Lee Bae @ Fondation PHI, Montréal - Union

Lee Bae : Union 

Fondation PHI, Montréal 

Jusqu'au 20 juin 2021 

LEE BAE

Vue d’exposition, Lee Bae, Issu du feu, 2018 

© Lee Bae, avec l’aimable permission de l’artiste et de la

galerie Perrotin. Photo : Guillaume Ziccarelli

Né en Corée du Sud, l’artiste LEE BAE quitta son pays natal pour s’installer à Paris en 1989. Il estima que le fait de s’immerger dans un environnement nouveau lui permettrait de se voir de manière plus objective. S’éloigner du cadre familier de son pays d’origine lui aura offert l’occasion de s’engager avec la mémoire, qui deviendra sa matière principale. Cette union plus profonde avec le Soi finira par renouer l’artiste avec le charbon de bois en tant qu’extension physique, mentale et spirituelle de la mémoire.

Ne trouvant pas son compte avec les traditionnels bâtonnets généralement utilisés en dessin, Lee Bae achète un jour un sac de briquettes de charbon. Dessiner avec ces blocs comprimés de combustible le ramène à ses débuts en peinture. Il se reconnecte à la signification de la couleur noire dans le monde asiatique — la couleur qui exprime toutes les couleurs. Cela lui rappelle l’encre de Chine à base de suie utilisée dans la calligraphie coréenne et l’emploi du charbon de bois comme agent purifiant dans les maisons de la Corée du Sud. En outre, il voit dans le charbon de bois une métaphore puissante du cycle de la vie et de la mort.

Les dessins, peintures, sculptures et installations de Lee Bae s’inspirent des propriétés formelles et conceptuelles de ce matériau ancien. Cette importante exposition personnelle de l’artiste, sa première au Canada, regroupe plus d’une quarantaine d’oeuvres récentes explorant une diversité d’approches aussi bien figuratives qu’abstraites. L’exposition présentera également une installation à grande échelle mettant en valeur la corporalité de son travail et sa capacité à nous connecter à un lieu profond. L’artiste propose ainsi au public un moment de calme pour le mental en cette période trouble.

LEE BAE (né en 1956 à Cheongdo, en Corée du Sud) a présenté plus de 40 expositions individuelles et participé à de nombreuses expositions collectives dans des musées et à l’occasion de biennales en Europe, en Asie et aux États-Unis. On a notamment pu voir son travail à la Biennale de Gwangju en 2016. En 2013, il a reçu le Prix de l’Association nationale des critiques d’art de Corée du Sud et, en 2019, il a été fait chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France. Il vit et travaille entre Paris et Séoul.

Commissaire de l'exposition : Cheryl Sim

FONDATION PHI 

POUR L’ART CONTEMPORAIN 

451 et 465, rue Saint-Jean, Montréal H2Y 2R5

fondation-phi.org

Lygia Pape @ Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles - Tupinambá

Lygia Pape: Tupinambá

Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles

24 April - 1 August, 2021 

LYGIA PAPE

Memória Tupinambá, 2000

Red-feathered polystyrene ball with plastic foot

50 cm diameter / 19 5/8 in diameter

© Projeto Lygia Pape

Courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape and Hauser & Wirth

Photograph © 2020 Fredrik Nilsen, All Rights Reserved

LYGIA PAPE

Concerto Tupinambá, 2000

Two red-feathered chairs with guitar

150 cm / 59 1/16 in

© Projeto Lygia Pape

Courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape and Hauser & Wirth

Photograph © 2020 Fredrik Nilsen, All Rights Reserved

A significant Brazilian artist of her generation and a founding member of Brazil’s Neo-Concrete movement, LYGIA PAPE (1927 – 2004) favored the primacy of the viewer’s sensorial experience and its role in everyday life. Examining the artist’s unique reframing of geometry, abstraction and poetry, ‘Tupinambá’ is the first solo exhibition in Los Angeles dedicated to Lygia Pape’s work and is organized with Projeto Lygia Pape and Olivier Renaud-Clément. Central to the show is the Tupinambá series, one of the artist’s final bodies of work, revealing her desire to create more immersive experiences beyond the conventional boundaries of life and art.

Exhibited for the first time in the US, the works on view from the Tupinambá series – distinctive in their use of artificial red feathers – illuminate Lygia Pape’s sense of connection to Brazil’s indigenous populations and certain characteristics of their history. Unfolding across two galleries, the exhibition will feature the monumental spatial work ‘Manto Tupinambá’ (2000), comprising a series of related sculptures entitled ‘Memórias Tupinambá’ and works on paper, as well as an emblematic Ttéia. This exhibition follows the artist’s critically acclaimed retrospective at the Met Breuer, New York, and inclusion in the Hammer Museum’s 2017 exhibition ‘Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960 – 1985.’

Featuring one of the most commanding and rarely seen bodies of work by Lygia Pape, the exhibition introduces her deeply Brazilian Tupinambá series to a North American audience for the first time. Pape devised a wholly original language during her career to investigate the physical and experiential life of the body, and with this series achieves an unprecedented union of the geometric and the figurative within the wider context of her oeuvre. Here, Pape proposes a refreshingly divergent understanding of Brazil’s modernist history, suggesting that the aesthetic prerogatives of the present are firmly rooted in the nation’s indigenous past.

The Tupinambá series thus reflects Pape’s longtime interest in indigenous Brazilian peoples and cultural practices—most notably that of anthropophagy, a ceremonial variant of cannibalism practiced by the Tupinambá people. She describes it as follows: ‘The Tupinambá devoured their prisoners, their enemy, not from hunger as in cannibalism, but to swallow and assimilate the spiritual capacities of the other.’ Anthropophagy thus possesses a dual valence, in one sense it is literal and ritualistic, and in another, cultural and metaphorical.

Illuminated by spotlights in an otherwise darkened room and accompanied by the projection of the artist’s seminal and quasi-manifesto film ‘Catiti-Catiti’ (1974), these sculptures come to life. They embody Pape’s belief that, despite their population’s veritable extinction, ‘the Tupinambá spirit endures in the Brazilian person.’ By employing a host of powerful symbols that evoke the ancient Tupinambá ritual, Pape poetically reimagines and reclaims her nation’s fraught past in these distinctive forms. Defined by a bold use of red plumage—alluding to feather capes originally made with the red feathers of the Guará bird and worn by the Tupinambá when performing their anthropophagic ritual—the works on view are also adorned with cockroaches and protruding body parts, cohering in a totalizing vision of ghostly sensuality. ‘Memória Tupinambá’ (2000) and ‘Trono Tupinambá’ (2000), for example, display a synthesis of these elements, as spheres and thrones adorned with red feathers sport disembodied hands, feet, and breasts, dripping with what appears to be blood rendered with red paint. As an abstract sculptural representation of anthropophagy’s dual nature, ‘Mala Tupinambá’ (2000) hauntingly evokes the diffusion and ingestion of culture: two breasts of a white woman protrude from an open feather-clad suitcase. Here, the uncanny beauty, violence, and objectification of the body are viscerally felt by the viewer.

‘Manto Tupinambá’ (2000) serves as a sort of apex of the series and, by extension, the exhibition, dwarfing the viewer in its profound impact and effect of surprise. A large square piece of sailcloth hangs just above the floor, supported and pulled taught by metal poles positioned around its edges. Countless red feather spheres rest atop it, some harboring cockroaches just below the feathers, while others feature protruding bones: specs of white in a sea of red. The artist has further suggested that the cockroaches, resilient insects capable of living in difficult environments, featured in the remarkable work ‘Caixa das Baratas’ (1967), symbolize indigenous peoples—extinguished and yet somehow eternally present within Brazilian art and culture—and that the sailcloth refers to the arrival of the European, who, one could say, ‘devoured,’ via eradication, and was ‘devoured’ by the Tupinambá. Pape described her conception of this work, saying ‘I wanted to make my ‘Manto Tupinambá’ an extremely beautiful thing, like original Tupinambá feather art, and at the same time seize the terror of death. Because both are present all the time.’

Punctuating the exhibition is a selection of Lygia Pape’s ‘Desenhos’ (Drawings) from the 1980s, which serve to anchor her later work in the historic lineage of Neo-Concretism and highlight her artistic trajectory toward an increasingly political and environmentally-minded practice, exemplified by the Tupinambá series. The early ‘Desenhos’ possess a rhythm and cadence evocative of both music and geometrical abstraction. By uniting these two modalities, Pape manifested the very tenets of the Neo-Concrete movement that she, along with Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, defined years prior—those which seek to break barriers between the intuitive and the intellectual, the spirit and the body—in the construction of a rebellious, unprecedented, and uniquely Brazilian avant-garde.

The exhibition culminates in one of Lygia Pape’s most emblematic installations, ‘Ttéia 1, C’ (2000/2021), part of the artist’s eponymously titled series first developed in 1978. The word ‘Ttéia,’ which Pape coined, is an elision of the Portuguese word for ‘web’ and ‘teteia,’ a colloquial term for something graceful and delicate. Much like her fellow Neo-Concretists, Lygia Pape was driven by experimentation and a desire to unite the space of the artwork with that of the viewer. The Ttéia series enabled her to do just that. These large-scale installations exist within an ethereal space, comprising practically invisible silver or gold thread stretched by hand from floor to ceiling (Ttéia 1, C) or across the corner of two walls (Ttéia 1, A and Ttéia 1, B). Manifesting an illusion of geometric shapes and planes, ‘Ttéia 1, C’ beckons viewers ever closer, enthralling them in an elusive game of light and shadow. One of these ‘Ttéia 1, C’ installations was shown at the 2009 Venice Biennale and was awarded the Special Mention ‘Fare Mondi // Making Worlds.’

LYGIA PAPE

Lygia Pape’s work traverses a diverse spectrum of media and genres, including sculpture, engraving, painting, drawing, performance, filmmaking, video, and installation art. Born in Nova Friburgo, Rio de Janeiro in 1927, Lygia Pape worked in close dialogue with the Concrete and Neo-Concrete movements active in Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s. Along with her fellow Neo-Concretists, Pape ultimately sought to challenge the tenets of abstraction underpinning the aesthetic philosophy of Concrete art, and to move toward a greater sensorial, organic and phenomenologically attuned mode of expression.

Most recently, Lygia Pape’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Serpentine Gallery in London (2011), the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil (2012), the Fondazione Carriero in Milan (2019), the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2018) and at Hauser & Wirth in New York (2018) and London (2016). In 2017, The Met Breuer in New York mounted the first large-scale monographic survey of her work in the United States.

HAUSER & WIRTH

901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles CA 90013

www.hauserwirth.com

Chakaia Booker Exhibition @ ICA Miami - The Observance

Chakaia Booker: The Observance 

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

April 22 – October 31, 2021

As the first comprehensive museum survey of American artist Chakaia Booker, this exhibition explores the artist’s signature form—monumental works made of rubber—while showcasing her innovations across mediums. Featuring an expansive range of Chakaia Booker’s sculptures, including totemic and anthropomorphic assemblages fabricated from cast-off tires, the exhibition highlights Chakaia Booker’s ongoing expression of ecological and technological concerns, examinations of racial and economic disparities, and her interest in the symbolism of the automobile in American culture.

The Observance includes some of Chakaia Booker’s most topical works, including Chu Ching (2012), which depicts a cross on a wheelbarrow resembling Jesus being dismounted from the cross, as well as two rarely seen series of paintings that explore landscape and language. The artist’s photographic series, Foundling Warrior Quest (2010) and Graveyard Series (1995), are also featured to explore the importance of performance and mythology in her practice. Anchoring the presentation is The Observance (1995), an immersive installation made of deconstructed rubber tires and tubes––Booker’s first work in this signature material, chosen by the artist for its associations with riots. 

Chakaia Booker: The Observance is curated by ICA Miami Artistic Director Alex Gartenfeld and Curator Stephanie Seidel.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Charles Long @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles - Worklight

Charles Long: Worklight 

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles 

Through May 28, 2021 

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery presents CHARLES LONG’s second solo exhibition at the Los Angeles Gallery, and thirteenth with the gallery.

In WORKLIGHT, a title obtained from a scrap of plastic the artist found while crossing an intersection on his daily bike ride to the studio, Charles Long presents a new body of assemblage works playing with the openness of consciousness (light) against the seeming limits of physical material (work). This dichotomy unfolds Charles Long’s relationship with the processes of time, the flow between inner and outer experience, and the building up and breaking down of realities.

With production commencing at the start of quarantine, Charles Long’s studio quietude allowed for a detox of mind and an organic accrual of new forms and practices. The path between his home and studio acted as an art supply store of the uncanny, paralleling the dreamlike corridor inwards amid accumulating seclusion. The seventeen sculptures that comprise this year-long investigation reveal individual forms that act as fossils or accretions of lost time. These chimerical bodies move from geological to mechanical, erotic to the mundane, mineral to animal, and architectural to cosmological. Some appear milky and melted, only to burst open with crystalline precision. Others are chaotic and formless, gathering into something insistently specific, only to collapse again into the unnamable, left to be perceived as a fraction of a moment caught between two eternities.

WORKLIGHT is laid out in nearly chronological order to its making. In the front gallery space, a wall-mounted sculpture, The Oracle, 2020, grew out of scavenged, disinterred detritus, commingled with fragments of strange quarantine dreams. The white, shell-like surface submerges the origins and identities of its parts, as layer upon layer of white plaster fuses with diverse forms into one illusive body, creating a cohesive but coalescent artifact. This initial way of engaging material and time became the method for the works that followed. Like The Oracle, these enigmatic forms each present their riddle, one whose answer lies with the beholder. 

Hung throughout the space are metaphorical work-lights: mounted beacons, camera-like and observational, created with plaster, dumpster treasure, parts of older sculptures, plant material, and unique pieces of venetian glassware the artist inherited from his grandmother. Six of these work-lights function as speakers whose vibrations create an ambient pathway through the space. Charles Long partnered with the studio of experimental trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell to create an aural landscape for the sculptures to inhabit. The 30-minute composition featuring Jon Hassell, Rick Cox and Luke Schwartz embodies Hassell’s “Fourth World'' sound, as both primitive and futurist. Jon Hassell’s work has been influential to Charles Long’s practice since his art school days in Philadelphia. 

In the main gallery, visitors are met with large installations that transform the space with light, movement, and Long’s own subjective memories. On the back wall, Azazel (after Rogier van der Weyden’s Crucifixion with the Virgin and St. John, c. 1460), 2021, references a historical painting that Long would visit recurrently in his formative years exploring the Philadelphia Museum of Art. New figuration replaces the religious subjects of the diptych with what Long refers to as monads. Monads have been a consistent and important motif in Charles Long’s oeuvre and can be found throughout the exhibition.

For the five works employing reflected light, Charles Long combines the optical with the sculptural as fields of mirrored, crystalline growths sprout and redirect light into organized patterns appearing on proximate surfaces. Each of these sculptures has a unique identity, ruptured by chaotic transfiguration. These eruptions appear unsystematic, though they are faithfully precise to their purpose, as they angle their refraction to form cogent glyphs. Crafted by a process of merging the individual letters of a specific word into one symbol, these glyphs of light form what are historically known as sigils, where the maker maintains a state of mind where what would have been wished-for is known to already exist.  In WRKLT: make, 2021, the sigil for the word ‘make’ appears upon the surface of a totem where the myriad light fragments can be seen as either assembling or in the process of disintegrating. Extending into the final, darkened gallery, the sculpture creating the sigil for ‘believe’ can be spun by the viewer so that the sigil disintegrates and scatters throughout the room, becoming stars on the ceiling.  When the five reflective works are imagined all together, they form this sentence: ‘make believe our exile’s chosen,’ an advocation of the imagination as a pathway to find illumination in darkness. 

CHARLES LONG

Born in 1958 in Long Branch, New Jersey, Charles Long currently lives and works in California. In 1981, he received a BFA from Philadelphia College of Art while also participating in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program that year, and later earned an MFA from Yale University in New Haven in 1988. He currently teaches as a professor in the Art Department at the University of California, Riverside.

Throughout the past two decades, Charles Long’s work has been the subject of major exhibitions worldwide, most recently Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum in 2018, curated by Anne Ellegood and Erin Christovale. His most important solo presentations include CATALIN at The Contemporary Austin in Texas (2014), Fountainhead, a public commission in Dallas, Texas organized by the Nasher Sculpture Center (2013), Pet Sounds at Madison Square Park in New York City (2012), Seeing Green, a solo project in conjunction with All of this and nothing: The 6th Hammer Invitational at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2011), 100 Pounds of Clay at The Orange County Museum of Art in California (2010), and More Like a Dream Than a Scheme at David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University in Rhode Island, which traveled to SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico (2005).

His work was featured twice in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1997, 2008), and has also been included in notable group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, SculptureCenter in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall in Sweden, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, among other museums.

His work is represented in important public and private collections worldwide, including those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, St. Louis Art Museum in Missouri, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.

TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY

1010 N Highland Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90038

www.tanyabonakdargallery.com

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Robert Mangold @ Pace Gallery, London - A Survey 1981–2008

Robert Mangold: A Survey 1981–2008 

Pace Gallery, London 

Through May 22, 2021 

Pace Gallery presents an exhibition of Robert Mangold, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery in London. Robert Mangold: A Survey 1981–2008—the artist’s first solo show in the UK in 12 years—features significant paintings spanning three decades, tracing pictorial developments by one of the most significant artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. 

Showcasing Robert Mangold’s lifelong balancing of shape, line, and color, the paintings on view epitomize the conceptual and aesthetic rigor of his six-decade career, while also demonstrating an enduring will to challenge definitions of painting. Spanning nearly 30 years of work, this survey of Robert Mangold’s mid-career allows viewers to identify themes as they develop, finding prescience in the earlier works. The exhibition has been greatly enhanced by the inclusion of several paintings from the private collection of the late Dr. Walter de Logi, a long-time collector and champion of Robert Mangold’s work. 

In the 1960s Robert Mangold emerged as one of the most original and incisive voices shaping the discourse on painting in America. From the outset, Robert Mangold’s works explored the most elemental components of his art form, in doing so examining the very nature of painting. Integral to Robert Mangold’s thinking has always been a questioning of the primacy of the rectangular format. Beginning with the Walls and Areas of the mid-sixties, and right on through to today, Robert Mangold’s engagement with shaped canvases has allowed him to push his work beyond the conventions of traditional painting.

Bringing together vibrant but subtle color combinations, hand-drawn lines, and an innovative use of form, Robert Mangold’s ‘x’ or ‘+’ paintings, such as X Within X (Red-Orange) (1981) and Aqua/Green/Orange + Painting (1983), exist somewhere between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional; these works simultaneously insist on the ‘flatness’ of painting as well as its objecthood. Robert Mangold’s works always emphasize the relationship between the canvas and the wall and with the ‘x’ and ‘+’ paintings that relationship becomes even more apparent. These ideas are expanded in paintings such as Green Ellipse/Gray Frame (1989) in which Robert Mangold juxtaposes the active painted surface with the lines created by the unusual configuration of the diptych. Further, in Column Structure works of 2006, Robert Mangold continues to take a sculptural approach to his painting by joining multiple panels and tying them together with the elegant curl of a pencil line. 

Joining panels to create expansive canvases recurs throughout Robert Mangold’s practice. Curved Plane/Figure VIII, Study (1995) and Red/White Zone Painting II (1996) are each made up of three panels with a curved top edge. In the latter, Robert Mangold paints over the canvas joins to create an incongruity between the painted image and the structure of the support. Robert Mangold further subverts expectations by drawing sweeping intersecting ellipses over the textured red panels. The ovals perfectly align but are separated by the painting’s central white panel. In this way, Robert Mangold explores ideas of perception and narrative by forcing the viewer to ‘complete’ the work by mentally connecting the lines.

In its evolution, Robert Mangold’s work never becomes predictably linear or dogmatic. Rather, it remains open to the surprising twists and turns of his intuition and curiosity, often referring to his earlier works and re-examining previously raised questions. Ring Image C (2008), with its turquoise surface and elegantly undulating lines, is yet a step further in Robert Mangold’s exploration of shaped canvases. Like his ‘x’ and ‘+’ paintings, Robert Mangold plays with positive and negative space: the painting itself surrounds the void inherent to the ring form, incorporating the wall into the work. For Robert Mangold, the Ring series is a way of ‘setting up problems for the viewer’, he is asking ‘how do you visually deal with a ring when what’s usually in the center of a painting is very important?’ In other words, Robert Mangold is interested in finding ways to confound expectations and in doing so encourages viewers to engage with his paintings in new ways.

ROBERT MANGOLD (b. 1937, North Tonawanda, New York) has, since the 1950s, explored line and colour on supports ranging in shape, size, and dimension. Committed to abstraction as a means of communication, he has worked within a consistent geometric vocabulary to produce a varied body of paintings and works on paper. His career has developed through an evolution of techniques for the application of paint onto his chosen surface—first plywood and Masonite, and later, beginning in 1968, stretched canvas. Moving away from the conventions of paintings, he introduced shaped canvases, working with symmetrical and asymmetrical forms as well as curvilinear edges. For his early shaped and multi-panel constructions, Robert Mangold airbrushed oil-based pigments in gradations of colour, and later used a roller before ultimately adopting a brush to apply acrylic in subtle hues that near transparency. He remained intrigued by colour as much as structure, and his relationship with it shifted throughout the decades. His initial palette, inspired by industrial objects—file cabinets, brick walls, and trucks—transitioned toward colours that evoke mood: warm ochres, light blues, deep oranges, olive greens, and other hues. Robert Mangold’s mostly monochromatic compositions show an attention to gesture with the addition of hand-drawn pencil lines that curve across the planes of colour. 

Robert Mangold’s European exhibitions include Robert Mangold: Paintings 1964–1982, at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, October 21–December 12, 1982 and Robert Mangold: Paintings: 1964–1987, at the Hallen für neue Kunst, Schaffhausen, Switzerland, May 2–October 31, 1987. These shows were followed by the retrospective Robert Mangold: Painting as Wall, Werke von 1964 bis 1993, presented at Hallen für neue Kunst, Schaffhausen, Switzerland, in 1993, before travelling to RENN Espace d’Art Contemporain, Paris, November 27, 1993–June 26, 1994; Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Muenster, February 12–April 12, 1995; andCulturgest C.G.D., Lisbon, Portugal, September 15–October 22, 1995. Additionally, Robert Mangold: Paintings and Drawings 1984–1997 was presented at Museum Wiesbaden, October 18, 1998–February 21, 1999, travelling to Kunstmuseum, St. Gallen, Switzerland, June 16–August 22, 1999. More recently, Robert Mangold/Gaugin was presented at Musée d’Orsay, Paris, May 30–September 3, 2006 and Robert Mangold X, Plus and Frame Paintings was presented at Parasol Unit, London, UK, February 24–May 8, 2009.

PACE GALLERY

6 Burlington Gardens, London W1S 3ET

www.pacegallery.com

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Marie Harnett @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - What Was My Own

Marie Harnett: What Was My Own 

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London 

Through 15 May 2021 

A major exhibition of new works by British artist MARIE HARNETT (b. 1983), capturing fleeting moments of drama, beauty and sus­pense from contemporary film, is on view at Cristea Roberts Gallery, London. What Was My Own features over thirty new highly detailed, meticulous drawings, both large and minute in scale, derived from film stills. A sense of unease and melancholy pervades Marie Harnett’s new work, as we are offered glimpses into scenes that present an emotion or history that is suddenly intimate and familiar to us.

The new drawings, completed last year whilst Marie Harnett was living in both London and Norway, derive from period dramas. Scenes of domesticity, blossoming trees, baskets and platters, abundant with food, figures dancing, laughing and couples embracing are exhibited alongside images of vacant winterscapes, bare trees, extinguished candles, empty rooms, lonely figures and expressions of grief or sadness. Marie Harnett's skillful draughtsmanship and attention to detail sees her focus on every aspect of pose, light and texture of these described moments. Her process requires her to watch film trailers online without sound, frame by frame, until she finds inspiration. She removes the colour and takes the still out of its narrative context, suspending a moment in time.  

In several drawings we appear to be witnessing a pause before or after an event. In What was My Own, 2020, and It’s Exactly as I Planned, 2020, we do not know if figures are turning away from or towards us. Do Not Speak It, 2020, depicts a woman who on first glance appears to be sleeping but the expression on her face indicates grief or pain. The perspective we are offered in each of the drawings suggests we are intruding on the scenes. In Change the World, 2020, a chaotic spectacle depicting a party, goes one step further. This large-scale drawing measuring almost 150 cm wide, which is full of life and energy, does not feature the faces of its figures. They have been obscured or removed completely, suggesting an undertone of darkness and unease.

Marie Harnett continues this theme in new overlap drawings. This involves her taking two stills and superimposing one on top of the other. She uses her source imagery to create a unique image that takes on its own life and a new story. In She Broke the Rules, 2019, a large-scale drawing measuring over 150 cm wide, Marie Harnett presents a couple picnicking in a forest, but not all is as it seems. Marie Harnett comments; “Stills are layered atop each other, building in a false representation. The forest is actually a stage set. The figures are having a picnic, but the overlaying image is snowing. The drawing represents a sense of passing time, misremembering and lost love and pain.” Harnett adds surreal twists to her drawings, which have been inspired by the uncanny.

Marie Harnett’s wider inspirations are drawn from varied sources. She cites Dutch seventeenth-century painting; Vermeer; Rubens; the German Romantics; Baroque painting; swooning figures from eighteenth-century classical art; Degas dancers; and the dreamlike elements from works by Dorothea Tanning and Dora Maar, amongst others, as influences on this new body of work.

What Was My Own is Marie Harnett’s third solo exhibition at Cristea Roberts Gallery. In Summer 2019 Marie Harnett completed a residency at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut. Her work will feature in a forthcoming exhibition at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Other recent exhibitions include Städtische Galerie Bietigheim-Bissingen, Germany, and Haugesund Billedgalleri, Haugesund, Norway.

Her works are housed in the permanent collections of British Museum, London; Government Art Collection, London; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh; Städtische Galerie Bietigheim-Bissingen, Germany; Yale Centre for British Art, Connecticut; and Museum of Modern Art, New York.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

cristearoberts.com

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Senga Nengudi @ Philadelphia Museum of Art - Topologies

Senga Nengudi: Topologies 

Philadelphia Museum of Art 

May 2 – July 25, 2021 

PORTRAIT OF SENGA NENGUDI, 2014

Photo © Ron Pollard, courtesy of Senga Nengudi

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is the only US East Coast venue for a major traveling exhibition devoted to Senga Nengudi, a leading figure of the 1970s Black American avant-garde and a pioneering artist of our time. Marked by her innovative use of everyday materials that range from water and sand to pantyhose and air conditioning units, Senga Nengudi’s work bridges the mediums of sculpture and performance, offering a cross-disciplinary investigation into the personal experiences of the Black female body and the collective practices of community and ritual. Senga Nengudi: Topologies traces the expansive range of the artist’s career and context from the 1970s to today through a combination of more than 70 artworks, including sculptures, environmental installations, and archival documentation. Shown together, they affirm Senga Nengudi's pivotal role in redefining the possibilities of sculpture and abstraction, and exemplify the continuing vitality and urgency of her practice. The exhibition will be presented in the museum’s Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries and is accompanied by a major catalogue.

Senga Nengudi: Topologies begins with an entire gallery dedicated to one of Nengudi’s earliest immersive installations. Titled Black and Red Ensemble, this work is on view for the first time since 1971 when it was presented as the artist’s master’s project for her M.A. in Sculpture at California State University. In the exhibition, visitors will be invited to walk through this red room while navigating a labyrinth of black plastic forms that hang from the ceiling. The presentation continues with a gallery featuring Senga Nengudi’s works from the early 1970s, created shortly after her return from a year studying abroad in Tokyo. Absorbing and reinventing aesthetic lessons from Japanese theatrical forms like Kabuki and Butoh, and inspired by the avant-garde artistic experiments of the Gutai Art Association and the “relational objects” of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, these works signal Senga Nengudi’s extraordinary early experimentation with material and form. This gallery highlights the artist’s Water Compositions, which are heat-sealed vinyl sculptures filled with colored water, along with photographic documentation of Senga Nengudi’s human-like fabric sculptures as they appeared installed throughout Spanish Harlem in New York City where she lived from 1971 to 1974.

An in-depth presentation of Senga Nengudi’s iconic R.S.V.P. sculptures and their related documentation and ephemera will make up one of the most significant sections of the exhibition. Inspired by the experience of pregnancy and giving birth to her first son, these sand-filled pantyhose sculptures stretch, sag, and suspend in ways that speak to the resilience and fragility of the human form. In a statement from 1977, Senga Nengudi wrote: “I am working with nylon mesh because it relates to the elasticity of the human body … from tender, tight beginnings to sagging ends… the body can only stand so much push and pull until it gives way, never to resume its original shape.”

As the R.S.V.P. series title suggests, these sculptures invite participation in both tactile and visceral ways. In some cases, this response is literal, as Nengudi encourages collaborators to engage with the sculptures in improvised movements. These activations will be represented in the exhibition by both photo and video documentation, including a series of photographs by Harmon Outlaw of artist Maren Hassinger (like Nengudi, Hassinger also trained as a dancer) engaging with one of the sculptures. In 1977, the series was featured in Nengudi’s first New York solo exhibition at Just Above Midtown—a now-legendary gallery run by Linda Goode Bryant from 1974 to 1986 that promoted artists of color. Senga Nengudi continued to work on this series well into the 1980s, returning to it again in new and experimental ways in the 2000s. For example, in A.C.Q. I from 2016-17, the artist combines found pantyhose with discarded refrigerator parts, an air conditioning unit, and a fan that brings the nylons to life in similar ways to a performer—with breath and subtle motions.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Senga Nengudi spent a significant amount of time working in the creative epicenters of New York and Los Angeles. While in Los Angeles she participated as a member of a loose collective known as Studio Z alongside a constellation of fellow artists and musicians that included Houston Conwill, Kathy Cyrus, Ron Davis, Greg Edwards, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Duval Lewis, Franklin Parker, Joe Ray, Roho, and Roderick Kwaku Young. Many of these Studio Z artists participated in Nengudi’s 1978 event titled Ceremony for Freeway Fets. Inspired by Japanese dance-theater and West African Yoruba festivals, this ceremony featured improvised dance, music, and pantyhose-adorned costumes all captured in photographs by Roderick Kwaku Young. Honoring this spirit of collaboration and the ways in which these artists and their creative outputs were deeply connected and intertwined, Topologies will also feature individual works by Nengudi’s contemporaries and long-time collaborators, among them David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Ulysses Jenkins, and Barbara McCullough.

In addition to a section focused on Studio Z, the exhibition also expands upon the role of Black-run spaces, including Gallery 32 in Los Angeles and Just Above Midtown in New York, as they provided platforms for radical experimentation for Black artists who, like Senga Nengudi, were working in a conceptual nature during a period of extreme underrepresentation in, and exclusion from, the mainstream art world.

In Philadelphia, the exhibition focuses in greater depth on Senga Nengudi’s work in recent decades. This includes the artist’s experiments with spray paint and dry cleaner’s plastic from the 1990s and her ephemeral sand installations that incorporate colored pigments and abandoned car parts. Also on view is Senga Nengudi’s first video installation, titled Warp Trance, which was produced when she was an artist-in-residence at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia in 2007. As part of her residency, Senga Nengudi conducted research in textile mills across Pennsylvania and New York. Inspired by the sounds, rhythms, and patterns of the textile industry—itself deeply entwined in the histories of colonialism and exploitation—the resulting 3-channel video projection reflects Senga Nengudi’s ongoing interest in dance and movement, specifically seen through the lens of the labor performed by both body and machine.

Chronicling the entire arc of Senga Nengudi’s oeuvre, this is one of the most expansive exhibitions of the artist’s work to date and captures the range of her explorations in material and subject, in art and in life. As Senga Nengudi has stated, “My art responds to being Black, being a woman, and being of a certain age. The artworks you’ll see on display represent someone who has had children, cared for her mother, and experienced many of the things life has to offer.”

Senga Nengudi: Topologies was previously presented at the Lenbachhaus Munich, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, and most recently at the Denver Art Museum.

Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, said: “We are delighted to bring this beautiful exhibition to Philadelphia as it culminates a wonderful itinerary that included Germany, Brazil, and Denver. It presents us with a rare opportunity to explore the artist’s extraordinary development in its full depth and breadth, and by placing her achievements into such a rich context we can see clearly just how salient her art continues to be for us today.”

Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art and organizer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition, said: “Marking the grand finale of this international traveling exhibition, the presentation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art stands as a celebration of Senga Nengudi’s place in the history of art and a testimony to the enduring relevance of her work in the present. Generous in spirit and radical in form, Nengudi’s artworks offer an invitation for connection—with ourselves, with one another, and with the world.”

SENGA NENGUDI

Born in Chicago in 1943, Senga Nengudi spent much of the 1960s through the 1980s working between the cities of Pasadena, Los Angeles, and New York. In 1989, Nengudi moved to Colorado Springs where she continues to live and work today. While in Los Angeles, she pursued concurrent degrees in art and dance at California State University, where she graduated with an MA in Sculpture in 1971 following a formative year studying abroad at Waseda University in Tokyo. Throughout her studies, she also trained as a dancer and worked as an educator at the Watts Tower Arts Center and the Pasadena Art Museum (now, the Norton Simon Museum).

In the 1970s, Senga Nengudi became a leading force within the emerging community of Black artists and musicians in Los Angeles and New York whose work engaged with the radical politics of the time through an abstract and dematerialized visual vocabulary. Since then, her media-spanning practice has drawn on a range of influences, including the cultures of free jazz and spoken word, Yoruba mythology, Japanese theater, Brazilian Constructivism, and African ritual. Characterized by experimentation with process, material, and form, Nengudi’s work challenges and reimagines the traditional narratives of Post-minimalism and Conceptual Art, while reframing the broader histories of both feminism and the Black Power Movement.

Senga Nengudi has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2019); Henry Moore Institute (2018); the Baltimore Museum of Art (2018); Art + Practice, Los Angeles (2018); the ICA Miami (2017); and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans (2017). She has also been featured in significant group exhibitions, including Soul of a Nation (2017); VIVA ARTE VIVA, the 57th Venice Biennale (2017); We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 (2017); Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2012); Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 (2011); WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007); and the 54th Carnegie International (2007).

Catalogue

SENGA NENGUDI

Topologien / Topologies

Hirmer, 2020

This exhibition is accompanied by an extensive exhibition catalogue by Matthias Mühling and Stephanie Weber and published by Hirmer Publishers (2020), in both German and English. It features commissioned essays by Kellie Jones, Catherine Wood, and Malik Gaines, as well as excerpts of historical and archival materials, an in-depth interview with the artist, and an extended timeline that situates Nengudi’s work and personal life as they relate to major socio-political events, as well as the commercial production of pantyhose. A portion of the 1978 Contextures catalogue is also re-printed in the catalogue to provide further context to her early work and connections to Conceptual Art. 

Organized by the Lenbachhaus Munich in cooperation with the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The exhibition was organized by curator Stephanie Weber at Lenbachhaus in Munich. In Philadelphia, the exhibition is curated by Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, with support from Alexis Assam, the Constance E. Clayton Fellow.

PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART

2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130

philamuseum.org

Kiki Smith @ Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris - From Inside

Kiki Smith: From Inside 

Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris 

20 mai – 13 juillet 2021 

KIKI SMITH 

Black Madonna, 1992 

Bronze, 182 x 67 cm 

© Kiki Smith, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. 

Pour cette nouvelle exposition (la 8e à la Galerie Lelong), qu'elle a intitulée From Inside, Kiki Smith a réuni un groupe de nouveaux bronzes représentant des mains, qu'elle met en relation avec deux grandes oeuvres emblématiques des années 90 : deux sculptures murales de figures humaines, une masculine Ice Man et une féminine Black Madonna. Elle y ajoute une série de dessins délicats de 1995 représentant des parties du corps féminin ainsi que la rare série de gravures « Possession is nine-tenths of the law », de 1985. L’artiste met de cette façon en évidence la continuité et la cohérence de son travail au fil des années.

Après le succès de sa rétrospective à la Monnaie de Paris à l’automne 2019, Kiki Smith a bénéficié de deux autres grandes expositions muséales : au Storm King Art Center de l’Etat de New York et au Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne : Kiki Smith. Hearing You with My Eyes . L’installation d’une sculpture permanente au Castello Sforzesco de Milan est prévue pour la fin du printemps.

Née en 1954 à Nuremberg, Kiki Smith vit et travaille à New York.

GALERIE LELONG & CO.

38 avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris

www.galerie-lelong.com

Blessing Ngobeni @ Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg - Skeletons at Work

Blessing Ngobeni: Skeletons at Work 

Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg 

April 17 - May 21, 2021 

“I drive through my work’s open wounds, its scars, its moods, its behavior… to mend where it is broken…” Blessing Ngobeni – 2021.

Blessing Ngobeni’s paintings are immediately identifiable; Laden with collage and painted in bold colour, his characters perform dances of ecstasy and agony across endless swathes of canvas.

Skeletons at Work is a series of three triptychs which demonstrate a crystilisation of Blessing Ngobeni’s aesthetic. In his own words, it is a series that celebrates the “technique and language that I developed… to be able to create line drawing, reminiscent of Keith Haring, without losing my artistic language.”

Blessing Ngobeni often refers to the process of stripping away the layers embedded in his work, aesthetically and conceptually, and has coined the term “skeletonising”. The process of skeletonizing leaves only the bones, the structural framework within which Ngobeni operates. This process allows Ngobeni “to track the ups and downs of moments of self-expression without offending an individualised mentality”; the graphic and confrontational content found embedded in his collage instigates a reaction from the viewer, sometimes shock and fear, sometimes laughter.

The process of skeletonizing removes the prescriptive elements of the artwork and engenders a sense of vulnerability to his characters. Blessing Ngobeni feels that “by stripping off its flesh, so it reminds us who we are inside without the colour of skin, that is a dust to my vision.” In a society where our indentity politics are being intensively scrutinized, challenged and reimagined, Blessing Ngobeni presents us with his vision of skin dissolving into dust and ask us to think about what remains – when so much of our world has been constructed around our differences.

This exhibition coincides with the launch of Chaotic Pleasure, the first published monograph on Blessing Ngobeni. The book begins with Blessing Ngobeni winning the Standard Bank Young Artist Award 2020, for the Visual Arts, and documents the body of work created for the 2020 National Arts Festival, Chaotic Pleasure. The monograph then surveys the zeniths of Blessing Ngobeni’s artistic production, highlighting outstanding works from the artist’s archive, and contextualizes his position as one of contemporary African art’s greatest living artists.

EVERARD READ

2 & 6 Jellicoe Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg, 2196

www.everard-read.co.za

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DE CHIRICO: Magical Reality @ Hamburger Kunsthalle

DE CHIRICO: Magical Reality 

Hamburger Kunsthalle 

Through 24 May 2021 

Magical Reality is the first Hamburg exhibition to be devoted to the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), founder of so-called Metaphysical Art. At the centre of the large-scale show are de Chirico’s iconic paintings from the ground-breaking years 1909 to 1919, when he joined forces with Giorgio Morandi and Carlo Carrà as well as his brother, the composer Alberto Savinio, to lay the foundations for a »different modernism«, known as Pittura metafisica. The well-travelled artist drew on a variety of European cultural influences, including the Greek myths he grew up with in his homeland as well as his engagement with German philosophy – in particular Friedrich Nietzsche – and with major late Romantic German works of art during his studies in Munich. He was likewise inspired by the light and space he experienced in Italian piazzas, his encounters with the French avant-garde in Paris, and finally his military service in Ferrara. Thanks to its outstanding collection of works from the late Romantic period in Germany, the Hamburger Kunsthalle is able to focus on the striking parallels between de Chirico’s work and that of the artists Arnold Böcklin and Max Klinger – particularly fitting, as 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the latter’s death.

A total of over 60 masterpieces by de Chirico and by Arnold Böcklin, Max Klinger, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio Morandi, Alberto Magnelli, Alexander Archipenko and others await discovery. Works on loan, some of which have rarely travelled before, have been assembled here in an unprecedented density and quality from major international museums including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and the Tate Gallery London, as well as from high-calibre private collections worldwide, supplemented by selected exhibits from the Hamburger Kunsthalle’s own collection.

In the shadow of the First World War, de Chirico sought with his realistically and precisely rendered yet enigmatic scenes to visualise the invisible and to provide glimpses of another world beyond that of mere appearances. He created a haunting mood through meticulously depicted, prop-like objects accompanied by figurees set like dolls in exaggerated, dreamlike Mediterranean-looking settings where time seems to stand still. De Chirico’s pictorial language exposes the ambiguity of what we usually take for granted as signifying reality. The ambivalent meanings that emerge and the artist’s virtuosity in presaging today’s virtual reality are particularly captivating for contemporary viewers.

DE CHIRICO: Magical Reality is the first cooperative project between the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Musée d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie in Paris.

Curator: Dr. Annabelle Görgen-Lammers

Research Assitant: Sjusanna Eremjan

HAMBURGER KUNSTHALLE

Glockengießerwall 5, 20095 Hamburg

www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de

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Victor Pasmore @ Marlborough Gallery, London - Line & Space

Victor Pasmore: Line & Space 

Marlborough Gallery, London 

12 April - 6 June 2021 

VICTOR PASMORE 

Untitled, 1996

Oil, spray paint and pencil on board

121.9 x 121.9 cm

© The Estate of Victor Pasmore, courtesy Marlborough Gallery

VICTOR PASMORE (1908-1998) was one of the greatest British artists of his generation. His pioneering development of abstract art is considered to be one of the most significant achievements in 20th century British art.

Following the success of Victor Pasmore’s exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, this retrospective provides a unique chance to take stock of a major figure in the international abstract movement. His incredibly versatile output was described by former Tate Director Alan Bowness as ‘a succession of metamorphoses that have at various times dismayed, astonished and delighted his admirers … surely one of the outstanding and most original contributions that anyone has made to the art of our time.’ Victor Pasmore holds a unique place in the canon of British art. His work reflects and anticipates the changes that occurred in art and art practice throughout the twentieth century. A career that evolved from the lyrical landscapes of the young artist through the development of a new, pure abstraction to experiments with constructivist sculpture, spray painting, collage and Perspex, and involvement with the planning of Peterlee New Town, made Victor Pasmore one of the foremost exponents and theorists of abstract art. His work, in all its diversity, remains challenging and relevant today.

VICTOR PASMORE was educated at Harrow School, where his interest in painting began. From 1927 he studied under A.S. Hartrick at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, during which time he discovered the School of Paris. In 1933 he was elected as a member of the London Artists’ Association, headed by Roger Fry and Duncan Grant. Robert Pasmore, William Coldstream and Claude Rogers formed an independent private art school, the Euston Road School, in 1937. In 1954 Pasmore was appointed Consulting Director of Urban Design for the South West Area, Peterlee New Town, in Country Durham.

Victor Pasmore held positions as Director of Painting at Camberwell School of Art and Head of the Department of Painting at King’s College, Durham University, as well as lecturing at Harvard University. He was awarded Honorary degrees from the Royal College of Art and the University of Warwick and was appointed CBE in 1959. He became a Trustee of the Tate Gallery in 1963-4 and was elected a Royal Academician in 1983. Victor Pasmore’s work can be found in major museums and public collections worldwide, including Tate Britain (UK), Royal Academy of Arts (UK), Museum of Modern Art (USA), The British Council (UK) and Yale Center for British Art (USA), amongst others.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with forward by Elizabeth Gilmore, Director Hastings Contemporary, and text by Chris Stephens, Director Holburne Museum, Bath. 

MARLBOROUGH GALLERY

6 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BY

www.marlboroughgallerylondon.com

Bernard Cohen @ Flowers Gallery, London - Interiors

Bernard Cohen: Interiors

Flowers Gallery, London

14 April - 22 May 2021

BERNARD COHEN

Interiors, 2020 

Acrylic on linen, 120 x 150 cm

© Bernard Cohen, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

BERNARD COHEN is considered one of Britain’s most significant painters, whose paintings tell stories about identity and experience. Interiors is an exhibition of recent works demonstrating Bernard Cohen’s sustained enquiry into the complex chaos of everyday existence.

Since the 1950s, Bernard Cohen has developed a wide range of inventive techniques and processes of painting, creating labyrinthine compositions of line, shape, pattern and colour. His paintings will often tell many stories at once, using distinctive strategies of layering, superimposing, and condensing multiple images to establish intricate networks and relationships.

In a Spotlight exhibition at Tate Britain in 2017, Bernard Cohen's paintings were described as being, both individually and as a whole, "a series of diagrams about painting.” This approach developed during the 1960s, with works that incorporated many small independent paintings within the same canvas. (For example, Matter of Identity, 1963, in the Tate collection.) Bernard Cohen refers to the inner paintings as "small objects, that together establish the identity of the whole painting". In the recent works in this exhibition, recurring individual figurative motifs such as doors, windows, airplanes, paw marks and railway tracks, are interlaced to form an accumulative coherence and logic. The motifs are always rooted in personal experience, as Bernard Cohen explains: "There is nothing that appears in my paintings that hasn’t been seen by me or experienced by me. I paint things that I’ve seen, things that are part of the everyday, the ordinary. Among things that I see are random things: the way things overlap or interfere with each other. The random has become a very important part of my painting."

Bernard Cohen credits the beginning of his interest in interiors as a subject for his work with an encounter with Velasquez's 1656 painting Las Meninas and what he describes as "the extraordinary way in which [Velasquez] made everything in the space I was occupying part of the painting, so that half the painting is of things outside of the canvas." Cohen's paintings similarly operate around the complex space of the picture plane, navigating the unseen border that separates, in his own words "what is in the spectator’s world from what is in the painting".

The composition of the painting How to Paint the Milky Way is underpinned by a cosmos of dots, overlaid by a random configuration of airplane symbols and various cube-like planes and lattices that together make up a domestic scene of a doorway, pictures on the wall and a carpet on the floor. Bernard Cohen recalls: "During a long stay in New Mexico I experienced a daylight that was so bright that it voraciously consumed objects, while at night at 10,000 feet, away from any artificial light, the Milky Way appeared as one overwhelming physical object. I was overwhelmed by the density of what I saw. What is a painting and what fills it? Where is its all-containing identity? I continue to ask myself these questions.”

BERNARD COHEN

Born in London in 1933, Bernard Cohen studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1951-1954. In 1988 he was appointed as Slade Professor and Director of the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London. Bernard Cohen came to prominence during the 1960s and has since exhibited widely. His first solo exhibition with Flowers Gallery was in 1998. In 2007 the gallery hosted Bernard Cohen: Paintings from the Sixties, focusing on an important period in Bernard Cohen’s artistic development, followed by Work of Six Decades in 2009, which celebrated his career by bringing together a selection of key works and the publication of a comprehensive book. A subsequent survey exhibition titled About Now: Paintings and Prints 2000-2015 took place at Flowers Gallery in 2015, accompanied by the book About Now by Ian McKay. Other important exhibitions include Artist in Focus, Six Paintings from the Tate Gallery Collection, The Tate Gallery, London in 1995; Stroll on! Aspects of British Abstract Art in the Sixties, Mamco, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva in 2005-2006; Abstraction and the Human Figure at CAM’s British Art Collection, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon in 2010; and a solo retrospective Spotlight Display at Tate Britain in 2017-18. Bernard Cohen lives and works in London. Ten of Bernard Cohen’s paintings are in the Tate collection, and his work is included in numerous public collections worldwide.

FLOWERS GALLERY

21 Cork Street, London W1S 3LZ

www.flowersgallery.com

Georg Baselitz @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - Hands

Georg Baselitz: Hands

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

13 April - 15 May 2021

Cristea Roberts Gallery presents an exhibition of a major new body of work by German artist Georg Baselitz (b. 1938). 

Hands focuses on two new series of prints that explore the subject of the hand. Estranged from the body, the hands writhe and twist, emerging in a series of renderings that form part of Georg Baselitz’s ongoing survey of the human form, which has been at the forefront of his practice since the 1960s.

The first series, entitled Eine Hand ist keine Faust, 2019 – translated as A Hand is not a Fist – consists of 12 etchings, each depicting Baselitz’s hand clenching, pointing, grabbing and twisting. Gallery director David Cleaton-Roberts comments; “Each one is a delicate depiction of the artist’s own hand, drawn onto the copper plate in a variety of positions and each printed in one of three colours. The second project is comprised of two complementary suites of ten aquatints titled Mano – one group printed in gold and the other in white, depicting an abstracted representation of a hand, printed onto dense, dark backgrounds. The two suites show distinct and contrasting renderings of a hand, both haunting and powerful.”

The second suite of prints Mano (gold) and Mano (white), 2019, consisting of ten aquatints each, hover closer to abstraction as the hands, now more fragile and open, emerge from a dark background, appearing to loosen their grip. Hands showcases a pictorial device for which Georg Baselitz has long been recognised, with all his images appearing upside down. For the past fifty years he has subverted traditional representations of the human form by upending his figure and its component parts. This inversion acts partially as a vehicle for Georg Baselitz to remove focus from the narrative content so that he can explore the mark making itself.

Georg Baselitz is a prolific printmaker and printmaking is as essential a part of his artistic practice as painting, drawing and sculpture. He uses a variety of intaglio techniques to realise these new works; having initially drawn and proofed the plates on his own etching press at his studio on the Ammersee, outside Munich, he then works with a master printer who pulls the final editions. Hands forms part of a wider project which includes paintings, sculptures and drawings, all on the same subject, which Baselitz began in 2019.

This is be the artist’s second solo exhibition (after Georg Baselitz: Devotion in 2019) at the Cristea Roberts Gallery, which represents the artist for his original prints. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with a text by David Cleaton-Roberts and an essay by psychoanalyst and author, Darian Leader.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

cristearoberts.com

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John McLaughlin @ Van Doren Waxter, NYC - Linocuts

John McLaughlin: Linocuts

Van Doren Waxter, New York

Through May 1, 2021

John McLaughlin

Linocut - Title # 8, c. 1973

Only state, Linocut, 12 x 18 inches (30.5 x 45.7 cm) 

© Estate of John McLaughlin, Courtesy Van Doren Waxter

John McLaughlin

Linocut - Title # 3, c. 1973

Only state, Linocut, 12 x 18 inches (30.5 x 45.7 cm)

© Estate of John McLaughlin, Courtesy Van Doren Waxter

Van Doren Waxter presents John McLaughlin: Linocuts, a special presentation of rare, intimately scaled geometric prints by the late modernist. A seminal figure in West Coast Abstraction, JOHN McLAUGHLIN (1898-1976) was a midcentury innovator of perception whose hard, clean edged paintings anticipated California art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including West Coast Minimalism and Light and Space.

A disciplined, self-taught artist admired among postwar Abstractionists and Minimalists for his precision and clarity of vision, John McLaughlin’s oeuvre is characterized by elegant, rectangular forms. His work evolved from an interest in Sesshu Toyo, a 15th Century Japanese artist and Zen monk, whose approach to ink painting introduced the concept of “emptiness” or the “marvelous void” into Japanese painting. “In McLaughlin’s work,” art critic and curator Michael Duncan wrote on the occasion of an acclaimed retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016), “the placement of two black forms on a white field becomes a metaphysical event.”

The eight linocuts were planned in the artist’s studio in Dana Point, Laguna Beach in his late 70s, a year prior to a solo show at The Whitney Museum of American Art (1974). These never before shown or reproduced richly textured works on paper are the result of a long-distance project conducted via postal mail.  The works were printed and cut at the French atelier of the legendary printer Hildago Arnéra, known for collaborating with Pablo Picasso. Each of the poignant works evince the artist’s interests in contemplation, silence, and nature.

An untitled linocut (all c. 1973), pictured, features a layering of two black vertical rectangular bars atop a bright expanse; while in another, also pictured, two black bands hover horizontally over a white form. In each, all measuring uniformly 18.1 x 11.9 inches, serene and solemn bars, blocks, and volumes bisect open, large fields, suggesting serenity and the natural world. The American art critic Phyllis Tuchman recently asserted that a green field in John McLaughlin’s paper constructions, also made in 1973, suggests “that such black and white forms exist in a landscape…the rest of the sheets literally traverse states of light and dark.” Likewise, the linocuts invoke the sensuous and the divine, a presence and a void.

JOHN McLAUGHLIN was an American abstract painter born in Sharon, MA in 1898 and died in Dana Point, CA in 1976. In 1935, John McLaughlin and his wife Florence Emerson (descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson) moved to Japan where they lived for three years. Upon their return in 1938, John McLaughlin established a business dealing Japanese prints. It was around this time that he decided to start painting, which was brought to a halt just a few years later with the start of the War. Fluent in Japanese, John McLaughlin was recruited as a translator by the Army during WWII. After the war, McLaughlin settled in Dana Point, California, where he started painting full time in 1946. Entirely self-taught, the artist continued to paint, with considerable success in his later career, until his death in 1976. He was the subject of a major retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016-2017).

VAN DOREN WAXTER

23 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021

vandorenwaxter.com

Henry Taylor @ Hauser & Wirth Somerset

Henry Taylor 

Hauser & Wirth Somerset 

Through 6 June 2021 

HENRY TAYLOR 

2020 

Photo: Fredrik Nilsen 

© Henry Taylor 

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth 

HENRY TAYLOR

Untitled, 2021

Acrylic on linen

Photo: Ken Adlard

© Henry Taylor

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Henry Taylor culls his cultural landscape at a vigorous pace, creating a language entirely his own from archival and immediate imagery, disparate material and memory. Through a process he describes as ‘hunting and gathering,’ Henry Taylor transports us into imagined realities that interrogate the breadth of the human condition, social movements and political structures.

For his inaugural exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, the American artist has taken over all five galleries in Somerset to present a major body of sculptural work and paintings evolving in unison across the spaces. Throughout his four-decade long career, Henry Taylor has consistently and simultaneously both embraced and rejected the tenets of traditional painting as well as any formal label. He has amassed a staggering body of highly personal work rooted in the people and communities closest to him, often manifested alongside poignant historical or pop-cultural references. In preparation for the exhibition, Taylor extended and unraveled his studio practice within the galleries at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, followed by an artist residency at Hauser & Wirth Somerset this winter – energetically building, stacking and affixing a vast array of collected objects together to create a holistic record of his everyday routine and the materials that define them. With a guiding sense of human connection, Henry Taylor layers reoccurring visual cues associated with his own personal experiences and broader cultural references that lead us through a multifaceted narrative in sculpture and painting.

Although his subjects are wildly diverse – family members, peers and acquaintances – Taylor’s ability to seek out the truest sense of a person and their sociocultural framework is evident throughout. This sharp focus has shifted inwards during the UK’s national lockdown with two new self-portraits. The first, a head and shoulder profile, depicts a regal-looking Taylor as Henry V and is a play on the artist’s childhood nickname of Henry VIII, since he is the youngest of eight children. The second is a full body image of Taylor in Somerset adorning pinstripe pyjamas and flanked by sheep, placing him firmly in his new rural environment.

Henry Taylor’s lean towards standalone sculpture over the past decade has allowed him to reconfigure commonplace objects into stories of his own lived history. Throughout the first two galleries we journey through new installations made over the past six months, including a series of tabletop sculptures that relate directly to the landscape of a city, urban planning and an altered perspective looking down into housing projects. Repetitive objects connected to voyage, sense of place and locality evolve from the first to the last gallery, alongside materials synonymous with Taylor such as heavily painted black milk bottles, a wall sculpture made of toilet paper rolls and a return to horses as a symbol of freedom and power, or alternatively of power restrained and fenced in. Taylor’s heightened awareness of art historical predecessors is continually prevalent throughout, ranging from references to Philip Guston, Bob Thompson, Yayoi Kusama, Louise Nevelson and Cy Twombly.

A series of miniature box paintings in the Pigsty gallery act as a conduit between Henry Taylor’s painting and sculpture, serving as a continuous thread in his studio practice. This will be the first time these works have been presented on a scale of this size in Europe. The earliest, made in the 1990s while Taylor was still a student, are painted on cigarette, cracker, and cereal boxes, surfaces that were on hand at the time. Acting as fleeting thoughts and records, the miniature works span intimate domestic scenes to prison visits and playful reinterpretations of the boxes’ original logos. Tactile, expeditious, and recognizable, Taylor repurposes the box both as substrate and subject.

Several miniatures exist more fully in the realm of sculpture, with painting extending across multiple sides, whilst others act as a starting point for the manifestation of large-scale works. Such is the case for Henry Taylor’s first outdoor bronze sculpture placed within Oudolf Field, relating to a conversation he had with his older brother Randy in the 1980s. Randy was a founding member of the Black Panther chapter in Ventura County, California and was faced with an explicit bumper sticker using a racial slur. The memory of this encounter stayed with Taylor and was realised in both a miniature work in the Pigsty gallery and the more recent outdoor bronze.

HENRY TAYLOR lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Taylor’s work is currently featured in US group exhibitions ‘i’m yours: Encounters with Art in Our Times’, at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Boston MA and ‘Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America’ at New Museum, New York NY. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles CA is preparing a major survey exhibition of his work for 2022.

Henry Taylor has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and internationally, and his work is in prominent public collections including the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, France, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx NY, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh PA, The Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston MA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles CA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York NY, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles CA, Museum of Fine Art, Houston TX, Museum of Modern Art, New York NY, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham NC, Pérez Art Museum, Miami FL, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco CA, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York NY, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY.

In 2018, Henry Taylor was the recipient of The Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize in 2018 for his outstanding achievements in painting. Taylor’s work was presented at the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY in 2017 and the 58th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy in 2019.

HAUSER & WIRTH SOMERSET

Durslade Farm, Dropping Lane

Bruton, Somerset BA10 0NL

www.hauserwirth.com