uzomah ugwu 12/17/24 uzomah ugwu 12/17/24

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.

uzomah ugwu 12/16/24 uzomah ugwu 12/16/24

Loie Hollowell: Overview Effect

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.

uzomah ugwu 12/15/24 uzomah ugwu 12/15/24

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.

uzomah ugwu 12/13/24 uzomah ugwu 12/13/24

Wendell Castle: Cantilever

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.

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.

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.

“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.

uzomah ugwu 12/12/24 uzomah ugwu 12/12/24

Adolph Gottlieb: Vital Images

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.

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.

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ROGER HERMAN: FROM CALIFORNIA WITH LOVE

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

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.

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Robert Frank: Hope Makes Visions

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.

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.

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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.

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

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.

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).

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 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

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Gustav Metzger: And Then Came the Environment

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.

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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

‘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.

uzomah ugwu 12/4/24 uzomah ugwu 12/4/24

Mark Manders : Self-Portrait as a Building

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.

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.

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.

uzomah ugwu 12/2/24 uzomah ugwu 12/2/24

Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue

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.

uzomah ugwu 11/30/24 uzomah ugwu 11/30/24

KAWS + Warhol

Andy Warhol, Train, 1983, © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

The Andy Warhol Museum announces KAWS + Warhol. In celebration of its 30th anniversary, The Warhol presents KAWS + Warhol, the first exhibition to examine the dark themes present in the work of both artists. From skulls to car crashes, both artists deploy their signature bright colors and pop culture references while also presenting the lurid spectacle of death. The dark undercurrents in the work of KAWS and Warhol are magnified and brought into plain sight by presenting the two artists together for the first time.

KAWS and General Mills, Franken Berry Limited Edition Cereal Box, 2022, © KAWS, Photo Brad Bridgers

KAWS will also respond to Warhol’s embrace of commercialism by presenting a new series of paintings, sculptures and installations related to his recent commission with General Mills which inserted his signature characters into the packaging for some of America’s most loved cereal boxes including Frankenberry, Frute Brute, Count Chocula and Boo-Berry. The cereal works will be juxtaposed with Warhol’s iconic Brillo Boxes and his lesser-known series of paintings for children.

Andy Warhol, Little Electric Chair, 1964-65, © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

“KAWS and Warhol share many qualities, from their joyful embrace of commercial ventures to a relentless mining of American culture for inspiration,” said Patrick Moore, director of The Warhol and curator of the exhibition. “However, what most fascinates me with both artists is their ability to delight viewers, especially young people, while exploring dark and serious themes. By pairing these two artists, the museum continues its work to keep Warhol’s legacy relevant and fresh.”

KAWS, *TIDE*, 2020, © KAWS, Photo Farzad Owrang

“Warhol’s bold and unapologetic approach to art continues to inspire generations, and his ability to challenge conventional norms through his work is a testament to his visionary genius. As an artist, I am humbled to be part of an exhibition alongside Warhol at his eponymous museum and to contribute to the ever-evolving legacy of one of the greatest artistic minds of our time,” said KAWS.

In response to The Warhol’s new initiative, The Pop District, KAWS will also present a monumental wooden sculpture in Pop Park, directly across from the museum and visible from its entrance space.

Andy Warhol, Moon Explorer Robot, 1983, © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

KAWS + Warhol is curated by Patrick Moore, director of The Warhol. The exhibition is expected to travel to at least two international venues to be announced.

KAWS, UNTITLED (KIMPSONS), PACKAGE PAINTING SERIES, 2001, © KAWS, Photo Brad Bridgers

A press preview of the exhibition that included a tour with Patrick Moore, director of The Warhol, will took place on Friday, May 17, 2024 at 2 p.m. at The Warhol.

The Warhol receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania; the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; and The Heinz Endowments. Further support is provided by the Allegheny Regional Asset District.

Andy Warhol, Skull, 1976, © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

The Andy Warhol Museum

Located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the place of Andy Warhol’s birth, The Andy Warhol Museum holds the largest collection of Warhol’s artworks and archival materials and is one of the most comprehensive single-artist museums in the world. The Warhol is one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

The Andy Warhol Museum can be found on X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh

Established in 1895 by Andrew Carnegie, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh is a collection of four distinctive museums: Carnegie Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Carnegie Science Center, and The Andy Warhol Museum. The museums reach more than 1.4 million people a year through exhibitions, educational programs, outreach activities, and special events.

The Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh can be found on Facebook.

The exhibition has been on view since May 18, 2024, and will conclude on January 20, 2025.

uzomah ugwu 11/29/24 uzomah ugwu 11/29/24

Kaifan Wang: One Piece

BLUM is pleased to present One Piece, Berlin-based artist Kaifan Wang’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. There is a nomadic underpinning to the way that Wang thinks—this mindset sentimentally unifies the artist’s practice as well as this exhibition. Born in Hohhot, China, an area with a long cultural history that has been buried by rapid urban development, and living in Berlin, Wang is a masterful and worldly storyteller with the unique ability to find overlap between the histories of the Chinese diaspora and the preexisting narratives embedded within the places where he lives or works. For Wang, migration is a means of traversing cultural references across time and space to find meaning in the now.

**Kaifan Wang** *Silver Lining*, 2024 Oil, oil stick, acrylic on canvas 74 3/4 x 94 1/2 x 1 3/4 inches (189.9 x 240 x 4.4 cm) 77 1/4 x 97 x 2 3/4 inches framed (196.2 x 246.4 x 7 cm) Photo: Hannah Mjølsnes © 2024 Kaifan Wang; Courtesy of the artist and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York

The artist draws out disparate references and discursively relates them to one another in surprising ways. Wang nods, for instance, to emigrants from Inner Mongolia through the movement and gestures in his paintings—some strokes moving along the pull of gravity or the natural flow of the composition and others moving against. Bearing in mind the stark contrast between the history of Chinese and Western abstract painting, Wang’s style ruminates on fractured cultural identities and the fluidity of human migration through flowing gestures and plumes of oil, oil stick, and acrylic on canvas—offering conclusions at once intellectual and emotive on a topic that is otherwise quite slippery. While doing research for One Piece, Wang visited Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze (1901–1902), a mural commissioned for the Secession Building in Vienna, Austria in which Klimt depicted Wagner’s literary interpretation of the swelling crescendos and opulence of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony as an expression of desire. As though with a gold thread, Wang draws unlikely parallels between the gold of Klimt’s goldleaf, the sandstorms of the artist’s childhood, and the gold rush that drew in the first generation of Chinese migrants to the United States. Here, gold becomes the intersection of desire and personal memories.

Wang’s painting Gum Shan (2024), for instance, takes its title from a Cantonese name given to San Francisco that translates to “gold mountain.” Gum Shan captures Wang’s vivid visions of the glimmer of hope that might motivate nineteenth century Chinese prospectors arriving in California to mine gold— encouraged to marry and have children, sometimes just months away from their departure dates, they were meant to work hard and send their profits back home. As Wang puts it, “The inherent contradiction in the relationship between searching and desire is bondage.” The yearning for happiness can be a yoke along the path to autonomy.

One Piece, a Japanese manga and animation, is a story of risk-taking, adventurous seafarers, each representing different civilizations and spirits. All characters in this tale are driven to find the ultimate treasure of a fabled prize known as the one piece—although its nature is shrouded in mystery, this treasure unifies the characters in a common trajectory. This idea pervades Wang’s practice, apparent in the fusion of his vast array of references as well as each individual story. Reverse Mountain (2024) is a surrealist landscape. Its water flows upward along a golden mountain range toward the important gateway to the New World. Calm Belt (2024) is the impediment posed toward those who want to enter this same world. In this peaceful vignette, there is neither wind nor currents that could propel a ship toward successful passage to the coveted destination.

**Kaifan Wang** *Reverse Mountain*, 2024 Oil, oil stick, acrylic on canvas 86 5/8 x 59 x 1 3/4 inches (220 x 149.9 x 4.4 cm) 89 x 61 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches framed (226.1 x 156.2 x 7 cm) Photo: Hannah Mjølsnes © 2024 Kaifan Wang; Courtesy of the artist and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York

One Piece coincides with the release of Kaifan Wang’s first monograph. Eponymously titled, this in- depth exploration of the artist’s practice features essays by Xiaoyu Weng, Martin Herbert, and Marta Gnyp.

About the Artist

Kaifan Wang (b. 1996, Hohhot, China) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He studied in Shanghai and Florence before completing his Fine Arts education at the Universität der Künste, Berlin, Germany in 2022. Wang has exhibited his work in prominent group exhibitions, including Out of Silence: A Yuz Foundation Collection, Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2024); Supercrowds/Super community, TANK Shanghai, China (2024); Border crossing: Possibilities and Interactions, Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2023); Briefly Gorgeous, Songwon Art Center, Seoul, South Korea (2023); Temporary Chapter, Wilhelm Hallen, Berlin, Germany (2022); Caused BY Hair, Shanghai Himalayas Museum, Shanghai, China (2019); and FLUXUS+Studis, FLUXUS+ Museum, Potsdam, Germany (2019). Wang was featured in Influential 2023: Forbes China Contemporary Young Artists and won the Ivan Juritz Prize 2022, funded by King’s College London and Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy. He also received the HypoVereinsbank KunstCUBEs One-Year Artist Grant. The first monograph of his work will be released in October 2024

About BLUM

BLUM represents more than sixty artists and estates from seventeen countries worldwide, nurturing a diverse roster of artists at all stages of their practices with a range of global perspectives. Originally opened as Blum & Poe in Santa Monica in 1994, the gallery has been a pioneer in its early commitment to Los Angeles as an international arts capital.

The gallery has been acclaimed for its groundbreaking work in championing international artists of postwar and contemporary movements, such as CoBrA, Dansaekhwa, Mono-ha, and Superflat, and for organizing museum-caliber solo presentations and historical survey exhibitions across its spaces in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and New York. Often partnering with celebrated curators and scholars such as Cecilia Alemani, Alison M. Gingeras, Sofia Gotti, Joan Kee, and Mika Yoshitake, the gallery has produced large- scale exhibitions focusing on the Japanese Mono-ha school (2012); the Korean Dansaekhwa monochrome painters (2014); the European postwar movement CoBrA (2015); Japanese art of the 1980s and 1990s (2019); a rereading of Brazilian Modernism (2019); a revisionist take on the 1959 MoMA exhibition, New Images of Man (2020); and a survey of portraiture through a democratic and humanist lens (2023); among others.

BLUM’s wide-reaching program includes exhibitions, lectures, performance series, screenings, video series, and an annual art book fair at its base in Los Angeles. BLUM Books, the gallery’s publishing division, democratically circulates its program through original scholarship and accessible media ranging from academic monographs, audio series, magazines, to artists’ books.

Across the three global locations, BLUM prioritizes environmental and community stewardship in all operations. In 2015, it was certified as an Arts:Earth Partnership (AEP) green art gallery in Los Angeles and consequently became one of the first green certified galleries in the United States. The gallery is also a member of the Gallery Climate Coalition, which works to facilitate a more sustainable commercial art world and reduce the industry’s collective carbon footprint. BLUM is committed to fostering inclusive and equitable communities both in its physical and online spaces and believes that everybody should have equal access to creating and engaging with contemporary art.

At the BLUM Los Angeles location, the exhibition opened on November 2 and will be on view until December 21, 2024. There was an opening reception on Saturday, November 2, from 5–7pm.

For more information about this exhibition and others please visit Blum’s website here. The gallery can also be found on Instagram.

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Yu Hong: Islands of the Mind

For her first solo exhibition in London, Yu Hong presents a series of large-scale new acrylic-on-canvas paintings. Based between Beijing and New York, the artist, who has been described as one of the most important voices of her generation, unveils a selection of poignant and poetic paintings that each explore a distinctive state of mind or consciousness.

Inspired by Arnold Böcklin Island of the Dead (1880-1901), this suite of paintings expands on the body of work unveiled in Yu Hong’s solo exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah in 2023, and follows her first major exhibition in Europe, where she transformed the Chiesetta della Misericordia in Venice through a series of new works organized by The Asian Art Initiative of the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Yu Hong Island of Love, 2023 Acrylic on canvas 300 x 250 x 4.5 cm 118 1/8 x 98 3/8 x 1 3/4 in © Yu Hong, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

For this presentation, Yu Hong focuses on the concept of psychological landscapes, with each painting embodying an emotion or experience that unites us all: be it love, expectation, survival, oblivion or repose. In each of these works we witness the complexity of these experiences; the light with the dark. In Island of Love (2023), we discover a tender, seemingly blissful scene with two entwined figures intimately cocooned within a pink blossom tree, the lovers’ outstretched arms uniting above them in a symbol of hope. Yet on a towering flowering foundation they are alone in a vast expanse of water. The foreboding sea, with its waves pounding against the rock, becomes one with the sky, painted in what could be perceived as a heavenly, golden glow or a tempestuous volatility. In Island of Life (2024) there is a similar evocative glow, with two reclining figures perhaps Adam and Eve, with the lush apple tree and exotic birds beside them only visible by their legs. The painting, depicting equally solitary figures with just the sea beneath them, can be seen as a metaphor for paradise and the contradictions of life: the balance between joy and suffering, strength and weakness, temptation and control, love and loss.

Yu Hong Island of Expectation, 2024 Acrylic on canvas 250 x 300 x 4.5 cm 98 3/8 x 118 1/8 x 1 3/4 in © Yu Hong, courtesy Lisson Gallery

Like many artists, Yu Hong gravitates toward the ocean as a recurring motif, symbolising depth, beauty, constant change, and the undercurrent layers of emotion. In Island of Expectation (2024) we see a young female figure, with her back to the viewer, sitting atop a high, laddered chair gazing out at a dramatic, turbulent sea, captured at the moment of the eruption of a powerful wave. In many of there is a sense that the character is on the edge, suspended in time, and often confronted with an extreme weather pattern, from rising sea levels to blazing tornados. In Island of Repose (2024) a lone female figure shelters her face with her arms as the sea prepares to wash over her; in Metropolis Island (2024), three adolescent girls converse on spiral staircases which surround a broken chimney while the world combusts beneath them; and in Island of Oblivion (2024) a group of contorted figures find refuge behind a rock, their bodies merging with their form of protection.

The exhibition also features Night Walk (2023), a monumental three-panel work referencing Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Blind Leading the Blind (1568). In this biblical, otherworldly painting, a line of adults bearing sticks with closed eyes cross a burning volcanic landscape, one of them riding a tricycle holding a group of wide-eyed children, with a screaming, chained monkey trailing behind. The procession, following two other (also blind) figures leading the way, impels the viewer to understand the individuals also as an entity as a group endeavour with a shared destiny.

Yu Hong Island of Survival, 2024 Acrylic on canvas 250 x 300 x 4.5 cm 98 3/8 x 118 1/8 x 1 3/4 in © Yu Hong, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

One of the final and most dramatic works in the exhibition is Island of Survival (2024), depicting a frenzy of figures wrestling, twisted and writhing atop a platform set against a rendering of The Sea (c.1865). There is a sense of instability and unpredictability, heightened by the dark, tumultuous sea, but a brief break in the sky serves as a nod to the possibility of personal experiences living between East and West, witnessing the considerable changes that have taken place in contemporary life during this time, this new body of work reflects on our shifting, precarious state and provides a cathartic opportunity to both immerse ourselves in the deepest, darkest waters, and return to witness an opening in the clouds.

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Installation view: Yu Hong, Islands of the Mind, Lisson Gallery London (27 September – 9 November 2024) © Yu Hong, Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

About Yu Hong

Portrait of Yu Hong, from 'Women in Motion' by Kering 喻红, 2021. Photographer ©️ gregmei. Courtesy Lisson Gallery

A painter of epic scenes and intimate moments, Yu Hong constructs modern-day fables and complex, allegorical compositions by channelling historical, narrative- caught in extremis: floating on clouds, climbing vertiginous mountains or walking through flames as if to hell all variously suffering the ecstasies and tribulations of existence. Yet her fantastical worlds are inhabited by real people, featuring portrayals of friends, acquaintances and family members, revealing a personal and touching dimension to the sweeping cycles of paintings that she produces over long periods of time. Her lifelong autobiographical project, Witness to Growth, begun in the 1990s as a series of diptychs, charts her own life juxtaposed with news clippings from each era, now with the addition of her daughter’s milestones running alongside her own. As well as elevating people and their bodies to otherworldly, uncompromising and often female celestia intense lows of depression, urban deprivation and social alienation, as in her apocalyptic Earth and Heaven (2014), or when tumbling from her Ladder to the Sky (2008). The latter image not only borrows from a medieval precedent (The Ladder to Paradise in the Egyptian Monastery of St Catherine), but utilises a gold background, which she has employed since 2010, in order to iconise and foreground her cast of modern- ake in the styles, ideologies and ambitions of both Eastern and Western Old Masters, from cave paintings to Renaissance altarpieces recently echoing Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, for the piled-up mound of humans and animals in Pyramid Blind Leading the Blind, across three panels of her blazing Night Walk handling can also scale down to the depiction of an individual lost in thought, or to a pair of hands locked in a gesture of tender internalisation.

Yu Hong was born in 1966 in Xi’an, China. In 1984, she studied oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing and graduated from the oil painting department in 1988. Since 1988 she has been a teacher at CAFA. Yu Hong’s first major exhibition in Europe, ‘Yu Hong: Another One Bites the Dust’ opened at the Chiesetta della Misericordia in Venice as a special off-site exhibition of the Asian Art Initiative of the Guggenheim Museum, New York in April 2024. Her first major American museum show was held at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA, in 2023 and her work was featured in ‘Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World’ (2017) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Recent solo exhibitions in China include: ‘The World of Saha’ (2019) at Long Museum, Shanghai; ‘Garden of Dreams’ (2016) at the CAFA Art Museum, Beijing; ‘Concurrent Realms’ (2015) at the Suzhou Museum; ‘Golden Horizon’ (2011) at the Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai and ‘Golden Sky’ (2010) at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

About Lisson Gallery

Lisson Gallery is one of the most influential and longest-running international contemporary art galleries in the world. Today the gallery supports and promotes the work of more than 60 international artists across two spaces in London, two in New York, one in Shanghai and Beijing, as well as a forthcoming gallery in Los Angeles, opening 15 April. Established in 1967 by Nicholas Logsdail, Lisson Gallery pioneered the early careers of important Minimal and Conceptual artists, such as Art & Language, Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, Donald Judd, John Latham, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long and Robert Ryman among many others. It still works with many of these artists as well as others of that generation from Carmen Herrera to the renowned estate of Leon Polk Smith. In its second decade the gallery introduced significant British sculptors to the public for the first time, including Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, Shirazeh Houshiary and Julian Opie. Since 2000, the gallery has gone on to represent many more leading international artists such as Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, John Akomfrah, Susan Hiller, Tatsuo Miyajima and Sean Scully. It is also responsible for raising the international profile of a younger generation of artists led by Cory Arcangel, Ryan Gander, Van Hanos, Hugh Hayden, Haroon Mirza, Laure Prouvost, Pedro Reyes, Wael Shawky and Cheyney Thompson.

Yu Hong - Islands of the Mind opened on September 27th and will close on December 14th at 67 Bell Street, London. There was an opening on the 26th of September from 6 – 8pm.

For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Lisson Gallery here. The gallery can also be found on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

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Dexter Dalwood: English Painting

*P u n k I s D e a d* 2023 Oil on canvas 90 x 120 cm 35 3/8 x 47 1/4 in DAL W230004 GBP 60,000
Comprising an imagined portrait of the infamous London punk venue, the Roxy Club, ‘Punk Is Dead’ is a reference to the history of the British music scene and Dalwood’s own history. Dalwood played bass guitar in punk band, The Cortinas, who played at the Roxy alongside The Jam, The Stranglers and Sex Pistols.
Dalwood returns to the pictorial device of a puddle or ellipsis to reflect the façade of the now defunct venue. Speaking on his experience of the 1970s London punk scene the artist describes being “totally caught up in how it broke like a wave over the over-indulgent, and to me addled, British music scene”
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‘Punk is Dead’ is the melancholic aftermath of this deluge exploring how the Artist’s lived experience has become a fixed moment in history that has been contained to the specific moment in time.

Dexter Dalwood’s inaugural exhibition with Lisson Gallery represents a return to the artist’s homeland and to the subject of what it might mean to be an ‘English’ painter. After an initial period at a residency in Mexico in 2017, Dalwood moved there to live and work fulltime, since 2022. Now, from this relative distance, he has begun to re- consider his attachments with English art history and the culture of his youth, growing up in 1970s and ’80s Britain. The question of whether national identity can be determined or distilled through art is explored in this new group of paintings that consider the legacies of traditional genres, such as landscape or the lowlier practice of horse portraiture, all the way up to twentieth-century movements including the Bloomsbury Group and Pop Art.

Installation View of Dexter Dalwood’s *English Painting* Centering’ at Lisson, Gallery 67 Lisson Street, London, 27th September – December 14th, 2024 © Dexter Dalwood, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Dalwood’s complex painterly surfaces blend styles and moments from different eras. His diptych Track and Turf 1754 (all works 2023 or 2024) repeats the date 1754 – when Stubbs began dissecting and painting horses in Lincolnshire – in gold across a coloured ground similar to British racing green, next to a detail of a horse painted by Reynolds (considered the more famous and successful artist). Another date painting, Boleskine House 1973, refers to a property next to Loch Ness in Scotland bought by the lead guitarist of Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page, who was briefly obsessed by the nefarious activities of its previous owner, the occultist and black magician, Aleister Crowley, although the ghostly visage reflected at the foot of the painting is from a Black Sabbath record, with lead singer Ozzy Osbourne releasing the song ‘Mr Crowley’. Another glimpsed view occurs within a giant tree trunk, titled Avalon, which splits to partially reveal a scene from Arthurian legend painted by Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones, also a surprising source of inspiration for rock guitarist Page.

Another absent but important figure in the exhibition is David Bowie, whose presence is merely suggested by the title Languid Ziggy. A red, minimalist backdrop is disturbed by a pair of languorous legs, perhaps hinting to the way in which Bowie has embodied ‘style’, from 19th century dandyism all the way to 20th century fashion as high art. A further moment of modernism interrupted here – in Dalwood’s painting Northern Pop – is the work of Jasper Johns, one of whose famous hatched grey paintings has been usurped by English county names – Yorkshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire – suggesting a humorous swipe at the greyness of the weather, although not everything Johns labelled was quite as it seemed.

*R i s e U p* 2024 Oil on canvas 201 x 251.5 cm 79 1/8 x 99 in DAL W240001 GBP 120,000
'Rise Up responds to the music culture in both London and Bristol and Dalwood’s personal connection with each location. He was born in the latter but moved to London as a teenager . Dalwood’s painting of a life-size sound system calls to mind the eclectic atmosphere of Notting Hill Carnival, London and St Paul’s Carnival, Bristol. During these events the streets are flooded with people dancing to music from homemade, painted up sound systems much like the one depicted here and celebrating Caribbean culture and diaspora. Formally this composition references the Modernist grid and Peter Halley’s colour palette.

While the links between these paintings are not often immediately evident, among them are hints and clues to wider topics and traits – such as music, mysticism and melancholy – that could all arguably be associated with that intangible term, ‘Englishness’. There are autobiographical nods to the artist’s own musical heritage in images such as Rise Up, a riotously colourful carnival sound system and a clear example of the sample-heavy undertones running through every one of these paintings, as well as in Punk is Dead, recalling the now defunct Roxy Club and Dalwood’s time with Bristol-based punk band The Cortinas.

In addition to upending traditions of painting and reflecting on the status and meaning of cultural moments past, Dalwood also tackles seismic historic monuments and events associated with the heritage of this Sceptred Isle. Bloody Sunday is a numerical panorama that abstracts and honours the 13 civilians killed by British soldiers stationed in Northern Ireland in 1972, while The Blitz makes oblique reference to the removal of paintings from the walls of the National Gallery in expectation of German bombing raids over London in the 1940s.About the artist

Installation View of Dexter Dalwood’s English Painting Centering’ at Lisson, Gallery 67 Lisson Street, London, 27th September – December 14th, 2024 © Dexter Dalwood, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

An avowed master of contemporary history painting for over three decades, Dexter Dalwood translates real-world events into imagined and composite landscapes, furthering the language and narratives of his chosen medium, while acknowledging the weight of all that has come before. An acute understanding and referencing of past artistic genres has recently given way to a style all his own: one that evades figurative tropes, in favour of uninhabited and uncertain spatial concerns, shifting scales and compressed picture planes. The artist’s famed, fictional interiors of Kurt Cobain’s Greenhouse (2000) or Wittgenstein’s Bathroom (2001), executed with knowing painterly flourishes and references – ranging from Willem de Kooning and Clyfford Still to Manet, Munch and Bellini – have since been concentrated down into constricted views from inside an airplane or else expanded through windows into Dalwoodesque spaces that are at one further remove from any original source material. The increasing presence of textual or numerical impositions on the canvases, in addition to abstract passages of gestural and frontal mark making, likewise signifies a distillation and honing of this practice.

Sites of trauma depicted in earlier works such as Brian Jones' Swimming Pool (2000) and the imagined view out of W.G. Sebald’s wrecked car in The Crash (2008), for example, have been replaced with an unnamed sense of foreboding, perhaps evoked by a still from a 24-hour newsfeed, or by the myriad potentialities of a mirrored puddle or a glimpsed ceiling rose. Dalwood’s fragmentary, sample-heavy aesthetic, which often begins with pencil or cut paper studies, goes far beyond a locus for postmodern quotation and displacement. Instead, his paintings enact a dizzying layering of the thought processes behind painting, on top of the vast back catalogue of art history, added to various ongoing bodies of research, as well as an appreciation of the importance of time and memory as touchstones for creating newly epochal images.

About Artist

Dexter Dalwood (born Bristol, UK, 1960) is based in Mexico City. In 2017 he undertook a residency in Oaxaca and made a series titled An Inadequate Painted History of Mexico on his return to London, which has since featured in the touring show, 'Esto No Me Pertenece' at Centro de las Artes San Agustín, Oaxaca, Mexico and Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL), Mexico City, Mexico (2021-22). Dalwood’s other major solo museum shows include: Kunsthaus Centre PasquArt, Biel, Switzerland (2013); CAC Málaga, Spain (2010); FRAC Champagne-Ardennes, Reims, France (2010) and Tate, St. Ives, UK (2010). His work has featured in recent group exhibitions including: ‘The Paradoxes of Internationalism. Part I’, at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (until 1 October, 2023); 'You to Me, Me to You', A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa (until 18 Nov 2023); ‘Modern Media Networks: Painting and Mass Media’, Tate Modern, London, UK (2020); ‘Hello World. Revising a Collection’, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2018); ‘Michael Jackson: On the Wall’, National Portrait Gallery, London, UK touring to Grand Palais, Paris, France, Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany and Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland (all 2018-19).

About Lisson Gallery

Dexter Dalwood’s English Painting Opened on September 27th and will close on December 14th at 67 Lisson Street, London. There was an opening on the 26th of September from 6 – 8pm.

For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Lisson Gallery here. The gallery can also be found on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

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ANTOINE ROEGIERS : THE GREAT PARADE

Installation view: The Great Parade, Templon Gallery, Paris, October 30th to December 21, 2024. Photo Credit: Laurent Edeline

Belgian artist Antoine Roegiers is presenting his work for the first time at Galerie Templon’s Paris location this autumn. Since 2018, Antoine Roegiers has been deeply immersed in his ongoing visual narrative project, a series of paintings that collectively tell a single, evolving story. This narrative unfolds in a fluid, non-linear manner, devoid of a defined conclusion, blending humor, solemnity, and poetry to provoke reflection on the contemporary world while inviting us to laugh at our own absurdities. His inaugural exhibition at Galerie Templon in Brussels in 2023 left the story at a pivotal moment, as nature reclaimed its domain following a massive fire.

In this new chapter, titled The Great Parade, Roegiers presents thirteen oil paintings that draw heavily from the Romantic tradition. The motifs of fires, stray dogs, masks, crows, and forests — elements from the previous show — reappear, but are now joined by fresh symbols that further enrich the narrative. Among these new elements are a relentless grand duke, a mysterious eclipse, and the grotesque return of humanity: a slow-moving, mechanical procession of masked figures reminiscent of James Ensor’s musicians, blind to the world’s deteriorating state.

Roegiers’ mischievous wit is on full display, offering a sharply satirical portrayal of the disconnect between the flamboyant, raucous parade and the ruined world it marches through, all under the bewildered gaze of a pack of emaciated dogs.

Installation view: The Great Parade, Templon Gallery, Paris, October 30th to December 21, 2024. Photo Credit: Laurent Edeline

“I wanted to reintroduce people into my story to express my own despair at the madness of society, the helplessness that often engulfs us,” Roegiers explains. “In “La mélancolie du déserteur” — a self-portrait — I depict a disoriented figure, unsure of how to handle the boldness of his departure from the collective. The eclipse serves as a reminder of our insignificance, mere specks of confetti in the vast expanse of the universe.”

Born in 1980 in Belgium, Antoine Roegiers lives and works in Paris. He fuses his knowledge of classic painting with contemporary animation techniques. Putting technology and his talent for drawing to good use, he breathes life into the fantastical characters typical of the Flemish masters, taking liberties with them and inventing stories that never stay still. His work has been shown in a range of solo exhibitions, including at the Noordbrabant Museum in Hertogenbosch, Netherlands, Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, France, in 2012 and Botanique in Brussels in 2013. His art has also featured in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Frissiras Museum in Athens (2003), Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard in Paris (2009), Kulturhuset Museum in Stockholm (2012), Petit Palais in Paris (2013), Palais Pisztory in Slovakia (2013), Paço das Artes in Sao Paulo (2013), Albertina Museum in Vienna (2013), Contemporary Art Collection of the City of Geneva (2013), Bruce Museum in Greenwich, USA (2015), Palacio Bellas Artes and National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City (2018), Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (2019), Cité de la Musique Philharmonie in Paris (2021), MO.CO in Montpellier (2023), Château du Rivau in Lémeré, France (2024) and Wasserman Projects in Detroit, USA (2024). It is also included in the Contemporary Art Collection of the City of Geneva and the Ministry of the French Community of Belgium's collections. Antoine Roegiers has won several prizes, including the Molière de la Création Visuelle (2020) and Roger Bataille Prize (2007).

His work will be included in Painters’ Day, a group exhibition at Paris' Musée d’Orsay, in September 2024 and currently features in the Hybrids exhibition at the De Warande cultural centre in Turnhout, Belgium, running until 13 October 2024. He has also been asked to take part in the ENNOVA International Art Biennale in Langfang City, China, from 24 October 2024 to 30 April 2025.

ANTOINE ROEGIERS Le grand incendie, 2024 Huile sur toile | Oil on canvas 130 × 162 cm — 51 1/4 × 63 3/4 in Courtoisie de l'artiste et Templon, Paris – Bruxelles - New York | Courtesy of the artist and Templon, Paris – Brussels - New York Photo © Laurent Edeline

The exhibition opened on October 30th and will be on view until December 21st of this year.For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Templon’s Gallery website here. Antoine’s interview with the magazine can be found here.

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I Was Carefree, Green, and Golden

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Installation View: I Was Carefree, Green, and Golden 2024 Photo Credit: Isabel Sullivan Gallery and Artist 39 Lispenard Street New York, NY 10013

On view thru Dec. 31 at the newly opened Isabel Sullivan Gallery (39 Lispenard Street), I Was Carefree, Green, and Golden brings together the work of 3 female representational painters whose beautiful works encompass figurative & landscape paintings: Antonia Caicedo Holguín (b. 1997, Colombia), Joana Galego (b. 1994, Portugal), and Stephanie Monteith (b. 1973, Australia). Marking the first time Holguín and Monteith’s work will be shown in the US, these 3 exceptional artists are linked by a joint interest in and unique approach to the use of bold colors in painting, each culling ideas and images from personal experience, along with the verdant landscapes of their diverse home countries. Overlapping themes include imagination, place and memory, love and connection, everyday life, and the natural world. The title of the show is drawn from the Dylan Thomas poem “Fern Hill,” a temporal and evocative piece of writing that depicts the pastoral and idyllic scenes of the Welsh countryside, where the writer spent his youth. Collectively, this exhibition invites the viewer to explore their own history and identity, and the spaces we create and inhabit – both past and present, interior and exterior, empirical and mystical.

Isabel Sullivan who loves working with international artists; it always fascinates, inspires, and enlightens her to see the ways in which different cultures influence them. With her new gallery which opened earlier this year, she is excited to share those unique and diverse experiences and perspectives, with a particular interest in showcasing women artists and using her platform to expose emerging and mid-career artists from around the world to the U.S. market.

Antonia Caicedo Holguin Her Heart Sets the Beat, 2024 Acrylic, oil, and pastels on canvas 68 x 63 in

Antonia Caicedo Holguín is deeply influenced by her hometown of Cali, Colombia, from the people who inhabit the city to the vibrant salsa music and dance culture of the region. Caicedo Holguín’s exuberant paintings are charged with a kinetic and soulful energy that pulls us into compelling scenes of song, dance and kinship. “A key component of my practice is the playfulness of writing narratives. The characters I build hold the charm, depth, and presence of literary protagonists.” She works with a variety of materials, including oil paint and unconventional materials like coffee grounds, coffee dyes, natural Latin American pigments, and found objects. Her work focuses on common settings and everyday actions, with a recurring emphasis on human figures.

Joana Galego *If Now Then At Least Now,* 2023 Acrylic, charcoal, soft pastel on canvas 72 x 50 in

Central themes in the romantic paintings of Joana Galego are memory, moments of gathering, and expressions of connection. Galego combines observational drawing, imagination and drawing from reference photos, often starting from a tender personal experience. “Surprise and mystery are important to me. I look for images that deeply engage the senses, mind, and, for lack of a better word, the spirit. I’m particularly interested in making work that asks questions rather than making statements.” Galego grew up in Cascais, Portugal, between the Sintra mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, a coastal town whose biodiversity profoundly influenced her imagery and imagination. Galego created a monumental work for this exhibition spanning 10 feet in length, titled Our Mother’s Cloak, a loose reference to Piero della Francesca’s Madonna of Mercy. Our Mother’s Cloak depicts three childlike figures hiding under a cloak, a powerful symbol of protection, concealment, or escape. She probes viewers to question the nature of innocence, purity, and care, in compositions that combine the spiritual and physical realms.

Stephanie Monteith *End of Day*, 2024 Oil on linen 36 x 48 in

Stephanie Monteith observes objects, interior spaces, landscapes, people, and animals, and their interactions with one another. She is interested in the wonder and interconnectedness of all life. The paintings in the exhibition are from her Suburban Garden Series, a series depicting her lush garden on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia. She completes her radiant canvases en plein air. “In the mornings the sun comes into the garden and creates color spaces which I observe. I see differences in tone, light and atmosphere changing all of the time and I respond with paint.” The artist originally set about making a garden that would be interesting to paint. She selected and arranged native Australian plants chosen for their color and texture, amongst some already established vegetation. Having explored this subject from 2018-2022, Monteith created four new garden paintings in 2024 for this exhibition that capture natural transformation and the mood of a place over time.

For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit Isabel Sullivan Gallery's website here.

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Brandon Deener : Resonance

View of the exhibition *Resonance* à la Galerie 75 Faubourg, Paris, France. Photo : Grégory Copitet. © Brandon Deener. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Without Walls

In the course of their 30-plus years of friendship, Tony Shafrazi and Enrico Navarra have often thought of organizing a joint exhibition, but being both bubbling with activity, they never found the time. It is therefore with great emotion that Doriano Navarra welcomed at Galerie 75 Faubourg this exhibition curated by Tony Shafrazi /Gallery Without Walls and Galerie Enrico Navarra Tony Shafrazi / Gallery Without Walls and Doriano Navarra / Galerie Enrico Navarra are pleased to present “Resonance” at Galerie 75 Faubourg, Los Angeles-based artist Brandon Deener’s first solo exhibition in Paris, featuring 15 large-scale oil paintings. The title highlights the striking result of combining more than one element— within music, painting, and among people, with a particular emphasis on the splendor and pleasure of jazz, as seen in the focused expression of Miles Davis playing trumpet (Sketches of Miles [all works 2024]), the vibrant depiction of John Coltrane with two saxophones (Soprano and Tenor), and the tightly packed crowd of Tennessee teenagers blowing various brass instruments (The Aristocrat of Bands).

One of the largest canvases in the exhibition, Players of the Horn, gives homage to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Horn Players, 1983. Both paintings feature jazz legends Charlie Parker playing sax and Dizzy Gillespie playing trumpet. In Deener’s work, the musicians are loosely rendered wearing pastel suits, while the abstract background of dark washes conjures the more dreamlike, emotive world of music. For Deener, the oft-repeated motif of horn blowing in the exhibition represents a resonant wake up call to social, political, and spiritual consciousness.

Other art works in the show relate more explicitly to the artist’s interest in Afrofuturism, including Statuesque , a majestic painting featuring the head and elongated neck of a model in front of

luscious cadmium red curtains. Sonic Salute similarly renders the long neck of a model wearing sunglasses and long teal gloves, whose angular figure calls to mind Amedeo Modigliani. In both cases, the artist altered source images using Photoshop to create his preferred compositions. The shine of the models’ skin and the length of their necks evoke the dignity and pride of heads “held high.” As with other works in this show, Statuesque and Sonic Salute embody an optimistic and confident look to the future— a visualization of the world Deener desires so that it may become manifest.

Courtesy the artist and Gallery Without Walls

Brandon Deener (born in Memphis, Tennessee, 1982) has had solo exhibitions at Simchowitz Gallery, LA; Jac Forbes Gallery, LA; A Hug from the Artworld, NY; and Gallery One, Fort Lauderdale, among other venues. His paintings have been written about in publications including The Guardian, Artlyst, Culture Is Free, Sugarcane, and Art of Choice. Deener’s art works are included in museums and institutions such as Amorepacific Corporation, The Hall Foundation, The Crocker Art Museum, The Fairfield University Art Museum, and in the personal collections of Carmelo Anthony, Ingrid Best, Hebru Brantley, Jaha Johnson, Bruno Mars, Ayesha Selden, and Usher.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated 120-page monograph designed by Sebastien Moreu. For more information about this exhibition, please visit the Galerie Enrico Navarra site here. Brandon’s interview with the magazine can be found here.

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BILAL HAMDAD: Reflets

Galerie Templon’s Brussels space is inaugurating the new art season with an exhibition of work by young figurative painter Bilal Hamdad.

Born in 1987, Bilal Hamdad trained as a painter in Sidi Bel Abbes before moving to France to study. He graduated from the Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2018, and quickly made a name for himself with his strikingly naturalistic canvases exploring contemporary solitude. He borrowed to socialist realism to develop a body of work marked by a long process of observation and exploration of society. Often haunted by the question of isolation in the public space, his paintings tackle crowd phenomena as well as themes of intimacy, sharing and mixing.

Toutes les images / All images: © Courtesy of the artist and TEMPLON, Paris - Brussels - New York

The artist unveils a dozen brand-new canvases, including four large format and a handful of medium format pieces. Created during his residency at Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, Hamdad found inspiration in the Spanish masters - Velázquez to Goya - as well as artists influenced by Hispanic culture, such as Rubens and Manet. Reminiscences of their works - café scenes, opulent draperies, ghostly figures - appear in disturbing chiaroscuro effects. By combining scenes of urban gatherings with the issues of the great masters, Bilal Hamdad builds bridges between past and present, and opens up his painting to a multitude of interpretations. Beyond the homage, his canvases evoke visual palimpsests of a new kind that question both the ambiguity of our times and the relevance of painting today.

Bilal Hamdad’s work has featured in a wide range of solo and group exhibitions, including at the Louvre Lens (2024), Mo.Co Panacée, Montpellier (2023), La Biennale de Paname, Paris (2023), Le Suquet des Artistes, Cannes (2022) and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2018). His art has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Prix Fondation François Schneider (2023) and Prix Fondation Colas (2020), and features in several collections, including at the Fondation François Schneider, Wattwiller, northeast France (2023), Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, Paris (2022), Fondation Colas, Paris (2020) and The Sarr Collection (2019).

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Refets opened at the Templon Gallery on September 12th and will be on view until October 31st. An exhibition of his work at the Fondation François Schneider will open on 25 October 2024, and in November 2025 his piece Rive droite will be shown as part of an exhibition celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Musée de l’Immigration collection.

For more information about Bilal Hamdad’s artwork and his exhibition, please visit Templon’s site. The gallery can also be found on Instagram, artnet, Facebook, YouTube, and Artsy.