GEORGE SEGAL : Nocturnal Fragments
Blimpies, 1999 Plâtre, peinture, bois et verre | Plaster, paint, wood and glass 244 × 265 × 122 cm — 96 × 104 1/4 × 48 in. Photo: Isabelle Arthuis
Templon’s New York space is celebrating its first anniversary by paying tribute to American master painter and sculptor George Segal (1924-2000).
A pioneer of installations combining plaster and everyday objects, the Bronx native began his career as an abstract painter. When he discovered the use of pre-cut plaster bandages in the early 1960s, he abandoned paint as a medium and, at the height of the Pop Art movement, turned his focus on three- dimensional paintings with plaster casts applied directly to living models. This unique visual language soon became his signature, opening the door to endless formal possibilities. Both spontaneous and frozen, his compositions reveal an unexpected poetic force as well as a social and political radicality.
Toutes les images / All images : Courtesy TEMPLON, Paris —Brussels — New York
All works by George Segal © The George and Helen Segal Foundation/ licensed by Artists Rights Society, NY, NY.
The exhibition takes visitors on a journey over 25 years of the artist’s career, with pieces spanning the period from 1972 to 1999. George Segal’s work initially embraced a realist style before shifting in the 1970s to a freer expression. His colored work in the 1980s engaged in a dialogue with the history of art, featuring subtle references to Bonnard, Cézanne and Degas, before embracing a more expressionist style in the 1990s. The later works fuse sculpture and painting, opening the door to a new scope of expression by means of color and light. Segal’s “Nocturnal Fragments,” assemblages of ordinary activities in realistic settings, are more than mere observations of the quotidian, but prompt a consideration of the human condition. Mysterious, possibly even unsettling, these tableaux are often a springboard for an existentialist questioning of the individual and consumer society. Capturing isolated moments of ennui, slices of the private body, and secluded intimacies, Segal's fragments envision the whole.
Born in 1924 in New York, George Segal lived and worked in New Jersey, USA, until his death in 2000. The artist was discovered at a group Pop Art collective exhibition in since 1962. Since then George Segal’s work has been widely shown in the USA and internationally.
He was famed for his spectacular public commissions, such as his monuments commemorating the holocaust (Holocaust Memorial in San Francisco) and the Kent State Massacre or championing LGBT rights with Gay Liberation, part of the Stone Wall Monument in Sheridan Square, New York. His many solo exhibitions include retrospectives in 1978 at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1997 at the Montreal Musée des Beaux-Arts, in 1998 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C, and in 2002 at the Utsunomiya Museum of Art, Utsunomiya, Japan and State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg in Russia.
His work features in the world’s leading museums, including MoMA, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, MAM Paris, Kunsthaus Zurich and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
Considered, against his will, as a pioneer of hyperrealism, he was a major influence on artists such as Duane Hanson and Ron Mueck. Over recent years his pieces have regularly been presented alongside the work by new generations of sculptors, for example, with the traveling European exhibition Hyperrealism Sculpture. This is not a body and Corporeal at SF MOMA (until April 2024).
Templon presented George Segal’s work for the first time in Paris in 1979 as part of the group show La peinture américaine as well as at two further shows, in Paris in 2017 and Brussels in 2018.
The exhibition has been on display since September the sixth and will conclude on the 28th of October of this year.
For more information about this exhibit, please visit the Templon’s website.
SHAPES OF WATER/ GROUP EXHIBITION
Courtesy of Afriart Gallery
Shapes of Water is a group exhibition presenting works by women artists from Eastern and Southern Africa. The exhibition offers space
for individual and genuine expressions of femininity by artists from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, DRC, Sudan, Mozambique, and South Africa. It
hopes to instigate conversations and inspire to imagine new possibilities.
In this exhibition, some of the physical, cultural, and political characteristics and implications of the element water may act as a
metaphor or ‘lens’ through which to think about expressions of femininity in the artists’ work.
Blessed is the Spectrum, 2020, Digitally manipulated drawing, Archival print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Paper, 3 +2 APs, 42 x 29.7 cm
Water, in the form of solids, liquids, and gas, is the earth’s and human body’s main constituent and, therefore, our main source of life.
It’s valued, treasured, and at the same time, so hard to contain. Humans have always attempted to control water, its flow, and
accessibility, and to direct the source of life to irrigate agriculture, save drinking water and keep it from showing up as
destructive floods.
Canary, 2023, Mixed Media on Paper, 117 x 96 cm
Water politics is now a global concern, such as the policing of a woman’s body is being debated in many forms in different cultures
around the world. Yet her genuine expression always finds a way to seep through – at times in joy, other times in pain.
Sundays are not Rest Days 2, 2023 Oil on Canvas, 110 x 68 cm
Over centuries of patriarchy, women have and still are morphing into any shape to sustain themselves - gracefully, fearfully leaning in like a straightened stream, rearing up like a torrential river, carving canyons into history, and at the same time bearing and
sustaining life.
Eco-Target 3, 2023 Wool and Threads, 200 x 50 cm
She is fluid. Femininity is fluid, so this exhibition suggests. Femininity changes its shape as it pleases, disregarding the many
voices trying to contain it in an 8-shaped vessel. She might turn into ice, breaking the vessel into pieces. She might rise from the vessel as a cloud and rain down on more fertile ground elsewhere. This exhibit is curated by Lara Buchmann.
Installation View, 'Shapes of Water', Afriart Gallery, May - August 2023, Courtesy of Afriart Gallery
EXHIBITING ARTISTS: Charity Atukunda (Uganda), Amani Azhari (Sudan), Naseeba Bagalaaliwo (Uganda), Nelsa Guambe (Mozambique), April Kamunde (Kenya), Maliza Kiasuwa (DRC), Charlene Komuntale (Uganda), Kitso Lynn Lelliott (South Africa), Sungi Mlengeya (Tanzania), and Mona Taha (Uganda).
There will be an artist talk Thursday, 27th July 2023, at 6.00 PM, Afriart Gallery SHAPES OF WATER – ARTISTS TALK: “EXPRESSING FEMININITY: NAVIGATING THE PERSONAL AND THE POLITICAL.” The exhibit first opened on May 27th of this year and will conclude on the 12th of August of this year.
For more information, please visit Afriart Gallery’s site, and follow them on Instagram.
Landscape by Frank Bowling
Portrait of Sir Frank Bowling© Frank Bowling. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2023. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Sacha Bowling
One of the foremost British artists of his generation, Sir Frank Bowling, has spent more than six decades relentlessly challenging the limits of the medium of painting and expanding its possibilities, attracting acclaim for his contributions to abstraction. ‘Landscape,’ the artist’s first solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood, will present 11 recent ebullient paintings that engage the rich art historical tradition of landscape painting – and propel it forward into the present moment.
To accompany the exhibition, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will produce an extensively illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Dorothy Price, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
#4 to the Lighthouse 2021 Acrylic and acrylic gel on canvas with marouflage 188 x 259.1 cm / 74 x 102 in
‘Landscape’ at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood coincides with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) exhibition ‘Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966-1975,’ the first major US survey of the artist’s work in more than four decades. Traveling from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the exhibition will be on view from May 20 – 10 September 2023. It will feature 11 additional artworks, including an expanded group of paintings made between 2018 and 2022.
About the Exhibition
Landscape has figured in Bowling’s work since the artist first began making his celebrated Map paintings – vast color fields depicting stenciled images of landmasses like South America or his native Guyana – while living in New York in the 1960s. Over subsequent years, he gradually moved away from cartographic representation to embrace the freedom of abstraction as a means to convey the emotive qualities and properties of color. By the early 1980s, having established a studio near the River Thames in the Pimlico neighborhood of London, Bowling had immersed himself in the purely abstract aspects of traditional painting, specifically the rich history of European painterly engagement with land, sea sky, and clouds found in the work of J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. In response to this influence, the artist developed a highly personal abstract language of his own, in which vivid, dynamic flows of paint allude to landscapes – implicit, metaphorical, metaphysical – alive with distant but distinct sense memories of his birthplace.
Bowling states, ‘I have been fascinated by English landscape painting since my first visit to the National Gallery in London in the 1950s and that tradition is a furrow that I have ploughed for many years. The thing is, I don’t want to make Turners or Constables or Gainsboroughs; I always tried to avoid that. I want to make something completely new, something that no one has seen before.’
Bowling’s lyrical compositions belie the technical prowess and virtuosity by which they are created. Embracing his medium’s inherently aleatory nature, Bowling manipulates the aqueous qualities of paint with the intention of a choreographed performance. ‘I’m fascinated by the movement of paint across the surface of the canvas; when water floods and moves liquid paint, and as it bleeds, drips, splashes and stains, I feel that this captures something of the movement of nature itself,’ he says.
Among the works on view in the exhibition, the monumental canvas ‘#4 to the Lighthouse’ (2021) features broad swathes of paint, some of which have been poured directly onto the canvas and mixed on its plane, rendering an expansive fluorescent field of color imbued with a lambent light. ln ‘Ashton’smix’ (2014), Bowling has harnessed the downward pull of gravity to encourage his medium across the surface of the canvas; the slow drip captured here evokes the passage of time. In other works on view, the canvas ground is covered with paint through combined methods of pouring, throwing, spilling, and trickling. Multi-layered washes, thick impasto textures, acrylic gels, stitching, and metallic and pearlescent pigments all suggest the aftermath of an alchemical process. Built up layer by layer, atmospheric canvases, such as ‘On the way’ (2021), feature sweeping lines that seem to bear traces of landscape: horizon, land, and water. Other works on view, like ‘On The Beach’ (2017) and ‘Skyla’schoice’ (2014), a feature found objects embedded in the surfaces of the paintings, offering glimpses of biographical detail that root them in the present moment.
Installation view, ‘Frank Bowling.Landscape,’ Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood 26 May–5 August 2023 ©Frank Bowling All rights reserved, DACS, London / ARS, New York 2023 Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Fredrik Nilsen
‘I firmly believe that paint carries its own light within it and I want my paintings to catch the light that exists in the natural world. My whole life I have lived near water – the Berbice river, the Thames, the East River. And I am sure that my eye has been influenced by the light over the water and the terrain in those places, whether that is New Amsterdam or London or New York,’ says Bowling.
On the way too 2021 Acrylic and acrylic gel on canvas with marouflage 188.4 x 285.2 x 5.4 cm / 74 1/8 x 112 1/4 x 2 1/8 in
About the Artist
Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA has been hailed as one of the greatest living painters. Born in British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1934, Bowling arrived in London in 1953, graduating from the Royal College of Art with the silver medal for painting in 1962. By the early 1960s, he was recognized as an original force in London’s art scene with a style combining figurative, symbolic, and abstract elements.
After moving to New York in 1966, Bowling’s commitment to modernism meant he was increasingly focused on material, process, and color so that by 1971 he had abandoned the use of figurative imagery. Bowling’s iconic Map Paintings (1967 – 71), which include the stenciled landmasses of South America, Africa, and Australia, embody his transition to pure abstraction. Bowling exhibited six large Map Paintings in a solo show at the Whitney Museum of Art in 1971. From 1973 to 1978, Bowling experimented with ideas of chance and ‘controlled accidents,’ pouring paint from a two-meter height to create his visually arresting Poured Paintings. His sculptural paintings of the 1980s include embedded objects and thickly textured canvases and have been described as evoking landscape, riverbeds, and geologic strata.
Bowling became a Royal Academician in 2005. He was awarded the OBE for Services to Art in 2008 and a knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday honors in 2020. His work is represented in collections worldwide and has been exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including the 2017 – 19 touring exhibition ‘Mappa Mundi’ and the hugely successful retrospective at Tate Britain in 2019. Bowling is the subject of a BBC documentary, ‘Frank Bowling’s Abstract World,’ which coincided with the opening of the Tate retrospective. In 2022, he was awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, which honors exceptional contemporary artists.
The exhibit opened on May 26th at Hauser & Wirth’s West Hollywood location and will close on the 5th of August this year.
For more information about the exhibit, please visit Hauser & Wirth site. Also, follow the gallery on Instagram, Facebook, X, and YouTube for more updates on this exhibit. For more updates on this exhibit.
Richard Misrach: New New Pictures/New Old Pictures
Cargo Ships (January 11, 2022, 5:02pm), 2022 pigment print © Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to announce New New Pictures/New Old Pictures, an exhibition of large-format photographs by Richard Misrach, his fifteenth with the gallery since 1985. The exhibition marks the debut of his new series, Cargo, atmospheric studies of maritime traffic that raise questions about international commerce and the supply chain upon which the world now depends. Also on view will be works made from recently discovered negatives produced throughout Misrach’s near five-decade career.
Misrach began Cargo in 2021, as the global shipping industry faced a critical moment. The photographs in this ongoing series are made from a single vantage point in San Francisco, looking south and east across the bay. Photographed throughout the changing seasons, the five images on view capture the glow of the Port of Oakland at dawn and ships seen by afternoon and evening light. In their careful observation of the drama of sky and water, the images suggest a comparison to J.M.W Turner’s seascapes and recall Misrach’s On the Beach series, which similarly depended on patient waiting for the convergence of light and subject. The exhibition also features approximately 10 new works made from negatives spanning 25 years, from 1984 to 2009, many of them previously unseen or unpublished. Returning to his archive, Misrach selected images that hadn’t fit into larger projects but which, when viewed today, have gained new meaning. “Photographs, when they’re made, can shift meaning with time, and often do,” Misrach has noted. Many of the works were made as part of Misrach’s Desert Cantos series, which explores the impact of our human presence on the deserts of the American Southwest. The selection features photographs of iconic land art installations, including Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels and Michael Heizer’s City, and images of the Great Salt Lake Desert and Battleground Point, where Misrach recorded figures among the water and dunes, setting the photograph apart from other work in the series. Other works include a cloud-filled print from the Golden Gate series and a view of an Oregon beach that was previously featured in the artist’s Color Reverse series. Printed as the camera originally recorded the scene, the image takes on a new life. Together, the photographs serve as a brief and idiosyncratic survey of Misrach’s career.
Richard Misrach (born 1949) has been photographing the American West for more than 50 years and is perhaps best known for his ongoing Desert Cantos series. Misrach recently collaborated with San Francisco’s Alonzo King LINES Ballet on their Spring 2023 season, incorporating his photographs of company dancers in Hawaii into backdrops and costumes for the performance, which will travel throughout the U.S. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others. His work has been featured in more than a dozen monographs, including Telegraph 3 A.M.; Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West; Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach; On the Beach; Destroy this Memory; Petrochemical America; and Border Cantos. Recent publications include Blind Spot Folios 001: Nancy Holt & Richard Misrach, which presents Misrach’s previously unseen images of Holt’s Sun Tunnels; On Landscape and Meaning, from Aperture’s Photography Workshop Series; and Notations, published by Radius Books, which explores the negative image in photography. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist on Thursday, June 29, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm, and a book signing with the artist on Saturday, July 29, from 2 to 4 pm. Please visit the Fraenkel Gallery's site for more information about Richard’s exhibit.
High Stakes: SARAH MISKA
Photo credit: Maya Fuhr
Night Gallery is pleased to announce High Stakes, a presentation of new paintings by Sarah Miska. This exhibition follows Swept, Miska’s 2022 debut at the gallery. The exhibit will open on July 8 and close on August 5, 2023.
Sarah Miska’s paintings investigate mechanisms of control through equestrian motifs. Her unusual, constrained croppings and a masterful ability to capture intricacy expose the less refined dimensions of English riding, as wrinkles pucker on show jackets and loose horse hairs spring from ornately braided manes. The subculture’s aesthetic qualities act as a potent site for social critique; elite status and immense wealth seem as native to equestrianism as, well, horses.
Red Checkered Jockey Silk, 2023 acrylic on canvas 72 x 60 in (182.9 x 152.4 cm)
Miska’s magnified contortions of hair and bodies underline the futility of total regimentation, giving way to wider considerations of power relations and their signifiers. In High Stakes, the artist shifts her attention to horse racing in spirited reflections on risk, endurance, and the exhilarating prospect of reward.
Trifecta, 2023 acrylic on canvas 72 x 60 in (182.9 x 152.4 cm)
The show’s title alludes to the myriad risks embedded into horse racing: owners’ and bettors’ chances of losing or gaining money, as well as the very real physical dangers posed to horses and jockeys. More subtly, High Stakes invokes the volatility of the art industry that is inherent to capitalist enterprise and guaranteed for artists, collectors, and gallerists alike. As she captures jockeys lifted high out of the saddle and the tension of the starting gate, Miska posits the racetrack as a stage where these concerns play out.
High Stakes, 2023 acrylic on canvas 96 x 72 in (243.8 x 182.9 cm)
A propulsive, anticipatory sense of movement ripples through High Stakes. Rendered large-scale with the artist’s signature meticulousness, tight compositions, and rich textures give each painting a quiet charge. Risk/Reward, 2023, nods to Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th-century photographer who first documented a galloping horse with all four limbs off the ground. Miska distills the momentary weightlessness of a horse moving at full speed, legs suspended in air, dirt flying.
Wager, 2023 acrylic on canvas 48 x 60 in (121.9 x 152.4 cm)
Elsewhere, Miska expands her examination of affluence and stature with a new series depicting jockey silks. These garish garments are coded to represent horse ownership and lineages in the sport, with patterns and colors specific to influential families and individuals. Devoid of any markers of identity, Miska’s jockeys become pure signifiers, emblems of concentrated wealth, while the dramatic light cast upon torsos against black backgrounds bolster the cinematic quality of each tableaux.
The Starting Gate, 2023 acrylic on canvas 72 x 60 in (182.9 x 152.4 cm)
What is being said about Sarah’s work:
“High Stakes is a study in proximity, interrogating how far we’ll go in pursuit of something bigger. Miska is here interested in the intoxicating energy of risk, the absurd willingness to lose everything for the possibility of even more. So moves the uneven rhythm of life—some run with their chances, others may never try.”
— Jayne Pugh
Gallery Details:
2276 E. 16th Street,
Los Angeles, California 90021
Sarah Miska (b. 1983, Sacramento, CA) received her BFA from Laguna College of Art and Design in 2007 and her MFA from Art Center College of Design in 2014. She has had solo exhibitions at Lyles & King, New York, NY; Friends Indeed Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Hernando’s Hideaway, Miami, FL; and Griff’s, Milwaukee, WI. Miska’s work has been featured in group shows at Praz-Delavallade, Los Angeles, CA; Spazio Amanita, Los Angeles, CA; Below Grand, New York, NY; Dread Lounge, Los Angeles, CA; Super Dutchess, New York, NY; and Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, among others. She is a 2022 subject of “In the Studio,” W Magazine’s culture series. Her work belongs in the permanent collections of the Institute for Contemporary Art, Miami, FL, and Long Museum, Shanghai, China. Miska lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
For more information about Sarah and her exhibit please visit the Night Gallery’s website here.
Body: Instrument and File By Cristiano Mangovo
Photos are courtesy of the artist and Chase Contemporary
Chase Contemporary is pleased to present the solo exhibition debut from Angolan visual artist Cristiano Mangovo (b. 1982), Body: Instrument and File, which opened on June 15th and will close on July 13th. Primarily based between Lisbon, Portugal, and Cabinda, Angola, as a child he fled the Angolan Civil War to the Democratic Republic of Congo where, with his mother’s encouragement, went on to study at the Academy Des Beaux-Arts (he is in NYC for a two-month residency with Chase, currently creating all new pieces for the show). The paintings in this exhibition explore the body as an instrument for creation and destruction, and a file (or archive) of lived experiences. His large-scale acrylic paintings often touch on the cultural differences between his two homes, and the artist’s experiences in Angola have led him to advocate for social and environmental change through his art, addressing climate change, gender inequality, and other universal human concerns in his work.
Photos are courtesy of the artist and Chase Contemporary
His unique style combines surreal & expressionistic elements, painting distorted, multi-faceted faces, often with two mouths. This body of work also connects disappearing rituals from Angola with scenes of nature and metropolitan life. Making a painting of disappearing Angolan traditions, like Tchikumbi (an ancestral rite of initiation and fertility, marking the passage of the young girl from childhood to marriageable age), allows him to memorialize these traditions and pass them on to others. His visual storytelling functions as a method of cultural preservation, conveying the message that all cultures, though varied, should be approached on an equal level, with respect and harmony. For Mangovo, the body is a planet, vast, sometimes incomprehensible, and full of brutality and riches. It is at the core of all experience, an agent for creation and destruction with a capacity for communication beyond language. The body also chronicles all of the physical and emotional marks left on each of us throughout our lives. Everything that moves — human, animal, and organic forms —inspires him. When someone stands before his paintings, he wants them to see a living thing, something vibrant and energetic. He views his work as an act of bringing things to life and waking people up to their surroundings.
The winner of the 2018 Ensa-Art Prize as the Best Visual Artist of Angola, his work has been exhibited at international fairs like 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in Paris (Jan. 2021), Expo Milan, and he’s participated in over 50 exhibitions & performances in Angola, Portugal, France, Italy, South Africa, Zimbabwe, D.R. Congo, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
For more information about the exhibit, please visit Chase Contemporary’s site.
Love Thy Neighbor by James Reyes
Photo Credit: Roman Dean
Ki Smith Gallery presented Love Thy Neighbor by James Reyes on June 3 and will be on view until July 2 of this year. The works in this exhibition are complex amalgams of memory, imagination, and fantasy depicted through rich oil paintings that move between loose gestural abstraction and highly rendered stylized figuration. Reyes’s process is reactive and intuitive, using broad action-packed gestures as a cryptic map to pull out subject matter, conger memory, and allow the abstraction of the underpainting to act as a portal into the subconscious.
Photo Credit: Roman Dean
The push and pull between the layers of the work mirrors memory and imagination, where some moments are crystal clear while others fade into swirls of abstraction. Reyes’s works depict a range of subjects and archetypes, often intermingling figures with animals that suggest hidden desire, emotions, and the unconscious.
Photo Credit: Roman Dean
Please visit the Ki Smith Gallery's site for more information about James Reye’s exhibit.
Tectonic Worlds Collide in The Perfect Storm: A Collaborative Exhibition by Katrin Fridriks and Jan Kaláb
Courtesy of BC Gallery
Tectonic Worlds Collide in The Perfect Storm: A Collaborative Exhibition by Katrin Fridriks and Jan Kaláb at BC Gallery in Basel has been on display since June 1 and will conclude on September 16, 2023.
They say opposites attract, and similarities repel. However, some beg to differ, and in reality, mash-ups and diversity always create unique and beautiful creatures. This holds true and is the case proven with decadent artworks in the exhibition, The Perfect Storm, a quintessential collection by Katrin Fridriks and Jan Kaláb debuting at BC Gallery in Basel. Together, Katrin and Jan have found the ultimate sweet spot of their individual artistic expression to radiate into a new realm with breathtaking pieces evoking sensory stimulations where you can’t look away and become happily lost within its movements and colors. “Katrin and I spoke about collaborating on a project together a few years ago, and the timing was perfect when the opportunity came up for a duo show at BC Gallery in Basel. The significant similarities and clashes of our works made us think it could be an interesting match. In the beginning, we thought we would do just one or two collaborative paintings for this show, but this turned into a creative storm, and we ended up building the whole show out with more than twenty collaborative paintings.
Courtesy of BC Gallery
“We shipped the paintings back and forth between Katrin’s studio in the South of France and my studio in Prague. It was an absolute pleasure to work on Katrin’s splash paintings to create new depths in her spontaneous abstract figures and to elaborate her lines in my compositions. This project took us completely out of our comfort zones - challenging us immensely, and it was super fun. The results are beyond our expectations,” says Jan.
Director and Curator of BC Gallery Nick Bargzei further elaborates, “Having worked with Jan for several years and following and collecting Katrin Fridriks’ work for about the same time, the subject matter of their respective art was already familiar to the gallery. The integrity and trust between Katrin and Jan are extraordinarily rare and a sight unseen”.
Courtesy of BC Gallery
“To send a whole body of work to another artist, countless hours of labor, powerless in the hands of another miles away in another country with no margin of error - whom, yes, you know of, follow, and respect in his or her work, however, only met once - to continue working on was unprecedented in the ten years of running the gallery. Needless to say, the experience of this collaboration was, at times, quite anxious and exciting, but most of all...inspiring, Jan adds!"
GALLERY DETAILS
Address:
BC Gallery
Spalenring 142, 4055
Basel, Switzerland
Hours:
By appointment only
Jan Kaláb was born in Czechoslovakia and is one of the country’s most notable contemporary artists today. His creative roots are based in graffiti, street art, and murals, and he is widely recognized among the founding pioneers of the Prague scene. Since then, Jan’s work has evolved to paintings, sculptures, and 3-D graffiti, and he has exhibited in high-profile galleries around the world, including New York, Miami, London, Paris, Shanghai, and Rio de Janeiro. He lives and creates in Prague.
ABOUT BC GALLERY
BC Gallery was founded in 2013 in Berlin and moved to Basel in 2020. Directed and curated by Nick Bargezi and co-curated by Sarah Fischer, the gallery features regular solo and group exhibitions by international contemporary artists as well as providing secondary market inventory and art consultation for collectors. Secondary market inventory includes artworks by Shepard Fairey, D-Face, Retna, Dran, Pejac, TLP, and more.
For more information, please visit BC Gallery’s site.
PIERRE ET GILLESLES COULEURS DU TEMPS
Pierre et Gilles have returned to Brussels for the first time since their spectacular 2017 retrospective at Musée d’Ixelles with their new series, Les couleurs du temps.
The works are jointly created by the two artists, Pierre as photographer and Gilles as painter. The exhibition is firmly anchored in the contemporary world, opening with a piece in homage to Ukraine, La promesse, in the war-torn country’s colors. Contrasting with the seriousness of the message, Pierre et Gilles produce a gallery of portraits that are now playful, now unsettling. References to sacred and religious icons abound. Carefully staged and more complex than ever, the portraits feature unknown as well as familiar faces, from Tahar Rahim to Silly Boy Blue. Together the artists invent new archetypes: young apollos surrounded by pink flamingos, eroticized biblical characters, cursed lovers, and nostalgic sailors.
Discreetly, almost imperceptibly, Pierre et Gilles evoke many of the questions facing society today, from sexual identity issues to the phenomena of social exclusion, religious tolerance, the war in Ukraine, global warming, and pollution of the oceans. The ambiguity of their art, lying somewhere between painting and photography, illusion and realism, offers a nuanced vehicle for conveying a message of tolerance in an era torn apart by conflicts and inequalities.
Toutes les images / All images : © Courtesy des artistes et Templon, Paris —Brussels — New York
Internationally renowned artists Pierre et Gilles have been producing art together since 1976. Their work has been the focus of numerous major exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris in 1996, New York’s New Museum in 2000, Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai in 2005, and Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2007. In 2017, a comprehensive retrospective entitled Clair-Obscur was held at the Brussels Musée d’Ixelles before moving to MuMa in Le Havre. 2018 they exhibited at the K Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul. In 2019, two major exhibitions, La Fabrique des idoles at the Philharmonie de Paris - Cité de la Musique, Musée de la Musique and Le goût du cinéma at the La Malmaison art centre in Cannes, met with spectacular public and critical success. In 2022, their work was the subject of the Troubled Waters exhibition at the Spritmuseum in Stockholm.
PIERRE ET GILLESLES COULEURS DU TEMPS has been on view since May 4th and will be exhibited until the 22nd of July of this year. For more information about the exhibit, please visit Templon’s site.
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.
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.
PORTRAIT 2023 NYC © CHARLES ROUSSSEL
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.
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.
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.
Fraenkel Gallery hosted a public reception with Lee Friedlander and Joel Coen on Saturday, May 6, from 2-4 pm. Luhring Augustine hosted a reception with both artists in New York on Saturday, May 13. Both exhibitions will accompany a special projection created by Coen, sequencing Friedlander’s images in unexpected and revealing ways. The book accompanying the exhibition is published by Fraenkel Gallery and includes an expanded selection of 70 works. It will be available on both galleries’ websites.
Lee Friedlander (born 1934) began photographing in 1948. His work was included in the influential 1967 exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski, among countless other exhibitions. His more than 50 monographs include Signs, Self-Portrait, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan, Letters from the People, At Work, and Sticks and Stones, among others. One of the most important living photographers, Friedlander’s prints are held by major collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others.
Joel Coen (born 1954) is celebrated as one of the most visionary and idiosyncratic filmmakers of our era. Combining thoughtful eccentricity, wry humor, arch irony, and often brutal violence, the films of Coen (working with his brother Ethan) have become synonymous with a style of filmmaking that pays tribute to classic American movie genres—especially film noir—while sustaining a firmly postmodern sensibility.
Frances McDormand (born 1957) is an acclaimed American actor and producer. McDormand has won numerous accolades, including four Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, three BAFTA Awards, two Emmy Awards, and a Tony Award, making her one of the few performers to achieve the "Triple Crown of Acting."
The exhibit will be on view until June 24th of this year. Please visit the Fraenkel Gallery’s site for more information about the exhibit.
re:tratos urbanos rodríguez calero at the Gallery Space at Wagner NYU
Artist Statement:
The exhibition re:tratos urbanos rodríguez calero featured at NYU Wagner’s Gallery represents my constant commitment and concerns regarding my heritage and diverse communities. The works are personal and deeply rooted to encompass many issues regarding identity, gender, race, ageism, social and spiritual beliefs.
Curator Statement:
The Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University is home to the Gallery Space at Wagner. Our mission is to bring artwork into a public-accessible workspace to further engage the NYU community and local audiences in dialogues on contemporary art, culture, and public service. In exploring this intersectionality, we prioritize partnerships that foster social justice, human rights advocacy, and political activism, as well as projects that promote Wagner’s commitment to IDBEA values—inclusion, diversity, belonging, equity, and access.
Installation view, re:tratos urbanos rodríguez calero at Gallery Space at Wagner NYU Wagner | The Puck Building. March 21 – June 23, 2023. Courtesy Gallery Space at Wagner NYU Wagner | The Puck Building Photo Credit Jonathan King
Description:
Proudly marking Women’s History Month, re:tratos urbanos (urban portraits) highlights the work of celebrated Nuyorican painter and collage artist Rodríguez Calero (affectionately known as RoCa). With a focus on portraiture, this two-decade survey exhibit showcases RoCa’s signature acrollage and fotacrolé techniques, two innovative processes that blend painting, printmaking, photography, and collage to spellbinding effects. Meticulously layering paper, acrylic paint, and recycled materials, among a rich variety of mediums, the artist presents an intriguing collection of portraits that masterfully combine religious iconography, classical and Byzantine patterns, and elements of hip-hop and street art. Bold colors, compositional balance, texturing, and ornamentation are the visual means to the thematic depth and gravitas behind each portrait.
Presented by the Gallery Space at Wagner and the Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies (CLACS).
re:tratos urbanos rodríguez calero
Gallery Space at Wagner
March 21 – June 23, 2023
Curator Frankie Cresioni-Santoni
NYU Wagner | The Puck Building
295 Lafayette Street | 2nd Floor | NYC 10012
Monday - Friday 12 - 5 pm | 1212.998.7400
For more information about Rodríguez Calero's art, please visit her site. For more information about the exhibit, please visit here.
ABSTRACT ADJACENT at Mon Dieu Projects
Courtesy of Mon Dieu Projects
Los Angeles, USA - Mon Dieu Projects’ second group exhibition strips away most, but not all, of the figurative elements from its inaugural show Intimate Exchanges. Abstract Adjacent is a fusion of Mon Dieu Projects’ founder’s artistic tastes. Juno Youn prefers more figurative works, while his co-founder, Spencer Walker, leans more toward the abstract. The show meets in the middle, celebrating all that is not quite what it seems.
“Adjacent” is also LA-speak for being close to, but not quite part of something as in “Beverly Hills-adjacent.”
Courtesy of Mon Dieu Projects
The exhibition splashes with bursts of flashing colors - some obnoxious, some refined; however, all the pieces express sublime sensory overload. Here in the adjacent, possibilities are unlimited with the artist’s visions, and the selected artwork is a stacked deck of imagination and extraterrestrial lands. An international mix of artists from Berlin, the great Canadian North, Mexico, and Los Angeles, including Jaehong Ahn, Eva Blue, Lucas Biagini, Nadege Monchera Baer, and Rick Boling; each artist’s works are singular, and they each take on their own askew approach to interpreting the world around them. Together, these paintings and photography create a dialogue between each other that begs the question, “What is abstract?”
ABOUT MON DIEU PROJECTS
Founders LA-based Spencer Walker and Montreal-based Juno Youn share a passion for emerging and established artists with distinctive points of view. And Korean BBQ. With Mon Dieu Projects, they are sharing their idiosyncratic multilingual mashup of style, culture, and art in LA at the newly opened second location of the notorious Mohilef Studios.
GALLERY DETAILS
Opening hours:
Wednesdays - Fridays 2 pm -7 pm
Saturdays 11 am - 6 pm
Or by appointment
Address:
Mohilef Studios
Washington Blvd building
720 E. 18th Street, Ground floor
Los Angeles, CA 90021
For more information, don't hesitate to get in touch with the Gallery here.
bücher 1933 exhibit at Hauser and Wirth Publishers
Cover of the 1933 catalog of the Dr. Oprecht und Helbling bookstore, Zurich. Design by Max Bill @ 2023, ProLitteris, Zurich
Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor on January 30, 1933. The following months would shape the path of history in remembrance that still terrorizes the world today. Followers of the Nazi party and their allies turned Germany into a dictatorship. On May 10, 1933, groups of students gathered throughout Germany for a book burning as Nazi Party members labeled thousands of books as an “un-German Spirit.” Similar demonstrations occurred in other parts of Europe and cities across North America.
Thomas Mann and Emil Oprecht, 1937 © ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Thomas-Mann-Archiv. Photo: Emil Berna
It’s been ninety years since the Nazi book burnings. Emil and Emmie Oprecht were essential supporters of writers opposed to the Nazi regime. Hauser & Wirth Publishers bookstore in Zurich is presenting an exhibition examining how Emil and Emmie Oprecht used publishing to educate and inform the public about fascism and provide opposition to Hitler’s and Mussolini’s political ideals. The Oprechts founded a vital bookstore and publishing company at the center of Zurich’s cultural quarter at Rämistrasse, where Hauser & Wirth Publishers is today.
Rämistrasse, Zurich, 1939 © Baugeschichtliches Archiv Zürich
During the 1930s, the Oprechts were publishers of literary works by emigré authors in the Dr. Oprecht and Europa publishing houses, providing a platform for thinkers, philosophers, and poets.
All images:
Installation view, ‘bücher 1933’ at Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 15 April – 25 May 2023 © Hauser & Wirth Publishers. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Publishers. Photo: Jon Etter
With the ‘bücher 1933’ exhibition, Hauser & Wirth Publishers at Rämistrasse becomes an important space to muse on the effects of the Nazi overtaking of power and the vital role of Dr. Oprecht and Europa publishing houses during these times. The exhibition presents a selection of works by Annette Kelm and a dedicated reading corner with titles from Lars Müller Publishers, Scheidegger & Spiess/Park Books, and Limmat Verlag.
Please visit their site for more information about Hauser & Wirth Publishers and this vital exhibit ’bücher 1933’, about history, which runs until May 25, 2023. Also, follow the gallery on Instagram, Facebook, X, and YouTube for more updates on this exhibit. For more updates on this exhibit.