Gideon Rubin @ Ryan Lee Gallery, NYC - The Sun Also Rises

Gideon Rubin: The Sun Also Rises 

Ryan Lee Gallery, New York 

November 11 – December 22, 2021 

Ryan Lee presents The Sun Also Rises, the gallery’s first exhibition of work by the London-based painter, GIDEON RUBIN. Rubin is known for painting faceless figures and ambiguous landscapes that are familiar yet fugitive. Using vintage and found photographs as the basis for his paintings, Gideon Rubin reimagines the context surrounding these memory fragments, drawing the viewer into recognizable scenes that refuse resolution and leave the narrative and its protagonists deliberately nebulous. Through the application and erasure of paint, Gideon Rubin says, “details are lost, but a new identity appears.”

Gideon Rubin considers himself a portrait painter, but his paintings are less about an individual sitter than his perception of the world. He turns his attention to pops of strategically placed color and points of contact: “I focus on the edges, where colors, shapes and tones touch each other,” he says. In works such as Blue Jeans (2021) and White Shirt (2021) Gideon Rubin’s lone figures seem lost in moments of contemplation, but the absence of facial features obscures access to definitive meaning. Rubin confesses that he enjoys cultivating this deliberate incompleteness; the resulting images are painterly snapshots of moments in time that appear both commonplace and particular.

All of the paintings in The Sun Also Rises were produced during the height of the pandemic in London, and the landscape images in particular provided Gideon Rubin with “a comforting sense of escapism,” he said. In Boat (2020) and Untitled (2021) Gideon Rubin’s solitary figures seem to stare out at the nature that surrounds them—the blue of a body of water, and wild forest greenery, respectively. Though each of these landscapes is abstracted—into loose layers of blue and energetic bursts of green—and neither reveals itself as a specific location, they are meditations on the role of place in Gideon Rubin’s own practice. “Over the past year or two, we all had to reflect on our relationship towards our environment – the landscape, or lack thereof. This relationship, between experience and the memory of it, between painting a boat and going out on a boat, became the backdrop to a very productive artistic isolation.”

GIDEON RUBIN 

Gideon Rubin (b. 1973 in Tel Aviv, Israel) frequently deals with the subjects of memory, history and identity - each painting is a fragment of a larger story, a moment in time. Working from photographic source material, Gideon Rubin voraciously hunts for old film stills and vintage photographs, scavenging for images on the Internet for each new work.

Gideon Rubin studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York before getting his M.F.A. from University College London - Slade School of Fine Art. He lives and works in London.

His work has most recently been the subject of important solo exhibitions at the Rubin Museum (2020), the Freud Museum, London (2018), the Chengdu MoCA (2016), the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (2016), and the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art (2015), among others.

Gideon Rubin is represented in prominent public collections worldwide including the Collezione Fondazione San Patrignano, IT; Fondation Frances, Senile, FR; Herzliya Museum for Contemporary Art, Herzliya, IL; McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Museum Voorlinden Collection, NL; Rubin Museum, IL; Ruinart Collection, Reims, FR; The Seavest Collection, New York, NY; Sender Collection, DE; the Speyer Family Collection, New York, NY and the Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK.

RYAN LEE GALLERY

515 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

ryanleegallery.com

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Martine Gutierrez @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco - Half-Breed

Martine Gutierrez: Half-Breed 

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco 

November 18, 2021 – January 29, 2022 

Martine Gutierrez

Neo-Indeo, Cakchi Lana Caliente, p29 from Indigenous Woman, 2018

© Martine Gutierrez, Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

Fraenkel Gallery presents Martine Gutierrez: Half-Breed, a new exhibition of photographs. Acting as both subject and producer, Martine Gutierrez explores the multiplicity and complexity of identity in a series of pop-influenced narrative scenes. The exhibition, which takes its name from Cher’s 1973 album, includes selections from three recent series, Body En Thrall, Plastics, and Indigenous Woman, the 124-page magazine for which Martine Gutierrez acted as muse, model, photographer, and art director, creating every element from fashion spreads and ads to an editor’s letter. A Berkeley native now based in Brooklyn, this is the artist’s inaugural show with Fraenkel Gallery.

Indigenous Woman presents images in the glossy, seductive style of fashion and advertising photography, reimagining the tropes of those genres with wit and nuance. In the project, which was shown at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Martine Gutierrez carves out a place for herself, trying on fluid identities that touch on race, class, gender, and sexuality. As she has noted, “No one was going to put me on the cover of a Paris fashion magazine, so I thought, I’m gonna make my own.” The exhibition includes selections from Neo-Indeo, a fashion editorial in which Martine Gutierrez wears Indigenous textiles, some of which belonged to her Mayan grandparents, paired with vintage and designer items in a personal, multicultural version of high fashion. In a 1960s-inspired ad, Identity Boots, Martine Gutierrez poses nude except for shiny white go-go boots and brightly colored gender symbols and glyphs, crudely taped to her skin. In a series of portraits titled Demons, Martine Gutierrez transforms herself into mythical women from ancient and indigenous cultures, adorned with sculptural hairstyles and extravagant jewelry. Together, the pages of Indigenous Woman present what Martine Gutierrez has called a celebration of “ever-evolving self-image.”

In the series Body En Thrall, begun as an editorial for Indigenous Woman, the artist stages photographs using herself as a model, posing with mannequins in charged scenarios. In the selection on view, Martine Gutierrez appears in the guise of a blonde persona she has referred to as “the bombshell,” and pictures provocative scenes that navigate questions about power, desire, and self-objectification.

In Plastics, Martine Gutierrez pulls plastic wrap tightly over her face while wearing messy blonde wigs and contact lenses, holding her breath as she embodies a series of archetypes. The transparent film pushes her features and smears her makeup, creating portraits that speak to the violence and artifice inherent in mainstream ideals of beauty.

MARTINE GUTIERREZ (b. 1989) was commissioned by the Public Art Fund to produce ANTI-ICON, a series of photographs installed on bus shelters throughout New York, Chicago, and Boston, on view until November 21, 2021. In 2023, her work will be included in Musical Thinking: New Video Artists in the Smithsonian American Art Museum Collection in Washington, D.C. Her work has been featured in solo museum exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Photography, Darlinghurst, New South Wales; Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, Houston, TX; Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, NC; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; and the Rockwell Museum, Corning, NY, among others. Her work is included in the collections of the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, among others.

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

fraenkelgallery.com

Roni Horn @ Peder Lund Gallery, Oslo - Wits’ End Mash

Roni Horn: Wits’ End Mash

Peder Lund Gallery, Oslo 

Through 27 November 2021

Portrait of Roni Horn photographed by Mario Sorrenti

Photo Courtesy of Peder Lund, Oslo

Peder Lund presents a new exhibition by the American artist RONI HORN (b. 1955). On display are six fascinating drawings and a fantastic glass sculpture. 

For more than 40 years, Roni Horn has worked with a wide range of media, ranging from photography, drawing, sculptural installations and performance, to artist’s books and text. Roni Horn’s work embodies matters such as the mutable nature of identity and that of the natural world and the relationship between subject and object in the perception of art and nature. Across the multidisciplinary formal approaches, she has employed throughout her oeuvre, Roni Horn has remained focused and her subject matters well articulated.

RONI HORN 

Wits’ End Mash (Rome wasn't built in a day), 2019 (detail)

Courtesy of Peder Lund, Oslo

Presented at Peder Lund are six works on paper from Roni Horn's important series Wits’ End Mash (2019). These works are comprised of 75-350 idioms and clichés hand-written by different individuals who were asked to write down their favorite idiomatic expressions. Phrases like “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” “swimming with the fishes” or “lose my head” were then selected by the artist and the original handwritten texts were individually silkscreened on paper into unique clouds of words. Previously, a related body of work, Wits’ End Sampler (2018), was presented at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, TX, USA in 2018/2019. As the curator, Michelle White analyses, the artist’s work “marks moments when language fails and connotation migrates, or when dictionaries and indexes and libraries of water don’t work as empirical fact.” [Michelle white, "RONI HORN WAS HERE," in Roni Horn: Wit's End, Göttingen : Steidl, 2021).

RONI HORN

Installation view, Roni Horn, Wits’ End Mash, 

Peder Lund, Oslo, Norway, 2021

Courtesy of Peder Lund, Oslo

Another body of work by the artist that challenges the notion of classification is of course her renowned glass sculptures since glass is neither liquid nor solid, but an amorphous liquid-solid that exists between those two states of matter, with atoms moving too slowly for its condition of constant change to be visible. By virtue of this extraordinary duality, glass is an ideal medium for Roni Horn’s exploration of the shifting grounds of meaning and identity. At display at Peder Lund is the mesmerizing sculptural work, Untitled (“And Chikatilo?’ I ask him.”What was your moment of breakthrough?’ A half lowering of the heavy eyelids, a small sigh. ‘The reek of his breath,’ he replies, after a long pull at his cigarette. ‘Chikatilo ate the private parts of his victims. Over time it effected his digestion.’”), (2013-17). The title quote for this work comes from The Pigeon Tunnel (2016) which comprises a collection of memoirs by the British-Irish novelist John le Carré. This glass sculpture is a prime example from the artist’s oeuvre – similar works are for example held by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland, Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom, and LACMA, Los Angeles, CA, USA. 

On 30 September 2021, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration has opened a new Scenic Route installation by Ron Horn in Havøysund, Northern Norway. The permanent art installation Untitled (“I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness.”), consists of two glass objects from 2013-15, in a wooden pavilion designed by architect Jan Olav Jensen in collaboration with Roni Horn, completed in 2021.

Roni Horn’s numerous solo exhibitions include shows organised by The Pola Museum of Art, Hakone, Japan, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA, The Drawing Institute at The Melin Collection, Houston, TX, USA, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland, and Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover, Germany. A major retrospective titled Roni Horn aka Roni Horn was organised by Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom and travelled to Collection Lambert, Avignon, France, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, USA in 2009/2010. Her work has been exhibited in several Reykjavik venues, as well as in group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA (1991 and 2004), Documenta 9, Kassel, Germany (1992), Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (1997 and 2003), and Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia (1998 and 2014). Roni Horn has received various awards, among them a Ford Foundation grant (1978), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1984, 1986, and 1990) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1990). In 2013, she was awarded the Joan Miró Prize.

Roni Horn’s work is featured in numerous major international institutions and collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA and Tate, London, United Kingdom.   

PEDER LUND

Tjuvholmen allé 27, 0252 Oslo

pederlund.no

David Salle @ Lehmann Maupin, Seoul - Alchemy in Real Life

David Salle: Alchemy in Real Life

Lehmann Maupin, Seoul

Through November 12, 2021

Lehmann Maupin Seoul presents Alchemy in Real Life, featuring new paintings by artist DAVID SALLE from his Tree of Life series. The artist’s fourth exhibition with the gallery and first with Lehmann Maupin in Seoul features eight of David Salle’s newest paintings, created during the course of the pandemic. Born in 1952 and raised in Wichita, Kansas, David Salle attended California Institute of Arts (CalArts) in Los Angeles, receiving a B.F.A. in 1973 and an M.A. in 1975. A member of the influential Pictures Generation, David Salle combines popular, or commercial imagery with images made from direct observation, as well as a range of art historical references to create a personal pictorial language. His work features a sophisticated and highly intuitive approach to composition, one that suggests new associations and relationships between familiar (or un-familiar) subjects. David Salle’s multi-layered works do not rely on subject matter alone, however—his paintings pack an immediate formal impact and present multiple points of entry for the viewer. Built to draw the eye through and across the picture plane, they reward close looking and prolonged contemplation.

The paintings in David Salle’s Tree of Life series feature vignettes of men and women in the midst of various interpersonal interactions. The style of Salle’s figures recall the cartoons of Peter Arno, who rose to prominence during the Depression era and revitalized single panel cartooning while working for the New Yorker Magazine. Peter Arno’s distinctive style and one line captions brimmed with social satire, and were often aimed at America’s upper class. Many of the figures in David Salle’s Tree of Life series appear to be in the middle of conversation, and the viewer can almost hear the next line of dialogue captioning the paintings—much like an Arno cartoon. In Tree of Life #26, a glum man in a large overcoat and crumpled hat appears to have stopped a woman dressed smartly in a strapless dress, bejeweled necklace, and large fur coat. The figures’ grisaille tones contrast sharply with the bright blue background and red, leafless tree in the center of the work, and the overall impression is of cold winter’s night, the hand-drawn flowers in the lower left corner appearing as ghostly shadows of their summer selves. The viewer seems to have stumbled upon these two figures at a critical juncture—perhaps the woman has just noticed the man behind her, or he has just called out to her while stepping out from a shadow. In this and other works in the series, the ambiguous relationship between the subjects and the sometimes madcap situations in which they have found themselves ensures that the full story remains just beyond our grasp. As is so often the case with David Salle’s work, we are unable to completely decipher the narrative at play in each painting—we can almost, but not quite discern what might have come just before or what will come just after the scenes depicted in each work.

Trees figure throughout Alchemy in Real Life, vertically bisecting the canvas in most paintings and often obscuring the subjects and settings. Typically, a single tree acts as a visual divide or barrier between the sexes, men on one side, women on the other—a formal device that references Tarot imagery as well as historical representations of the Garden of Eden. In many religious, philosophical, and mythological traditions, the Tree of Life is imagined as the support for all creation—here, it overlays the action in each piece, presenting a throughline across the series and imparting a certain timelessness to the otherwise period-specific clothing and pictorial style of the subjects. One of Salle’s innovations in this series is to represent—in the same painting—the tree both above and below ground. The roots of each tree occupy the lower third of the composition, often in a separate panel directly beneath the larger canvas. This lower panel takes on a range of meanings. Broadly speaking, it is the “subconscious” of the painting, or a representation of our collective history; simply put, it represents the past, or ‘how we got here’. In these panels, David Salle’s penchant for, and skill at, relational composition, as well as his imagistic resourcefulness reaches new heights, The roots of the various trees are shown intermixed with ladders, worms, and human heads, torsos, and hands, as well as passages of “pure” abstraction , and these panels privilege David Salle’s other highly recognizable, signature attributes—his strong, vibrant color palette and confident line. As David Salle himself has written in his highly acclaimed essays, it is how something is painted, as much as what is painted that is the key to unlocking a painting’s meaning, and nowhere is this more apparent than in these paintings. That is, simply put, Alchemy in Real Life.

DAVID SALLE

David Salle (b. 1952, Norman, Oklahoma; lives and works in New York). Salle received both a BFA and an MFA from the California Institute of Arts, Los Angeles (1973 and 1975). Solo exhibitions of his work have been organized at the Dallas Contemporary, Dallas (2015); Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago (2014); Metropolitan Opera House, New York (2012); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico (2000); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1999); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung, Ludwig, Vienna (2000); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (2000); and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (1999). In 1987, at age 34, David Salle was the youngest artist ever to be honored with a mid-career survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Select group exhibitions featuring his work include Before/On/After: William Wegman and California Conceptualism, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2018); Zeitgeist, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Geneva, Switzerland (2017); Fast Forward: Paintings from the 1980s, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Third Space/Shifting Conversations About Contemporary Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama (2071); Unfinished Business: Paintings from the 1970s and 1980s by Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, and David Salle, Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY (2016); Inspired by True-Life Events, CAC Malaga, Spain (2016); America is Hard to See, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); This Will Have Been: Art, Love, & Politics in the 1980s, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2012); and The Pictures Generation, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009). His work is in numerous international public and private collections including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

David Salle

How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art

W.W. Norton, October 2016

David Salle is also a prolific writer on art. His essays and reviews have been published in Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, and The Paris Review, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogs and anthologies. A recent volume of David Salle’s collected essays, How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art, was published by W.W. Norton in October 2016.

LEHMANN MAUPIN SEOUL

74-18, Yulgok-ro 3-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Pablo Picasso @ Acquavella Galleries, NYC - PICASSO: Seven Decades of Drawing

PICASSO: Seven Decades of Drawing

Acquavella Galleries, New York

Through December 3, 2021

Arguably the most influential artist of the 20th century, over the course of his career Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) pioneered successive artistic innovations that shaped the development of modern art. He was prolific in a wide range of mediums, including painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, and printmaking. Born in 1881 in Spain, the son of an art teacher, Pablo Picasso exhibited his first paintings in Barcelona at the age of 12. After an earlier trip to Paris, he left Barcelona in 1904 and moved permanently to France, where he would live until his death in 1973. 

Acquavella Galleries presents PICASSO: Seven Decades of Drawing, a survey of significant drawings by painter, draftsman, sculptor, printmaker, and ceramicist, Pablo Picasso. Curated by Olivier Berggruen, the show features over 80 drawings spanning seven decades of the artist's career, including works in an array of mediums such as charcoal, crayon, colored pencil, collage, graphite, gouache, ink, pastel, and watercolor. 

Drawing was the foundation of Pablo Picasso’s practice throughout the many stages of his stylistic development. The son of an art teacher, Picasso began to sketch at an early age; it is said that his first word was “piz,” short for “lápiz,” the Spanish word for pencil. He began his formal training at the age of seven, quickly mastering the techniques of classical draftsmanship. 

Pablo Picasso’s drawings reflect the artist’s lifelong quest to innovate and experiment; they also demonstrate his virtuosic ability to switch between styles, techniques, and mediums. Guided by his intuition and innate understanding of line, in his drawings Picasso imaginatively experimented and pioneered the development of radical ideas, innovating new approaches to form and expression in the process.

Several works on view provide insight into the evolution of his most influential, large-scale paintings, such as Les demoiselles d’Avignon, while others stand alone as virtuoso, independent works showcasing Picasso’s mastery of line, form, and medium. Developed in concert with his monumental paintings Les demoiselles d'Avignon [1907, The Museum of Modern Art, New York] and Les trois femmes [1908, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia], three drawings in the exhibition—Les demoiselles d'Avignon: Nu jaune (Étude) [1907, Collection of John and Gretchen Berggruen, San Francisco], Nu à genoux [1907-1908, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York] and Nu debout (Étude pour 'Les trois femmes') [1907-1908, Private Collection]—illustrate Pablo Picasso’s development of the striking, geometric female figures whose fragmented forms paved the way to Cubism. The watercolors, studies of the female form in motion, mark a radical break from traditional composition and perspective in painting. These bold and confrontational depictions of form became a seminal point in the development of Cubism and modern art. 

One of the most recurring subjects in Pablo Picasso’s oeuvre is the tête de femme or buste de femme (the female head or bust of a woman). The subject serves not only as a motif to explore the artist’s stylistic development, but also to chronicle his personal life and relationships. The notorious lothario’s rapid and often dramatic changes of style are frequently attributed to the presence of a new love interest, the waning of an old one, or both. Numerous examples of the motif of the buste de femme abound in the exhibition, including early portraits evincing his study of archaic sculpture; fragmented, Cubist representations; more naturalistic, classicizing portraits; biomorphic Surrealist abstractions; and later, more erotic portraits. In his early drawing, Buste de femme nue (1906), a representation of his mistress and muse Fernande Olivier, Picasso fused Fernande’s striking face with his study of ancient Iberian masks and Romanesque sculpture, while Buste de femme (1907) betrays Picasso’s increasing interest in African masks, a formative influence in his development of Cubism. The evocative Tête de femme (1921), reflects the artist’s study of Classical sculpture and art history after World War I, when he was married to Olga Khoklova, while the sensual Portrait de femme endormie, III (1946), reflects Picasso’s later impassioned affair with Françoise Gilot and his spurring rivalry with Henri Matisse.

PICASSO: Seven Decades of Drawing

Exhibition Catalogue, November 2021

A fully illustrated hardcover catalogue will be produced for the exhibition featuring critical essays by historian and curator Olivier Berggruen and historian Christine Poggi.

Seven Decades of Drawing is supported by loans from The Art Institute of Chicago, The Cleveland Museum of Art; Fondation Beyeler, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Morgan Library & Museum; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Para el Arte (FABA), Madrid. 

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES

18 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075

www.acquavellagalleries.com

Elmgreen & Dragset @ Pace Gallery, NYC - The Nervous System

Elmgreen & Dragset 

The Nervous System

Pace Gallery, New York

November 10 – December 18, 2021

Elmgreen & Dragset

The Painter, Fig. 1, 2021 

© Elmgreen & Dragset, courtesy Pace Gallery

Elmgreen & Dragset 

Tailbone (Stainless Steel), 2021 

© Elmgreen & Dragset, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of new and recent work by the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset. This exhibition marks the Berlin–based artists’ first major show with Pace since they joined the gallery in 2020. The Nervous System, which comprises a highly narrative domestic scene of 11 works, including eight new pieces, is reminiscent of Elmgreen & Dragset’s acclaimed double exhibition, titled The Collectors, in the Nordic and Danish Pavilions at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009.

Elmgreen & Dragset, who have been collaborating since 1995, will take over the first floor of Pace’s New York space for this presentation, creating an almost surreal depiction of a dysfunctional home within the gallery’s walls. Featuring varied sculptural elements that together create a complex set of associations, the exhibition encourages viewers to draw their own interpretations of the scene from the many different cues in the display. For instance, five characters are presented as figurative sculptures, though the relationships between these characters are not explicitly described. In this presentation, Elmgreen & Dragset have inverted the experience of reading a novel, providing images but requiring viewers to construct the story.

Among the recent works in the exhibition is the installation Short Story (2020), which features two figurative bronze sculptures of young boys on a tennis court and speaks to competition in society at large as well as the subjective nature of fairness. New pieces in the show include Boy with Gun, a sculptural installation showing a painted white bronze figure of a young boy holding a gun above his head and staring through a window, and The Painter, Fig. 1, a sculptural rendering of the act of painting that blends the two mediums and playfully intertwines reality and representation. 

Elmgreen & Dragset’s extraordinary, large-scale sculptural installations have been presented around the world. Among their permanent public works are Prada Marfa, a reproduction of a Prada store erected in Marfa, Texas in 2005, Bent Pool in Miami, the Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime in Berlin, and their site-specific ceiling installation, The Hive, which was unveiled at the new Moynihan Train Hall in New York in December 2020. Central to the artists’ practice are investigations of the social histories of public spaces, and their works are often imbued with political and emotional resonance.

As Ann Lui wrote in a 2018 essay published on the occasion of the artists’ solo exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, London, “In Elmgreen & Dragset’s work questions of queer space always intersect exploration of issues of economy and governance and their tongue-in-cheek critiques of late-capitalist life.”

Much of the artists’ work, like the stainless-steel Han sculpture in the Danish city of Elsinore, incorporates figurative elements. Others, like the large-scale sculpture Van Gogh’s Ear presented in New York, Hong Kong, and Wuhan, utilize recognizable objects from the physical world to conjure unexpected associations.

“What’s important is that art can make us less fearful,” Elmgreen said in a 2019 interview with the critic Linda Yablonsky.

In June 2021, Elmgreen & Dragset inaugurated a permanent outdoor sculpture, Life Rings, at the Royal Djurgården in Stockholm, Sweden. The artists’ solo exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark will be on view until October 24. On October 4, coinciding with a presentation of selected sculptures throughout the Würth Kunstmuseum, Künzelsau, the artists will be awarded the Robert Jacobsen Prize, one of Europe’s biggest prizes for artists. In spring 2022, they will present a multi-venue solo exhibition inside and outside the Fondazione Prada in Milan.

In conjunction with this presentation, Pace produces a catalogue featuring an essay by the writer Martin Herbert and an interview with the artists by the art historian Richard Shiff.

PACE GALLERY

540 West 25th Street, New York

www.pacegallery.com

John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist @ Mint Museum Uptown, Charlotte + Other Venues

John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist

Mint Museum Uptown, Charlotte

Through January 2, 2022

John Leslie Breck (American, 1860–1899)

Self Portrait, ca. 1890

Oil on canvas, 11 x 9 inches 

Private Collection

Courtesy of Martha Richardson Fine Art, Boston 

James Carroll Beckwith (American, 1852–1917)

Portrait of John Leslie Breck, 1891 

Oil on canvas, 13¼ x 17¼ inches

Collection of Max N. Berry

The Mint Museum presents the premiere of John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist, an exhibition showcasing more than 70 works by one of the first American artists to introduce Impressionism to the United States. The exhibition is the first ever organized by a museum to be dedicated to works by John Leslie Breck.

Drawn from public and private collections, as well as the acclaimed Terra Foundation collection of American art, many of the works have not been on public view in more than a century. In addition to John Leslie Breck’s landscape-inspired works, the exhibition highlights his exploration of new styles and approaches to painting in the years before his early death at the age of 38. More than 10 related paintings by John Leslie Breck’s French and American Impressionist colleagues, including Theodore Robinson, Willard Metcalf, and Lila Cabot Perry, are also featured in the exhibition.

John Leslie Breck (American, 1860–1899) 

Chez M. Monet, 1888 

Oil on canvas, 18 x 22 inches 

Private Collection

John Leslie Breck (American, 1860–1899)

Suzanne Hoschedé Sewing, 1888 

Oil on canvas, 18 1/8 x 21 7/8 inches. 

The Mint Museum, Gift of the Mint Museum Auxiliary and 

courtesy Heather James Fine Art. 2016.25

John Leslie Breck (American, 1860–1899)

The Sketch Class, 1890

Oil on panel, 5¼ x 7 inches.

Private Collection

The exhibition is inspired by The Mint Museum’s acquisition of John Leslie Breck’s canvas Suzanne Hoschedé-Monet Sewing. “I have been an admirer of John Leslie Breck’s beautiful, trailblazing paintings ever since my first encounter with his work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the late 1990s,” says Jonathan Stuhlman, senior curator of American art at The Mint Museum. “When we had the opportunity to acquire one for The Mint Museum in 2016, it was the perfect catalyst for the museum to begin organizing this exhibition — the first retrospective of his work since his death in 1899.”

“The importance of John Leslie Breck’s works and his introduction of French Impressionism to an American audience has largely gone unrecognized but is an important part of American art history,” says Todd A. Herman, PhD, president and CEO of The Mint Museum. “Through dedicated research and work by the staff at the Mint, Breck and his beautiful paintings will be brought back into the conversation of American art.”

In addition, a 208-page, fully illustrated exhibition catalogue is available. Stuhlman collaborated with leading Breck scholars Royal Leith and Jeffrey Brown to bring together Breck’s finest paintings, as well as to create the first ever monograph produced about the artist, which also includes contributions from Erica Hirshler, PhD, and Katherine Bourguignon, PhD. 

After debuting at The Mint Museum, John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist will travel to the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee in the winter of 2022 and the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa in the spring of 2022.

John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist is generously presented by Bank of America, with additional support provided by The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts and the Mint Museum Auxiliary. Individual support provided by Charlie and Susan Murray in honor of Welborn and Patty Alexander, and Mary and Dick Payne.

MINT MUSEUM UPTOWN

at Levine Center for the Arts

500 South Tryon Street, Charlotte, NC 28202

mintmuseum.org

Betye Saar Exhibition @ ICA Miami - Institute of Contemporary Art - Serious Moonlight

Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight 

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami 

October 29, 2021 – April 17, 2022 

Rarely-seen installation works by pioneering artist Betye Saar (b. 1926) receive their first dedicated exhibition in more than three decades at ICA Miami. Serious Moonlight spans significant installations created from 1980 to 1998, including Oasis (1984), a work that is reconfigured for the first time in more than 30 years. Showcasing this lesser-known aspect of the artist’s practice, the survey provides new insights into Betye Saar’s explorations of ritual, spirituality, and cosmologies, as well as themes of the African diaspora. Serious Moonlight is curated by ICA Miami Curator Stephanie Seidel. 

“Betye Saar’s impact on art history is undeniable, yet important aspects of her innovative body of work have yet to be fully explored,” said ICA Miami Artistic Director Alex Gartenfeld. “Serious Moonlight gives audiences the first opportunity to view many works of large scale sculpture and installation together that have not been seen in a museum context for decades. ICA Miami is committed to exploring under- recognized aspects of significant artists’ practices in order to enable deeper understanding of their work and its impact.”

“Saar’s radical immersive installations are incredibly rich with narrative,” said ICA Miami Curator Stephanie Seidel. “Connecting the political and the spiritual from a feminist point of view is an enduring aspect of Saar’s practice, and her groundbreaking work continues to spur important dialogues about gender and race. Through these rarely-seen installations, made nearly three decades ago, the exhibition illustrates her bold and pioneering approach as an artist, storyteller, and mythmaker, and the ongoing significance and relevance of her work to the most pressing issues in America today.”

Recognized for her visionary artistic practice, Betye Saar has been a pioneer of assemblage art on the West Coast and Black feminist art in the United States since the 1960s. Her dense, complexly referential assemblages, sculptures, and collages reflect changing cultural and political contexts—generating and influencing dialogues and artistic practice related to race and gender. Rich with familiar symbols, a number of the works in the exhibition highlight Saar’s interest in spirituality and cosmology. Serious Moonlight brings together a series of her lesser-known installations to demonstrate the artist’s critical focus on Black identity and Black feminism throughout her practice, as well as her explorations of myth and spirituality in relation to the African diaspora and the African American experience.

Influenced by Betye Saar’s lifelong home of Los Angeles and research trips to Haiti, Mexico, and Nigeria in the 1970s, the installations seen in the exhibition explore concepts of ritual and community through both cultural symbols and autobiographical references. Reconfigured in close collaboration with the artist, each installation is exhibited in a dedicated architectural pavilion, enabling each work to be showcased individually and supporting the artists’ intentions to create immersive, dynamic viewer experiences with each installation.

Among the significant works on view is Oasis (1984), the exhibition’s earliest installation, which will be reconfigured for the first time since 1988. Featuring meticulously blown glass spheres around a children’s rocking chair embedded in sand, Oasis evokes a utopic space where life and death merge and coexist.

Serious Moonlight additionally features House of Fortune (1988), an ominous scene of a card table, tarot cards, and Vodou flags as a meditation on spirituality. Limbo (1994) and Wings of Morning (1992), both address death and mourning, and draw from the history and experience of African American communities to create tangible and powerful monuments consecrating collective memories. Saar’s reflections on the African diaspora are also illustrated through the installations Mojotech (1987), Secrets and Shadows (1989), A Woman’s Boat: Voyages (1998), and Gliding into Midnight (2019)—the latter with fragments of the 1993 installation In Troubled Waters—which touch upon this history of the aftereffects of the transatlantic slave trade. 

Betye Saar - Exhibition Catalogue: Serious Moonlight is accompanied by a richly illustrated scholarly catalogue edited by Stephanie Seidel. The catalogue features contributions by Sampada Aranke, Edwidge Danticat, Leah Ollman, and Stephanie Seidel that consider Betye Saar’s work in the contemporary context. 

BETYE SAAR - BIOGRAPHY

Boldly addressing questions of race and gender in her art and activism, Betye Saar (b. 1926, Los Angeles) has been a pioneer of readymade art on the West Coast and Black feminist art in the United States since the 1960s. Her revolutionary work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and around the world, including, most recently, the exhibition “Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl's Window” at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, dedicated to her prints; the retrospective “Betye Saar: Still Tickin’” at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona, and Het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands; the group show “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85” at the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and the monumental traveling group show “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” at the Tate Modern, London; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Brooklyn Museum; The Broad, Los Angeles; and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Current exhibitions include solo presentations “Betye Saar: Call and Response” at the the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, MS, previously on view at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Morgan Library & Museum, New York) and traveling to Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX (Fall 2021), focused on her sketchbooks and related works. The Academy of Arts and Letters recently inducted Saar May 19, 2021. Saar’s works are held in more than sixty museum collections, including the Detroit Institute of Arts; MoMA; LACMA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Carrie Mae Weems @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco - WITNESS

Carrie Mae Weems: WITNESS

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Through November 13, 2021

Carrie Mae Weems

Untitled (Playing harmonica), 1990-1999

© Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and 

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

“Art has saved my life on a regular basis.” 

— Carrie Mae Weems

Fraenkel Gallery presents a survey of the work of CARRIE MAE WEEMS examining her extraordinary achievement over four decades. WITNESS traces Carrie Mae Weems’s exploration of history, identity, and the structure of power, in photographs and video from many of her most important bodies of work. Carrie Mae Weems’s inaugural show celebrates the gallery’s recently announced representation of the artist.

The exhibition begins with early documentary-style photographs from the series Family Pictures and Stories, depicting Carrie Mae Weems’s own multigenerational family in a joyful and nuanced vision of Black family life. In her iconic Kitchen Table series, Carrie Mae Weems cast herself as a woman at the emotional center of an imagined domestic world, staging photographs that build a rich fictional narrative around her role as a lover, friend, and mother.

In the series Museums, American Monuments, and Roaming, Carrie Mae Weems photographed herself in front of institutions and public spaces around the world, dressed in black and facing away from the camera. Carrie Mae Weems has described the character she depicts as a witness whose presence invites the viewer to consider how power is inscribed in these spaces and which groups are welcomed and represented in them.

Carrie Mae Weems has often used performance marked by highly constructed artifice to explore how history is remembered and created. In Constructing History, Weems worked with college students to re-enact moments of social upheaval from the 1960s, building stage-like photographic tableaux. In the video People of a Darker Hue, Carrie Mae Weems addresses more recent history, pairing footage of buoyant city life and solemn protest with a stark, highly stylized vision of oppression, in commemoration of Black men and women killed by police.

In From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, one of Carrie Mae Weems’s best known and most powerful series, photographs of enslaved men and women and other Black subjects, collected from museum and university archives and other sources, are tinted red and overlaid with heartbreaking and poetic texts. Using important images in American photography to explore not only race, but rather race through the lens of American photographic history, the series takes on both photography and the racist structures it has supported.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS (b. 1953) has been featured in major exhibitions at museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain. This winter, the Park Avenue Armory will host an exhibition and convocation curated by Weems, and in 2022 her work will be exhibited in a solo show at Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, Germany, and in a two-person exhibition with Dawoud Bey at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. She has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including a MacArthur “Genius” grant, the U.S. State Department’s Medal of Arts, the Joseph Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, NEA grants, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. Herwork is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New  York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Tate Modern, London.

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

fraenkelgallery.com

Jan Van Imschoot @ Galerie Templon, Paris - La présentation des Absents

Jan Van Imschoot

La présentation des Absents

Galerie Templon, Paris

6 novembre - 24 décembre 2021

Après l’exposition de 2020 Le bouillon de onze heures, hommage au néerlandais Willem Claeszoon Heda, le peintre flamand JAN VAN IMSCHOOT, dévoile le deuxième volet d’une trilogie consacrée aux grands maîtres de la peinture occidentale. Avec « La Présentation des absents », l’artiste confronte son imaginaire à celui qu’il considère comme le grand maître de la peinture moderne française : Édouard Manet.

Avant tout, Jan Van Imschoot souhaitait saluer la profonde connaissance de Manet de l’école traditionnelle du Nord et son admiration pour la peinture flamande, peut-être catalysée par sa relation avec la pianiste néerlandaise Suzanne Leenhoff, qui deviendra sa femme. Jan Van Imschoot a entrepris d’étudier la langue de Manet comme on apprendrait celle de Shakespeare, et s’est particulièrement attardé sur sa palette intrigante qui oscille inlassablement entre « le gris de l’Inquisition » et « le taupe clair de la religion hollandaise ».

Dans L’échange des bêtises, la Présentation des Absents, ou L’empire se trompe, on retrouve en filigrane les mises en scènes du moderniste, du Déjeuner sur L’herbe au Bar des Folies Bergères, ou encore aux séries de marines et de natures mortes aux asperges.

Comme Manet l’a fait avec ses prédécesseurs, Jan Van Imschoot s’amuse et prend des libertés avec l’histoire de l’art. « Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, par exemple, est un écho à Suzanne et les Vieillards, du Tintoret, allusion d’autant plus drôle que son épouse s’appelait Suzanne. Sa malice m’a parue très proche de ma démarche. » raconte Jan Van Imschoot dans la préface du catalogue d’exposition.

Il s’empare de l’œuvre du maître sous toutes ses coutures : « Je suis convaincu que l’art peut et doit être remis en question, et qu’il en va de même de la peinture occidentale. » Tantôt il interpelle par l’absence, comme celle de la serveuse dans son ode aux Folies Bergères ou celle de la nature dans son Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. Tantôt il trouble par le foisonnement de connotations absurdes, érotiques, ou historiques comme ses silhouettes de poires, symbole d’adultère, flottant en apesanteur sur le fond noir, ou ce portrait de femme s’admirant nue dans un miroir, le pied ensanglanté.

Comme toujours chez Jan Van Imschoot, la peinture devient un terrain de jeux propice à une réflexion sur la relation triangulaire entre trois de ses plus grandes passions : l’art, le langage et la vérité. Les bateaux-mouches de la ville lumières sont représentés en insectes éponymes dans Le Pari de Paris ; alors que quelques « Trahisons des Images » de Magritte réinvestissent la surface des Fameux Paresseux Heureux.

Pour Jan Van Imschoot, la beauté de l’art pictural réside en ce que lui seul peut faire éclater les codes du langage et de la vérité. « Qu’est ce qui est vrai ? Qu’est-ce qui est pensé et qu’est-ce qui est rêvé ? Autant de questions qui me confirment que la réalité et la vérité n’ont rien à faire dans l’art. Le rapport qu’entretiennent la langue et l’image reste un territoire ouvert ; les mots y rencontrent leurs propres limites, alors que l’art, tel un oiseau, le survole en toute liberté. »

Un catalogue est publié à l’occasion de l’exposition :

JAN VAN IMSCHOOT

La présentation des absents

Textes de Michèle Deghilage

Editions Galerie Templon, 2021, 96 pages

ISBN : 978-2-917515-42-6

Disponible sur store.templon.com

JAN VAN IMSCHOOT

Né à Gand en 1963, exposé en Belgique comme à l’international, Jan Van Imschoot vit en France depuis 2013. Le SMAK de Gand lui a consacré une grande exposition personnelle en 2002. Ces dernières années, il a présenté son travail au Kunstpalast de Düsseldorf (2005), au Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens à Deurle (2008), au National Art Museum of China à Beijing (2010) et à la Fondazione Volume ! à Rome (2012). En 2018, il participe à l’exposition collective Sanguine/Bloedrood conçue par Luc Tuymans pour le MHKA à Anvers et pour la Fondazione Prada de Milan, et en 2019, à Feast of Fools, Bruegel Rediscovered au Château de Gaasbeek en Belgique. En 2020, le Roger Raveel Museum accueillait la 7e Biennale de la Peinture autour du thème des intérieurs. Jan Van Imschoot y présentait quatre grands tableaux de sa série Intérieurs.

Jan Van Imschoot est représenté par la Galerie Templon depuis 2015. C'est sa première exposition personnelle avec la galerie à Paris.

GALERIE TEMPLON

28 rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare, 75003 Paris

www.templon.com

Roxy Paine @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC - Normal Fault

Roxy Paine: Normal Fault

Kasmin Gallery, New York

November 4 - December 23, 2021

Roxy Paine 

Topographic, 2021

60 1/2 x 84 x 8 inches / 153.7 x 213.4 x 20.3 cm

Courtesy of the artist 

Kasmin presents an exhibition of new work by ROXY PAINE (b. 1966, New York). Comprising an installation of thirteen relief paintings and one of the artist’s Dioramas, the works extend Roxy Paine’s epistemological investigations into the interconnected structures that constitute both the natural world and the systems humanity has imposed on it.

Obscuring the delineation between abstraction and the representation of landscape, soil, and flora, the works deliberately obscure the scale of their subjects to present simultaneously micro- and macroscopic perspectives of biological and geological phenomena, as well as the maps we use to notate the world around us. Roxy Paine’s constructions of these phenomena, including mycelium, molds, and rock material, entangle the dichotomy of beauty and destruction as they draw parallels between the patterns associated with the organic, the industrial, and the digital. Whether cells, bolts, or pixels, Roxy Paine repeatedly brings the accumulation of these formative units into absurdity, asking us to question how perception is framed, filtered, and codified.

Roxy Paine’s exploration into stratigraphy acts to interweave three distinct temporal frameworks: geological, fungal, and human. Time becomes the subject, as well as the perception of time and the way that the understanding of geology forces a different frame of reference. The artist has long been fascinated by fungi and its ability to productively transform dead matter into building blocks that other entities can harness to create new life. Their traditional medicinal uses, to induce perceptual shifts and philosophical epiphanies, is also of interest.

Three works in the exhibition use the internal geometric structure of the American flag as a compositional beginning. Layered with complex symbolism and rendered in lifelike layers of sediment, they consider our planet’s ongoing transformation in both political and biological terms. Drawing on the irony of a country at pains to assert its authority despite rapid ecological decline, they lay bare the pallid resemblance that political or social systems have to the effortless perfection and complexity of nature.

Reverent of the immensity of geological time, Gros Ventre (2021) is titled after a wilderness situated nearby to the artist’s studio and residence in Wyoming. The area’s historic vulnerability to landslides has contributed to a distinctive and contrasting terrain, forming a mountain range which is broken by faults that form an asymmetrical arch. Roxy Paine uses this as a starting point to look at nature and the lenses through which we variously understand, analyze, mythologize, romanticize, and disturb the natural world.

Works that emphasize the man-made entropy of the earth are intentionally fraught in tone. In Large Green Pools (2021), what appears as a volcanic landscape is interrupted not by the chlorophyllic burst of plant life but by toxic craters almost extraterrestrial in their vibrancy. Large Sun (2021) and Small Sun (2021) present the eventual absorption of earth in space while also conjuring associations of rapidly multiplying bacteria or fungi, signaling the presence of death or the dying. Roxy Paine revels in this theatre of nature as he condemns its destruction by pollutants and emissions.

Distinct from the arborescence of the artist’s Dendroids (the structure of which mimic the branch-like networks of leaf structures and microchips), these works consider multiplicity, proliferation, and the slow layering of sediment over time to create the environments we recognize on earth during the epoch of the anthropocene. Presenting devastated landscapes, charred by fire or nuclear disaster, these works also develop previous major installations such as Desolation Row (2017).

ROXY PAINE’s work is the subject of numerous museum exhibitions worldwide including Roxy Paine: Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor at Beeler Gallery, Columbus College of Art & Design, OH, 2016–17; Natura Naturans at Villa Panza, Varese, Italy, 2015–16; and Roxy Paine: Scumaks and Dendroids at Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO in 2011.

In 2009, Roxy Paine was selected to create Maelstrom, a site-specific installation for the rooftop garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His work has also been installed in prominent public venues In New York City such as Madison Square Park in 2009 and Central Park in 2002.

Roxy Paine has been the recipient of many prestigious awards, including John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Asher B. Durand Award by the Brooklyn Museum and the Trustees Award for an Emerging Artist by the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. His work is included in prominent public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art New York, Museum of Modern Art San Francisco, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, National Gallery Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., North Carolina Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

Major monographs of the artist’s work were recently published by Rizzoli in 2018, and by Skira in 2021.

ROXY PAINE

Text by Marc Mayer and Tan Lin

Published by Rizzoli Electa, November 2018

Hardcover, 288 p.

ROXY PAINE

Dioramas

Edited by Saul Anton

Texts by Mia Kang, Steven Matijicio and Michael Goodman

Published by Skira, 2021

Hardcover, 176 p., 145 ill.

KASMIN GALLERY

509 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.kasmingallery.com

Christo @ Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich - Nature | Environments - Curated by Lorenza Giovanelli

Christo, Nature | Environments 

Curated by Lorenza Giovanelli

Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich

Through November 20, 2021

“All our projects involve areas, whether in an urban or a rural area, where people live. Jeanne-Claude and I have always been interested in the space that people use […]. We’ve always said that it was wonderful to lend us the spaces that belonged to others.”

– CHRISTO

Galerie Gmurzynska presents “Nature | Environments,” Christo’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

The exhibition, curated by Lorenza Giovanelli, features collages and drawings dating from the artist’s early projects to the never realized Over the River, and explores Christo’s diverse artistic work within natural environments worldwide.

Starting with Wrapped Coast in 1969 in Australia to the iconic Umbrellas, the incredible Running Fence and the Wrapped Trees at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, the works in the exhibition bear witness to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s often decades long efforts to realize their projects. The meticulous preparation as well as the aesthetic aspects of the collages and sketches show the dedication and work processes behind the implementation of the installations:

“Works on paper can be a combination of photographs, fragments of other projects, technical information […] the drawings reflect the evolution of the project. It doesn’t emerge from my thoughts ‘fully equipped’.”

– CHRISTO

“Taking place simultaneously in Zurich and New York – evoking The Umbrellas project, conceived and realized as a diptych – this exhibition aims to explore the kaleidoscopic variations of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s environmental art and how it dialogued with the ecosystem they set within.” – Lorenza Giovanelli

GALERIE GMURZYNSKA 

Talstrasse 37, Zurich 

www.gmurzynska.com

Aleah Chapin @ Flowers Gallery, Hong Kong - Walking Backwards

Aleah Chapin: Walking Backwards

Flowers Gallery, Hong Kong

November 20, 2021 - January 15, 2022

ALEAH CHAPIN

The Unearthing, 2021

Oil on canvas, 121.9 x 101.6 cm

© Aleah Chapin, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery

ALEAH CHAPIN

The Purging, 2021

Oil on canvas, 121.9 x 101.6 cm

© Aleah Chapin, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Flowers Gallery presents an exhibition by contemporary American painter ALEAH CHAPIN, her first solo exhibition in Asia.

Aleah Chapin is renowned for her unflinching nude portraits of older women, relatives, and friends. Described by painter Eric Fischl as “the best and most disturbing painter of flesh alive today,” Aleah Chapin’s bold and intimate portrayals of the human figure have broadened the debate around the visibility of aging in representations of the body.

Over the past year, Aleah Chapin has taken an increasingly intuitive approach to painting, resulting in a radical shift of painterly style and process. The new works in this exhibition take their starting point from spontaneous sketches, often made using her non-dominant hand, which are guided by a personal instinctive awareness of self, time, and place. In her paintings, Aleah Chapin's automatic drawings are combined with images of her own body and reconfigured into hybrid forms poised at the edge of abstraction.

ALEAH CHAPIN

The Opening, 2021

Oil on canvas, 121.9 x 101.6 cm

© Aleah Chapin, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery

ALEAH CHAPIN

The Prodding, 2021

Oil on canvas, 121.9 x 101.6 cm

© Aleah Chapin, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Fluctuating between imposing rational structures and allowing the paintings to follow their own course, Aleah Chapin's new works remain fluid throughout their making, and open to chance. As the title of the exhibition Walking Backwards suggests, each painting treads a pathway into the unknown, shedding the familiar and building a sense of identity that develops, as Aleah Chapin describes, "from the inside out". The titles of the paintings underpin their association with experiences both seen and unseen, such as The Opening, a painting with a radiating core; or The Prodding, which alludes to the connection between body and mind. 

During this recent period, Aleah Chapin spent time in the expansive landscape of New Mexico, USA, an area that has attracted artists throughout history due to its wide open spaces and limitless skies. In Aleah Chapin's paintings, earth and sky are split distinctly into two planes via a sharp horizon line, providing opposing archetypal symbols for solidity and intangibility. The ground is often fertile with lush vegetation, a reference to the landscape of her home on America's Pacific Northwest coast, while richly graduated skies reveal abstracted elements of light and shape, denoting an awareness of energy and the natural forces of life. 

ALEAH CHAPIN - SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Born in 1986, Aleah Chapin grew up on an island north of Seattle, WA, (USA). She received her BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in 2009 and her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2012. Aleah Chapin attended a residency at the Leipzig International Art Programme in Germany and has exhibited her work in the US, the Netherlands, Germany and the UK. Recent exhibitions have included Aging Pride, Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria; and The Ingram Collection: Bodies, Woking, UK. She has been a recipient of the Willard L. Metcalf Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Posey Foundation Scholarship, Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, and a Postgraduate Fellowship from the New York Academy of Art; Aleah Chapin won the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2012. She lives and works in Seattle.

FLOWERS GALLERY

49 Tung Street, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

www.flowersgallery.com

Wifredo Lam @ Pace Gallery, NYC - The Imagination at Work

Wifredo Lam: The Imagination at Work

Pace Gallery, New York

November 10 - December 21, 2021

In collaboration with Gary Nader of Gary Nader Art Centre, Pace Gallery presents Wifredo Lam: The Imagination at Work, an exhibition of paintings, works on paper, and rarely seen bronze sculptures, including a significant loan from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The Cuban artist, who early in his career associated with major European figures in the surrealist and cubist movements, invented a radically syncretic visual language that challenged the Eurocentricity of Modernism. The presentation traces the artist’s career from the late 1930s to the 1970s, exploring the influence of Wifredo Lam’s heritage in his art. The exhibition is organized by Nader and Pace’s Senior Director and Curator Andria Hickey with curatorial contributions by Dr. Michaëla Mohrmann, a scholar and curator of Latin American art.

Wifredo Lam believed that “a true picture has the power to set the imagination to work, even if it takes time.” Taking its title from the artist’s words, this chronological survey presents Wifredo Lam’s many stylistic transformations and painterly innovations. Born in Cuba to a Chinese father and Congolese-Iberian mother, Wifredo Lam, who was in dialogue with surrealist and cubist artists, is widely considered one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Having trained in Spain and France in the early years of his career, the artist was introduced and became lifelong friends and associates with members of the European avant-garde, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque. Over the course of his life, Wifredo Lam radically transformed modernist painting through his unique cross-cultural hybridization of art.

Wifredo Lam: The Imagination at Work begins with the artist’s paintings from the late 1930s, when he converged with avant-garde artists and intellectuals in Europe. It was during this period that Wifredo Lam encountered Pablo Picasso’s collection of African masks, which would come to influence his later work. Returning to Havana in the early 1940s, Wifredo Lam was struck by the racism and exploitation that characterized Cuban society under the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. In response to these conditions and inspired by the Négritude movement’s celebration of Blackness, Wifredo Lam cultivated a practice that decolonized modernist art. Deeply informed by African sculpture and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, his work during the 1940s developed an iconography referencing Santería, an Afro-Cuban religion. He would eventually view his practice as “an act of decolonization not in a physical sense, but in a mental one.”

The exhibition features a group of paintings created between 1947 and 1950, a period following Wifredo Lam’s first visit to Haiti in 1946. These works, which are characterized by their somber, muted palette, were informed by the Vodou ceremonies that the artist encountered in Haiti at a time of political unrest. Also on view in the presentation are Wifredo Lam’s paintings from the 1950s and 1960s, during which time the artist relocated to France and traveled frequently to Cuba, Venezuela, and Mexico. Works such as Untitled (1957) and La Veille (1959) exemplify the artist’s gradual attenuation of Santería symbols—a consequence of his distance from Cuba but also of his gradual, post-war disassociation from Surrealism. In the 1970s, Lam increasingly favored abstraction, geometry, and fragmentation in his paintings. Personnage (1970) typifies his late career interest in angular, machinic beings that spoke to the Space Age and feelings of alienation.

Among the exhibition’s highlights is a selection of rarely seen bronze sculptures that Wifredo Lam created in Albissola Marina, Italy in the late 1970s. Stemming from the artist’s experimentation with ceramics in the early 1950s, these highly textured statuettes reflect his paintings’ Santería-inspired iconography and reveal the dialogue between Lam’s sculptural practice and paintings, which were often exhibited next to African and Oceanic sculptures.

Wifredo Lam’s work is included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York’s highly anticipated exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders, which examines the movement outside Western Europe. In 2015 the Centre Pompidou, Paris opened a major retrospective of the artist’s work—an exhibition that traveled to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid and Tate Modern, London. The artist’s work can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Menil Collection, Houston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; Tate, London; and many more international institutions.

PACE GALLERY

510 West 25th Street, New York

www.pacegallery.com

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