Margel Hinder @ Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney & Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen - Modern in Motion

Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

30 January – 2 May 2021

Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen

30 June – 10 October 2021

MARGEL HINDER 

Revolving construction 1957

Art Gallery of New South Wales, purchased 1959 

© AGNSW

The Art Gallery of New South Wales presents Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion, the first retrospective of one of Australia’s most important and dynamic, yet underrated, modernist sculptors of the 20th century.

The exhibition, presented in collaboration with Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne, showcases an arresting array of sculptures by Margel Hinder (1905 – 1995) produced over five decades of her career.

From the solidity and volume of her wood carvings in the 1930s, to the ‘space age’ kinetic and wire works of the 1950s and her major public commissions in the 1960s, Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion traces the development of Margel Hinder’s creative vision and her exploration of sculptural languages.

Art Gallery of NSW director Dr Michael Brand said the exhibition aims to rectify Margel Hinder’s profile as one of the most underestimated Australian sculptors of the 20th century.

“Margel Hinder was an agent for cultural change and part of the first generation of abstract artists in Australia. This important retrospective reveals how vital Hinder was in the making of Sydney’s modernism and for asserting the place of sculpture within it,” Brand said.

Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion is co-curated by Art Gallery of NSW senior curator of Australian art Denise Mimmocchi and Heide Museum of Modern Art artistic director Lesley Harding.

Lesley Harding said the exhibition uncovers the expansive nature of Margel Hinder’s creativity, and her skill in giving sculptural form to universal concepts like time and motion in materials expressive of the era.

“Apart from her inclusion in a few surveys of local modernism, Hinder’s vanguard practice and its legacy have largely been overlooked since the 1980s. This exhibition presents her innovative and visually arresting sculpture to new generations and the wide audience it deserves.”

Denise Mimmocchi said the exhibition is an opportunity to explore the breadth and depth of Hinder’s oeuvre.

“Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion brings together major sculptures from public and private collections, immersive representations of public sculptures, maquettes, drawings and archival photographs to present an insightful portrait of the pioneering sculptor’s life and work.”

“The Art Gallery of NSW has a substantial collection of Hinder’s maquettes that reveal incredible details of her creative processes. We are excited to have recently completed conservation on more than 40 of these maquettes so that they can be exhibited,” said Denise Mimmocchi.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Margel Hinder (née Harris) initiated her sculpture studies in Buffalo and Boston. She migrated to Australia in 1934, following her marriage to Australian artist Frank Hinder, where her mature practice flourished.

Exhibition highlights include Margel Hinder’s commanding kinetic works, whose slow rotations encapsulate a sense of the world in perpetual motion, and an immersive installation based on two of Hinder’s major public sculptures.

Created by environment designer and 3D artist Andrew Yip, the life-size digital reconstructions are of two of the most significant public sculptures of Hinder’s career: the Civic Park fountain, Newcastle 1961–66 and the now decommissioned Northpoint fountain 1975. This project allows for a presence of this important component of Hinder’s art within the context of her retrospective while also demonstrating the dramatic shift in the style and scope of Hinder’s art in monumental and water kinetic sculpture.

The exhibition is accompanied by the richly illustrated publication Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion featuring essays by Denise Mimmocchi; Lesley Harding; Art Gallery of NSW object conservator Melanie Barrett; and Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University assistant professor of immersive media, Dr Andrew Yip; and a foreword by University of Oxford professor of the history of art Dr Geoffrey Batchen.

Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion is presented at the Art Gallery of NSW and will tour to Heide Museum of Modern Art.

ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

Art Gallery Road, The Domain, Sydney

www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au

HEIDE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen VIC 3105

www.heide.com.au

An-My Lê @ The Carter, Fort Worth - On Contested Terrain

An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain

Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth

April 18 - August 8, 2021

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art (the Carter) will present the first comprehensive survey of the work of Vietnamese-American photographer AN-MY LÊ (b. 1960). Featuring photographs from a selection of the artist’s five major bodies of work, the nationally touring An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain draws connections across Lê’s career and provides unprecedented insight into her subtle, evocative images that draw on the classical landscape tradition to explore the complexity of American history and conflict.

Celebrated photographer Lê has spent nearly 25 years exploring the edges of war and recording these landscapes of conflict in beautiful, classically composed photographs. Born in Saigon in the midst of the Vietnam War, Lê vividly remembers the sights, sounds, and smells of growing up in a warzone. She and her family were eventually evacuated by the U.S. military in 1975. It would take another 20 years for Lê to return to her homeland, this time with a large-format camera in tow.

“We are proud to bring An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain to our North Texas community,” said Andrew J. Walker, Executive Director. “Lê’s photographs bring history into conversation with the present, confronting head-on, complicated questions that remain relevant today. It feels especially important that we are spotlighting her work during our anniversary year, as it draws on the traditions reflected in our historical photography collection and underlines our 60-year commitment to exhibiting the best American photographers at the Carter.”

Lê follows in the tradition of nineteenth-century photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan and Mathew Brady, whose images of the Civil War brought the realities of combat to everyday Americans. Crafting sweeping views that emphasize the size and breadth of the theater of war, Lê captures the complexity of conflict and the full scope of military life, avoiding the sensationalism often seen in newspapers and movies. On Contested Terrain highlights the artist’s technical strengths, used to compose beautiful images that draw the viewer into deeper consideration of complex themes of history and power.

The exhibition presents selections from five of Lê’s major series:

- Viêt Nam (1994–98)

Almost 20 years after her family was evacuated, Lê returned to Vietnam with her large-format camera. The resulting series is a meditation on her homeland, addressing both her memories of it and the country’s reality decades later. It depicts the landscape as a backdrop for human history, a theme Lê would return to again and again.

- Small Wars (1999–2002)

Back in the United States, Lê photographed Vietnam War reenactors in North Carolina and Virginia, often participating as a North Vietnamese soldier or Viet Cong rebel. Working with the reenactors, many of whom had not fought in the war, to achieve “authenticity” whenever possible, Lê made images that explore the legacy and mythology of the Vietnam War for contemporary Americans.

- 29 Palms (2003–04)

Unable to secure credentials to embed on the front lines of the Iraq War, Lê traveled to a California military base to photograph troops training in a landscape similar to the environment in which they would soon be deployed. In addition to the desert training exercises, Lê photographed the debriefings and downtime that filled the soldiers’ days.

- Events Ashore (2005–14)

This series, the artist’s first foray into color photography, was created over nine years that Lê spent photographing the crews of U.S. naval vessels around the world. An extensive exploration of the global reach of the American military, Events Ashore includes scenes of everyday life on an aircraft carrier alongside diplomatic, humanitarian, military, and political activities.

- Silent General (2015–ongoing)

In her current series, Lê grapples with the legacy of America’s Civil War and responds to the complexities of the current socio-political moment. Her poetic photographs of polarized landscapes confront issues of our time that are rooted in our history, from the fate of Confederate monuments to immigration debates around agricultural laborers.

“An-My Lê has spent decades investigating conflicted terrains, both physical and metaphorical” stated Kristen Gaylord, Assistant Curator of Photographs. “Her photographs consider questions that we are all thinking about now: What does it mean to be an American citizen? How does our country’s history shape our contemporary lives? What should be the role of the U.S. in the world? These questions are especially salient for the City of Fort Worth, which includes a major defense contractor, the first Joint Reserve Base in the country, and residents and refugees from around the world, including Vietnam, Somalia, Guatemala, and Afghanistan. The generosity and incisiveness of Lê’s vision are a model for how we can navigate these complexities together.”

An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain is organized by Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. The exhibition debuted at Carnegie Museum of Art (March 2020 - January 18, 2021). Following the presentation at the Carter, the exhibition will travel to the Milwaukee Art Museum in fall 2021. An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring many images never-before-published.

AN-MY LÊ was born in Saigon in 1960. She and her family fled Vietnam in 1975, living for a short period of time in Paris, France, before settling in the United States as a political refugee. Lê received her BAS (1981) and MS (1985) degrees in biology from Stanford University and an MFA from Yale University in 1993. While Lê is represented in many major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Dallas Museum of Art — An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain is the first survey of her work in an American museum. Currently, a professor of photography at Bard, Lê has received many awards, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellow (2012), the Tiffany Comfort Foundation Fellowship (2010), the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program Award (2007), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1997). Her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries across the world, including the Baltimore Museum of Art; Dia Beacon, Beacon, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; MoMA PS1, New York; and more, and her photography was featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial.

AMON CARTER MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

3501 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth, TX 76107

www.cartermuseum.org

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Idris Khan @ Victoria Miro Gallery, London - The Seasons Turn

Idris Khan: The Seasons Turn

Victoria Miro Gallery, London

8 April - 15 May 2021

IDRIS KHAN

The Seasons Turn - Autumn 3, 2020

Watercolour, oil, paper and aluminium.

45.5 x 55 cm.

© Idris Khan. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

Victoria Miro announces an exhibition of new works by IDRIS KHAN. Conceived of as two distinct installations, each a reflection on aspects of the past year, The Seasons Turn includes a suite of 28 watercolour and oil collaged works on paper that incorporate fragments of the score of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, and an environment of enveloping blue paintings whose rich bands of colour are layered with the artist’s thoughts, feelings and responses to 2020.

Music in its written and played forms has long been a source of inspiration for Idris Khan who, in two- and three-dimensional works and film, has reimagined the work of composers including Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert and Bach. In these new works Idris Khan returns to Vivaldi’s baroque masterpiece The Four Seasons, using fragments of the violin concerti’s scores as a springboard for his own visual evocation of a calendar year. Idris Khan’s work has often alluded to the excessive proliferation of information in the technical age, whilst simultaneously advocating for a slower, more considered way of looking. Forced to slow down during this period of lockdown, in these works he reflects on his own increased awareness of the changing rhythms and colours of the natural world.

Seven works correspond with each of the seasons. Each individual work comprises a ground of watercolour in a selected hue on to which a smaller sheet, stamped with fragments of Vivaldi’s score in a contrasting or complementary colour, is affixed. Stamping further across the sheets in a free and improvisatory way, Idris Khan arrives at combinations of colour and gesture that, referring to the natural world, also reflect his own emotions amid the turbulence of the past year. The effect is twofold. Just as Vivaldi’s work brims with allusions to nature, in Idris Khan’s work colour – stepping forward here to become a major protagonist – changes with seasonal nuance, the vibrancy of spring giving way to the lushness of summer, the burnished hues of autumn and winter’s stark palette as the viewer moves around the gallery. Yet, while the works line the gallery in chronological order – with a compositional linearity that might be considered akin to a line of music – individually and collectively they are subject to staccato change, each line of music a fragment of time that might be overlaid or repeated at any point in the year, irrespective of the music’s progression. For Idris Khan, this manner of working is reflective of a year in which a sense of time’s passage and collapse has been unlike any other. It is one, as the artist says, ‘with uncertainty built into the process’. Yet, it is also one perfectly in tune with the ‘live’ quality of creating the work and the fortuitous emergence of unforeseen beauty.

Idris Khan has often drawn inspiration from key philosophical and theological texts in his work, yet increasingly his own writings have become a conduit for investigating memory, creativity and the layering of experience. Unified by the use of the colour blue, which the artist describes as having ‘an immediate effect on emotion’, a number paintings, some large scale, feature passages of texts in which Khan expresses thoughts, feelings and responses to 2020.Diaristic in nature, these texts, once repeated and layered in sonorous blue oil, are distilled, a number fragmentary experiences and disparate ideas becoming a single image. In this manner, while Idris Khan ultimately eradicates the meaning of the original text, he constructs an abstract and universal language. Moving between the works in a specially conceived installation, the viewer becomes aware of the way in which each painting is subtly different, the horizontal bands appearing to rise and fall almost like breathing, shifting in a rhythmic way that also relates to the musicality of the works in his Vivaldi series. It is in this contemplative space that both the processes of Minimalist art and allusions to the role of repetition in the world’s major religions are brought into focus – as a vehicle for transcendence and a conduit of the sublime.

Born in Birmingham in 1978, IDRIS KHAN completed his Master’s Degree at the Royal College of Art and lives and works in London. Idris Khan was appointed OBE for services to Art in the Queen’s Birthday 2017 Honours List. In 2023, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA will present the first career survey exhibition by the artist in the United States.

A major survey exhibition Idris Khan: A World Within was held at The New Art Gallery Walsall in February 2017, with solo presentations of the artist’s work previously staged at national and international institutional venues including the Whitworth Gallery, University of Manchester (2016–2017 and 2012); Sadler’s Wells, London (2011); Gothenburg Konsthall, Sweden (2011); Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2010); Kunsthaus Murz, Mürzzuschlag, Austria (2010) and K20, Düsseldorf (2008). His work has also been included in group shows at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (2015); Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2014–2015); Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2014); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, Florida (2013); The British Museum, London (2012); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (2012); Fundament Foundation, Tilburg (2011); Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); and Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin (2009).

 

A major public sculpture for London by Idris Khan, commissioned by St George’s Plc with London Borough of Southwark as part of the development of One Blackfriars, was unveiled in autumn 2019. Idris Khan’s 21 Stones is currently displayed in The Albukhary Foundation Islamic Gallery, which recently opened at the British Museum, London. 21 Stones is the British Museum’s first site-specific artwork. In 2016, Idris Khan was commissioned to make a permanent public monument, forming the centrepiece of the new Memorial Park in Abu Dhabi, which was unveiled on the UAE Commemoration Day. In 2017, it received an American Architecture Prize, a World Architecture News Award and a German Design Award. Further commissions include a wall drawing commissioned by the British Museum in 2012 for its exhibition Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam. In addition, for the duration of the exhibition, Idris Khan’s monumental floor installation, Seven Times, was installed in the museum’s Great Court.

VICTORIA MIRO

16 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW

www.victoria-miro.com

Hannah Wilke @ LaiSun Keane Gallery, Boston - Friendship

Hannah Wilke: Friendship

LaiSun Keane Gallery, Boston

February 18 - April 10, 2021

For the first time in more than 20 years, LaiSun Keane presents an exhibition of an exclusive group of works by Hannah Wilke (1940-1993) to Boston titled Hannah Wilke: Friendship. The exhibition illuminates the friendship between Hannah Wilke and Deena Axelrod.  

Hannah Wilke and Deena Axelrod’s youths were informed by 60s feminism, which was foregrounded by huge social and cultural shifts. Their lives converged in many ways which impacted their family, friends and most importantly, Hannah Wilke’s art making. The works in this exhibition show how Hannah Wilke’s art and their personal lives were intertwined. Hannah Wilke’s art WAS very much her life and it seeps into every aspect, be it through friends and family members or famous lovers. 

A pertinent example of the Deena Axelrod’s connection to Hannah Wilke’s work is Bar Mitzvah, 1985 which was produced by repurposing Mayan Axelrod’s Bar Mitzvah invitation into her famous chewing gum artwork. Notably, in a beautiful gesture, Hannah Wilke re-gifted the work to Mayan Axelrod hence making it a forever memento for the bond between her and the Axelrod family. 

Together with the exhibition, is a catalogue essay by Anya Ventura who conducted a lengthly interview with Mayan Axelrod for her piece. In her essay, she discussed the importance of the women’s friendship with tender anecdotes. This allows us to see a side of Hannah Wilke in a deeply personal and meaningful way. It is undeniable that Hannah Wilke was very much a formidable force but she had a strong support system in this friendship. Deena Axelrod was there all along, to inspire, to support and to comfort until Hannah Wilke’s premature death at 52.  

This solo exhibition in Boston is the first since her group show at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, in 1996. Her one and only solo exhibition in Boston was at the now defunct Genovese Gallery in 1990. 

LAISUNE KEANE

460C Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA 02118

www.laisunkeane.com

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Christian Boltanski @ Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris

Christian Boltanski, Après

Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris

20 janvier – 13 mars 2021

« Nous sommes entourés de disparus qui restent gravés dans notre mémoire et dont la présence me hante ». -- Christian Boltanski

La Galerie Marian Goodman présente « Après », la première exposition personnelle en France de CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI, depuis sa rétrospective au Centre Pompidou il y a un an.

Répartie sur les deux niveaux de la galerie, Christian Boltanski y donne libre cours à son goût pour un art total, où les oeuvres déploient une scénographie propre. Articulés en un tout cohérent, elles stimulent tous les vecteurs de perception, qu’ils soient directs ou plus enfouis dans l’intimité du souvenir. « L’expérience que je souhaite pour le public qui vient visiter chacune de mes expositions n’est pas forcément de comprendre mais de ressentir que quelque chose a eu lieu. » (1) résume l’artiste. Cette exposition comprend un nouvel ensemble de sculptures doublé de projections vidéo, une grande installation vidéo inédite au sous-sol, et s’achève avec deux autres installations de réalisation plus ancienne.

Au rez-de-chaussée, des masses de tissus blancs sur des chariots occupent, pêle-mêle, le centre de la salle. Dans ces nouvelles oeuvres intitulées « Les Linges » (2020), et initiées pendant le confinement du printemps dernier, les matériaux emblématiques de Christian Boltanski « prennent une signification nouvelle en lien avec les événements que nous vivons ». On est invité à se perdre et à déambuler parmi ces formes qui finissent par nous renvoyer à un souvenir, une atmosphère ou une expérience vécue.

Cette installation cohabite avec des projections aux murs intitulées « Les Esprits » (2020). On y voit des visages d’enfants, dont les traits à peine visibles s’effacent doucement, comme des souvenirs fugaces. D’abord très fantomatiques, les visages se dessinent plus distinctement sur les murs à mesure que le jour décline, créant ainsi une interaction dynamique avec les caractéristiques propres à l’espace de la galerie.

Une vidéo à peine visible et mystérieuse accompagne le spectateur et l’invite à descendre.

Au niveau inférieur, l’installation vidéo « Les Disparus » (2020), se déploie sur quatre grands rideaux sur lesquels des « vidéos clichées d’une vision fabriquée du bonheur recèlent des images subliminales des horreurs qui ont eu lieu au cours du siècle où je suis né et qui se sont déroulés en parallèle d’une partie de ma vie », explique l’artiste, « elles demeurent présentes dans le subconscient de la plupart d’entre nous ».

Le mot « Après » (2016) invite à entrer dans un lieu plus apaisé où se trouvent « Les rangements » (1995).

CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI est né à Paris en 1944. Depuis sa toute première exposition au cinéma Le Ranelagh en 1968, le travail de Boltanski a été exposé dans de nombreux lieux d’expositions partout dans le monde. Dès 1984 le Musée national d’art moderne lui consacre sa première rétrospective. En 1988 plusieurs grands musées américains organisent une importante rétrospective itinérante. Entre 2012 et 2018 il réalise plusieurs projets au Chili, au Brésil, en Argentine ou au Mexique. En 2018, son travail a été montré en Chine à la Power Station of Art de Shanghai, au Israël Museum à Jérusalem en Israël ainsi qu’au European Centre for Art and Industrial Culture à Völklingen en Allemagne. En 2019, outre son exposition rétrospective au Centre Pompidou (Mnam) à Paris, le Japon accueille une exposition itinérante au National Museum of Art d’Osaka, à la National Art Gallery de Tokyo et au Prefectural Art Museum de Nagasaki. Entre 2001 et 2014, Christian Boltanski a reçu plusieurs prix récompensant son oeuvre.

(1) In Christian Boltanski. Faire son temps, Ed. Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2019, entretien entre C. Boltanski et B. Blistène, p. 63.

GALERIE MARIAN GOODMAN

79 rue du Temple, 75003 Paris

www.mariangoodman.com

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Zhang Wei @ Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris

Zhang Wei

Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris

6 février - 13 mars 2021

ZHANG WEI 

Z-AC2018, 2020 

Oil on linen

200 x 180 cm.; 78 3/4 x 70 7/8 in.

Photo: Yang Chao Photography Beijing

Pour sa première exposition à Paris et la seconde à la galerie Max Hetzler, ZHANG WEI, l’une des figures de proue de la peinture abstraire chinoise, a sélectionné douze peintures et deux huiles sure papier aquarelle réalisées entre 2016 et 2020. L’artiste offre un aperçu de son travail récent empreint de l’influence de l’Action Painting qu’il découvre dans les années 80, marquant un tournant dans sa pratique, et l’incitant à rompre définitivement avec la figuration.

Zhang Wei confronte le spectateur à des toiles souvent monumentales, composées de coups de pinceaux aux couleurs vives et contrastées, suscitant une émotion intense et ajoutant une conscience corporelle à son œuvre. Comme l’évoque C. S. Chinnery « Il y a une énergie violente dans de nombreuses peintures récentes de Zhang Wei, mais ce n’est pas l’élément central. C’est plutôt ce qui sert d’intermédiaire à l’énergie essentielle. Malgré tout le contraste impétueux des couleurs et de la texture, ce qui définit vraiment le travail de Zhang Wei, c’est un sentiment d’équilibre » *.

Sentiment également présent dans trois peintures aux formats plus modestes et aux tonalités plus douces. Composées de touches de bleu, de blanc et de rose, elles semblent dessiner des pétales flottant dans l’eau offrant un apaisement au regard et l’interrogeant sur un possible retour à la figuration. Enfin, deux huiles sur papier aquarelle aux tons vert d’eau sont également présentées. La peinture céladon est versée sur la surface du papier transformant ainsi la couleur en des formes diaphanes, évocatrices de la tentative de prendre une profonde inspiration - à la fois fragile et pénétrante, elles rappellent l’importance de la spiritualité du « Qi » dans le travail de l’artiste.

ZHANG WEI est né en 1952 à Beijing où il vit et travaille. A la fin des années 70, Zhang a travaillé pour le Northern Kun Opera à Beijing. De 1986 à 2005 il vit aux Etats-Unis. Son travail a été exposé dans des institutions internationales dont plus récemment à la M + Sigg Collection, Hong Kong (2016); Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, Beijing (2015); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2014); Asia Society, Hong Kong (2013); China Institute Gallery, New York (2011); Yuan Art Museum, Beijing (2010) and CaixaForum, Barcelone (2008). Son travail est présent dans les collections publiques de M + Museum of Visual Culture, Sigg Collection, Hong Kong et de l’Art Institute of Chicago.

*C. S. Chinnery, ‘A colourful dissonance: On the paintings of Zhang Wei’, in Zhang Wei, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2017, p. 29

GALERIE MAX HETZLER

57 rue du Temple, 75004 Paris

www.maxhetzler.com

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - Mirror-works and Drawings (2004 - 2016)

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

Mirror-works and Drawings (2004 - 2016)

James Cohan Gallery, New York

48 Walker Street, January 29 -  March 6, 2021

291 Grand Street, January 29 - February 27, 2021

MONIR SHAHROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN

Untitled Maze, 2015

Mirror and reverse glass painting on plaster and wood

53 1/8 x 53 1/8 in., 135 x 135 cm

Courtesy James Cohan Gallery

James Cohan presents an exhibition of work by Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, on view from January 29 through March 6 at 48 Walker Street and January 29 through February 27 at 291 Grand Street. The exhibition spans both of the gallery’s locations, with a presentation of two major sculptural series in Tribeca and a selection of the artist’s geometric drawings and Convertible sculptures in the Lower East Side. This is the late artist’s first exhibition with James Cohan.

Over six decades, MONIR SHAHROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN (1922 - 2019) investigated the intricate geometries of her Iranian heritage, reconfiguring traditional craft techniques to explore the philosophical, poetic, and perceptual possibilities of interlocking primary forms. In her work, rigorous structure and repetition are the foundations of invention and limitless variation. Spanning mirrored mosaics, sculptural assemblage, drawings, textiles and monotypes, Monir’s multidimensional practice centered on incorporating elements from her inherited past into her own designs—which blended a range of compositional influences, from classical Persian interior decoration to Western modernism. 

Monir is best known for her geometric mirror-works, in which cut polygonal fragments of reverse-painted, reflective glass are arranged into kaleidoscopic compositions grounded on principles of Islamic geometry. Tied to a mystical understanding of primary shapes as sacred and connected to a divine natural order, her unit-based compositions of luminous glass reveal uniformity, repetition, and precedent as the basis for endless recombination. This two-part exhibition brings together major mirror-mosaic works and related geometric drawings from the prolific period following Monir's return to Iran in 2004.

On view at the Tribeca gallery are five major Maze works: Triangle Maze, Square Maze, Pentagon Maze, Hexagon Maze (all 2014), and Untitled Maze (2015). In these sculptures, the traditional surface of the mirror-mosaic is dissected and reassembled into a maze form, opening up spatial arrangements drawn from architectural convention to new possible interpretations. For Monir, the luminous reverse-painted glass pathways in these wall-based sculptures invoke the mazes of Persian gardens as well as the extravagant hedge labyrinths of English and French estate gardens. Her Maze works incorporate sacred geometries to give meditative, physical expression to the Farsi adage Hameesheh yek raah hast—“there is always a way”—inviting the viewer to discover their way in and their way out of the path laid out by the artist.

Monir often grouped her work in series she called “families,” suggesting a familial and conceptual affinity of form, dimensionality, or structure between works in each group. Each family comprises eight sculptures, which begin with the fundamental form of the triangle and progress through the remaining seven regular polygons in Euclidean geometry. In the central gallery, three exemplary works from Monir’s Fourth Family (2013) are each anchored by central, multi-sided linear shapes whose features define an outward-spanning tessellation of form. Like the sequence of Maze works in the previous gallery, Fourth Family Pentagon, Fourth Family Hexagon, and Fourth Family Octagon unfold in a progression of geometric complexity, each subsequent form composed of more facets and more angles.

The Convertible sculptures on view in Tribeca marry Monir’s enduring interest in repetition and seriality with explorations into modularity and permutability. Each wall-based mirror work is composed of segments that can be assembled in myriad patterns, folded and unfolded according to diagrams drawn by the artist—some based on extant decorative patterns, and others of her own invention. In Monir’s own words, they enable her to “play with ideas of infinity.” Khordad - Convertible Series (2011) is named for the third month of the Persian solar calendar, a timekeeping system that begins each year on the vernal equinox. The work is composed of four individual forms that each suggest the sinuous trefoil arches of early Islamic architecture. Reflection Five (2010) is a wall-based sculpture that consists of one central rhombus and four identical square-shaped forms which, in the Islamic tradition, symbolize North, South, West, and East. By organizing the forms according to her own design, and invoking concepts central to Minimalism such as modularity, the shape’s axes are complicated, demonstrating the fluidity and generative potential of geometric structure.

With Installation of 9 elements (2004), on view at the Lower East Side gallery, Monir employs diagrammatic organization to establish a spatial order between dissimilar, mirrored forms. Layering contemporary ideas with an Islamic integration of mathematics, bodily presence, and spirituality, this immersive installation work reconnects 20th century abstraction with its theological roots to invite sublime perceptual experience grounded in the body of the viewer. Monir explained in a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, “With the reflections, you’re also a part of the art piece. Your own appearance, your own face, your own clothing—if you move, it is a part of the art. You’re the connection: it is the mix of human being and reflection and

artwork.”

Exhibited alongside this nine-element installation are two mirror works whose shapes respond to Sufi mathematical principles, and a selection of historically significant drawings. Drawing was an integral throughline in Monir’s wideranging practice, providing a means for exercising dimensional thinking through experimentation with geometric structure. The drawings on view in this exhibition were created in the 1990s and 2000s, when Monir returned to Tehran after a 26-year period of exile in New York following the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Collectively, they demonstrate her decades-long, two-dimensional exploration of sculptural possibilities and sculptural production, as well as what curator Suzanne Cotter describes as the “intensely spatial nature of Monir’s artistic thinking.”

The work of MONIR SHAHROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN (b. Qazvin, Iran, 1924 - d. 2019) has been exhibited internationally beginning in the 1960’s. Her forthcoming solo exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA will open in 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include Sunset Sunrise, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2018), which travelled to Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates (2019); Mirror Variations: The Art of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Grand Rapids Art Museum, MI (2018); Lineages, Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2017); Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings, 1974-2014, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal (2014), which travelled to Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2015); and Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (2017); Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Convertibles and Polygons, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2013); and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Mirror Mosaics, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom (2007).

Her work is held in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, including the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; the Barry Art Museum, Norfolk, VA; Grand Rapids Museum of Art, Grand Rapids, MI; Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, France; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Monir Museum, Negarestan Museum Park Gardens, Tehran, Iran; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, Tehran, Iran; Niavaran Cultural Center, Tehran, Iran; Queensland Gallery of Contemporary Art, Queensland, Australia; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran, Iran; Toledo Art Museum, Toledo, OH; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom.

JAMES COHAN GALLERY

48 Walker St New York, NY 10013 

291 Grand St New York, NY 10002

www.jamescohan.com

Tara Donovan @ Pace Gallery, NYC - Intermediaries

Tara Donovan: Intermediaries

Pace Gallery, New York

Through March 6, 2021

TARA DONOVAN

Sphere, 2020 

© Tara Donovan, courtesy of Pace Gallery

Pace Gallery presents Intermediaries, a solo exhibition bringing together discrete yet interrelated bodies of work created by TARA DONOVAN throughout 2019 and 2020. Based in Tara Donovan’s rigorous investigatory methods and aggregative logic, the exhibition’s drawings, wall-bound pieces, and free-standing sculptures transform commonplace materials into totalities that test our perceptual limits. Intermediaries also articulates the artist’s ever-deepening exploration of art’s capacity to mediate phenomenological encounters that interconnect viewers to one another and their environment. 

The exhibition’s primary concept underscores the structural and material openness of Tara Donovan’s works, which are less to be looked at than looked through. Her art’s capacity to filter and reconfigure vision is most apparent in her free-standing, large-scale sculptures, made of transparent materials that refract light and distort their surrounding space. Stacked Grid (2020), for example, is marked by an orthogonality and monumentality that parallels and heightens the “white cube” of the gallery. Yet it simultaneously thwarts the rationality of the grid that is at the structural core of both the sculpture and its architectural context. Through their aggregation and play with light, the work’s translucent building blocks turn the modernist grid into an evanescent, almost pixelated, entity that, at times, appears labyrinthian. If Minimalism was augured by Frank Stella’s dictum “what you see is what you see,” Donovan, though operating in a minimalist idiom, tacitly questions this foundational emphasis on the self-evidence of vision.

Stacked Grid’s engagement of architecture also points to the intermedial complexity characterizing all of the exhibition’s works. “Medium,” from the Latin medius or “middle,” is at its roots an intermediary, a middle position through which to convey or effect. Monolithic and monochromatic, Tara Donovan’s black, wall-bound and framed sculptures, Apertures (2020), are suspended in between painting and sculpture. From a distance, their austere shape and somber hue emanate a solemnity conducive to a hushed, meditative experience. Up close, however, they exude liveliness. A soft, spectral light, filtered through the works’ strata and enlivened by the viewer’s lateral motion, animates swirling surface patterns, created by hollow stirring sticks that channel light. This light, in turn, subtly, almost imperceptibly, offers an encounter that is psychosomatic as well as visual. In their conflation of darkness and light, absence and presence, stasis and dynamism, these works invite viewers to consider relationships and identities that outstrip simplistic dualities.

Based in a process of elimination and manipulation rather than accumulation, Tara Donovan’s series of twenty-four drawings, titled Screen Drawings (2020), is the result of the artist’s meticulous interventions in the weave of metal screen fragments, which are coated in ink and pressed onto paper. Leveraging as much as disturbing the mathematical regularity of the grid, the drawings attune the eye to subtle shifts in pattern, the ambiguity of figure- ground relations, and instability of form. Housed in Pace’s first floor library, a series of 13 large-scale drawings was similarly created through the use of malleable fiberglass screens, stretched into a variety of patterns. These works’ layered compositions—whose all-over, optical effects range from intense vibrations to aquatic dissolutions—not only suggest movement but also encourage an ambulatory experience that combines seeing and feeling, eye and body. As materials that typically cover windows and hence filter the gaze, the screens forming the field of these two series point to vision as an always mediated phenomenon, even in the moment of creation. To “draw” these works, the artist had to look through and past the screen, translating their textile-like materiality into two-dimensional, graphic markings. By yet again mobilizing the grid, which has long served as the infrastructure of vision in both art (e.g., the perspectival scaffolding of Renaissance painting) and science (treatises on physiological optics are rife with diagrammatic grids), Tara Donovan parses and breaks through this paradigm in the search for new perceptual models, new intermediaries.

Sphere (2020) continues this investigation. Though offering a universally legible form, the massive sculpture complicates its pure geometry through its transparent materials, which bend light and open the work to its surrounds. Its metamorphic effects unfold gradually and indirectly, revealing their full potency when the viewer engages the work in a triangulated encounter with others. As a go-between, the sculpture pushes the solitary phenomenological experiences devised by Minimalism into an interpersonal realm. The authoritative position of omniscience underwriting grids, especially the lattice of perspective, gives way to a kind of dynamic, embodied perception that is optimized when intersected by others in a moment of relational multiplicity.

Additionally, Pace’s website features a selection of approximately six works from the Screen Drawings series, providing detail shots that show the works’ varying structures and formal effects. The digital presentation sheds light on Tara Donovan’s creative process through additional multimedia materials related to the series and contextualizes Tara Donovan’s investigation of the grid by discussing the centrality of this form in modern art through references to the work of past artists.

TARA DONOVAN (b. 1969, New York) creates large-scale installations, sculptures, drawings, and prints, utilizing everyday objects to explore the transformative effects of accumulation and aggregation. By identifying and exploiting the usually overlooked physical properties of modest, mass-produced goods, Donovan creates ethereal works that challenge our perceptual habits and preconceptions. The atmospheric effects of her art align her with Light and Space artists, such as Robert Irwin and James Turrell, while her commitment to a laborious and site-responsive methodology links her to Postminimalist and Process artists, especially Eva Hesse, Jackie Winsor, Richard Serra, and Robert Morris. She has had major survey exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, which was also on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, as well as a string of solo projects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, UCLA’s Hammer Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, Smart Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Parrish Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, among others.

PACE GALLERY

540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.pacegallery.com

Susan Meiselas @ Milwaukee Art Museum - Through a Woman’s Lens - Virtual Exhibition

Susan Meiselas: Through a Woman’s Lens 

Milwaukee Art Museum - Virtual Tour

Through March 14, 2021

SUSAN MEISELAS

[1976 DNC], 1976; printed 2020.

Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 in.

Courtesy the artist.

© Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos

SUSAN MEISELAS

Roseann on the way to Manhattan Beach, New York, 1978, 

from the series Prince Street Girls, 1975–92. 

Courtesy the artist. 

© Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos

A virtual exhibition presented by the Milwaukee Art Museum highlights the four decades of work of documentary photographer Susan Meiselas, and is the first to focus on the artist’s long-standing commitment to working with and sharing the stories of women. Susan Meiselas: Through a Woman’s Lens presents never-before-shown photographs alongside iconic series that raise challenging questions about the documentary practice and the relationship between photographer and subject. 

“Susan Meiselas’s collaborative practice honors the people she photographs and those that view her pictures,” said Lisa Sutcliffe, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts. “By intuitively following her own instincts over the course of her career, Meiselas has built a unique body of work that examines the many lives and stories of women that might have otherwise been overlooked. Her inclusive process brings a diverse array of voices to bear on issues from human rights to civil conflict, and encourages us to become more responsible in how we consume and interpret images.”

Throughout her nearly fifty-year career, Susan Meiselas has consistently focused her lens on what she believes the wider public needs to see, including women living and working at the edges of the mainstream. Her subjects have ranged from carnival strippers at county fairs to women engaged in resistance in Central America. Collaboration is an integral part of the artist’s practice, and she works closely with her subjects to bring their voices to the issues they face, often returning to communities she has photographed to reconnect and examine how their perspectives have changed over time. This collaborative spirit was extended in 2020 through the creation of an expansive virtual tour, which allows visitors near and far to hear from not only the curator and the artist but also the people in her photographs and her many partners.

The exhibition features selections from the artist’s earliest series, including 44 Irving Street, Prince Street Girls, and Carnival Strippers; vivid color photographs that Susan Meiselas made during the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua; and never-before-shown pictures of women training in the U.S. Army, as well as an examination of the experience of a Filippino mail-order bride. 

Through a Woman’s Lens is also showing photographs that Susan Meiselas took at the Democratic National Convention in 1976, which examined the role of women in the party. This exhibition marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the women’s right to vote. 

“I am excited to have this opportunity to share some of my lesser-known work from the 1970s and reflect on how my practice has evolved,” said Susan Meiselas. “I was part of the generation following the Women’s Movement and benefited from what others had fought hard for. I felt I could explore as broadly as I could imagine and challenge myself to go beyond boundaries and have these experiences shape my thinking and my life. ”

Since 1976, Susan Meiselas has been a member of the international photographic cooperative Magnum Photo. The cooperative is composed of some of the world’s most renowned photographers, who “share a vision to chronicle world events, people, places and culture with a powerful narrative that defies convention, shatters the status quo, redefines history and transforms lives.”

In 2019, Susan Meiselas received the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize Prize for her survey show Mediations, which was organized with the Jeu de Paume in Paris and later traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She was also the first winner of the Women in Motion photography prize at the Rencontres d’Arles festival. She has received numerous additional awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992. 

Susan Meiselas: Through a Woman’s Lens is curated by Lisa J. Sutcliffe, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts, Milwaukee Art Museum.

MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM

700 N. Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee, WI 53202

mam.org

Bianca Nemelc, Joiri Minaya, Monica Hernandez, Uzumaki Cepeda, Veronica Fernandez @ Jenkins Johnson Projects, New York - De Lo Mío, curated by Tiffany Alfonseca

De Lo Mío - Bianca Nemelc, Joiri Minaya, Monica Hernandez, Uzumaki Cepeda, Veronica Fernandez. Curated by Tiffany Alfonseca

Jenkins Johnson Projects, Brooklyn, NY

13 February - 27 March 2021

Jenkins Johnson Projects, New York, presents De Lo Mío. A group exhibition curated by artist Tiffany Alfonseca, with an accompanying essay by curator and writer César García-Alvarez, features works by Bianca Nemelc, Joiri Minaya, Monica Hernandez, Uzumaki Cepeda, and Veronica Fernandez. De Lo Mío brings together a focused selection of works by an emerging group of women artists with varying relationships to their Dominican heritage. Originating from Tiffany Alfonseca’s ongoing interest in her generation’s evolving connections to a motherland, De Lo Mío envisions identity not as a definable set of associations but rather as a spectrum through which multiple personal and collective pasts as well as lived experiences come to forge how people exist. 

The artists included in this exhibition assemble a constellation of positions—each sited at differing distances from a shared culture—that challenge the notion that geography alone bonds people. Instead, each artist puts forth a unique perspective that push back against a history of art that thirsts for cohesive but oversimplified narratives. Intended to be a spirited dialogue between the work of artists who don’t see the world the same, rather than as a friendly sharing of common opinions, De Lo Mío is an introduction to a host of future projects Tiffany Alfonseca is developing with the intention to expand art histories of the Caribbean.

While each artist brings their own voice to the exhibition, their work does intersect, at times, along some difficult but necessary questions—like how does one pay tribute to Dominican visual culture without reinforcing stereotypes forged by institutions and popular culture? or how do we remain connected to our roots beyond immediate generations? or how do AfroLatinx lives find solidarity with African-American ones while not dismissing the meaningful specificities of their Latinidad? De Lo Mío will not pretend to provide answers to these questions but hopes to ignite a much belated public conversations about these issues. 

TIFFANY ALFONSECA (b. 1994) is a Bronx- based Dominican-American mixed media artist who creates vibrant and colorful artworks that celebrates Black and Afro-Latinx diasporic culture. Alfonseca continuously taps into her Afro-Dominican roots and leverages it as a conceptual cantilever that provides a dynamic framework for her artistic practice. Moreover, her work aims to visually articulate that the Black and Afro-Latinx diaspora does not exist within a monolith, but that these communities are a cultural cornucopia that is vast, varied, and complex. Alfonseca’s artwork is an intricate combination of beauty, diversity, and multilingualism that exemplifies the strength of the Black and Afro-Latinx diaspora. Through immersion and rumination, Alfonseca utilizes these experiences as reference material within her work as she toils to construct new narratives and build a universe that is reflective of her upbringing as a Dominican-American woman in the Bronx. These narratives harken towards dialogue about womanhood, colorism, class, family, ritual, and memory; all of which are building blocks in her creation of an ontological framework that is responsive to how she sees and experiences the world. Alfonseca has been included in such publications as Harper’s BAZAAR, Juxtapoz Magazine, and Artsy. Her work is included in collections such as The Dean Collection and the Perez Art Museum Miami. She received her BFA from The School of Visual Arts.  

BIANCA NEMELC (b. 1991) is a figurative painter whose work explores the connection between the female form and the natural world. Born and raised in New York City, Bianca’s work is inspired by her own investigative journey into her identity, paying homage to her heritage through the use of many hues of brown that make up the figures in her work. The worlds within her paintings are loosely inspired by the tropical and Caribbean landscapes where her families are originally from and her roots can be traced back to. Through her work, Bianca Nemelc aims to highlight the beautiful and symbiotic relationship between nature and the female body. Bianca Nemelc has been in several group exhibition in NY, SF and London. She recently presented works at SPRING/BREAK Art Show in 2019.  

JOIRI MINAYA (b. 1990) is a Dominican-United Statesian, NY based multi-disciplinary artist. She investigates stereotypes around Dominican womanhood in an attempt to understand where these constructions originated from and how they circulate. Often the stereotypes she finds are related to exoticism and expectations of entertainment. For this exhibition, Joiri Minaya contrinbutes her collage works, mixing fragmented bodies found from google searches of the phrase ‘Domanican Woman’. Joiri Minaya has exhibited across the Caribbean, the U.S. and internationally. She has recently received a NY Artadia award and BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize, and has received grants from foundations like Nancy Graves, Rema Hort Mann, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. She been awarded in two Dominican biennials (XXV Concurso León Jimenes; XXVII National Biennial) and has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Smack Mellon, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Red Bull House of Art, LES Printshop, Socrates Sculpture Park, Art Omi and Vermont Studio Center. Minaya attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales (DR), the Chavón School of Design, and received her BFA from Parsons the New School for Design. 

MONICA HERNANDEZ (b. 1995) is a Bronx-based artist born in the Dominican Republic. Her paintings are imagined scenes that draw from a well of tucked away experiences ranging from religious guilt, to body anxiety, to realizing the first time the voice in your head could be switched from Spanish to English. She explores the body, desire, sexuality, identity, and representation. Hernandez has been including in publication such as Cultured Mag and Artforum. She has been is several group shows including at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts. She received her BFA from Hunter Collage. 

UZUMAKI CEPEDA (b. 1995) textile tableau acts as a safe space for black and brown people all over the world. While addressing the stigmas of homophobia, transphobia, racism, and colorism that often affect queer people and women who feel unprotected by our current American policies and way of life. Her practice consists of transforming every day often found objects with brightly-colored faux fur to create interactive installations informed by traditional iconography of domestic spaces. Using her dream-like and vibrant work drawn from her childhood imagination growing up both on the islands of the Dominican Republic and in the Bronx. Bringing two worlds together. Uzumaki’s interactive installations have been shown from Los Angeles, California, to Montreal, Canada, and all the way overseas to Tokyo, Japan. She has been featured in print and digital publications including Forbes, Teen Vogue, Paper Magazine, Nylon Magazine, i-D, HypeBAE, L.A. Weekly, and The Fader. 

VERONICA FERNANDEZ (b. 1998) is a mixed media artist that discusses relationships between people and their environments. Frequently using personal memorabilia and experiences as a canon for her pieces, she explores the various ways we perceive our ever-fluctuating memories over time and the atmospheres around us. Using colorful, varying sized canvases full of an eclectic array of textures, paint is used as an expressive vehicle to highlight themes of disconnection, impermanence, and reconstruction, meanwhile putting a focus on the alternate realities we enter when reflecting on our past and present. In these pieces, she  uses techniques of fragmentation, and abstraction of space to form narratives about individuals and how the factors of their environment influence them, meanwhile discussing the indefinite roles we can take on in the world at any moment. Fernandez has shown nationally and internationally. She received her BFA from The School of Visual Arts. 

JENKINS JOHNSON PROJECTS

209 Ocean Avenue, Booklyn, NY 11225

www.jenkinsjohnsongallery.com

___________________________

Alex Hubbard @ Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong

Alex Hubbard 

Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong 

15 January - 13 March 2021 

ALEX HUBBARD

You're a thing, 2020

Acrylic, urethane, epoxy resin, fiberglass oil on canvas 

147.3 x 162.6 x 5.1 cm (58 x 64 x 2 in.) 

Courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery

Simon Lee Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist ALEX HUBBARD. This is his second solo exhibition with the gallery and his inaugural presentation in Hong Kong. 

Alex Hubbard’s work encompasses video art, sculpture and painting, exploring the boundaries of each via a cross-examination that invigorates an array of media in new and inventive ways. In his painting practice, the artist brings together a range of industrial materials, such as resin, urethane, oil and wax, using traditional techniques to pour, pull and drip his media across the canvas, sometimes with the assistance of a squeegee. Fields of colour underlaid with industrial prints are interrupted with richly pooled, dripped and poured resin and oil paint. Working with fast-drying materials, Alex Hubbard embraces chance happenings, revealing the autonomy of his chosen media. Nonetheless, compositional spontaneity is achieved through meticulous layering that results in unexpected formal and chemical combinations. His latest process involves UV printing technology that unites the languages of abstraction and figuration in a single canvas via underlying prints of machinery and everyday items.

ALEX HUBBARD was born in Toledo, OR in 1975 and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He has been the subject of solo museum presentations at Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2014) and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2012). Major group shows include Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA (2018); De La Cruz Collection, Miami, FL (2017); Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC (2016) and Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2014). In 2010 Alex Hubbard was included in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. In 2013 Alex Hubbard was a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. His work is housed in prominent international collections, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Victoria, Australia; Colleción Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

SIMON LEE GALLERY, HONG KONG

304, 3/F The Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong

www.simonleegallery.com

Mit Jai Inn @ Rossi & Rossi Gallery, Hong Kong - Royal Marketplace

Mit Jai Inn: Royal Marketplace

Rossi & Rossi Gallery, Hong Kong

Through 20 February 2021

Royal Marketplace presents recent works by celebrated Thai artist MIT Jai Inn (b. 1960, Chiang Mai) that challenge conventional boundaries of art through medium and display. 

The exhibition has been curated by curator and writer Erin Gleeson.

The exhibition’s title is inspired by The Royalist Marketplace, a Facebook group set up in April 2020 as a space for people to discuss the Thai monarchy freely. Within months, the group had reached one million members, including Mit. Access to it was blocked within Thailand by the government in August 2020. At the same time, almost daily youth-led protests against the government also called for reforming the monarchy.

The artworks in this exhibition, however, are not explicitly political in nature. Rather, they honour resistance against unchecked power through the artist’s use of colour, the hybridity of their form and the untraditional ways they are displayed.

In the series Screen (Actants) (2020), Mit painted large canvases in bright, vertical stripes, and then cut them into strips. Since he painted both sides of each canvas, there is no front or back, and thus no ‘correct’ way to view them. They are meant to be hung from the ceiling, so the viewer is forced to navigate the exhibition space either by walking around the works or through them. By challenging traditional modes of display in such ways, the artist investigates the materiality of painting as well as its relationship with the body.

Mit’s enquiry into the conventional boundaries of art can also be seen in Scrolls (2013). In this series, the artist rolled long strips of canvas that are intended to be displayed on their edges, like unravelling spirals. As in Screen (Actants), both sides of these works have been painted, here with thick oil pigments in colourful stripes or blotches of colour. The works are, at once, both painting and sculpture.

Also on display are O.O.B.E. and The Sala Murals (both 2019). These works were made for, and first exhibited inside, Buddhist architecture, namely the sala (hall or gathering space) and the pagoda at Jim Thompson Farm in Isan, Thailand. They were originally shown against the unpainted wooden architecture typical of Isan, the north-eastern part of the county. The paintings represent Mit’s take on the figurative murals of the Buddha’s life that traditionally decorate temple walls. They also demonstrate his exploration of painting as a vehicle for figuration and meditation.

A catalogue with an essay by Kittima Chareeprasit, curator at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, and an interview with the artist by Vera Mey, curator and PhD candidate at SOAS, was published to coincide with the exhibition.

ROSSI & ROSSI, HONG KONG

3C Yally Industrial Building, 6 Yip Fat Street, Wong Chuk Hang, Hong Kong

rossirossi.com

_________________

Ken Currie @ Flowers Gallery, Hong Kong - Interregnum

Ken Currie: Interregnum

Flowers Gallery, Hong Kong

18 March - 29 May 2021

KEN CURRIE

Sea Creatures, 2020

Oil on canvas

122 x 107 cm, 48 1/8 x 42 1/8 in

© Ken Currie, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Flowers Gallery presents Interregnum, Glasgow-based artist Ken Currie's first solo exhibition in Asia. This body of work was completed by the artist in 2020, in what Ken Currie describes as the unprecedented limbo caused by the global pandemic. The title for this exhibition is taken from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, in which he wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Ken Currie rose to prominence in the 1980s as part of a generation of painters known as the New Glasgow Boys. He received acclaim for his public murals for the People’s Palace in Glasgow, as well as his enduringly popular and poignant work, for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery collection in 2002, Three Oncologists. Within his rich and luminous paintings Ken Currie observes what he describes as the sickness of contemporary society, the fragility of mortality and the disturbing impact of the corrosive human propensity for cruelty and violence.

Christine’s Mask and Interregnum were painted at the start of the pandemic when Ken Currie saw the mask as an accessory, intentionally draping it in the manner of an 18th century plague hood to exacerbate the surreal nature of the subject, these paintings now have a portentous quality. This evolved symbolism is echoed in Chinese Gloves, familiar for their practical use, the rubber garments are pierced and displayed, while in Life Cast a child’s full body cast, intended for healing, is presented as a disturbingly unused ornament, thereby embodied with a darker suggestive subtext.

Throughout this exhibition Ken Currie references his deep interest in the historical ritualistic superstitions held by Scotland’s most remote island dwelling communities and their reliance on the sea. The reality of this harsh, unforgiving way of life hinted at by the artist in the red raw feet of Salt Bath and imagined in Sea Creatures where a wet suit wearing-child carries a jelly fish in their vulnerable bare hands, as if it were an offering, only the child’s eyes expressing the pain of its stings. The attire worn in Liquidator is also reminiscent of Currie’s fisherfolk, dressed in gut covered overalls the apron is pristine as if in dreadful preparation.

To accompany the exhibition, the large-scale triptych Revenant-Three Sisters-Plague Finger will be available to view exclusively online. In this work Ken Currie’s weird sisters are depicted ominously grouped in the blood-drenched hulk of a boat, and flanked on either side by a shrouded harbinger, one in white and one in black. There is an intentionally unsettling air of mystery and foreboding, Currie choosing to remain ambiguous, as to whether the figures are summoning or warding the plague away. 

KEN CURRIE

Chinese Gloves, 2020 

Oil on gesso board

45.5 x 61 cm, 17 7/8 x 24 1/8 in

© Ken Currie, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

KEN CURRIE

Life Cast, 2019 

Oil on canvas

214.5 x 122 cm, 84 1/2 x 48 1/8 in

© Ken Currie, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

KEN CURRIE - BIOGRAPHY

Ken Currie was born in 1960; and studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1978 - 1983. He was known as one of the New Glasgow Boys along with Peter Howson, Adrian Wisniewski and the late Steven Campbell who studied together at the Glasgow School of Art.

In 1987, Ken Currie completed a powerful series of large scale of history paintings for the People’s Palace in Glasgow, commemorating the massacre of the Calton Weavers. Through the 90's deeply affected by humanitarian events in Eastern Europe, Ken Currie's works evolved, his focus shifting to confront ideas of mortality and corruption, both physical and moral. Over the last 10 years, Ken Currie's work has addressed the horrors of the contemporary world, without shying away from their brutality or grotesque nature. In 2009 Currie was commissioned to paint the theoretical scientist Peter Higgs following his receipt of the Nobel Prize, the painting now hangs at The University of Edinburgh.

Ken Currie has exhibited widely internationally, including a 2013 solo exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, which also commissioned his painting Three Oncologists, and as part of the British Council's major touring exhibition Picturing People: Figurative Painting from Britain since 1945, shown at the Kuala Lumpur National Gallery in 1989 and the Hong Kong Museum of Art and Empress Place, Singapore, in 1990. Ken’s work is in the collections of Yale Centre for British Art, Connecticut; Tate, London; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; New York Public Library; Imperial War Museum, London; Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; Campbelltown City Bicentennial Art Gallery, Australia; British Council, London; Boston Museum of Fine Art; and ARKEN, Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen.

FLOWERS GALLERY HONG KONG

49, Tung Street, G/F, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

www.flowersgallery.com

Peintres femmes, 1780-1830. Naissance d’un combat @ Musée du Luxembourg, Paris

Peintres femmes, 1780-1830

Naissance d’un combat

Musée du Luxembourg, Paris

3 mars - 4 juillet 2021

JULIE DUVIDAL DE MONTFERRIER

Autoportrait

Huile sur toile, 65 x 53,5 cm

Paris, Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts (ENSBA)

Parcours du demi-siècle qui s’étend entre les années pré-révolutionnaires jusqu’à la Restauration, l’exposition Peintres femmes 1780-1830. Naissance d’un combat comprend environ 70 oeuvres exposées provenant de collections publiques et privées françaises et internationales. L’exposition s’attache à porter à la connaissance du public une question peu ou mal connue : comment le phénomène alors inédit de la féminisation de l’espace des beaux-arts s’articule à cette époque avec la transformation de l’organisation de l’espace de production artistique (administration, formation, exposition, critique) et une mutation du goût comme des pratiques sociales relatives à l’art.

Entre le XVIIIe des Lumières et le second XIXe siècle, celui du Romantisme puis de l’Impressionnisme, la perception de la période est phagocytée par les figures de David et celles des « trois G. » (Gérard, Gros, Girodet). En ce qui concerne les peintres femmes, il en va de même : après le « coup de théâtre » de la réception à l’Académie royale de peinture d’Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun et Adélaïde Labille-Guiard en 1783, les noms le plus souvent cités sont ceux de Marie-Guillemine Benoît (et son célèbre Portrait d’une négresse — c’est le titre original), Angélique Mongez pour ces grandes machines historiques davidiennes, Marguerite Gérard qui a survécu stylistiquement au goût Rococo et à la renommée de Fragonard, dont elle fut l’élève puis la collaboratrice ou bien encore Constance Mayer dont le suicide semble l’avoir sauvée de l’oubli davantage que son oeuvre souvent réattribuée à Prud’hon, son compagnon de vie et d’atelier. Or, si on se plaît à rapporter souvent cet épisode tragique, c’est qu’il offre une explication commode à l’ « absence des femmes » et une occasion de s’en indigner pour ne pas pousser plus loin l’analyse historique de la période.

Un des enjeux majeurs de l’exposition est celui de la méthode historique, de l’interrogation de cette méthode et de la conscience critique que doit en avoir l’historien (comme le commissaire d’exposition) pour ne pas rompre le contrat de vérité qui le lie à son lecteur. Pour écrire et mettre en scène une histoire qui n’a pas été racontée (celle des peintres femmes), il apparaît essentiel de se doter de moyens nouveaux et, plus humblement d’interroger sans relâche ceux qui ont été mobilisés jusque-là pour écrire une histoire de l’art « sans femmes ».

On a souvent posé la question de l’absence des « grandes » femmes artistes et trouvé une réponse historique à cette absence et à l’ « empêchement » : l’interdiction faite aux femmes de pratiquer le nu et donc la peinture d’histoire, leur niveau moindre de formation, le numerus clausus à l’académie royale, la vocation matrimoniale, maternelle et domestique que leur attribuent les critères de genre, leur minorisation sociale et politique, la limitation de leur pratique à des genres « mineurs ». Tous ces arguments sont documentés, il n’est pas question de le nier. Le problème est qu’ils sont ceux-là même (arguments et documents) et seulement ceux que fournissent l’histoire de l’art traditionnelle et le récit historique dominant. Dans ce récit, on ne parle pas des peintres femmes parce qu’il n’y en a pas ou peu qui sont « grandes ». Parce que le « grand » (grand homme, grand genre, grande oeuvre, grande Histoire) y est un présupposé tout autant qu’une intention esthétique et politique qui détermine des choix, des omissions et des exclusions dans la recherche documentaire.

Un des intérêts de l’exposition est d’avoir déplacé l’origine du point de vue sur les productions des artistes femmes. Les livrets des salons (avec les commentaires des oeuvres, les noms des exposant-e-s), les articles de la presse en pleine expansion à cette époque, les oeuvres elles-mêmes (par qui ont elles été commandées ? achetées ? etc.), les témoignages contemporains constituent un paysage totalement différent de celui que l’histoire de l’art traditionnelle nous a transmis : il est beaucoup plus complexe, et le sort des artistes femmes y apparaît moins tributaire qu’on a voulu le dire du schéma manichéen opprimées/ oppresseurs, empêchées / favorisés, féminin /masculin. Il s’est donc agi de redonner toute sa place aux témoins et aux acteurs de l’époque dont la parole avait été occultée mais aussi aux oeuvres, à la démarche artistique.

Car à ne considérer les oeuvres des artistes femmes qu’à la lumière de leur statut de femme, qu’il s’agisse de démontrer comment elles en pâtirent, comment elles le transgressèrent ou comment elles le revendiquèrent, on ne fait que corroborer et maintenir les présupposés et les valeurs qui ont conduit le modèle historiographique dominant à oublier leur rôle, leur apport et leur place dans l’espace des beaux–arts entre 1780 et 1830 comme dans les importantes mutations que celui-ci enregistre alors — mutations déterminantes pour la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle. L’exposition est aussi un combat contre l’oubli.

Commissariat de l'exposition : Martine Lacas, Docteure en histoire et théorie de l’art, auteure, chercheuse indépendante

Scénographie : Loretta Gaïtis et Irène Charrat

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