uzomah ugwu 6/9/23 uzomah ugwu 6/9/23

ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS by Martine Gutierrez

Aphrodite from ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS, 2021 chromogenic print, hand-distressed welded aluminum frame © Martine Gutierrez, courtesy of the artist, RYAN LEE Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS, a daring new body of work by artist Martine Gutierrez. The series continues her exploration of identity across the cultural landscapes of gender, race, and celebrity. In 17 new works, Gutierrez has transformed herself into a multitude of idols—a selection from the series comprises Gutierrez’s second exhibition with the gallery. Costumed by the barest of essentials, Gutierrez’s figure is the catalyst, reflecting dystopian futurism upon the symbols of our past. Through each metamorphosis, Gutierrez re-envisions a diverse canon of radical heroines who have achieved legendary cultural influence over thousands of years in both art history and pop culture.

Still a patriarchal language, a determinative frame. Still a divisional boundary of womanhood, a categorization of the icon, a spiritual reality in mass production. The same face of currency made over and over again. What is an icon, a cult image? Rather, what is an image? What brings a symbol to power? Culture is history’s political influence, a pendulum of domination. What is power without resistance? The historical moment, and the figure that stands in opposition. Icon as fact, a perceived understanding of truth in the world, teaching us how to see. Image as instruction; see, when an aspiration finds meaning it exceeds its boundaries, it becomes momentous. Larger than life or death, but rather the cycle between lives. Not a vision, but the place we are at now, the inevitable new, the next civilization we are going to become. In refusal of deception, an encounter with unobfuscated femininity is revealed. If the icon shows humanity’s spiritual ideal, it is the anti-icon who refuses the delusion of man, his inflated self-conception. For the icon makes real the image, anti-icon must break through to reveal reality. What is a revelation? A proclamation of clarity, a veneer stripped away, a shattering. It feels like the world is ending, because it did; it has before, and it will again end. What is the world? In the progress of nihilism, creation becomes resistance; a new image of what the world was all along.

– Martine Gutierrez

The project’s cult following began in 2021 when first commissioned by Public Art Fund. Ten images from the original series were chosen to circulate on bus shelters normally used for advertising. Pedestrians encountered the larger-than-life figures on their daily commutes in 300 locations across New York, Chicago, and Boston. Gutierrez adapted these images by veiling the publicly hung nude self-portraits, both delegating her autonomy and struggle in the ongoing political restrictions placed on women’s bodies in the United States.

This summer, Gutierrez will reveal ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS in three distinct selections set to preview across three venues: Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; RYAN LEE Gallery, New York; and Josh Lilley, London. The three-gallery exhibition will be accompanied by a new artist book, published by RYAN LEE, entitled APOKALYPSIS. The full collection of 17 portraits will be presented in its entirety for the first time in a traveling museum show organized by Polygon Gallery, Vancouver, slated for 2024.

Gutierrez is the sole performer in the series, portraying all 17 groundbreaking figures: Aphrodite, ancient Greek goddess of love, desire and beauty, identified by the Romans as ‘Venus’; Ardhanarishvara, composite male-female figure of the Hindu god Shiva together with his consort Parvati; Atargatis, Syrian mother goddess of fertility and the moon; Cleopatra, Egyptian ruler famed for her influence on Roman politics; Queen Elizabeth I, England’s second female monarch when the country asserted itself as a major power in politics, commerce, and the arts in the 16th century; Gabriel, angel in the Abrahamic religions believed by many to be able to take on any physical form; Helen of Troy, Greek beauty seen as the cause of the Trojan war; Joan of Arc, sainted heroine of France, revered as a holy person for her faithfulness and bravery in battle, burned at the stake by the church; Judith The Slayer, courageous biblical widow who used her charm to save her people from an Assyrian general; Lady Godiva, bold noblewoman from the Medieval period who fought for justice for everyday people; Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mesoamerican Catholic title of Mary, who appeared to the Indigenous man Juan Diego and imprinted herself on his cloak as proof of her visitation; Mary Magdalene, ‘Magdalene’ means tower, as she is an early tower of the Christian faith, cited in the four canonical gospels as a follower and companion of Jesus Christ, a witness to his crucifixion and resurrection; The Virgin Mary, a young Jewish virgin from Nazareth, chosen by God to conceive Jesus through the Holy Spirit; La Madonna, Italian for ‘Lady, Virgin Mary’, central figure of Christianity, celebrated as the ‘Virgin Queen’ in processions of Semana Santa, throughout Spain and Latin America; Hua Mulan, famed warrior of Chinese folklore who disguised herself as a man to fight in battle; Sacagawea, Shoshone interpreter and guide of the expedition to discover routes through pre-colonial America, journaled by Lewis and Clark; Queen of Sheba, Ethiopian queen, known for her wit, power, and wealth, her romance with King Solomon is documented in the Kebra Nagast.

Judith from ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS, 2021 chromogenic print, hand-distressed welded aluminum frame © Martine Gutierrez, courtesy of the artist, RYAN LEE Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Martine Gutierrez is a transdisciplinary artist whose practice includes photography, performance, music, and film at the Australian Centre for Photography, Darlinghurst, Australia; Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, Houston; Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, North Carolina; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma; and the Rockwell Museum, Corning, New York, among others. Her work is included in the collections of the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

Please visit the Fraenkel Gallery’s site for more information about the exhibit. The exhibit has been on display since May 24 of this year and will close on July 15, 2023.

uzomah ugwu 6/7/23 uzomah ugwu 6/7/23

JIM DINE THREE SHIPS

Three Ships (the Magi), 2022 Bronze | Bronze 284 × 267 × 234 cm — 112 × 105 × 92 in. Photo: © Jim Dine Studio

Jim Dine, the great American artist, is exhibiting his new works at Templon’s new Chelsea space until June 30th of this year.

With the exhibition “Three Ships,” Jim Dine signs a spectacular return to the city of his beginnings. A native of Ohio, Jim Dine moved to New York in 1958. Since his first happenings in the ’60s and his first success as part of the Pop Art generation, Jim Dine has always maintained a close relationship with the city, where he has long kept a studio. Now working between Paris, Walla-Walla, and Göttingen in Germany, he has chosen to unveil some of its most innovative new works for this comeback.

“Three Ships” brings together the production of the past three years: monumental bronze sculptures, rows of intimate self-portraits, and five massive abstract paintings on wood.

Through a clever play of scale and textures, the exhibition stages the obsessions of the artist: his taste for raw material and everyday tools, the artwork conceived as an expression of pure process, the self-portrait as a symbol of the artist’s doubts and relentless quest for beauty. For example, the basement of the gallery creates a dialogue between rare reliefs of tools from 1974, never exhibited before, with a series of pencil drawings made since the pandemic. Realistic and poignantly intimate, they portray the artist as a lucid yet youthful old man. Jim Dine embraces both childhood memories – he often recounts how his first artistic emotions were forged in the family hardware store – and reminiscences of the art history with discreet homages to Roman antiquity or German expressionism.

Both raw and sophisticated, the exhibition demonstrates the vitality of an artist for whom the creative process is the very essence of the work.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Steidl publishes an 89-page fully illustrated catalogue. Designed by the artist, it provides extensive documentation on Jim Dine’s sculptural process and texts by Anne-Claudie Coric, Jim Dine, and Sam Sackeroff.

Drawing the minutes A, 2020-2022

Crayon noir sur papier | Pencil on paper

31 × 23,5 cm — 12 2/8 × 9 1/4 in. Photo: © Jim Dine Studio

Exhibition views Toutes les images / All images: Courtesy the artist and TEMPLON, Paris – Brussels – New York ©️ Charles Roussel.

Jim Dine’s work features in over 70 public collections worldwide, including at the MoMA, Guggenheim, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Tate Collection in London. In 2018, the Centre Pompidou organized a major retrospective of his work which then traveled to the Centre Pompidou Malaga and then the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow. Another major retrospective was held in Rome by the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in 2020.

In 2021, he inaugurated the Fondation GGL in Montpellier with his largest commissioned work in France: a ceramic ceiling created especially for the 17th-century manor house that is home to the foundation in collaboration with the Manufacture de Sèvres. In the spring of 2023, Dine will inaugurate The Stardust House in Gottingen, Germany, a Pavillon dedicated to the sculpture, Thru the stardust, the heat on the lawn. This exhibition will be followed in June by the exhibition Storm of Memory at the Kunsthaus Gottingen, of new sculptures, prints, and books. In the fall, Dine will participate in the exhibition, Paravents at the Prada Foundation. Later in the fall, Dine will inaugurate an exhibition of portrait drawings donated to Bowdoin College, Maine, USA.

For more information, please visit Templon’s site.

uzomah ugwu 6/4/23 uzomah ugwu 6/4/23

LEE FRIEDLANDER FRAMED BY JOEL COEN

*Sweden,* 2005 gelatin silver print © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York

Lee Friedlander Framed by Joel Coen is an exhibition of Friedlander’s photographs curated by the widely acclaimed filmmaker at the Fraenkel Gallery.

Rather than focusing on a single subject or period, Coen’s selection concentrates on Friedlander’s singular approach to composition. Through the approximately 45 images in the exhibition, Coen surveys the range of Friedlander’s 60+ year career, bringing many lesser-known images into the equation. The selection evidences an unexpected affinity between Friedlander and Coen, whose work explores the sly power of images. A new hardcover publication, with an introduction by Coen and an afterword by the actor Frances McDormand, accompanies the exhibition.

*Los Angeles,* 1967 gelatin silver print © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York

Friedlander, Coen, and McDormand, long admirers of each other’s work, met in the spring of 2022 at Friedlander’s home in Rockland County, New York. During the day-long visit, the artists studied hundreds of photographs, ultimately leading to the selection that constitutes the book and exhibition.

I was present when these two guys met for the first time and observed a familiarity that comes from their lifetimes of singular and eccentric visions… Neither would naturally refer to himself as an Artist. Yet they have honed their crafts over decades of practice, and those of us who cannot see the way they see have no other way to describe what they do but “art.”

—from the afterword by Frances McDormand

Coen’s selection focuses on dense and off-kilter photographs, often bisected by stop signs and utility poles, car doors, windshields, trees, and shadows. “As a filmmaker, I liked the idea of creating a sequence that would highlight Lee’s unusual approach to framing—his splitting, splintering, repeating, fracturing, and reassembling elements into new and impossible compositions,” Coen writes.