th-century American and European paintings, drawings, sculpture, and limited edition prints. Berggruen Gallery exhibits the works of major American post-war artists as well as established and emerging contemporary artists, such as Diana Al-Hadid, Heather Day, Peter Halley, Jane Hammond, Barry McGee, Joan Mitchell, Georgia O’Keeffe, Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, and Stanley Whitney.

Diana Al-Hadid: Wild Margins, November 15, 2024 – January 9, 2025. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and previews are available upon request. For more information about exhibitions and fairs featuring artists from Berggruen Gallery, please visit their site here. The Gallery can also be found on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. 

Takashi Murakami: Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami

Takashi Murakami: Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami, 2024–2025 installation view Artwork © 2024 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd Courtesy Gagosian

LONDON,—Gagosian is pleased to announce Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami, an exhibition of new paintings by Murakami at its Grosvenor Hill gallery in London. In this presentation, the artist pursues his fascination with the narrative of Japanese art by offering his own interpretations of historical paintings. By “Murakamizing” these iconic images, he ponders the erosion of the nation’s ancient splendor; he also considers the ways in which it has been impacted by new aesthetics and values associated with its opening to the West after the end of the Edo period (1603–1868)

Takashi Murakami White Tiger and Family, 2024 Acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame 70 7/8 x 84 5/16 inches (180 x 214.1 cm) © 2024 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Photo: Kei Okano Courtesy Gagosian

Rakuchu¯-Rakugai-zu Byo¯bu: Iwasa Matabei RIP (2023–24) is modeled on Iwasa Matabei’s Rakuchu¯- Rakugai-zu Byo¯bu (Scenes in and around Kyoto) (Funaki Version) from the collection of the Tokyo National Museum. The original seventeenth-century work depicts the city in extraordinary detail across two six-panel folding screens. Murakami’s version, which was commissioned for his exhibition Mononoke Kyoto at the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art, populates its gold-leaf clouds with skulls, a memento mori inspired by a visit to the Toribeno burial ground. He also integrates examples of his own iconography including smiling flower-faced figures and his familiar Mr. DOB character.

Takashi Murakami Black Tortoise and Arhats, 2024 Acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame 70 7/8 x 84 5/16 inches (180 x 214.1 cm) © 2024 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Photo: Kei Okano Courtesy Gagosian

Murakami’s paintings of the Four Symbols, mythical guardians of Kyoto, pair each of their subjects with metropolitan locations aligned with the four compass directions: the Black Tortoise is associated with Mount Funaoka and Mount Kitayama in the north of the city; the Blue Dragon with the Kamo River in the east; the Vermillion Bird with Ogura Pond in the south; and the White Tiger with the San’indo Highway in the west. To arrive at these juxtapositions, Murakami combined his own sketches with AI-generated images and fragments of his earlier works in a process that parallels the inventiveness of earlier artists in depicting unfamiliar or imaginary creatures. Another diptych pictures the gods of wind and thunder in the blend of classical Japanese painting techniques with Pop, anime, and otaku graphics that Murakami terms “Superflat.” This paired depiction employs the same motifs and composition that Tawaraya So ˉtatsu (c. 1570–c. 1640), Ogata Ko ˉrin (1658–1716), and Sakai Ho ˉitsu (1761–1828) each revisited roughly a century apart. At the same time, it allows viewers to observe the development of the Kyoto-based Rinpa school. In the premodern artists’ paintings, the subjects are depicted as Buddhist deities or attendants; today, they sometimes even appear on commercial packaging in the form of cartoonlike icons, a transformation reflected in Murakami’s treatment.

Takashi Murakami Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu Byōbu: Iwasa Matabei RIP, 2023–24 (detail) Acrylic and gold leaf on canvas mounted on wood panel, in 2 parts Overall: 9 feet 10 ⅛ inches × 42 feet 10 ⅞ inches (3 × 13.1 m) © 2023-2024 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved Photo: Joshua White Courtesy Gagosian

Among the other works in the exhibition are figure and flower paintings, including a tondo. In one, Murakami reworks a set of Daigo Hanami-zu screens from the collection of the National Museum of Japanese History in Sakura that depicts a cherry blossom viewing event on the grounds of Kyoto’s Daigoji Temple; in another, he reinterprets a pair of Kiku-zu screens by Ko ˉrin that portray chrysanthemums in white, green, black, and gold. A version of an additional screen by the same artist features bunches of hollyhocks in red, pink, and white, while a work inspired by a screen from the collection of the Artizon Museum, Tokyo, reproduces a composition of hollyhocks and peacocks. The\ tondo features aqueous patterns, or “Ko ˉrin Water,” and repeating chrysanthemums, motifs developed by Ko ˉrin that sometimes also appear on kimono fabric. In this bridging of art and fashion, Ko ˉrin, who was the son of a kimono merchant, could be considered Murakami’s creative forerunner.

Takashi Murakami Golden Pavilion, 2024 Acrylic on canvas mounted on wood panel 32 3/8 x 26 inches (82.2 x 66.1 cm) © 2024 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved Photo: Kei Okano Courtesy Gagosian

A limited number of copies of Takashi Murakami: An Arrow through History, a new catalogue documenting the 2022 exhibition of the same title at Gagosian New York, which comes with a trading card designed by the artist, will be available at the gallery.

Also opening on December 10, and on view concurrently with the exhibition, Murakami is taking over Gagosian Burlington Arcade. Four new paintings featuring the artist’s smiling flowers are on view in the gallery, while the Shop offers prints and merchandise.

Takashi Murakami Re: "Daigo-Hanami-zu-Byōbu", 2024 Acrylic and gold leaf on canvas mounted on wood panel 59 1/8 x 142 inches (150 x 360.5 cm) © 2024 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved Photo: Kei Okano Courtesy Gagosian

The artist was in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist at 4pm on Wednesday, December 11, at the Benjamin West Lecture Theatre at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The pair discussed Murakami’s interpretation of ancient Japanese art, including his reworking of Matabei’s Rakuchu¯- Rakugai-zu and the Rinpa school.

Takashi Murakami was born in Tokyo, where he lives and works. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Broad, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan. Exhibitions include Murakami Versailles, Château de Versailles, France (2010); Murakami: The 500 Arhats, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2015); Murakami by Murakami, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2017); The Deep End of the Universe, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2017); Under the Radiation Falls, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2017); The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2017, traveled to Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, in 2018); Murakami vs. Murakami, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2019); MurakamiZombie, Busan Museum of Art, South Korea (2023); Mononoke Kyoto, Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art, Japan (2024); and Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo (feat. Takashi Murakami), Brooklyn Museum, New York (2024).

#TakashiMurakami

The exhibition opened on December 10, 2024 and will be on view until March 8, 2025 There was an opening reception at the London location on Tuesday, December 10 from 6 to 8pm.

For more information about this exhibition and others presented by Gagosian please visit the gallery’s site here. The gallery can also be found on Pinterest, X, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Artsy.

Loie Hollowell: Overview Effect

Installation View: Loie Hollowell: Overview Effect 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90019 November 9, 2024 – January 18, 2025 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

Los Angeles – Pace is pleased to present Overview Effect, an exhibition of new paintings by Loie Hollowell, at its Los Angeles gallery. The exhibition opened on November 9, 2024, and will be on view until January 18, 2025, this will be the artist’s first solo presentation in Southern California, showcasing six of her largest works to date, each measuring eight by six feet, along with two new, intimately scaled, multi-part nipple paintings. Overview Effect follows Hollowell’s solo exhibition at the Aldrich. Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut—her first museum survey and first museum presentation on the East Coast, now on view at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institute for Contemporary Art through March 9, 2025—and her recent show at Pace’s New York gallery, Dilation Stage.

Loie Hollowell, Overview Effect in yellow and blue with large mandorla, 2024 PAINTING oil paint, acrylic medium, and high density foam on linen over panel 96" × 72" × 4-1/2" (243.8 cm × 182.9 cm × 11.4 cm) © Loie Hollowell, courtesy Pace Gallery

Her upcoming exhibition in LA takes its title from what astronauts describe as the “overview effect”—the experience of seeing Earth from space. From that vantage point, the planet becomes a unified whole without borders or boundaries, a single system of which humanity is a tiny part.

In her new Overview Effect paintings, Hollowell gives viewers a bold first impression: searing our retinas with the force of bright color, extreme lighting, symmetry, and strong geometries that take on larger-than-life proportions. Stare for a while, and you will feel the paintings’ lasting effects as afterimages linger over your field of vision and leave a psychic mark. The limited palette in this body of work, based on primary colors and their combinations, suggests something basic and elemental floating in the cosmic soup.

Loie Hollowell, Overview Effect in blue and red with large mandorla, 2024 PAINTING oil paint, acrylic medium, and high-density foam on linen over panel 96" × 72" × 4-1/2" (243.8 cm × 182.9 cm × 11.4 cm) © Loie Hollowell, courtesy Pace Gallery

But looking longer and closer, something else happens—a tension between strict compositional order and localized mark-making, between overall tightness and areas of looseness, between mathematical precision and hand-painted, jumbled chaos. The dynamic between these contradictory aspects is complex, with stability containing instability, symmetry and geometry emerging from entropy. This rapport between the overview effect and the works’ up-close details depends on proximity. What appear from a distance as luminous orbs, celestial bodies, and blended colors shift into new focus as tangles of swirling, frenetic lines that imply hidden dimensions zip through our own frequencies and pass undetected through this field of existence.

Hollowell’s twisted, kinky mark-making captures states and sensations of heightened energy. The calligraphic looping of her lines implies a deeper relationship with writing and communication, reminding us that the primary aim of her aesthetic project is to record a subjective, bodily experience of feeling.

Installation View: Loie Hollowell: Overview Effect 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90019 November 9, 2024 – January 18, 2025 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

The Overview Effect paintings depict two identically sized orbs stacked vertically with concentric ripples that intersect to form a horizontal mandorla. Here, Hollowell uses abstraction to capture the brief moments and breaks between contractions during childbirth, which can be a simultaneously out-of-body experience and a thoroughly visceral, embodied one. In each of these paintings, one orb bulges out while the other is a cavity—they could nest inside one another, like a hand or mouth cupped over a breast or like a child filling a pregnant mother’s belly.

In the gallery’s adjacent space, Hollowell will exhibit her rainbow suite of 16 small paintings, her smallest works to date, each spiked near the top with a protruding nipple cast from the bodies of her breastfeeding friends. Titled Spectrum XVI (an invocation of Ellsworth Kelly’s monumental Spectrum V) and spanning the full spectrum of color— from blue to green, yellow, orange, red, pink, purple, and back to blue—this multi-part work is an exercise in both smooth transitions and stark contrast. A “milking line” drops straight down from each raised nipple, sharply delineating a bright highlight on the left and a dark shadow on the right. A fold, a crease, a pleat, a peak: the nipple designates a dividing line and a kind of crucible of intense chroma. The plumb line conjures the glowing, revolving arm of a radar map while connoting the time-keeping function and cyclicality of a sundial. As in the Overview Effect paintings, Hollowell’s technical prowess produces confusing and captivating trompe-l’oeil illusions that both hyperbolize and complicate real dimensionality.

Loie Hollowell, Overview Effect in yellow and blue with small mandorla, 2024 PAINTING oil paint, acrylic medium, and over high-density foam on linen over panel 96" × 72" × 4-1/2" (243.8 cm × 182.9 cm × 11.4 cm) © Loie Hollowell, courtesy Pace Gallery

The juxtaposition of these groups of paintings in Hollowell’s presentation in LA underscores her interest in shifting scales, from the micro to the macro and back again, from deep within oneself to far beyond it.

Loie Hollowell (b. 1983, raised in Woodland, California) is recognized for her paintings that evoke bodily landscapes, using geometric shapes to move a figure or its actions into abstraction. Her work explores themes of sexuality, often through allusions to the human form with an emphasis on women’s bodies. An investigation of autobiography became evident in Hollowell’s early work, which explored the use of gradient staining techniques on cotton supports as a metaphor for intimate spaces—meditations on sleep and bodily fluids. These canvases evolved into figurative painting, introducing female nudes as subject matter as well as the use of reflection and mirroring. Her subsequent work exhibited a shift toward abstraction, characterized by radiating silhouettes and a pulsating color palette. With its strong colors, varied textures, and geometrical symmetry, Hollowell’s practice is situated in lineage with the work of the Transcendental Painting Group (1938–1941), Georgia O’Keeffe, Gulam Rasool Santosh, and Judy Chicago.

Hollowell has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including, One opening leads to another, GRIMM Keizersgracht, Amsterdam (2019–2020); Recalibrate, Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai (2021); Sacred Contract, Konig Galerie, Berlin (2021); Drawings as Urtext, The Anderson at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Richmond (2023). The artist’s first museum survey, Space Between, A Survey of Ten Years, is currently on view at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut. Her work has been included in over twenty group exhibitions including,10 Years Too Late, held at the Institut für Alles Mögliche, Berlin (2013); Mirror, Mirror, at the RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (2015); PaintersNYC, which opened at Páramo in Guadalajara, Mexico and traveled to El Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños, Oaxaca, Mexico (2015). Hollowell was featured in After Effect, held at Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2016), and her work was included in Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art, which opened in May 2018 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, and traveled to the New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut, in 2019. Recently, her work has been included in Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2022); Put It This Way: (RE)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2022–2023); Being in the World, Long Museum, Shanghai (2023); and x PINK 101, X Museum, Beijing.

This exhibition opened on November 9, 2024, and will be on view until January 18, 2025, at Pace Gallery, 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles. For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Pace Gallery’s website here. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too. The magazine highlights the book of the same title, which can be found here.

Pam Evelyn: Frame of Mind

Installation View: Pam Evelyn: Frame of Mind 510 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 November 8 – December 21, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

New York – Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of new, large-scale paintings by Pam Evelyn at its 510 West 25thStreet gallery in New York. The exhibition opened on November 8th and will run  to December 21, the show, titled Frame of Mind, will spotlight works created by the artist during her recent residency in Cornwall, England. Marking Evelyn’s first-ever solo exhibition in the United States, this presentation will be accompanied by a new catalog from Pace Publishing, featuring an essay by art historian and curator Yuval Etgar.

Pam Evelyn, Bacchus, 2024 PAINTING oil on linen 160 cm × 220 cm (63" × 86- 5/8") © Pam Evelyn, courtesy Pace Gallery

Evelyn, who lives and works in London, is known for her expansive, abstract canvases that are densely layered, richly textured meditations on nature, the body, and materiality. Through her intuitive approach, the artist brings her complex compositions to life. Working in an array of scales and multi-panel formats, she imbues her paintings with emotional and psychological resonances, creating works that reflect the landscapes and textures of her inner world. She joined Pace’s program in 2023, and her works can be found in the collections of the Zabludowicz Collection in the English capital and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy.

Pam Evelyn, Curtain for Parade, 2024 PAINTING oil on linen 200 cm × 500 16' 4-7/8"), overall 200 cm × each panel cm (78-3/4" × 250 cm (78-3/4" × 8' 2-7/16"), © Pam Evelyn, courtesy Pace Gallery

In Frame of Mind, Evelyn’s first solo show in New York, she will present nine paintings—including four monumental diptychs measuring some 16 feet wide—that she made this year in Cornwall. Physically removed from London’s frenetic energy, she spent several months completely alone with her work in an intense but also meditative state of focus. For Evelyn, time seemed to slow down during this period of isolation, and the paintings she produced simultaneously over the last year are fundamentally linked while entirely idiosyncratic. She built up these works as part of a rigorous physical process of layering and scraping paint and rearticulating forms, approaching each painting as a malleable, living being with no preordained contents or conclusion.

Pam Evelyn, Bigger Picture, 2024 PAINTING oil on linen 130 cm × 200 cm (51-3/16" × 78-3/4"), overall 130 cm × 100 cm (51-3/16" × 39-3/8"), © each panel Pam Evelyn, courtesy Pace Gallery

Moving fluidly between the elemental, the emotional, and the material in making these new paintings, Evelyn has made her most psychologically involved body of work yet. Rather than drawing direct inspiration from the Cornish landscape in which she was living, the artist used her natural surroundings to think through her work in the studio. Her resulting paintings, as her upcoming exhibition’s title suggests, are more “mindscapes” than landscapes, reflections of her own state of being.

Pam Evelyn, Habit Pattern, 2024 PAINTING oil on linen 200 cm × 500 16' 4-7/8"), overall 200 cm × each panel cm (78-3/4" × 250 cm (78-3/4" × 8' 2-7/16"), © Pam Evelyn, courtesy Pace Gallery

Evelyn’s deep and nuanced engagement with art history is also evident in the paintings she will show in New York. In particular, the works of El Greco and Milton Avery were on her mind, especially as she worked to translate fleeting moments in the natural world into her compositions in a conceptual way, using the surrounding Cornish landscape as a space to pose questions about how painting is made.

Pam Evelyn, Mourning Greys (detail), 2024 PAINTING oil on linen 200 cm × 500 16' 4-7/8"), overall 200 cm × each panel cm (78-3/4" × 250 cm (78-3/4" × 8' 2-7/16"), © Pam Evelyn, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pam Evelyn (b. 1996, Surrey, United Kingdom) is a painter living and working in London. Her expansive, abstract canvases are densely layered, richly textured meditations on nature, the body, and materiality. Evelyn’s intuitive approach to painting translates her lived experience in the world onto the canvas, creating complex and vivacious compositions that brim with life. Her charged use of oil paints—carefully layered, scraped, and rearticulated over several months—recalls the seething vitality of Abstract Expressionist painters while retaining a distinct and contemporary quality.

Made over long periods of time, Evelyn’s paintings move through countless iterations as she builds up and pares back her gestures in a dynamic tension between destruction and resolution, freedom and control, collapse and resurrection. The works appear like living, breathing canvases as the complexity of texture and temporality encased in the oil paint drips and sweats, obscures and reveals in turn. Indeed, Evelyn speaks of her paintings as quasi- sentient beings, positioning herself as their audience rather than creator as she allows them to dictate their direction.

Evelyn holds a BFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2019) and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2020). She received the Cass Art Prize in 2019 and a prestigious residency at Porthmeor Studios, Cornwall in 2022. Evelyn’s work is held in the public collections of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy and Zabludowicz Collection, London. Recent exhibitions include Pam Evelyn: Spectacle of a wreck, Peres Projects, Berlin (2021); The Reason for Painting, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, United Kingdom (2023); Pam Evelyn: Amid Tall Waves, Massimo De Carlo Pièce Unique, Paris (2023); New British Abstraction, Centre for International Contemporary Art, Vancouver, Canada (2023); Abstraction (re)creation – 20 under 40, Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2024); and XXX, Studio Voltaire, London (2024). In 2023, Evelyn was commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery, London, to create two etchings to accompany the major exhibition, Action, Gesture, Paint Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 (2023).

Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.

Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remaining at the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program— comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects. Pace has a legacy in art bookmaking and has published over five hundred titles in close collaboration with artists, with a focus on original scholarship and on introducing new voices to the art historical canon.

Today, Pace has seven locations worldwide, including European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where the gallery established an office in 2023. Pace maintains two galleries in New York—its headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, which welcomed almost 120,000 visitors and programmed 20 shows in its first six months, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. Pace’s long and pioneering history in California includes a gallery in Palo Alto, which was open from 2016 to 2022. Pace’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technology industry has had a lasting impact on the gallery at a global level, accelerating its initiatives connecting art and technology as well as its work with experiential artists. Pace consolidated its West Coast activity through its flagship in Los Angeles, which opened in 2022. Pace was one of the first international galleries to establish outposts in Asia, where it operates permanent gallery spaces in Hong Kong and Seoul, along with an office and viewing room in Beijing. In spring 2024, Pace will open its first gallery space in Japan in Tokyo’s new Azabudai Hills development.

This exhibition opened on November 8th and will be on view until December 21, 2024, at Pace Gallery 510 West 25th Street in New York. For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Pace Gallery’s website here. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too. The magazine highlights the book of the same title, which can be found here.

Wendell Castle: Cantilever

courtesy of Carpenters Workshop Gallery

Carpenters Workshop Gallery Paris presents Cantilever, a solo exhibition of Wendell Castle (1932 – 2018), revered as the founding father of the American Art Furniture Movement, showcasing the artist’s mastery of materials and their properties. Featuring works crafted in wood and metal, from gravity-defying structures of the 1960s to the exploration of classical forms and experimentation with trompe l’oeil, the show captures the dynamic later years of a pivotal figure in redefining the boundaries between art and design in the late 20th century, amidst periods of dynamic cultural change in the US. In a career spanning six decades, Castle forged a unique discipline that seamlessly intertwined sculpture and industrial design, consistently challenging the boundaries of artistic creation.

courtesy of Carpenters Workshop Gallery

His craftsmanship and whimsical, organic approach to sculpture are evident in the minimalist, monochromatic sculptures that feature dramatic cantilevered shapes extending horizontally from seemingly central points of a structure, without load-bearing support, thus appearing to float or defy gravity. The prevalence of the cantilever illustrates artist’s mastery of weight, balance, volume and structural integrity.

Produced between 2011 and 2017, the exhibited works demonstrate how Castle remained at the forefront of contemporary art and design by embracing new technologies late into his career. Exemplifying Castle’s departure from the static nature often associated with modernism, this period was marked by fluid, organic forms that maximised the abstract volume of the works, using digital methods such as 3D modelling, scanning and laser cutting to produce functional yet sculptural works of collectible design.

courtesy of Carpenters Workshop Gallery

courtesy of Carpenters Workshop Gallery

Many are made using the artist’s own groundbreaking technique of stack lamination, which entails skillfully carving into stacked layers of laminated wood. The resulting creations vary in composition, from bulbous to sinewy and serpentine, yet consistently maintain a delicate balance. They include biomorphic stained ash sculptures like Second Coming (2013), Dark Wish (2012) and Something to Hide (2012) and walnut sculptures like Only What It Seems (2011) and Saving Grace (2011).

These sit alongside metal works like Facing the Unfamiliar (2017), made of aluminium, and bronze pieces Arm in Arm (2015) and Veiled in a Dream (2014). Together, the works marry a whimsical aesthetic with a deep understanding of balance and composition and exemplify the unconventional forms that Castle injected into the Art Furniture movement.

Castle’s taste for innovation emerged during his study of sculpture and industrial design at the University of Kansas in the late 1950s. Utilising walnut sourced from a nearby factory, he laid the groundwork for his organic approach to design, inspired by contemporaries like Finn Juhl and Carlo Mollino. Castle’s investigation into different shapes is not only a testament to his technical prowess but also imbues his pieces with a playful and imaginative quality, therein challenging traditional furniture-making norms and establishing the artist as a visionary in the field.

courtesy of Carpenters Workshop Gallery

“Wendell Castle was a master of collectable design and the maturity we see in the works from the last decade of his life represents the culmination of a rich practice that combined form and functionality in the highest senses. The artist’s mastery of the cantilever is one of the most compelling elements of his work, illustrating his unparalleled instinct for space, form, medium and the vast inherent possibilities of materials like wood and metal.

”

— Loïc Le Gaillard and Julien Lombrail, founders of Carpenters Workshop Gallery

ABOUT WENDELL CASTLE

Born in Kansas in 1932, Wendell Castle received two degrees from the University of Kansas, one in industrial design in 1958 and the other in sculpture in 1961. He moved to Rochester, New York to teach at the School for American Crafts and established a permanent studio in the area that is still in operation today. He reinvented himself for nearly six decades.

Often credited as the founding father of the American Art Furniture movement, Castle has redefined sculpture and design by seamlessly merging the two into one discipline. He created unique pieces that blur the distinction between design and sculpture. Castle’s organic and whimsical approach to sculpture incorporates his own invented technique of carving into stacked laminated wood known as lamination. His furniture designs for residential clients, public spaces, and a number of churches represent a unique exploration of the qualities and possibilities of wood and fiberglass.

His work can be found in the permanent collections of more than forty museums and cultural institutions, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the White House in Washington, D.C. Moreover, he has been the recipient of many honours and awards, including four National Endowment for the Arts grants and the Modernism Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brooklyn Museum in 2007.

ABOUT CARPENTERS WORKSHOP GALLERY

Specialising in Functional Art and Collectible Design, Carpenters Workshop Gallery focuses on producing and exhibiting the work of international artists, designers, and architects, who look to push the boundaries of what is traditionally presented within the confines of the gallery and art fair space. Carpenters Workshop Gallery is founded on the partnership of childhood friends, Julien Lombrail and Loic Le Gaillard, who first opened the gallery in a former carpenter’s workshop in London’s Mayfair. Since then, Carpenters Workshop Gallery has proven its deserved place as a leading pioneer in the world of high art and design, expanding to operate four galleries worldwide, situated in key locations of London, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. Actively involved in the research, conservation and production of limited edition works, the gallery’s choices are guided by seeking an emotional, artistic, and historical relevance and breaking boundaries between art and design.

This ethos is exemplified by the founding of The Workshop complex in Mitry-Mory, on the outskirts of Paris – a unique 8,000 square meters space dedicated to artistic research, bringing together the elite of practitioners and artisans. Within this creative hub, Carpenters Workshop Gallery artists and leading artisans work collaboratively to produce pieces with a hand-finished touch. The gallery’s next exciting chapter is the recent opening of Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s new London space, within the expansive Notting Hill arts hub, Ladbroke Hall.

For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s website here. The gallery can also be found on Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook.

Adolph Gottlieb: Vital Images

Adolph Gottlieb: Vital Images 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 November 15 – December 21, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

New York – Pace is pleased to present Vital Images, an exhibition of late paintings, works on paper, and sculpture by Adolph Gottlieb, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Opened November 14 and will be on view until December 21, this show will spotlight paintings created by the artist in the final years of his life. Holistically, the exhibition will reveal the intense ambition and formal refinement that motivated Gottlieb’s practice in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Adolph Gottlieb: Vital Images 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 November 15 – December 21, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

Beginning his career as an artist in New York in the 1920s, Gottlieb would become one of the founding members of The Ten, a group of artists devoted to expressionist and abstract painting, in 1935. Eight years later, he helped establish another group of abstract painters, The New York Artist Painters, which included Mark Rothko, John Graham, and George L. K. Morris. In 1943, Gottlieb co-authored and published a letter with Rothko in The New York Times, expressing what is now considered the first formal statement of the concerns of Abstract Expressionism.

Adolph Gottlieb, Russet, 1973 Acrylic on canvas, 60" x 48" (152.4 cm x 121.9 cm). © 2024 Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Pace’s  exhibition of Gottlieb’s work in New York takes its title from a 1972 interview with the artist, published in The New York Times on the occasion of his last gallery show, which was mounted at Marlborough Gallery. “They are vital images to me,” Gottlieb said of his work. “I continue to project them as I feel them.”

Adolph Gottlieb, Open Above, 1972 Acrylic on canvas, 7' 6-1/8" x 9' 1/8" (228.9 cm x 274.6 cm). © 2024 Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

The presentation will focus on how Gottlieb’s lifelong explorations of abstraction and its capabilities evolved during the later years of his life and career. Following a 1968 exhibition that filled both the Guggenheim and Whitney museums, he began to explore sculpture for the first time. A stroke he suffered in 1971 left him with only the use of his right arm and put him face-to-face with an existential challenge that he embraced as a means to move forward. Aware that his time was limited, Gottlieb set out to expand and refine the ideas about abstraction that he’d been developing for over 50 years. Equipped with his vision and imagination, he saw art as a life-giving force, a source of renewal as he sharpened his focus and advanced the practice that defined his life.

Adolph Gottlieb, Triptych, 1971 Acrylic on canvas, 90" × 19' (228.6 cm × 579.1 cm), on 3 panels. © 2024 Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Remarkably, Gottlieb produced his largest-ever canvas, Triptych, a rarely exhibited three-panel composition, in 1971. This monumental composition—which measures 7.5 feet tall and 19 feet long—will figure in Vital Images at Pace, presented in conversation with paintings and works on paper dating between 1970 and 1973. The exhibition will also include Oval Slanted, a rare polychrome steel sculpture from 1968, in which the artist took up new experimentations with his visual vocabulary in three dimensional terms. Together, these late works reflect Gottlieb’s life-long practice of creating images and exploring and re-thinking them over time, assessing his process and progress time and again.

Adolph Gottlieb: Vital Images 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 November 15 – December 21, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

“What's going into it is what I'm looking for when I'm doing the painting—those things which I don't know,” Gottlieb said in a 1965 interview. “In other words, I'm feeling my way and then I find something—and there to my surprise is something that wasn't in the world before, and this can become more and more refined and subtle.”

Adolph Gottlieb (b. 1903, New York; d. 1974, New York) was a leading figure of the New York School. An advocate of abstraction, he produced paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and tapestries with an aesthetic vocabulary underpinned by automatism, primitivism, and Surrealism. He first received widespread recognition for his Pictographs series, which combine biomorphic abstraction with totemic imagery in compartmentalized compositions. In 1950, Gottlieb organized the protest of an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, for which he and a group of fellow artists became known as the Irascibles. Further refining his approach, Gottlieb developed his Labyrinths, Imaginary Landscapes, and Bursts series, works that he created with painted gestures and abstract forms that prompt an immediate, visceral impact on the viewer.

Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.

Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remaining at the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program— comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects. Pace has a legacy in art bookmaking and has published over five hundred titles in close collaboration with artists, with a focus on original scholarship and on introducing new voices to the art historical canon.

Today, Pace has seven locations worldwide, including European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where the gallery established an office in 2023. Pace maintains two galleries in New York—its headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, which welcomed almost 120,000 visitors and programmed 20 shows in its first six months, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. Pace’s long and pioneering history in California includes a gallery in Palo Alto, which was open from 2016 to 2022. Pace’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technology industry has had a lasting impact on the gallery at a global level, accelerating its initiatives connecting art and technology as well as its work with experiential artists. Pace consolidated its West Coast activity through its flagship in Los Angeles, which opened in 2022. Pace was one of the first international galleries to establish outposts in Asia, where it operates permanent gallery spaces in Hong Kong and Seoul, along with an office and viewing room in Beijing. In spring 2024, Pace will open its first gallery space in Japan in Tokyo’s new Azabudai Hills development.

This exhibition opened on November 15th and will be on view until December 21, 2024, at Pace Gallery 510 West 25th Street in New York. For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Pace Gallery’s website here. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.

ROGER HERMAN: FROM CALIFORNIA WITH LOVE

Installation View: Roger Herman From California With Love 54 Rue de la Verrerie, 75004 Paris, France 26 September – 20 December 2024 | Photography courtesy  Carpenters Workshop Gallery Paris

Carpenters Workshop Gallery Paris presents From California With Love, a display of ceramic works and large-scale abstract canvases by Los Angeles based artist Roger Herman (b. 1947), a multifaceted figure who has left a distinctive mark on contemporary notions of art, craft and design. Continuing from a solo exhibition presented in London in February 2024, the Paris exhibition explores how Herman seamlessly intertwines ceramics and painting to unveil an assemblage of colour, texture, material, processes and form.

Herman is known for his polyphonous orchestrations that embrace imperfection and incompleteness, in a practice that has evolved over five decades. Featuring recent works produced from 2015 onwards, the exhibition celebrates the gestural, spontaneous vibrancy of Herman’s colourful creations, illustrating why he came to be known as the West Coast parallel of 1980s neo-Expressionism.

Roger Herman, Untitled 156, photography by Benjamin Baccarani, courtesy of Carpenters Workshop Gallery.jpg

At the core of the exhibition is a series of dynamic handcrafted ceramic pieces sculpted from wheel-thrown clay, which exude energy and highlight the artist’s experimental approach. These include vases like Untitled 154 (2023) and Untitled 160 (2023), bowls like Untitled 97 (2019) and plates like Untitled 131 (2022). Adorned with vivid colours and varying textures, the works reflect Herman’s fascination with the transformative power of colour during the glazing process – a theme that he has passionately explored since the late 1990s.

More than functional vases, the irregular shapes, spontaneous voids and protrusions of these pieces transcend traditional ceramic design techniques, with vibrant, quickly executed expressionistic compositions applied beneath glossy glazes. Evoking a unique and unpredictable painterly expression that celebrates imperfection, spontaneity and intuition, each piece is marked by an approach that treats the clay as a blank canvas, allowing brush strokes, dashes and lines to build texture and colour in innovative ways.

Roger Herman, Untitled 154, photography by Benajmin Baccarani, courtesy of Carpenters Workshop Gallery.jpg

Complementing the ceramics is a series of large-scale paintings that echo the same expressive, experimental energy, testifying to the artist’s instinctual relationship to colour and composition across different mediums. They include Pink Sky, Green Window (2023) and Untitled – Yellow, Green, Red (2023), which feature abstract, evocative and boldly colourful painterly gestures. These paintings share a cohesive space with the ceramics in the gallery, illustrating how Herman’s instinctive artistic methods developed through his experimental work with clay, kilns and glazes.

Roger Herman, Untitled 133, photography by Nicky Roding, courtesy of Carpenters Workshop Gallery (2) (1).jpg

Born in Germany and relocating to the US in 1977, Herman quickly became immersed in California’s vibrant art scene, which greatly influenced his subsequent work. With works ranging from figurative to abstract, Herman’s journey reflects a commitment to pushing the boundaries of traditional mediums, evident in the unpredictable and experimental nature of his works. His focus on colour and glazing processes, as well as his dedication to embracing imperfections, resonates with broader movements in contemporary art that challenge conventional norms. As a teacher at UCLA, Herman has been a prominent figure in the artistic community, with his work featured in galleries worldwide and held in prestigious collections such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Roger Herman, Untitled 86, photography by Benjamin Baccarani, courtesy of Carpenters Workshop Gallery (1).jpg

“Roger Herman’s bold and painterly vision is vividly alive across his ceramics and paintings, which are intricately interwoven with each other, illustrating a dexterity with colour and form that proves him as a pioneer of art and craft. His intuitive, expressive and uniquely characterful work illustrates how visionary approaches to materials, colour, texture and form can transform our understanding of craftsmanship and artistic creation.”

— Loic Le Gaillard and Julien Lombrail, founders of Carpenters Workshop Gallery,

Roger Herman, Untitled 164, photogrpahy by Benjamin Baccarani, courtesy of Carpenters Workshop Gallery.jpg

ABOUT ROGER HERMAN

Roger Herman is an artist based in Los Angeles, renowned for his innovative work in ceramics, painting and various other mediums. Born to a French father and a German mother, Herman initially studied law before transitioning to the arts, eventually studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe.

Herman’s artistic journey took a significant turn after he received a DAAD grant from Germany, leading to his relocation to California in 1977. At the age of 30, Herman immersed himself in the vibrant California art scene, which greatly influenced his subsequent work.

He has since become well-known for his polyphonous orchestrations of color and form, embracing imperfection and incompleteness in his creations. Herman’s ceramic vessels illustrate his appreciation for these qualities. Beginning with wheel-thrown clay forms that are often irregular and feature spontaneous voids or protrusions, he applies vibrant, quickly executed expressionistic compositions beneath glossy glazes. This process results in pieces that exude energy, highlighting his ceaseless experimentation with colour, texture, material, process and form.

This new destination, dedicated to presenting ambitious programming across all forms of creative expression, confirms the leadership role of Carpenters Workshop Gallery in today’s international territory of art and design and their intersectionality. to manga, ukiyo-e, erotica, memento mori, surrealism and parietal art, Herman’s ceramics are dynamic and multifaceted. He also draws inspiration from Lucio Fontana’s psychedelic maximalism and the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, which values irregularity, roughness, and transformation.

Herman’s work extends beyond ceramics to include paintings on canvas, drawings, books, and woodcut prints. His instinctual relationship to colour and composition is evident across all these mediums.

Herman’s impact on the art world is also marked by his long teaching career at UCLA, where he led the Painting and Drawing department for many years. From 1998 to 2008, he co-ran the Black Dragon Society gallery in Chinatown, which played a crucial role in launching the careers of numerous young artists. He has also received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a DAAD grant. His recent solo exhibitions include shows at Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles, Louis Lefebvre Galerie in Paris, Sorry We’re Closed in Brussels, Carpenters Workshop Gallery in New York and London, and Jack Hanley Gallery in New York.  Influenced by a range of imagery and gestures, from painterly abstraction Herman’s impact on the art world is also marked by his long teaching career at UCLA, where he led the Painting and Drawing department for many years. From 1998 to 2008, he co-ran the Black Dragon Society gallery in Chinatown, which played a crucial role in launching the careers of numerous young artists. He has also received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a DAAD grant. His recent solo exhibitions include shows at Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles, Louis Lefebvre Galerie in Paris,.

ABOUT CARPENTERS WORKSHOP GALLERY

Specialising in Functional Art and Collectible Design, Carpenters Workshop Gallery focuses on producing and exhibiting the work of international artists, designers, and architects, who look to push the boundaries of what is traditionally presented within the confines of the gallery and art fair space. Carpenters Workshop Gallery is founded on the partnership of childhood friends, Julien Lombrail and Loic Le Gaillard, who first opened the gallery in a former carpenter’s workshop in London’s Mayfair. Since then, Carpenters Workshop Gallery has proven its deserved place as a leading pioneer in the world of high art and design, expanding to operate four galleries worldwide, situated in key locations of London, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. Actively involved in the research, conservation and production of limited edition works, the gallery’s choices are guided by seeking an emotional, artistic, and historical relevance and breaking boundaries between art and design.

This ethos is exemplified by the founding of The Workshop complex in Mitry-Mory, on the outskirts of Paris – a unique 8,000 square meters space dedicated to artistic research, bringing together the elite of practitioners and artisans. Within this creative hub, Carpenters Workshop Gallery artists and leading artisans work collaboratively to produce pieces with a hand-finished touch. The gallery’s next exciting chapter is the recent opening of Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s new London space, within the expansive Notting Hill arts hub, Ladbroke Hall.

For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s website here. The gallery can also be found on Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook.

Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions

Installation View: Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 November 15 – December 21, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

New York – Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of work by the celebrated photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York, which opened on November 15 and will be on view until December 21. This presentation, titled Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions, marks the centenary of Frank’s birth and coincides with several other major exhibitions of his work around the world. Pace’s upcoming Frank exhibition—organized in collaboration with The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation—will be accompanied by a new book from Pace Publishing, featuring an essay by Ocean Vuong.

Robert Frank Story A / Story B, Mabou, 2002 GELATIN SILVER gelatin silver print enlarged from two Polaroid negatives with inkjet prints and ink 20" × 24" (50.8 cm × 61 cm), overall signed, titled and dated recto in ink © The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, courtesy Pace Gallery

Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions will focus on Frank’s later work from the 1970s onward: the decades he spent experimenting with various cameras, printing methods, and media. Curated by Shahrzad Kamel, Director of The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, the exhibition takes its title from a sketch Frank made of his work Fire Below—to the East America, Mabou (1979), which was included in a bequest the artist made of his photographs and papers to The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation upon his death in 2019, and one of many discoveries that inspired this presentation of previously unseen works from his oeuvre.

Robert Frank, Look Out for Hope, Mabou – New York City, 1979 GELATIN SILVER gelatin silver print enlarged from three Polaroid negatives 23" × 19-1/2" (58.4 cm × 49.5 cm), image 24" × 20" (61 cm × 50.8 cm), paper © The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace’s show will feature groupings of multimedia works based on various motifs that Frank revisited throughout his career, offering a new way of seeing his work that will deepen viewers’ understanding of his artistic processes and motivations. The photographs on view, some of which feature multiple frames in a single image, hand-drawn etchings, and inscribed phrases, will showcase his long-standing interest in re-presenting older photographs from his past as new compositions, or ‘variants.’ Frank’s 2004 autobiographical short film True Story will also be presented in its entirety at the gallery. The atemporality of his photography and filmmaking—for which he pieced together fragments of not only images but also his own memories, dreams, and ideas—will be on full view in the exhibition.

Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 November 15 – December 21, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

The artworks in the presentation will be complemented by a selection of archival materials, including glass plates with etchings, journal pages, sketches, and other rarely exhibited pieces. Enriching viewers’ experience of the photographs on the gallery walls, these objects will invite a holistic and personal view of Frank’s life and his inventive, genre defying approach to image making.

Robert Frank, Andrea, Mabou / The War is Over, Mabou, c. 1976-1978 / 1998 GELATIN SILVER group of 3 works © The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, courtesy Pace Gallery

Early in his career, after receiving his first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955, the Swiss-born photographer embarked on a two-year trip across the United States during which he captured over 28,000 candid, poignant images of American life in the mid 20th century. Eighty-three of those images were ultimately included in his groundbreaking monograph The Americans, first published by Robert Delpire in 1958 in Paris (as Les Américains) and the following year by Grove Press in New York, with an introduction by Jack Kerouac.

Robert Frank, Fire Below - to the East America, Mabou, 1979 GELATIN SILVER gelatin silver print enlarged from six Polaroid negatives with paint and ink 19-1/2" × 23" (49.5 cm × 58.4 cm), image 20" × 23-13/16" (50.8 cm × 60.5 cm), paper© The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, courtesy Pace Gallery

Aperture is re-releasing Frank’s seminal photobook in this anniversary year, and, as part of Art Basel Unlimited this summer, Pace, in collaboration with Zander Galerie, presented all 83 photographs in this iconic body of work—plus an eighty-fourth print, a triptych image, that the artist added to the end of the sequence for Aperture’s 1978 edition of The Americans.

Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 November 15 – December 21, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions coincides with three other major presentations of the artist’s work: Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, a survey tracing six decades of his career, as well as a complete retrospective of his videos and films, at The Museum of Modern Art in New York; Robert Frank: Mary’s Book, an in-depth look at the personal scrapbook of photographs that Frank made for his first wife Mary Lockspeiser, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Robert Frank: Be Happy, a show of 34 photographs and select documents, at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany. This fall, ahead of the opening of Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions, Pace will spotlight a selection of works by Frank on its booth at Paris Photo—further details about the gallery’s presentation at the fair will be revealed in due course.

From left to right:  Robert Frank, Possessions and Souvenirs from Flamingo, Goteborg, March 7, 1997 PHOTO two gelatin silver prints, each enlarged from two Polaroid negatives, with paint and ink 18-1/4" × 27-1/4" (46.4 cm × 69.2 cm), overall signed, titled and dated recto (etched) © The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, courtesy Pace Gallery, Robert Frank, Look Out for Hope, 1979 GELATIN SILVER gelatin silver print enlarged from one Polaroid negative 14" × 11" (35.6 cm × 27.9 cm), image and paper unsigned, © The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, courtesy Pace Gallery, Robert Frank, Mabou, 1995 GELATIN SILVER gelatin silver print 10-15/16" × 13-7/8" (27.8 cm × 35.2 cm), image and paper signed, titled and dated recto in ink

Considered one of the most influential figures in the history of photography, Robert Frank (b. 1924, Zurich, Switzerland; d. 2019, Nova Scotia, Canada) redefined the aesthetic of both the still and the moving image via his pictures and films. Soon after his emigration to New York in 1947, Alexey Brodovitch hired Frank as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. The position brought many occasions for travel, and Frank’s impressions of the United States, in comparison to other places, impacted his work. After receiving his first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955, Frank embarked on a two-year trip across America during which he took over 28,000 pictures. Eighty-three of those images were ultimately published in Frank’s groundbreaking monograph The Americans, first by Robert Delpire in 1958 in Paris, and a year later by Grove Press in the United States. Frank’s unorthodox cropping, lighting, and sense of focus attracted criticism. His work, however, was not without supporters. Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg felt a kinship with Frank and his interest in documenting the fabric of contemporary society. Eventually The Americans jettisoned Frank into a position of cultural prominence; he became the spokesperson for a generation of visual artists, musicians, and literary figures both in the United States and abroad.

Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.

Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remaining at the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program— comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects. Pace has a legacy in art bookmaking and has published over five hundred titles in close collaboration with artists, with a focus on original scholarship and on introducing new voices to the art historical canon.

Today, Pace has seven locations worldwide, including European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where the gallery established an office in 2023. Pace maintains two galleries in New York—its headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, which welcomed almost 120,000 visitors and programmed 20 shows in its first six months, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. Pace’s long and pioneering history in California includes a gallery in Palo Alto, which was open from 2016 to 2022. Pace’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technology industry has had a lasting impact on the gallery at a global level, accelerating its initiatives connecting art and technology as well as its work with experiential artists. Pace consolidated its West Coast activity through its flagship in Los Angeles, which opened in 2022. Pace was one of the first international galleries to establish outposts in Asia, where it operates permanent gallery spaces in Hong Kong and Seoul, along with an office and viewing room in Beijing. In spring 2024, Pace will open its first gallery space in Japan in Tokyo’s new Azabudai Hills development.

This exhibition opened on November 15th and will be on view until December 21, 2024, at Pace Gallery 510 West 25th Street in New York. For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Pace Gallery’s website here. The magazine also highlights the book of the same title here. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.

Irving Penn: Kinship Curated by Hank Willis Thomas

From left to right: Irving Penn, Three Single Oriental Poppies, New York, 1968; Irving Penn, Three Dahomey Girls (with Bowls), 1967. Photographs © The Irving Penn Foundation. 

Pace is pleased to present Irving Penn: Kinship, an exhibition of work by the famed photographer Irving Penn, curated by artist Hank Willis Thomas, at its 508 West 25th Street gallery in New York. The exhibition opened on November 15 and will be on view until December 21, this show will spotlight works produced by Penn throughout his 70-year career, including selections from his Worlds in a Small Room series, his iconic portraits of artists, actors, and writers, and other genres of his images. These photographs will be exhibited within an installation designed by Thomas to replicate a structure that Penn used to photograph many of his high-profile subjects.

Working for Vogue for nearly 70 years, Penn left an indelible mark on the history of photography. His inventive fashion photographs, which transformed American image-making in the postwar era, continued to appear in the magazine up until his death in 2009. The artist was also highly accomplished and experimental in the darkroom, having engineered, among other innovations, a complex technique for making platinum-palladium prints.

Irving Penn, Issey Miyake Fashion, White and Black, New York, 1990 VINTAGE GELATIN SILVER vintage gelatin silver print mounted to board 15" × 14-3/4" (38.1 cm × 37.5 cm), image and paper 17" × 16" (43.2 cm × 40.6 cm), mount signed, titled, dated and annotated verso with stamps and ink Photographs © The Irving Penn Foundation

Often investigating the ways that framing and perspective can shape our experiences of the world around us, Thomas will situate Penn’s photographs within a bespoke, star-shaped structure with intersecting corners, created using a material similar to the plywood flats of the photographer’s original studio for his portraits in a corner. Displayed on the structure’s exterior walls and within its central interior space, Penn’s images will invite viewers to inhabit a similarly intimate, enclosed space as the subjects of his portraits captured across the globe—through Thomas’s vision, this room becomes a new world of its own.

A trained photographer, Thomas, widely known for his galvanizing public works around the US, is deeply interested in both the making and consumption of images. His investigations into subjectivity and perception inform his work in photography and other mediums, including sculpture, screen printing, video, and installation. Penn’s Worlds in a Small Room works—for which he journeyed to Cuzco, Crete, Extremadura, Dahomey, Cameroon, San Francisco, Nepal, New Guinea, and Morocco to capture people’s portraits within a tent he used as a portable studio—have been particularly influential for Thomas, who was part of the artistic team behind the traveling, participatory installation In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth), which debuted in 2011 and has since been presented around the world.

Irving Penn, Jessye Norman, New York, 1963 PLATINUM PALLADIUM platinum palladium print mounted to aluminum 18-7/8" × 18-7/8" (47.9 cm × 47.9 cm), image 24-7/8" × 22" (63.2 cm × 55.9 cm), paper 26" × 22" (66 cm × 55.9 cm), mount signed, titled, dated and annotated verso with stamps and pencil Photographs © The Irving Penn Foundation

Showcasing the varied but interconnected motifs and ideas that Penn returned to time and again over the course of his life, the images selected and paired by Thomas speak to a transcendent, universal quality that can be traced across the photographer’s vast oeuvre. His arrangement of Penn’s works is guided by a kind of “visual muscle memory,” which he describes as “the notion that an artist’s eye and hand retain the imprints of past works, unconsciously shaping new creations.” The diverse photographs on view, for Thomas, are marked by their stillness and dignity, their shared interest in capturing and communicating the human experience in a single frame.

Irving Penn: Kinship, Curated by Hank Willis Thomas 508 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 November 15 – December 21, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

“In Penn’s work, I see a profound reverence for the overlooked and the mundane,” Thomas writes in a curatorial statement for the show. “His fashion photography, often celebrated for its clean lines and sculptural compositions, shares a surprising kinship with his still lifes of discarded objects. By juxtaposing these images, I want to highlight how Penn’s meticulous attention to detail elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary. It’s as if each image, regardless of subject, carries an echo of his broader artistic ethos: the belief that beauty and meaning can be found in even the most unlikely places.”

Concurrent with this curated presentation in New York, Thomas’s solo exhibition of his work at Pace’s London gallery, Kinship of the Soul, will be on view from November 19 to December 21. A retrospective of Penn’s work, organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with The Irving Penn Foundation, will also open this fall—on view from November 23, 2024 to May 1, 2025—at The Marta Ortega Pérez (MOP) Foundation in A Coruña, Spain.

Thomas’s work is currently featured in the group exhibitions Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through February 18, 2025 and Grow It, Show It: A Look at Hair from Diane Arbus to TikTok at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, through January 12, 2025. At the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, The Gun Violence Memorial Project—a collaboration between Boston-based MASS Design Group and Songha & Company, where Thomas is Creative Director, in partnership with the gun violence prevention organization Purpose Over Pain—is on view through January 20, 2025.

Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.

Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remaining at the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program— comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects. Pace has a legacy in art bookmaking and has published over five hundred titles in close collaboration with artists, with a focus on original scholarship and on introducing new voices to the art historical canon.

Today, Pace has seven locations worldwide, including European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where the gallery established an office in 2023. Pace maintains two galleries in New York—its headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, which welcomed almost 120,000 visitors and programmed 20 shows in its first six months, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. Pace’s long and pioneering history in California includes a gallery in Palo Alto, which was open from 2016 to 2022. Pace’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technology industry has had a lasting impact on the gallery at a global level, accelerating its initiatives connecting art and technology as well as its work with experiential artists. Pace consolidated its West Coast activity through its flagship in Los Angeles, which opened in 2022. Pace was one of the first international galleries to establish outposts in Asia, where it operates permanent gallery spaces in Hong Kong and Seoul, along with an office and viewing room in Beijing. In spring 2024, Pace will open its first gallery space in Japan in Tokyo’s new Azabudai Hills development.

This exhibition opened on November 15th and will be on view until December 21, 2024, at Pace Gallery 510 West 25th Street in New York. For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Pace Gallery’s website here. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.

Gerhard Richter : Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version

Gerhard Richter Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version, 2019-24 (still) Digital projection (color, sound, 36 min.) © Gerhard Richter 2024 Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

ROME,—Gagosian is pleased to announce that Gerhard Richter will present Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version (2019–24), an immersive installation in film and sound that will fill the entire exhibition space at its Rome location. This is the gallery debut of Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version and the artist’s first gallery exhibition in Italy since 1983.

Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version is the immersive, experiential apotheosis of Richter’s Strip project, which he began working on in 2010 following his discovery of digital tools for mining existing paintings for new artistic strategies. The Strip series was initiated when the artist digitally fractured the photographic image of a canvas into progressively smaller divisions which he then doubled, or mirrored, across expansive surfaces. This process opened up a world of new possibilities that resulted in the Strip paintings (2011–16), as well as books, prints, tapestries, and STRIP-TOWER (2023), a monumental sculpture now on view at Serpentine, London.

Gerhard Richter Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version, 2019-24 (still) Digital projection (color, sound, 36 min.) © Gerhard Richter 2024 Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version consists of a film, made in collaboration with Corinna Belz, projected at a monumental scale, spanning over 7 meters (more than 23 feet) wide and accompanied by a score for trumpet composed by Rebecca Saunders and recorded by Marco Blaauw and Sebastian Schottke. Ten speakers surround the viewer, giving a physical force and presence to the music. Previously, Richter’s experimentations in combining image and sound into immersive experiences have resulted in temporary works at the Manchester International Festival (in 2015, with Arvo Pärt) and The Shed, New York (in 2019, with Pärt and Steve Reich).

Gerhard Richter Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version, 2019-24 (still) Digital projection (color, sound, 36 min.) © Gerhard Richter 2024 Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Throughout his storied career, Richter has consistently revitalized painting through an analytical exploration of the potentials of photography, chance occurrence, and systematic processes, all of which find their ultimate expression in Moving Picture. In the 1960s he harnessed found magazine and newspaper photographs as source imagery for his paintings, while in the 1970s he took pictures of his own paintings and vastly enlarged minute details of their brushstrokes. Richter has long found generative possibilities in the chance arrangements of color grids, first with his Color Chart paintings of the 1960s and later with 4900 Colors (2007) and the Cologne Cathedral Window (2007). Like the last of these projects, Moving Picture is a work in light, illuminating the infinite beauty of chance.

Gerhard Richter Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version, 2019-24 (still) Digital projection (color, sound, 36 min.) © Gerhard Richter 2024 Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden, Germany, in 1932, and lives and works in Cologne, Germany. His work resides in museum collections throughout the world. Major solo exhibitions include Forty Years of Painting, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2002, traveled to Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC); Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, London (2009); Panorama, Tate Modern, London (2011–12, traveled to Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and Centre Pompidou, Paris); ATLAS, Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, Dresden, Germany (2012); Drawings and Watercolors 1957–2008, Musée du Louvre, Paris (2012); Streifen & Glas, Galerie Neue Meister, Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Germany (2013–14, traveled to Kunst Museum Winterthur, Switzerland); Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel (2014); Birkenau, Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany (2016); New Paintings, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (2017); National Gallery, Prague (2017); The Life of Images, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2017–18); Over Schilderen, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium (2017); Abstraktion, Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany (2018); Seascapes, Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (2019); Painting After All, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2020); 00 Selbstbildnisse, Kunst Museum Winterthur, Switzerland (2020); National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2022); 100 Works for Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2023–26) and Hidden Gems. Works from Rhenish Private Collections, Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Germany (2024–25).

#GerhardRichter

GERHARD RICHTER

Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version

Opening reception: Friday, December 6, 2024, 6–8pm

December 6, 2024–February 1, 2025

Via Francesco Crispi 16, Rome

For more information about this exhibition and others presented by Gagosian please visit the gallery’s site here. The gallery can also be found on Pinterest, X, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Artsy.

Gustav Metzger: And Then Came the Environment

Installation view, ‘Gustav Metzger. And Then Came the Environment,’ Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles 13 September 2024 – 12 January 2025 © The Estate of Gustav Metzger and The Gustav Metzger Foundation. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2024. Courtesy The Estate of Gustav Metzger and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Keith Lubow

Los Angeles… Gustav Metzger. And Then Came the Environment,’ opened on the 13th of  September in conjunction with the Getty’s PST ART initiative, ‘Art & Science Collide,’ Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles  presents ‘the pathbreaking late artist’s first solo exhibition in LA and his second major presentation in the United States. ‘And Then Came the Environment’ presents a range of Metzger’s scientific works merging art and science from 1961 onward, highlighting his advocacy for environmental awareness and the possibilities for the transformation of society, as well as his latest experimental works, created in 2014. The exhibition title comes from Metzger’s groundbreaking 1992 essay ‘Nature Demised’ wherein he proclaims an urgent need to redefine our understanding of nature in relation to the environment. Metzger explains that the politicized term ‘environment’ creates a disconnect from the natural world, manipulating public perception to obscure pollution and exploitation caused by wars and industrialization, and that it should be renamed ‘Damaged Nature.’

Gustav Metzger Liquid Crystal Environment 1966/2021  7 Kodak SAV 2050 slide projectors, control units, rotating polarized filters, liquid crystals Dimension variable  Installation view, ‘Gustav Metzger,’ Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton, UK, 2021 © The Estate of Gustav Metzger and The Gustav Metzger Foundation Photo: Ken Adlard 

 An early proponent of the ecology movement and an ardent activist, Gustav Metzger (1926 – 2017) was born in Nuremberg to Polish-Jewish parents, and fled Nazi Germany to England when he was 12 with his brother via the Kindertransport. While working as a gardener, he began his art studies in 1945 in war-embroiled Cambridge, a nexus for scientific experimentation and debate as the Atomic Age was dawning. By the late 1950s, Metzger was deeply involved in anti-nuclear protests and developed his manifestos on ‘auto-destructive’ and ‘auto-creative’ art. These powerful statements were aimed at ‘the integration of art with the advances of science and technology,’ a synthesis that gained wide recognition in Europe in the 1960s through his exhibitions, lecture-demonstrations and writing.

Gustav Metzger Dancing Tubes 1968 Plastic tubing, compressed air Dimensions variable  Photo: Jhoeko West Den Haag

Metzger’s quenchless curiosity about new materials and gadgets—from projectors and electronics to cholesteric liquid crystals and silicate minerals such as ‘mica’—led him to conduct experiments in and out of laboratories in collaboration with leading scientists in an effort to amplify the unpredictable beauty and uncertainty of materials in transformation: ‘the art of change, of movement, of growth.’ By the 1970s, increasingly concerned with ethical ramifications, Metzger became closely involved with the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science, raising awareness of ‘grotesque’ environmental degradation and social alienation and arguing for ‘old attitudes and new skills’ to bring science, technology, society and nature into harmony. He initiated itinerant projects to draw attention to the immense pollution caused by car emissions, a pursuit that gained momentum with his proposal for the first UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 and was later partially realized in 2007 at the Sharjah Biennial.

Installation view, ‘Gustav Metzger. And Then Came the Environment,’ Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles 13 September 2024 – 12 January 2025 © The Estate of Gustav Metzger and The Gustav Metzger Foundation. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2024. Courtesy The Estate of Gustav Metzger and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Keith Lubow

The artworks on view in ‘And Then Came the Environment’ reveal Metzger’s lifelong interest in drawing and gesture, presenting works on paper from the mid-1950s alongside models, installations and later, Light Drawings that underpin the artist’s desire for human interaction amidst the reliance on technology that continues to this day. Following his death, The Gustav Metzger Foundation was established to further Metzger’s work and carry on his legacy. Exhibited for the first time in Los Angeles, works here include the earliest film documentation of Metzger’s bold chemical experiments on the South Bank in London (‘Auto-Destructive Art: The Activities of G. Metzger,’ directed by H. Liversidge, 1963); his first mechanized sculpture with Liquid Crystals—’Earth from Space’ (1966)—and the stunning, large-scale projection, ‘Liquid Crystal Environment’ (1966), one of the earliest public demonstrations of the material that makes Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs), now omnipresent in our computer, telephone and watch screens. ‘And Then Came the Environment’ also presents early kinetic projects Metzger developed in the Filtration Laboratory of the University College of Swansea in 1968 (‘Dancing Tubes’ and ‘Mica Cube’); various iterations of his projects against car pollution including the model ‘Earth Minus Environment’ (1992); and the Light Drawing series (2014), made using fiber-optic light directed by air or hand.

Gustav Metzger giving the Lecture/Demonstration ‘The Chemical Revolution in Art’ at the Society of Arts, Cambridge University, October 11, 1965, with projections of ink in glycerin Photo: Richard Gloucester

The exhibition will be complemented by a new short film created by artist Justin Richburg, who animated Childish Gambino’s 2018 hit ‘Feels like Summer,’ which references climate change. Richburg’s piece was inspired by and responds to Metzger’s 1992 essay ‘Nature Demised.’ The film represents the first time Metzger’s ideas have been directly expressed through a new medium, thus reflecting his interests in ongoing transformation and his conviction that younger generations were the most essential, urgent audiences for his work. In 2012, five years before his death at the age of 90, Metzger wrote:

“The future of the world is what we are after. We start with the young and then when the young are twelve, fifteen, and then twenty-one, they can enter politics, and if they have got this initiation/introduction to key issues … it will make an enormous difference to the future of the world.”

— Gustav Metzger

Gustav Metzger Light Drawing  2014 Photographic print on aluminum, 4 parts Each: 51 x 40.5 x 3 cm / 20 1/8 x 16 x 1 1/8 in Overall: 102 x 81 x 3 cm / 40 1/8 x 31 7/8 x 1 1/8 in Photo: Damian Griffiths

‘And Then Came the Environment’ coincides with two major European institutional exhibitions devoted to Metzger’s oeuvre and contributions: ‘Gustav Metzger. All of Us Together,’ curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Vassilis Oikonomopoulos and Arthur Fouray, at LUMA, Arles, France (30 June 2024 – onwards) and ‘Gustav Metzger,’ curated by Susanne Pfeffer and Julia Eichler, at Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt, Germany (27 July 2024 – 5 January 2025).

Gustav Metzger  Earth Minus Environment (Model) (detail) 1992 Wood, perspex, model cars Unique  122 x 122 cm Plinth 130 x 130 x 45 cm

Publication

On the occasion of the exhibition, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will release ‘Gustav Metzger: Interviews with Hans Ulrich Obrist.’ Drawing from more than two decades of conversations with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine, this richly illustrated volume will offer a comprehensive overview of Metzger’s life, approach to art, and political activism. With a candor that comes from speaking to someone who knows him well, Metzger discusses his childhood in pre-Second World War Nuremberg, his participation in and co-organization of the 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) after his move to London, and his visionary thinking about environmental destruction, among many other topics. This panoramic book, which is complemented with a new, rigorously researched chronology, will be a vital resource for Metzger scholars and newcomers alike. The publication is edited by Karen Marta with the support of Alexander Scrimgeour, managing editor and Michaela Unterdörfer, executive director of Hauser & Wirth Publishers.

A book launch and talk with Hans Ulrich Obrist will be held at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles was held on September 15th at 11 am. While a New York launch event  took place at Hauser & Wirth, 18th Street on 21 September.

Gustav Metzger at his first lecture demonstration at the Temple Gallery, London, June 1960 © National Portrait Gallery, London Photo: possibly by John Cox, for Ida Kar

Learning

A comprehensive learning program, interactive events and additional resources will be developed in conjunction with the exhibition, inspired by the life and work of Gustav Metzger. Further details to be announced in September.

About PST ART

Hauser & Wirth is part of PST ART as a Gallery Program Participant. Returning in September 2024 with its latest edition, ‘PST ART: Art & Science Collide,’ this landmark regional event explores the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty.

Information can be found about ‘PST ART: Art & Science Collide,’ here. Please find information about Gustav’s latest exhibition here and his current book publication here. The magazine did a highlight of Gustav Metzger Interviews with Hans Ulrich Obrist, which can be found here. For more information about the exhibit, please visit the Hauser & Wirth site. Also, follow the gallery on Instagram, Facebook,  X, and YouTube for more updates on this exhibit.

Mark Manders : Self-Portrait as a Building

Photo credit - Simon Bultynck, 2024.

Mark Manders expands his seminal ‘Self-Portrait as a Building’ project with multiple new rooms for his inaugural exhibition with the gallery. Installations referencing domestic spaces, including a bathroom, bedroom and studio, take their place alongside monumental and domestic-scale painted bronzes, mixed-media sculptures, objects, furniture and two-dimensional works. This large-scale exhibition draws together the multiple strands of practice to reveal the depth and breadth of his oeuvre.

Manders has been assembling his ‘Self-Portrait as a Building’ for almost forty years. The underlying concepts are constructed identity and the mind as a physical structure, analogous to a house or building. Every ‘room’ within the imaginary edifice translated into the physical gallery spaces represents a different aspect of Manders’ character or an autobiographical experience. Here, it is important to note that there are two Mark Manders: the person and the persona, the latter of whom is a fictional construct. The building is never finished; it expands ad infinitum. The rooms are furnished and filled with objects. Every element is a unique artwork, painstakingly crafted by the artist. Echoes of earlier pieces abound, while certain elements can be identified in more than one place. Such details link Manders’ works across time and space, and with each other, to form a vast network of interrelated references.

Figure with Thin White Rope, 2005-2023

The exhibition opens in the landscape: Bonewhite Clay Head with Vertical Cloud (2024) and Figure with Two Cloud Paintings (2010-2024) both allude to the sky. The wooden structure in the latter work is familiar but unplaceable: it evokes a hangman’s frame or crucifix, possibly the beams of an architectural structure. The kouros-like figure which references Mind Study (2010-11, Venice Biennale) is captured in a state of suspended movement, either saved by the cord while falling or resisting its razor-sharp hold. The tension is palpable and everything is in perfect balance. The two canvases are white, like clouds. Together with the neutral hues, they lend an indeterminate status to the sculpture: a frozen moment that is both timeless and placeless. Nothing is what it seems and Manders is a master of illusion: this is neither wood nor clay. The artist models his sculptures in these materials before using the lost-wax method to cast them in bronze. They are subsequently painted by hand until the inorganic (metal) becomes indistinguishable from the organic (wood, clay).

Installation View: Mark Manders Self-Portrait as a Building 25 October -21 December 2024courtesy of Xavier Hufkens and HV Studio

My Bed (1992-2024) occupies the garden-facing gallery. One side is filled with architectural maquettes and a collection of objects suggestive of an identity the other is empty. Absence is a familiar theme in the oeuvre, as Manders explains: “All the rooms seem as if they have been left behind by someone… as if the person who has created it has just left. You constantly see someone engaged in either thought processes or physical actions. It’s almost like stepping into a set that has just been vacated. Freezing time and making someone’s thought process visible. It all revolves around that single moment, but sometimes there can be twenty or thirty years in between. Yet it all appears as if it has just happened.” This work expands upon a similar installation that Manders showed at the Van Wassenhove house in 2023. Objects such as the clay figure, books and a pot with brushes make a reappearance, only the bedding has vanished. Stripped bare, so to speak, we can see that the bedframe is wood and the mattress is canvas. Combined, they suggest another plausible reading: the work as a metaphor for painting.

With its strip light and architectural composition, Perspective Study (2005-2024) features the newspapers that Manders devised for his Room With All Existing Words (2005-2022). For this latter project, the artist designed and printed ten newspapers that contain every word in the Oxford English Dictionary, each used once but in random order, to create columns of poetic nonsense. The papers recur throughout the exhibition in various guises, appearing in Figure with Thin White Rope (2005-2024) and compressed into Composition with All Existing Words / Perspective Study (2005- 2023), shown nearby, to name but two instances.

Installation View: Mark Manders Self-Portrait as a Building 25 October -21 December 2024courtesy of Xavier Hufkens and HV Studio

Shadow Study (2023-2024) presides over the garden. With its ancient-looking patina, it resembles a classical sculpture or archaeological relic. Manders often creates work in which wooden elements constrain or split the human figure. These allude to the nature of memory itself: how it can be legible yet fragmented, blocked and trapped, complete yet incomplete.

Isolated Bathroom / Composition with Four Colours (2005-2023) is situated on the first floor. The metal floor is a nod to minimalist sculpture, while the figure devoid of limbs is suggestive of both strength (wood) and vulnerability (clay). The juxtaposition is purely visual: this too is a painted bronze. The figure links back to the earlier Ramble Room Chair (2010), while the four colours new to the oeuvre were inspired by the nearby reenacted and staged photograph Colour Study (2001-2023). The hues recur in Table with Towels (1999-2023) while the original photo reappears in Studio Table (2024).

This latter work, on the third floor, expands on the theme of the desk as the crucible of creativity. The bureau is littered with tools of the artist’s trade drawings, photos and books as well as everyday items, such as dice and sugar cubes. These are not found objects or possessions in the conventional sense of the term: everything has been meticulously crafted by the artist to replicate the original items. Painted bronzes that resemble ancient artefacts can also be found in the studio, including Falling Earring (2024), a work that visualises a fleeting moment in time: a silver hoop tumbling from a notional ear.

Monument, 2024

Floor with Prime Movers (2005-2024), on the lower ground floor, is an installation of Manders’ furniture pieces on steel tiles that, as with the bathroom, allude to minimalism. Every item has been designed and constructed by the artist: an array of objects with which to furnish the rooms of his ever-expanding ‘self-portrait’.

Mark Manders’ work reflects his ongoing exploration of identity, materiality and illusion, language and structure, but also time. While many sculptures resemble archaeological finds, others reference modernism and twentieth-century design: a dissonance that transports us backwards and forwards through the centuries. His works can be seen as spatial materialisations of inner sometimes abstract thoughts, feelings and emotions. References to art history, recurring motifs and the reconfiguration of previous works, all add to the sense of continuity and perpetual transformation in his oeuvre.

About Artist

Mark Manders (b. 1968, Volkel, the Netherlands) currently lives and works in Ronse, Belgium. He will be the subject of two upcoming solo exhibitions: one at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin (October 31, 2024 March 2025), and another at Museum Voorlinden in 2025. Manders represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 2013. He was commissioned by the Public Art Fund to create a large public sculpture for the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park, New York in 2019. Other large-scale outdoor sculptural installations are on display at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and at the Rokin Square in Amsterdam. Public collections include The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Carnegie Museum of Art, PA; Kunsthaus Zürich; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, LA; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center, MN, among others.

For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit Xavier Hufkens’s site here.  The gallery can also be found on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue

Installation view, Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from September 15, 2024, through January 11, 2025. Photo by Jonathan Dorado © 2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

NEW YORK, The Museum of Modern Art presents Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, an exhibition that provides new insights into the interdisciplinary and lesser-known aspects of photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank’s expansive career.On view from September 15, 2024, to January 11, 2025, the exhibition delves into the six decades that followed Frank’s landmark photobook The Americans (1958) until his death in 2019, highlighting his perpetual experimentation and collaborations across various mediums. Coinciding with the centennial of the artist’s birth, and taking its name from his 1980 film, Life Dances On explores Frank’s artistic and personal dialogues with other artists and with his communities. The exhibition features more than 250 objects, including photographs, films, books, and archival materials, drawn from MoMA’s extensive collection alongside significant loans. Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue is organized by Lucy Gallun, Curator, with Kaitlin Booher, Newhall Fellow, and Casey Li, 12 Month Intern, Department of Photography.

Robert Frank. Sick of Goodby’s. 1978. Gelatin silver print, 21 15/16 × 12 11/16″ (55.8 × 32.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. © 2024 The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation

“This exhibition offers visitors a fresh perspective on this beloved and influential artist,” said Gallun. “The enormous impact of Frank’s book The Americans meant that he is often remembered as a solo photographer on a road trip, a Swiss artist making pictures of an America that he traversed as an outsider. And yet, in the six decades that followed, Frank continually forged new paths in his work, often in direct artistic conversation with others, and these contributions warrant closer attention. The pictures, films, and books he made in these years are evidence of Frank’s ceaseless creative exploration and observation of life, at once searing and tender.”

Robert Frank. Cocksucker Blues. 1972. Gelatin silver print, 19 7/8 × 15 7/8″ (50.5 × 40.3 cm). The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation. © 2024 The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation

Organized loosely chronologically, Life Dances On focuses on the theme of dialogue in Frank’s work and reflects on the significance of individuals who shaped his outlook. Frank’s own words are present throughout the exhibition—in the texts he scrawled directly onto his photographic negatives, in the spoken narrative accompanying his films, and in quotes woven into the exhibition catalogue published by MoMA in conjunction with the exhibition. Also revealed throughout the exhibition is Frank’s innovation across multiple mediums, from his first forays into filmmaking alongside other Beat Generation artists, with films such as Pull My Daisy (1959), to the artist’s books he called “visual diaries,” which he produced almost yearly over the last decade of his life.

Robert Frank. Andrea. 1975. Five gelatin silver prints and ink on paper, 10 15/16 × 13 7/8″ (27.8 × 35.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, NY. Gift of the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation in honor of Clément Chéroux and Lucy Gallun. © 2024 The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation

By focusing on dialogue and experimentation, the exhibition explores such enduring subjects as artistic inspiration, family, partnership, loss, and memory through the lens of Frank’s own personal traumas and life experiences. Among the works presented in the exhibition is a selection of photographs drawn from Frank’s footage for his 1980 film Life Dances On. These works reflect on the significance of individuals who shaped Frank’s own outlook—in this case, his daughter Andrea and his friend and film collaborator Danny Seymour. Like much of his work, the film finds its setting in Frank’s own communities in New York City and in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where he and his wife, the artist June Leaf, moved in 1970. An abundance of material was loaned to the exhibition by the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, including works from the artist’s archives that are shown publicly for the first time, as well as personal artifacts, correspondence, and book maquettes.

Robert Frank. Jack Kerouac. 1959. Gelatin silver print, 10 ⅞ x 8 5/16” (27.7 x 21.1 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Robert Frank Collection, Gift of Robert Frank. © 2024 The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation

In conjunction with the exhibition, MoMA presents Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage, an installation in the Morita and Titus galleries, featuring Frank’s previously unseen film and video footage, designed by Frank’s longtime film editor, Laura Israel, and art director Alex Bingham. With the support of the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, Israel and Bingham have crafted a multichannel installation from newly digitized and restored materials unearthed after Frank’s death. On view for the first time, this installation reveals Frank’s restless experimentation and offers an opportunity to encounter the central figures of his life and work in New York, Nova Scotia, and beyond. On the occasion of the exhibition, MoMA will also present a complete retrospective of Robert Frank’s films and videos—many of them newly restored by the Museum. Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage is organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film, with Lucy Gallun, Curator, and Kaitlin Booher, Newhall Fellow, Department of Photography, and the accompanying retrospective of Robert Frank’s films and videos is organized by Siegel.

Installation view, Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from September 15, 2024, through January 11, 2025. Photo by Jonathan Dorado © 2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

MoMA has been exhibiting Frank’s work since 1950, early in his career. In 1962, the Museum featured Frank’s work in a two-person exhibition alongside photographer Harry Callahan. Since then, the Museum has regularly collected and exhibited his work, and today the Museum’s collection includes over 200 of Frank’s photographs. That collection has been built through important gifts from Robert and Gayle Greenhill in 2013, and more recently, a promised gift to the Museum from Michael Jesselson, comprising a remarkable group of works, many of which are presented at MoMA for the first time in this exhibition. In 2015, the artist made an extraordinary gift of his complete film and video works, spanning the entirety of his career in filmmaking. MoMA’s Department of Film has since been engaged in a multiyear restoration project of these materials. Building upon this significant history with the Museum, Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue is the first solo exhibition of Robert Frank’s work at MoMA.

Robert Frank. James Baldwin. c. 1963. Gelatin silver print, 13 15/16 × 9 13/16″ (35.4 × 24.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist. © 2024 The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation

PUBLICATION:

The accompanying publication, edited by Gallun, features photographs, films, books, and archival materials, layered with quotes from Frank on his influences and process. Three scholarly essays, excerpts from previously unpublished video footage, and a rich visual chronology together explore Frank’s ceaseless creative exploration and observation of life. 192 pages, 150 illustrations. Hardcover, $60. ISBN: 978-1-63345-164-3. Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and available at MoMA stores and online at store.moma.org. Distributed to the trade through ARTBOOK|D.A.P. in the United States and Canada, and through Thames & Hudson in the rest of the world.

SPONSORSHIP:

Endowment.

Leadership support for the exhibition is provided by the Noel and Harriette Levine

Generous funding is provided by the Alice L. Walton Foundation.

Additional support is provided by the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York. Major support for the publication is provided by Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder through The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art. Generous funding is provided by the John Szarkowski Publications Fund.FILM SERIES: The Complete Robert Frank: Films and Videos, 1959–2017 November 20–December 11, 2024 The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters

In conjunction with the gallery exhibition Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue and the installation Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage, MoMA presents a complete retrospective of Robert Frank’s films and videos, many of them in new digital preservations and remasters, together with a modest selection of films relating to the artist and his circle of family, friends, and collaborators. Recognizing his uniquely important relationship with MoMA, Frank donated all of his unique film and video materials to its collection in 2015. These works span the entirety of Frank’s moving-image career, from his 1959 Beat psychodrama Pull My Daisy (co-directed by Alfred Leslie and starring the poets Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso; the artists Larry Rivers and Alice Neel; and the actress Delphine Seyrig; with narration by Jack Kerouac) to his 2008 video Fernando, a touching portrait of a Swiss artist friend, and Harry Smith at the Breslin Hotel, 1984 (2017).

Organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film. Thanks to The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, Peter Williamson, Laura Israel, and Nicholas Dawidoff.

Film at MoMA is made possible by CHANEL.

Additional support is provided by the Annual Film Fund. Leadership support for the Annual Film Fund is provided by Debra and Leon D. Black, with major funding from The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP), and The Young Patrons Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

This exhibition  opened September 15, 2024  and will be on view until January 11, 2025 at The Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with Life Dances On, MoMA also presents Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage from September 15, 2024, through March 2025, and The Complete Robert Frank: Films and Videos, 1959–2017 from November 20 through December 11, 2024.

For more information about this exhibition and others at MoMA please visit their site here. The museum can be found on Instagram,  Facebook, X, Threads, TikTok, Spotify, and YouTube.