Spider Talk: Logan Sylve
courtesy of the artist
Chase Contemporary is pleased to announce Spider Talk, a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Logan Sylve. Sylve’s work explores the push and pull between what we as people present to the outside world versus the complexity of our internal realities. The exhibition opened on Thursday, October 5th at 413 West Broadway in SoHo with a reception with the artist.
Many of these paintings were created in the gallery’s artist studio, in the lower level of the gallery. Subject matter ranges from complex figurative works to playful renditions of animals against vibrant, primary backgrounds. The presentation places scenes of human social interactions or solitary moments, with all the complexities and nuances of our makeup, in contrast to simple compositions of animals whose existence and intentions are far more straightforward and undefiled. Sylve is interested in the nature of people versus the nature of animals.
Commute, 2023 Acrylic on Canvas 85.50 x 69 in
An example of this intention is the painting Commute (2023, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 76 in), where a black haired figure represents what he believed God looks like, but he changed his mind when realizing the figure looks too much like himself (but it continues to represent a figure of good intentions - a protagonist). The white figure is unknown to the artist, “but he’s around now” says Sylve. This relationship could be representative of balance, and the figures may always exist together - a narrative to be continued in his work. Concentrating his color palette to evoke certain moods, Sylve’s style also incorporates elements of classical Western American imagery and animated cartoons while staying true to anatomical structure, his visual cues to pop culture allowing viewers to find their own points of reference. The attention to anatomy reveals Sylve’s intense study and dedication to his craft, also exposing the fetishization of certain body parts in Western culture while imploring the viewer to question their own relationship with their body and environment.
Courtesy of Chase Contemporary and Logan Syle.
Spider Talk will be on view until October 26th. For more information about Logan’s exhibit please visit Chase Contemptary’s site.
Louise Bourgeois. Once there was a mother
Installation view, ‘Louise Bourgeois. Once there was a mother’ Hauser & Wirth New York 18th Street 8 September–23 December 2023 © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NYPhoto: Thomas Barratt.
New York…Hauser & Wirth is pleased to announce that the gallery will inaugurate its new dedicated space for Hauser & Wirth Editions with ‘Once there was a mother,’ a solo presentation of important and little-seen works by Louise Bourgeois (1911– 2010). Celebrated for large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also an inventive and prolific printmaker, especially during the last decade of her life. Centered around one of her most powerful themes––motherhood and maternity––the exhibition places Bourgeois’s printed works in relation to sculptures and drawings to highlight the essential role printmaking played within her multifaceted practice. It is the first show to focus on Bourgeois’s prints since the 2017-18 MoMA exhibition, ‘Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait,’ curated by Deborah Wye, who is also the editor of the online catalogue raisonné of Bourgeois’s prints and books.
Hauser & Wirth’s new dedicated Editions space is located at 443 West 18th Street, a historic two-story former industrial building that has been transformed to complete the gallery’s West Chelsea expansion and complement its building at 542 West 22nd Street, which opened in 2020. In its new space, Hauser & Wirth Editions will explore the universe of contemporary and historical prints through curated exhibitions and public programs that showcase the multifaceted practices of the gallery’s international family of artists. Hauser & Wirth’s 18th Street location will also be home to new iterations of the popular Hauser & Wirth Publishers Bookstore and Roth New York Bar, both previously found in the gallery’s temporary location in the former historic Dia Center for the Arts building at 548 West 22nd Street. In addition to the Hauser & Wirth Editions space, the 18th Street location will house the Hauser & Wirth Learning hub for educational and community programs and projects; a small amphitheater for lectures, panels, performances and other special events; and extensive office and co-working spaces for the gallery’s New York team.
Installation view,‘Louise Bourgeois. Once there was a mother’ Hauser & Wirth New York 18th Street 8 September–23 December 2023 © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NYPhoto: Thomas Barratt.
About the exhibition
‘Once there was a mother’ takes its title from Plate 9 of Bourgeois’s 1947 illustrated book ‘He Disappeared into Complete Silence,’ which pairs nine engravings with short texts she called parables. These stories and their accompanying images of isolated buildings convey a sense of loneliness, alienation and lack of communication. They also show Bourgeois’s fascination with the architecture of her adopted city, New York, where she lived and worked from 1938 until her death in 2010. In the parable which accompanies Plate 9, a son ultimately rejects his devoted mother despite her best efforts to protect him. Bourgeois wrote this in the mid-1940s, while raising three young sons.
Most of the printed works in the exhibition were made during the last decade of Bourgeois’s life, when images of maternity––pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding––came to the fore. Although already in her nineties at the time of their creation, the prints reveal Bourgeois to be exceptionally active and innovative, experimenting with a variety of techniques, adding hand-applied details, and printing on the old garments and household fabric she had saved throughout her long life. Like pages of a diary, this material evoked memories of people and events from Bourgeois’s past and was used extensively in her sculptural work as she increasingly identified with her mother, a tapestry weaver and restorer. Her longtime intaglio printer, Felix Harlan, established a printing process in which the various fabrics could take as rich an impression as paper. During this period, Bourgeois also began working closely with noted New York publisher and gallerist Carolina Nitsch. With the help of Raylene Marasco at Dyenamix, Nistch encouraged Bourgeois to edition digital prints that were made unique by the addition of hand-applied dyes and inks, as well as collage elements.
The Passage 2007 Digital print on fabric with fabric collage Unique variant 129.5 x 96.5 x 5.1 cm / 51 x 38 x 2 in
Printmaking afforded Bourgeois the possibility of taking an image or theme and experimenting with it across different variations and permutations. ‘The Fragile’ (2007) is an edition of seven individual sets of thirty-six prints on fabric, each with distinct elements and hand-applied archival dyes. The work is an expression of Bourgeois’s feelings of physical and psychological frailty in her old age and her ensuing identification with the infant child.
The following year, Bourgeois made another edition of nine unique prints on fabric titled ‘The Good Mother’ (2008). Each print in the edition depicts a pregnant woman outlined in red with silver milk dribbling and puddling in various shapes from her left breast. According to Jerry Gorovoy, Bourgeois’s longtime assistant and president of her foundation, The Easton Foundation, the metallic elements are leftover drips of aluminum found on the foundry floor after the casting of one of Bourgeois’s sculptures.
Self Portrait (Detail) 2009 Drypoint, some with watercolor and ink additions, digital print, and embroidery on fabric 314.3 x 231.8 cm / 123 3/4 x 91 1/4 in
One of the exhibition’s only completely unique printed works is ‘Self Portrait’ (2009). Composed on an old bedspread embroidered with the initials ‘L.B.,’ this work was made a year before the artist’s death and depicts a 24-hour clock with hands positioned at the hours 19 and 11––which together form the year of Bourgeois’s birth. Twenty-four individual drypoint prints are collaged and stitched at every hour, with each print illustrating an important event from the artist’s life. The image at hour 24 resembles ‘Maman,’ the monumental spider Bourgeois saw as a symbol for her mother and as an analog for her own artistic practice.
About Louise Bourgeois Born in France in 1911 and working in America from 1938 until her death in 2010, Louise Bourgeois is recognized as one of the most important and influential artists of the past Century. For over seven decades, Bourgeois’s creative process was fueled by an introspective reality, often rooted in cathartic re-visitations of early childhood trauma and frank examinations of female sexuality. Articulated by recurrent motifs (including body parts, houses and spiders), personal symbolism and psychological release, the conceptual and stylistic complexity of Bourgeois’s oeuvre––employing a variety of genres, media and materials––plays upon the powers of association memory, fantasy and fear.
‘Once there was a mother’ opened to the public on the 8th of September and will remain on view through the 23rd of December 2023. For more information about the exhibition, please visit Hauser & Wirth’s site.
All images: Louise Bourgeois © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Courtesy The Easton Foundation and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Christopher Burke
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.
Exemplary Modern. Sophie Taeuber-Arp with Contemporary Artists
Sophie Taeuber-Arp in the planning office for the Aubette,Straßburg, France, 1927© Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth / Artists RightsSociety (ARS), New YorkCourtesy Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth and Hauser& WirthPhotographer unknown
New York…Beginning 6 September, Hauser & Wirth New York will present a special exhibition juxtaposing key works by pioneering early 20th-century Swiss modernist Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943) with works by three contemporary artists—Leonor Antunes, Ellen Lesperance and Nicolas Party. ‘Exemplary Modern. Sophie Taeuber- Arp with Contemporary Artists’ highlights the versatility and enduring legacy of the Swiss avant-garde master. Through the sculptures, works on paper, and textiles on view, the practices of Antunes, Lesperance, and Party resonate with that of Taeuber-Arp, underscoring the diversity and enduring influence of her radical interdisciplinary oeuvre.
Now recognized as a modern master and an exemplary figure in avant-garde art and design, Taeuber-Arp stands out as an important precursor to generations of artists working today. A polymath whose interests spanned a variety of mediums and disciplines, she embraced and balanced in a single practice the roles of painter, sculptor, architect, designer, and teacher and worked in the fields of textiles, costume, fashion, furniture, theatre-staging, interior design, puppetry, performance, and dance. A pioneer of both figuration and abstraction, Taeuber-Arp was a member of the Dada movement and found common cause with the revolutionary interdisciplinarity of the Wiener Werkstätte, the influential Viennese workshop dedicated to modernist design. The exhibition at Hauser & Wirth features examples by Taeuber-Arp that foreground her varied interests and inventive use of materials. Different series of compositions on paper typify her meticulous attention to the interplay of geometry and color, a formal concern that informed much of her practice. Sketches of scenographies showcase the artist’s mastery in designing theatrical space, while a beadwork purse on view encapsulates her brilliance in dissolving the line between applied and fine art.
By situating such objects in conversation with new and recent works by Antunes, Lesperance and Party, the exhibition reveals ways in which Taeuber-Arp’s multifaceted career and exceptional versatility continue to generate ripples across art today.
Three contemporary artists
ANTUNES LEONOR Portrait of Leonor Antunes, 2018© Leonor AntunesCourtesy Hauser & Wirth, Marian Goodman and Kurimanzutto Photo: Nick Ash
Leonor Antunes (b.1972, Lisbon, Portugal, lives and works in Berlin and Lisbon) makes complex, architecturally scaled sculptural environments that are modular in their composition. These comprise sculpturally rendered furniture, frames or screens, lighting, hanging elements and reliefs, and often include abstract floors. In her work, Antunes has pursued an archival- and research-based practice, through which she seeks to investigate and ‘recuperate’ overlooked modernists and, especially, pioneering female artists, architects and designers. She highlights those who for many years have been depreciated by or simply left out of the traditional histories of modernism, including Annie Albers, Lina Bo Bardi, Lygia Clark, Eileen Grey, Gego, Eva Hesse, Mary Martin, Charlotte Perriand, Clara Porset and Mira Schendel, among others, constituting an alternative modernist pantheon into which Sophie Taeuber-Arp can be situated as a peer and leading light.
Antunes works in a way that is complementary to Taeuber-Arp by drawing on a wide range of disciplines and sometimes unconventional materials. That Antunes’s sensitivity and intelligence in her use of materials deliberately sets aside the traditional hierarchies placed upon media or disciplines, and consciously embraces techniques associated with craft, brings her work into vivid alignment with that of Taeuber-Arp.
The works Antunes has made for the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth are in close dialogue with Taeuber-Arp’s art, architecture and design, as well as their scale and materials, and will constitute a series of related sculptures composed into an overall ensemble. Antunes is particularly interested in Taeuber-Arp’s use of beadwork, furniture design and architectural work.
LESPERANCE ELLEN-Portrait of EllenLesperance, 2019© Ellen LesperanceCourtesy Hauser & Wirth and Derek Eller Gallery, New YorkPhoto: Rose Dickson
Artist and educator Ellen Lesperance (b.1971, Minneapolis MN, lives and works in Portland OR) makes work that revolves around feminist histories and textile aesthetics, celebrating feminist activism, peaceful protest and female creativity, and the links between them. Her archive- and research-driven practice explores imagery of women-led protest movements (particularly the 19-year-long Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp) through the investigation of a range of source documents including photographs, videos and films and the recreation of the hand-crafted garments worn by female protestors depicted in them. These garments are translated by Lesperance into intricate, gridded works in gouache and pencil, executed on tea-dyed paper, evoking the matrices of textile patterns for knitting and weaving, specifically using a pattern-language called American Symbol Craft. Her reinterpretations of the original designs become schematic, two-dimensional renditions, with color reimagined from black and white or faded color photographs.
Lesperance’s sense of pattern and design also calls to mind the pattern and decoration movement (known also as the new decorativeness) of the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, to which art education was fundamental. Thus, the artist’s practice aligns with that of Taeuber-Arp with its dedication to balancing figurative and abstract design, and to teaching and writing (Taeuber-Arp taught at the Applied Arts Department of Zurich’s Trade School for 13 years and in 1922 published her text, ‘Remarks on Instruction in Ornamental Design’).Alongside her
Alongside her work on paper, Lesperance has made knitted garments and appliqué textile works, which she refers to as sculptures. A knitted sweater, with accompanying drawing, will be included as a unified, two-part work in the exhibition. These garment works have also been worn performatively or formed the core of socially oriented, collaborative pieces, which are shared by being passed along and worn by multiple participants. For ‘Exemplary Modern. Sophie Taeuber-Arp with Contemporary Artists,’ Lesperance has made a suite of seven new works on paper, including the two-part work.
PARTY NICOLAS Portrait of Nicolas Party© Nicolas PartyCourtesy the artist & Hauser & Wirth Photo: Richmond Lam
Nicolas Party (b.1980, Lausanne, Switzerland, lives and works in New York) is primarily a figurative painter who has attracted critical praise for his uncanny landscapes, portraits and still lifes, which simultaneously celebrate and challenge conventions of representation. Party works in soft pastel, an idiosyncratic choice of medium in the 21st Century and one that allows for exceptional degrees of intensity and fluidity in his images of the natural and the manmade. Transforming objects into abstracted, biomorphic shapes, he excavates deeper connections and meaning. Alongside his painting practice, he has also made sculptures and installations, engaging with ideas of theatrical space.
Underpinning Party’s work is a deep engagement with and knowledge of the history of art. As a Swiss-born artist, he has long admired the work of Sophie Taeuber-Arp, influenced by her immersive interior environments and a strong sense of color, design and form.
Nicolas Party Head 2018 Oil on coated polysterene 200 x 90 x 115 cm / 78 3/4 x 35 3/8 x 45 1/4 in © Nicolas Party Courtesy of the artist & Hauser & Wirth Photo: Thomas Barratt
For the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, Party is presenting a group of ‘Head’ sculptures that have a direct relation to Taeuber-Arp’s own sculptures and puppets (‘poupées’). Party’s sculptural works can be linked to those of Taeuber-Arp through his use of simplified volumes, which are given greater detail via bright, polychromatic painted surfaces. Here, he shows a group of these sculptures in a range of scales—some as small as Taeuber-Arp’s puppets, some larger—installed upon similarly chromatic painted plinths. To render an immersive effect, Party’s ensemble will be set against a black and white photographic mural employing archival photographs of Taeuber-Arp’s stagings of her puppets—theater settings that have helped to inspire some of Party’s previous two-dimensional and mural works.
About Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889 – 1943)
Born in Davos, Switzerland, in 1889, Sophie Taeuber-Arp was one of the most original artists of the 20th-century avant-garde and is considered a pioneer of both Dada and constructivist art. Reconciling extremes with confidence, and bridging Dada and geometric abstraction, fine art and utilitarian objects, Taeuber-Arp’s work boldly engaged the intellectual context of international modernism. Through an enthusiastically liberal approach to mediums, she challenged traditional hierarchies between fine and applied art, and asserted art’s urgent relevance to daily life. Taeuber-Arp defied categorization during her career through her work as a painter, sculptor, architect, performer, choreographer, teacher, writer and designer of textiles, stage sets and interiors. Sophie Taeuber-Arp began her studies at the School of Applied Arts in St. Gallen, Switzerland, between 1906 and 1910, studying textile design and embroidery. She later moved to the experimental workshops of Hermann Obrist and Wilhelm von Debschitz in Munich, Germany, where she learned a variety of techniques in fine and applied art and architecture, before spending a year studying weaving at the School of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 forced Taeuber-Arp to return to Switzerland, where in 1915 she took lessons in Ausdruckstanz (expressive dance), with the choreographer Rudolf von Laban and the revolutionary dancer Mary Wigman. During a visit to the Galerie Tanner in Zurich in that same year, she met her future husband Hans Arp, whom she married in 1922.
Between 1916 and 1919, Taeuber-Arp was a key member of the Zurich Dada movement, performing in modern expressive dances at the Cabaret Voltaire and the Galerie Dada. From 1916–1929, Taeuber-Arp taught textile design at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts. Her teaching methods in color theory and abstraction were informed by her own practice, which deliberately favored mediums and techniques that challenged accepted hierarchies, whether through her pioneering use of the grid, free-flowing geometric forms or abstracted figures. In these years, Taeuber-Arp produced collages, watercolors, textile works and stage sets, marionettes and tapestries, utilizing a unique interplay between color and form, which would later solidify her place as an early protagonist of constructivist art.
All images: Installation view, ‘Exemplary Modern. Sophie Taeuber-Arp with Contemporary Artists,’ Hauser & Wirth New York 69th Street September 6th to the 4th of November 2023 Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Photo: Thomas Barratt
The year 1926 was a turning point in Taeuber-Arp’s career: she was commissioned to design the interior of the Aubette Cultural Center in Strasbourg, a project upon which she invited Hans Arp and Theo van Doesburg to collaborate. Once completed in 1928, this groundbreaking design was the subject of an entire issue of van Doesburg’s journal, De Stijl.
The Aubette commission provided Taeuber-Arp and her husband economic freedom to move to Meudon, near Paris, where she designed their house and studio and some of its furniture. The move marked the beginning of the most productive period in Taeuber-Arp’s life. She joined various artistic collectives from Cercle et Carré to Abstraction-Création and the Swiss group Allianz, alongside fellow artists such as Georges Vantongerloo, Piet Mondrian and Max Bill, and founded and edited the radical art magazine Plastique. The house she shared with Arp in Meudon became a meeting place for artists, writers and other intellectuals, a circle of friends that included the artists Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró and Marcel Duchamp. Between 1929 and 1943, Taeuber-Arp exhibited in 40 exhibitions across the globe. Taeuber-Arp and her husband fled to Southern France when the Nazis invaded Paris in 1940, subsequently crossing over to Zurich in late 1942. The following year, she died tragically and prematurely from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning.
About the curator
The exhibition is organized by Tanya Barson. She was Chief Curator at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona (2016-21) and Curator of International Art, Tate Modern, London (2007-16), joining Tate originally in 1997. She has curated major exhibitions including Felix Gonzalez-Torres (2021), Gego (2019), Rosemarie Castoro (2017), Georgia O’Keeffe (2016), Mira Schendel (2013), Afro-Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic (2010) and Frida Kahlo (2005), among many others. Since 2021, she has been a Senior Curatorial Director at Hauser & Wirth.
On view through 4 November, ‘Exemplary Modern. Sophie Taeuber-Arp with Contemporary Artists’ has been organized by Tanya Barson.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.
Another Day’s Beautiful Chaos Features New York City as its Muse and Canvas
Photo Credit: Natalie Tirado
New York, NY - The artist duo known as Another Day turn garbage cans into gold, street signs into love letters, and park benches into beacons of light. This October, Another Day presents A Beautiful Chaos - their first solo exhibit, short film, and directorial debut.
Vicente Garcia Morillo and Eugene Serebrennikov, the artists behind Another Day studio have spent the last two years building a creative playground of self-expression inspired by their experiences navigating daily life in the city of juxtaposition. New York City is both the muse and the canvas. Another Day’s work incorporates street relics and objects often overlooked or discarded, transforming them into meaningful works of art. The art duo are creating a visual love letter to the city, flaws and all across a multiple mediums, including a series of paintings, three-dimensional sculptures, and experimental creations.
“Our work captures the chaotic yet harmonious forces of daily life in New York City. The heart of the city and soul of the world is overflowing with both trash and treasure. It’s a constant reminder that beauty is everywhere, if you open your mind to it.” - Eugene Serebrennikov and Vicente Garcia Morillo AD:BC, The Short-Film, their first directorial debut, intertwines live-action film-making, 3D clay animation, 2D illustration, and physical, artistic creations into experimental visual narratives.
Photo Credit: Natalie Tirado
The multifaceted artistic approach blends the digital and the physical. The film delves into the misadventures of a pigeon, who unwittingly ingests a psychedelic substance from the ground and embarks on a strange magical journey through the streets of New York City. Along the way, he encounters a series of mishaps, including an irate local Rat. Amidst the chaos, the city’s beauty is revealed.
Exhibition Details:
designers collab
119 N 1st Street
Brooklyn, NY 11249
The exhibition will close on the 27th of October. The gallery hours are | MON-SAT 11-7 pm | SUN 12-7 pm.
Photo Credit: Jacob Consenstien
ABOUT ANOTHER DAY:
Another Day is a New York-based art studio founded by Vicente Garcia Morillo and Eugene Serebrennikov. The artists began their creative partnership a decade ago, despite living on opposite ends of the globe and speaking different languages. Morillo, an award-winning artist and valedictorian from the Fine Arts University of Seville, caught the eye of Serebrennikov, a former Nike Art Director, who found his work online. The duo quit the safety net of their corporate jobs to form Burn & Broad, a creative studio focused on creating impactful designs for clients, and Another Day, the creative playground, focused on the duo's artistic self-expression. Morillo and Serebrennikov's artistic works span various mediums, including sculptures, paintings, and experimental creations. Their first solo exhibition and short film, Another Day: A Beautiful Chaos - is a visual exploration of balance in the city of juxtaposition - New York, New York. While the city is their muse, Morillo and Serebrennikov's personal experiences equally influence their work.
ARTIST STATEMENT: We started collaborating before ever meeting in person, living on opposite ends of the globe, and speaking different languages. Our journey from the very start has been a beautiful chaos. Over the last two years, we’ve been building Another Day, our creative playground of self-expression inspired by our experiences navigating daily life in the city of juxtaposition. New York City is our muse and our canvas. Our work incorporates street relics and objects often overlooked or discarded, transforming them into meaningful works of art and creating a visual love letter to the city, flaws, and all. The art spans multiple mediums, including sculptures, paintings, film-making, and experimental creations.
For further information about Another Day, please get in touch with them here.
Richard T. Walker NEVER HERE / ALWAYS THERE
this, as it isn’t (mountain #2), 2022 two pigment prints in artist's frames, modified rock © Richard T. Walker, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present NEVER HERE / ALWAYS THERE, an exhibition by artist Richard T. Walker. Incorporating photography, video, music, sculpture, and performance, the artist continues his exploration of the relationship between the individual and the changing natural world. In twelve new works, Walker reorders the elements of the environment, upending assumptions about humankind’s place in nature by embracing futile connections to the vast landscape. This will be the Bay Area-based British artist’s second solo show in the gallery’s 49 Geary space, following exhibitions at FraenkelLAB in 2016 and 2017. A public reception with the artist took place on Saturday, September 9, from 1:30–4 pm.
anywhere, somewhere (multiple), 2023 single channel video © Richard T. Walker, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
what we were (as we are) comprises six photographs of trees made in California during the intense 2020 fire season, when smoke tinted the sky an eerie orange color. A speaker embedded in each photograph plays guitar recordings Walker made at the location, in an arrangement that draws inspiration from the towering banks of speakers in the sound systems of the UK’s Notting Hill carnival celebrations. Together, the music builds into a fractured chorus. The piece acknowledges the feelings of anxiety and loss that the landscape evokes in the era of climate change. Walker notes that when photographing the work, “I had an undeniable sense that the California I felt so connected to and quite frankly in love with—the California that had seduced me with its mythical and mystical appeal, with its drama and undeniable beauty and with its perfect balance of invitation and rejection—was being put into question. It felt like it perhaps no longer existed.”
In many of the works on view, Walker combines his photographs of the Western American landscape with 19th-century etchings, found rocks, or guitar recordings, in playful or melancholic arrangements of nature and the human response to it. In the series eternally almost, Walker’s photographs of a lone tree at Crater Lake in Oregon are paired with images of drawings made by the artist’s father showing branches collected at Mount Shasta, a few hundred miles away. Framed separately, the branches and trees align, suggesting a continuity between the forms that plays with different interpretations of the meaning of distance and connection. this, as it isn’t (mountain #2), a photographic diptych, presents two versions of a nearly identical view of a distant, ancient volcano. One features a large rock in the foreground; in the other, the rock is missing from the photograph but has transformed, appearing now as a stone that sits outside of the frame, standing in for the mountain top and toying with notions of distance, scale, and cause and effect.
In other works, Walker employs light or sound in his interaction with the landscape. In a singlechannel video, anywhere, somewhere (multiple), driftwood thrown by an unseen hand hits or misses a drum kit set on a beach, creating human-made noises that mix with the sound of the waves. Elsewhere, Walker continues his long-running use of neon, draping it over a wall-mounted rock and frame in the infinity of an intimate distance, or curving it around a tree trunk in a nighttime lightbox triptych in still, missing you. Richard T. Walker’s artwork and performances have been included in solo and group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; The Contemporary Austin; Times Museum, Guangzhou, China; Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art; and Witte De With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, among other venues. His work is held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Kadist Foundation, San Francisco and Paris; and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (K21), Dusseldorf, Ger(K21), Dusseldorf, Germany, among others. Walker has been an Irvine Fellow at the Montalvo Art Center, and a resident at The Headlands Center for the Arts and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He received an Artadia Award in 2009.
The exhibit opened on September 7th of this year and will close on October 21st of this year. For more information about the exhibit please visit the Fraenkel Gallery’s site.
Nicolas Party. Swamp
Swamp 2023 Soft pastel on linen Left: 175.1 x 55 cm / 68 15/16 x 21 5/8 in Center: 175 x 110 cm / 68 7/8 x 43 5/16 in Right: 175.1 x 55 cm / 68 15/16 x 21 5/8 in
New York...For his first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in New York City, Nicolas Party will transform the first floor of the gallery’s 22nd Street building. New oil-on-copper paintings, cabinet compositions, signature pastel paintings and two monumental site-specific murals will immerse visitors in Party’s practice, which simultaneously celebrates and challenges longstanding and cherished conventions of representational painting through his uniquely singular, subversive style.
Internationally admired for his uniquely adroit use of soft pastel, bold yet delicate, as a primary painting medium, Party created many of the works in this exhibition, including the striking site-specific murals, in pastel. He first began working in this medium over 10 years ago and has since become a master at exploiting the pigments’ versatility, immediacy and saturated color.
Upon entering the exhibition, visitors will encounter the first of two expansive pastel murals––a forest in flames. Party is known for conceiving his exhibitions as comprehensive environments, incorporating architectural interventions and extending the palette of his paintings across the gallery’s white walls. Heightening the powerful effects––formal and psychological––of his subject matter, Party has chosen to steep the surrounding walls in a rich maroon. Just beyond the pastel mural hangs a group of portraits featuring enigmatic figures paired with an animal that obscures their body. These creatures were inspired by the work of radical 19th-century French realist painter Rosa Bonheur, an icon of women’s independence who put the living world at the heart of both her life and work, placing animals at the center of her practice.
Installation view, ‘Nicolas Party. Swamp’ Hauser & Wirth New York 22nd Street 7 September – 21 October 2023 © Nicolas Party Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer
Created directly on the gallery’s 37 1/2 foot wide rear wall, Party painted an immense swamp mural, full of endless tree trunks submerged into a marsh. A pair of alpine vistas inspired by the artist’s Swiss homeland flank the scene, hung atop deep green walls. These landscapes echo those of Ferdinand Hodler, one of the most renowned and innovative Swiss painters of the 19th Century.
In contrast to the large-scale, enveloping pastel works on view, intimately scaled cabinet paintings sit upon marble trompe l’oeil pedestals and oil-on-copper paintings hang throughout both rooms of the exhibition. Here Party once again contemporizes all but forgotten classical mediums; just as his signature pastels achieved the height of popularity in the 18th Century, oil on copper was a fashionable and prevalent alternative to canvas during the mid-16th Century, while cabinets were most commonly made as altarpieces in medieval and Renaissance art. Party uses these mediums to express his recent fascination with pre-historic creatures of the Mesozoic Era, the second-to-last era of Earth’s geological history, in the oil-on-copper paintings and one cabinet. Drawn to the architectural, three-dimensional quality of the cabinet’s multi-panel format, the jewel-like works point to the latest developments in the artist’s formal experimentations, which continue to illuminate the timelessness of art historical figures, movements and techniques by reinventing their application in the present. ‘Swamp’ coincides with Party’s major site-specific installation ‘Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera,’ commissioned for The Frick Collection on Madison Avenue, on view through 3 March 2024, and his participation as one of three contemporary artists featured in the exhibition ‘Exemplary Modern. Sophie Taeuber-Arp with Contemporary Artists’ opening 6 September at Hauser & Wirth’s 69th Street location in New York City.
Mountains 2023 Soft pastel on linen 155.1 x 185.1 x 2.7 cm / 61 1/8 x 72 7/8 x 1 1/8 in 161.9 x 192.1 x 9 cm / 63 3/4 x 75 5/8 x 3 1/2 in (framed)
About the Artist
Born in Lausanne in 1980, Party is a figurative painter who has achieved critical admiration for his familiar yet unsettling landscapes, portraits, and still lifes that simultaneously celebrate and challenge conventions of representational painting. His works are primarily created in soft pastel, an idiosyncratic choice of medium in the 21st Century, and one that allows for exceptional degrees of intensity tand fluidity in his depictions of objects both natural and manmade. Transforming these objects into abstracted, biomorphic shapes, Party suggests deeper connections and meanings. His unique visual language has coalesced in a universe of fantastical characters and motifs where perspective is heightened and skewed to uncanny effect.
Nicolas’s exhibit has been on display since the 7th of September and will end on the 21st of October of 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.
Ed Clark. The Big Sweep
Ed Clark Locomotion 1963 Oil on canvas 192.4 x 371.2 cm / 75 3/4 x 146 1/8 inches Photo: Thomas Barratt
Beginning 7 September, two full floors of Hauser & Wirth’s 22nd Street building in New York will be devoted to ‘The Big Sweep,’ an exhibition covering the six-decade career of pioneering American abstractionist Ed Clark (1926 – 2019). Taking its title from Clark’s dedication to innovative techniques, particularly his revolutionary embrace of the common push broom as a paintbrush, this presentation documents the ways in which Clark pushed the boundaries of abstraction and its conventions beyond expressionism, from his breakthrough introduction of the shaped canvas to his distinctive approach to and impact upon questions of materiality, form and color. ‘The Big Sweep’ exhibition will be accompanied by the release of ‘Ed Clark: The Big Sweep; Chronicles of a Life, 1926–2019,’ the definitive new book on Clark, produced by Hauser & Wirth Publishers. Among the exceptional works on view, the earliest is ‘Untitled’ (1955). Completed while Clark was living in Paris, this canvas reflects the direction of the artist’s early practice under influences he encountered upon arriving in Europe in 1952, after studying at the Art Institute of Chicago. Here, he has created a work at once in dialogue with the art of his contemporaries, while expressing a velocity discernably his own. In Paris, Clark surrounded himself with such luminary American peers as Beauford Delaney, Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell, while likewise finding profound inspiration in the paintings of French artist Nicolas de Staël. Released from the bigotry and racialized assumptions that burdened Black artists in the United States, Clark felt liberated from the focus on realism that had dominated his practice back home. He began to experiment with abstraction, and to lean into the central role gesture and the tangibility of paint could play in practice. Of this period, he said, ‘I began to believe, from my conversations with other artists, that the real truth is in the stroke. For me, it is large, bold strokes that do not refer distinctly to seen nature. The paint is the subject. The motions of the strokes give the work life.
Clark returned to the United States in 1956 and quickly established himself in the New York School alongside Al Held, Franz Kline, Yayoi Kusama, and George Sugarman, among others. In 1957, he broke away from the limitations of the traditional rectangular canvas and created the first shaped painting in American modernism, now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. By including protruding collage elements in his paintings, he immediately endowed his work with a bold, palpable physicality. In 1967, Clark spent a year living at Joan Mitchell’s home and studio in Vétheuil, France, where he painted his first oval canvas, mimicking the shape of the human eye, and using a push broom to create large sweeping brushstrokes. The monumental ovoid canvas of ‘Untitled’ (c. the 1970s)––on view in this exhibition––as well as the embedded oval shape of ‘Integrated Oval #1’ (1972)—exhibited in the Whitney Annual that same year—both suggest the pleasure and sense of freedom Clark achieved through the formal experimentation that in turn allowed him to intensify his gesture and the effects of materiality, form and color.
Untitled ca. 1970 Acrylic on shaped canvas 294 x 408.9 x 3.8 cm / 115 3/4 x 161 x 1 1/2 in
Clark would become renowned for his revolutionary use of a push broom as a paintbrush, a technique he first tried in Paris in 1956 and that, along with the shaped canvas, would come to define his practice. The push broom offered the artist a way to imbue his work with dramatic degrees of dynamism and energy that could not be realized by a conventional paintbrush. As demonstrated in such paintings as ‘Locomotion’ (1963) and ‘North Light (Paris)’ (1987), Clark’s method used the pressure of his entire body—he described the effect as being akin to ‘cutting through something really fast; that’s what the straight stroke with the push broom gives you, speed’— to evenly extend the momentum of his sweeping gesture across the whole surface of the canvas. Though Clark would occasionally vary the intensity of the line and color in a single motion, exploring nuances in its effects, the power of this revolutionary approach opened new vistas for abstraction with a big sweep.
Ed Clark Untitled 1955 Oil on canvas 129.5 x 129.5 cm / 51 x 51 in
By the 1980s, Clark had morphed the linearity of his earlier paintings into more tubular motifs that curved and splintered around the canvas. This ‘Broken Rainbow’ series is characterized by rounded brushstrokes that expand upon the curved lines of the 70s ovals with a new energy and confidence. Sometimes applying dry pigment to a wet broom, Clark injected his sweeping gestures with even greater motion and liveliness. In his late paintings, made in the first years of the 21st century, such as ‘Creation’ (2006), Clark’s forceful broom strokes gave way to softer, at times even aqueous, gestures that expressed a final burst of pure liberation.
Released in conjunction with the exhibition, ‘Ed Clark: The Big Sweep; Chronicles of a Life, 1926–2019’ (Hauser & Wirth Publishers), chronicles the story of the artist’s life and work through reprints of important historical texts by numerous authors, including Darby English, Anita Feldman, Geoffrey Jacques, Kellie Jones, April Kingsley, and Corinne Robins; interviews with Clark by Quincy Troupe, Jack Whitten and Judith Wilson; and photographs, letters and ephemera from the archive of Clark’s estate and his papers at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Ed Clark in Paris with his painting ‘Patel Wheel,’ 1989
About the artist Born in New Orleans in 1926 and raised in Chicago, Clark emerged in the 1950s as a pioneer of the New York School. Over the course of seven decades, his experimentations with pure color, abstract form, and the seductive materiality of paint have yielded an oeuvre of remarkable originality, extending the language of American abstraction. Clark’s breakthroughs have an important place in the story of modern and contemporary art: in the late 1950s, he was the first American artist credited with exhibiting a shaped canvas, an innovation that continues to reverberate today. His search for a means to breach the limitations of the conventional paintbrush led him to use a push broom to apply pigment to the canvas laid out on the floor. Defying the discreet categories of gestural and hard-edged abstraction, Clark has masterfully interwoven these approaches into a unique form of expressionism.
Installation view, ‘Ed Clark. The Big Sweep’ Hauser & Wirth New York 22nd Street 7 September – 21 October 2023 © The Estate of Ed Clark Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer
After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and L’Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris, Clark continued to live and work in France, absorbing the influence of such European modernists as Nicolas de Staël, Pierre Soulages, and Jean Riopelle. He became a member of a social and intellectual circle of American expatriate artists and writers, including fellow African-American creatives Beauford Delaney, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Barbara Chase-Riboud. Clark settled in New York in 1957, where, over the ensuing decade, he became part of the city’s dynamic downtown scene and a co-founder of the Brata Gallery, an artist-run cooperative among the Tenth Street galleries of the East Village. From the late 1960s until the last decade, Clark split his time between New York and Paris, traveling extensively to other locales from Mexico and Brazil to North Africa and Greece. In 2019, while living in Detroit, Clark passed away at the age of 93. ‘No matter what I do,’ the artist said, ‘there’s not a day that I’m not an artist.’
All images: © The Estate of Ed Clark Courtesy of the Estate and Hauser & Wirth
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.
BAILEY:Photographs
Self Portrait, Singapore, 1957© David Bailey, courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles
The Fahey/Klein Gallery is pleased to present selected photographs by David Bailey. This exhibition includes some of Bailey’s signature images of luminaries of fashion, music, and fine art. In portraits and little-known “torn” prints, he captures subjects including Jane Birkin, Michael Caine, David Hockney, Helmut Newton, Jean Shrimpton, and Mick Jagger.
Bailey’s bold and iconoclastic style has made him one of the world’s most renowned living portrait photographers and earned him as much fame as his subjects. Discarding the rigid rules of a previous generation of portrait and fashion photographers, he channeled and immortalized the energies of London in the 1960s and beyond. Self-taught, his distinctive style comprises stark white backgrounds, uncompromising crops, and striking, seemingly spontaneous poses. From the beginning of his career, which now spans more than six decades, his arresting yet spare portraits and fashion images have conveyed a radical sense of youth and sexuality, often typifying the look of the times.
David Bailey was born in London in 1938. His childhood shaped his early experiences in the East End during the Blitz of WWII. Having left school at fifteen, he was conscripted into the Royal Air Force in 1956. Whilst posted in Singapore, he bought his first camera and was inspired to be a photographer after seeing Cartier Bresson's photograph, 'Kashmir'’. Bailey started working with fashion photographer John French as his assistant in 1959. He left soon after to strike out his career as a photographer and published his first portrait of Somerset Maugham for 'Today' magazine in 1960. Bailey’s meteoric rise at British Vogue in the early ’60s was followed by the publication, in 1965, of his first photography book, Box of Pin-Ups, which, as its title suggests, depicted media stars such as Mick Jagger, The Beatles, and Andy Warhol, among many others. His mercurial persona was the inspiration for the principal character—a fashion photographer—in Michelangelo Antonioni’s modern classic film Blow-Up (1966), and Bailey went on to create some of the most memorable and sensual portraits of the last century. Bailey has exhibited worldwide, with the first of his landmark exhibitions in 1971 at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Other exhibitions have been held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (1983), the International Center of Photography New York (1984), Birth of Cool, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2000), and Bailey's Stardust, National Portrait Gallery, London (2014), which traveled through 2015 to Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan, and Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. Bailey's work is held in private and public collections, including the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The exhibition reception was held on Thursday, September 28th, and runs till November 11, 2023
For more information about the exhibit, please visit the gallery’s site.
JONATHAN MEESE DOCTOR-DOC-DR.-” HIGHNOON“IS BACK! (WONDERLAND DELARGE)
PhotoCredit: © Jana Edisonga
Four years on from the Meese Haute Couture series and the tribute it paid to Karl Lagerfeld, Jonathan Meese makes a spectacular return to Paris with DOCTOR-DOC-DR.- „HIGH NOON“ IS BACK! (WONDERLAND DE LARGE), an extravagant exhibition delving into the power of tales and legends.
Vidéo © Sylvie Boulloud
The names of a litany of heroes, from Alice in Wonderland, the Wizard of Oz, Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs to the Smurfs, the Loch Ness monster, Fantômas and Parsifal jump out at us, becoming the standard bearers for a new vision of art. The paintings teem with material, now dripping off the canvas, now crushed to the point of no return, fusing visions of childhood with calls for revolution. Tales, myths and legends are the glue that binds collective culture. And for Jonathan Meese, they are the crucible where the Western imagination is forged as well as a vital source of inspiration in his practice: “Without fairy tales, we wouldn’t be able to build the future,” he says. “The whole world is a fairy tale, the future is in some way our wonderful world. We have a role to play in this all-powerful future. And art determines the future. Art is all-powerful.”
"DRACULA'S DRAGONBABY "MAGIC WOLF"!", 2023 huile et acrylique sur toile de coton non traitée | oil and acrylic on coarse untreated cogon cloth 120.5 x 100.3 x 3.3 cm Photo: Roman März
Over the last twenty or so years, Meese has developed an uncategorizable body of work, lying somewhere between expressionism and actionism, combining painting, sculpture, installations, and performance. His work questions the boundary between culture and nature, creativity and conformism, appearance and power, proposing a singular philosophy where art alone can serve as our guide to the evolving world.
"SCHNAPP' DEN TRAPPERZ, DER DICH ANTEUFELT", 2014 Huile, acrylique, pâte à modeler acrylique sur toile | Oil, acrylic, acrylic modelling paste on canvas 120.8 x 100.5 x 3.3 cm Photo: Jan Bauer
Jonathan Meese was born in Tokyo in 1970 and lives and works in Berlin and Ahrensburg. His work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions since he first exhibited in Berlin and at the Berlin Biennale in 1998. He has taken part in various major group shows such as Generation Z at PS1 in New York (1999), New Blood at the Saatchi Collection in London (2004), and Dionysiac at the Pompidou Centre in Paris (2005). The Deichtorhallen in Hamburg and Magasin de Grenoble organized a retrospective of his work in 2006: Mama Johnny. Other notable exhibitions of his work include those held at the Miami MOCA (2011), Akademie der Künste in Vienna (2012), Prague National Gallery (2015), Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna (2017), Carré Sainte-Anne in Montpellier ( 2017) and Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (2018). In 2019, the artist took the Dr Zuhause: K.U.N.S.T (Erzliebe) project to Lübeck, where it occupied all the city's exhibition spaces. In 2022, in collaboration with young artist Conny Maier, he put together a large-scale exhibition entitled Hansel and Gretel (Let me in Ruh’) in Aurich, Germany.
Toutes les images / All images: © Courtesy of the artist and TEMPLON, Paris —Brussels — New York
Jonathan Meese has also created sets and scenery for the theatre and opera, including Dionysos by Wolfgang Rihm, presented at the Salzburg Festival in 2010 and the Staatsoper in Berlin in 2012. He designed the scenery for Charpentier's Médée directed by Pierre Audi at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in 2012. His improvisation on Wagner's Parsifal at the Berlin Staatsoper in 2005 and Homage to Noël Coward at Tate Modern in 2006 were both unforgettable events. In 2007, he wrote and performed De Frau: Dr. Poundaddylein – Dr. Ezodysseusszeusuzur at the Volksbühne in Berlin, and in 2020, he presented a new show, Lolita (R)evolution (Rufschädigendst)-Ihr Alle seid die Lolita Eurer Selbst! at Theater Dortmund. In 2021, during the global pandemic, Jonathan Meese released an acclaimed record in collaboration with renowned electronic music producer DJ Hell, Hab keine Angst, hab keine Angst, ich bin deine Angst [Don't be afraid, don't be afraid, I'm your fear].
The exhibit has been on display since the 2nd of September at the Paris-Beaubourg location and will close on October 28th of this year. For more information about this exhibit, please visit the Templon Gallery website.
CLAUDE VIALLAT : A Couple of Sidesteps
87-year-old French artist Claude Viallat is taking “a couple of sidesteps” to reveal a series of new paintings created between 2022 and 2023 at the Galerie Templon Brussels space. A founder and leading member of the Supports/Surfaces group in the 1970s, Claude Viallat, has spent the last 50 years exploring the limits of abstract painting through variations around his signature “shape” – a small bone form – reproduced on a wide variety of fabrics and tarpaulins, hung unmounted and unimpeded in space. With this new exhibition, carefully installed by Claude Viallat himself, the artist unveils a handful of his latest experiments. In a number of works, the shape, rather than being repeated as an endless sequence, is diluted to the point where it forms large spots of watery colors. In other pieces, it is outlined with dripped paint, suggesting a contrasting image of calligraphy.
Vidéo © José Huedo
The use of multi-colored fabrics offers him the opportunity to introduce new hues: a deep ruby canvas rubs shoulders with a soft mauve or platinum grey piece. In Viallat’s work, the palette always chooses itself: “I am an instrument,” he explains. “The work has a life of its own. I only have to concern myself with the result.” Another constant feature of the artist’s approach is that the exhibition layout is almost a work of art in itself.
The artist delights in juxtaposing canvases, mixing up surprising textures and patterns. He uses this ever-innovative game of contrasts to reveal an audacious and intuitive dialogue between volume and surface, accumulation and void. Claude Viallat was born in 1936 in Nimes, France, where he continues to live and work.
Vues d'exposition © Isabelle Arthuis
The many solo exhibitions of his work include shows at the MACBA in Buenos Aires (2022), Venet Foundation in southeastern France (2019), Musée Fabre in Montpellier (2014), Ludwig Museum in Germany (2014), Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico (2004), MuBe in Brazil (2001), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in Germany (1983) and Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou in Paris (1982). He represented France at the 43rd Venice Biennale in Italy in 1988. His works are featured in over fifty public collections in France and internationally, including at the Musée National d’Art Moderne - Centre Pompidou in Paris and MoMA in New York. His native city is holding a major retrospective of his work for the first time. It will take place at the Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art Contemporain starting on 27 October 2023. The city of Nîmes has also announced the opening of a Claude Viallat foundation in the former Saint Joseph Chapel. Architect Jean-Michel Willmotte has been commissioned with the design of the foundation, which is scheduled to open in late 2025.
Since his first collaboration with Daniel Templon in 1972, this will be the artist’s eleventh exhibition at the gallery that has represented him since 1999.
This exhibit has been on view since the 2nd of September at the Brussels location and will close on the 4th of November of this year. Please visit the Templon Gallery's site for more information about Claude’s exhibit.
ROBIN KID : KINGDOM OF ENDS
For his second solo show in Paris with Templon, Robin Kid is coming back to the Grenier-Saint-Lazare space with his new series « Kingdom of Ends,» taking over the entire gallery to create an immersive experience consisting of painting, sculpture, and installation, all centering around a two-story high mobile.
Kingdom of Ends - XIII, 2023 Résine uréthane, fibre de verre, fonte d'aluminium, acier inoxydable, peinture polyuréthane | Urethan resin, fiberglass, cast aluminum, stainless steel, polyurethane paint H250 x W190 x D90 cm Photo: ROBIN KID
Through the evocative poignancy of mass-produced foundational imagery depicting our commonly shared childhood, Robin Kid is delving into the notion of personal and cultural memories, conjuring up feelings of uncertainty but also of the most naive hopes and dreams gathered during childhood and teenage years.
By combining stainless steel panels and aluminum sculpture with oil painting in a toylike way, the artist is manufacturing an idealized billboard to our shared desire while operating in the context of power and control; Borrowing its title « Kingdom of Ends » from Kant’s ethical principle, the work explores our collective need and hope for a secure existence -and the fear that in Today’s world many might never attain it.
Toutes les images / All images: © Courtesy the artist and TEMPLON, Paris —Brussels — New York
Influenced by Robert Rauschenberg’s “Combines” and Jim Dine’s early works like “Lawnmower” and “Child’s Blue Wall,” - the Kingdom of Ends series are hybrid works, neither painting nor sculpture, but both at once. They invade the viewer’s space, demanding its attention and instigate a dialogue by simultaneously becoming eye-popping and menacing yet perfectly balanced advertisements, invoking a nostalgia so strong it amounts to an ache, for they show us a time and place of which we are and always have been exiled from.
Robin Kid (b. 1991) is an autodidact multidisciplinary artist from Dutch descent. His works hijack a variety of social, political and traditional imagery of the past and present, with rebellious, religious, fantastical and in some ways offensive undertones. He pulls intuitively from the world of advertising, the Internet, the entertainment industry and his childhood memories, to produce ambitious, enigmatic and thought provoking narratives, which question the polarized world of the 21st century.
This exhibit has been on view since the 2nd of September at the Paris- Grenier Saint Lazare location and will close on the 21st of October of this year. Please visit the Templon Gallery's website for more information about Robin’s exhibit.
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.