Will Boone @ David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles - Hell is Wet

Will Boone: Hell is Wet 

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles 

March 18 – April 22, 2023 

David Kordansky Gallery presents Hell is Wet, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Will Boone. In this exhibition, Boone showcases his recent experimentations on canvas with enamel, bar top resin, and auto body paint—known as “candy paint” in Houston—and considers his personal connection to place and storytelling through the accumulation of found objects. 

Generating content from an unlikely array of sources, Will Boone makes works with graphic power matched by their palpable physicality. His technical processes are informed by vernacular languages of numerous American subcultures, from the DIY ethos of punk to the precision of industrial manufacturing, typically reflective of the area in which the artist lives. In Hell is Wet, Boone makes visible the localized nuances associated with the American South and Southwest.

The paintings in this exhibition incorporate found relics that chart Will Boone’s physical and experiential trajectory. A lucky rabbit’s foot, a black Stetson hat, and a splayed Santa Claus suit appear embedded and crystalized in vibrant red and yellow canvases, forming a visual biography of the artist’s interactions, travel, and residences over the past five years. Since his return to Texas in 2020, Will Boone has shifted his focus to chronicle Gulf Coast ephemera. His practice of collecting and inserting physical objects into the canvas foregrounds the connection of the painting to a specific place and emphasizes the relationship painting has to drawing and sculpture.

Over the last decade, Will Boone has lived in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Canyon Lake, and Houston, between which lies an open landscape of discarded materials. When transitioning to a new place, Boone typically edits out the cumbersome items he’s accumulated, saving space for the unusual souvenirs he’s collected that memorialize past events in the artist’s life. These souvenirs find their way into Boone’s new work, forming a material map of his past and distilling life into a series of objects. The works are akin to curio cabinets typically found in homes, where vital family heirlooms and kitschy artifacts are neatly arranged on display shelves, or like religious reliquaries or fereters that contain holy remnants such as the clothing and bodily fragments of saints.

For Will Boone, objects act as proof of life and myth, often spinning a counternarrative tied to the specific region in both the objects’ materiality and the geographic context in which they were found. Literary and music sources also texture Boone’s process. Drawing inspiration from Texan songwriters such as Townes Van Zandt and Billy Joe Shaver, and authors like Harry Crews and Flannery O’Connor, Boone’s approach to storytelling develops not just by the collecting of things but also through the narrative tropes associated with each region. The open highway explored across generations of country and western singers and the Southern grotesque of Crews’s characters are foundational references for the preliminary research Boone embarks upon to make his work. In his visual storytelling, Texas is a swampy, damp, and humid environment, and the items sourced from this wet landscape are warped and discarded, revealing a gothic darkness evocative of the rural places he frequents. In Wet Weather Creek (2023), a lucky rabbit’s foot keychain found in a nearby dry limestone creek bed forms a lump at the center of the composition. Resin and paint physically pull marks further into the depths of the accumulating surface, creating voids that can subsequently be loaded with more material.

While he begins with the traditional painter’s support of stretched canvas, Boone quickly departs from the standard painterly procedure, relying instead on an instinctual feel for his materials. The embedded objects nested within the bar top resin disrupt the standard flatness of the picture plane, creating a slightly protruding silhouette of each form and introducing a texture that will continue to inform the painting as it evolves. Industrial-grade bar resin is used not simply as a sealant but also as another type of paint. The material itself calls to mind the range of bars and roadhouses that populate the Lone Star State, which are fundamental touchstones to its mythology and folklore.

The artworks on view emerge in both two- and three-dimensional terms, creating a finished relief that shows Boone pushing the materiality and sculptural possibilities of painting in equal measure. The recurring Saturn yellow and candy apple red paint colors, layered with viscous bar top resin, form an indestructible amber-like vessel that connects these paintings both to car culture in Houston and more art historical references such as Donald Judd’s Cadmium Red works, which Boone likens to the color of driving at night. In Hell is Wet, Boone displays these otherwise unassuming and unexpected objects in a manner that simultaneously distorts them and turns them into objects of wonder.

Will Boone (b. 1982, Houston) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Karma, New York (2022); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2019); and Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2014). A major installation was featured in Desert X 2017, Coachella Valley, California (2017). Other group shows include Zombies: Pay attention!, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2019); White Trash, Luhring Augustine Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York (2017); Prototypology, Gagosian, Rome (2016); Fétiche, Venus Over Manhattan, New York (2016); In Different Ways, Almine Rech, London (2016); and Love For Three Oranges, Gladstone Gallery, Brussels (2015). Boone lives and works in Houston and Comal County, Texas.

DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY

5130 W. Edgewood Pl., Los Angeles, CA 90019

www.davidkordanskygallery.com

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Claudette Johnson @ Ortuzar Projects, NYC - Drawn Out

Claudette Johnson: Drawn Out

Ortuzar Projects, New York

March 9 – April 22, 2023

Ortuzar Projects presents Claudette Johnson: Drawn Out, an exhibition of new works by London-based artist Claudette Johnson (b.1959, Manchester, UK). The exhibition is the artist’s first solo presentation in the United States.

Since beginning her career in the early 1980s, Claudette Johnson has challenged traditional representations of gender and Blackness in Western art history. Johnson’s studies of women, and, more recently, men, insist on demanding the acknowledgement of the Black body through often life-sized portraits—a presence that is, in the artist’s words, historically “distorted, hidden, and denied.” Often free-floating within fields of flat color or the white of the page, Johnson imbues her figures with power and subjectivity as she invites them to “take up space in a way that is reflective of who they are.”

In this new body of work, Claudette Johnson continues her exploration of portraiture. Many of her works are drawn from life, including friends and fellow artists, as well as self portraits of Johnson herself. Photographs and found media inform other works. Through a balance of carefully rendered faces, hands, and clothing, contrasted with sketchier and more gestural mark-making, Johnson’s compositions grasp disposition, personality, and mood. Many of Johnson’s subjects look directly at the viewer, recreating an intimate encounter with the artist. In a departure from her usual solo portraits, the exhibition includes three double portraits of friends or historical figures. Through the depiction of two friends posing together, Johnson introduces an additional layer of intimacy within the work: the intimacy and vulnerability of sitting for an artist, as well as the intimacy shared between the subjects. The negative space in-between bodies also introduces a new formal dynamic to the work. Johnson intends for her viewers to encounter the sitters on their own terms as strangers, rarely naming them or revealing biographical information. Her interest, to quote the artist, is stimulated by “what the image shows of their relationship rather than their relative celebrity.”

While traditionally working with pastel, watercolor and gouache, Claudette Johnson’s recent works have increasingly explored oil, oil stick, and egg tempera. This expanded repertoire has allowed Claudette Johnson to move fluidly between the acts of drawing and painting, as well as to work her compositions over a longer duration. These new mediums introduce a vibrancy and material density that sits in stark contrast to the fields of unpainted white ground. In the tension of positive and negative space is a sense of incompleteness that recreates the feeling of the live session. In an exploration of vulnerability, comfort, candidness, and ease, Johnson foregrounds the complexity of humanity in any shared encounter, granting her subjects their right to selfhood in the experience of being seen.

Claudette Johnson was an early member of the BLK Art Group, an association of young Black artists who examined, through their work, issues of race, gender, and the politics of representation. In an effort to bring young Black artists from Wolverhampton University together, the BLK Art Group organized the historic First National Black Art Convention in 1982, attended by several influential contemporary Black artists like Frank Bowling, Lubiana Himid, Rasheed Araeen, and Sonia Boyce. The lecture that Johnson delivered at the convention on the depiction of Black female figures within Western art history—notably the only presentation by a female artist—erupted into a heated dialogue. The discussion catalyzed the formation of a network of women artists at the forefront of the British Black Art Movement.

CLAUDETTE JOHNSON’s recent solo exhibitions include Still Here, Hollybush Gardens, London (2021); Claudette Johnson: I Came to Dance, Modern Art Oxford (2019); and Claudette Johnson, Hollybush Gardens, London (2017). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Courtauld Connections: Works from our National Partners, The Courtauld Gallery, London (2022); Drawing Closer, RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island (2022); Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 50s — Now, Tate Britain, London (2021); From Hockney to Himid: Sixty Years of British Printmaking, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, England (2021); Close: Drawn Portraits, The Drawing Room, London (2018); The Place Is Here, South London Gallery and Nottingham Contemporary, London (2017); No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960-1990, Guildhall Art Gallery, London (2015-16); and Thin Black Line(s), Tate Britain, London (2012). Her work is held in numerous public collections, including Tate, London; British Council Collection; Manchester Art Gallery; and Wolverhampton Art Gallery.

ORTUZAR PROJECTS

9 White Street, New York, NY 10013

www.ortuzarprojects.com

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Yuichi Idaka and László Moholy-Nagy, photographs from 1925 to 1946 @ Higher Pictures Gallery, Brooklyn - War Bonds

War Bonds

Yuichi Idaka and László Moholy-Nagy, 

photographs from 1925 to 1946

Higher Pictures Gallery, Brooklyn

March 15 – May 6, 2023

While many may have heard of László Moholy-Nagy—the legendary Hungarian artist and photographer best known for his work at the Bauhaus, and for the 1937 founding of the New Bauhaus, later called the Institute of Design in Chicago—fewer know of Yuichi Idaka. The son of Japanese immigrants, Idaka studied at Moholy-Nagy’s school from 1942 to 1945. In 1945, Idaka was hired by Moholy-Nagy to teach film and photography at the school. During the time, at Moholy-Nagy’s request, Idaka printed a number of images that Moholy-Nagy had made in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. These prints, alongside Idaka’s work from the 1940s, are the subject of the exhibition.

Idaka’s close collaboration with Moholy-Nagy took place during a brutal time for Japanese Americans. The United States’ internment of Japanese people began in 1942 and ended in 1946, and anti-Japanese persecution was rampant. One can only imagine that Moholy-Nagy—as a Jewish person who had fled Nazi Germany less than a decade prior—saw echoes in the U.S. of what he had just left behind in Europe. (Moholy-Nagy’s work was in fact featured in the infamous “Degenerate Art”exhibition organized by the Nazi Party in 1937, which purported that such art was of a primitive, inferior quality.) Moholy-Nagy, almost 20 years Idaka’s senior, seems to have taken the young photographer under his wing and supported Idaka’s creative output during a time of real political danger.

As if to encapsulate this parallel, Moholy-Nagy asked Idaka to print images of Germany that he had taken not long before leaving the country for good. In one oblique photograph shot from the Berlin Radio Tower (perhaps the only existing print of this image, as the negatives are believed to have been lost) the line of a fence curves and bisects the landscape, a dizzying abstraction of the snow-covered ground. Idaka’s later curving abstractions—photograms à la Moholy-Nagy—reflect this geometry, which he then brings with him to the streets of Chicago and beyond. In the gallery, the two artists’ work is exhibited side by side, perhaps for the first time since 1951, when both photographers were featured in the “Abstraction in Photography” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was a Hungarian artist and a faculty Bauhaus Master from 1923-1928. In 1937, Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago, since 1944 known as the Institute of Design, which in 1949 became a degree granting department at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Moholy-Nagy wrote several books including Painting, Photography, Film (1927) and Vision in Motion (1947). In 2003, the Moholy-Nagy Foundation was created to foster and share knowledge about the artist’s life and work. In 2016, he was the subject of a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Yuichi “Eugene” Idaka (1914-2012) was born to Japanese immigrants in Seattle, WA. After spending significant time during his childhood in Japan, he moved to Chicago in 1928 and helped run a Japanese Camera Club in the city. Idaka studied at the Institute of Design in Chicago from 1942-45 and taught their part-time from 1945-47 while working as a freelance photographer. He opened his own photography and design studio at 49 West Ontario – along with Angelo Testa and Edgar Bartolucci, fellow students at the Institute of Design – and later specialized in architectural photography. His work was featured in publications including Florida Architecture magazine, Architectural Digest, and The New York Times.

HIGHER PICTURES GALLERY

16 Main Street, Ground Floor, Brooklyn, New York 11201

www.higherpictures.com

Maia Ruth Lee @ Tina Kim Gallery, NYC - The skin of the earth is seamless

Maia Ruth Lee

The skin of the earth is seamless

Tina Kim Gallery, New York

April 6 – May 6, 2023

Tina Kim Gallery presents The skin of the earth is seamless, a solo exhibition of works by Busan-born (South-Korea), Colorado-based artist MAIA RUTH LEE (b. 1983). For her first exhibition with the gallery, Lee debuts a series of paintings, sculptures, and video, all developed over the course of the past year. These works expand on Lee’s Bondage Baggage series (2018-ongoing), born out of the artist’s longstanding concerns surrounding the physical, psychological, and emotional experiences of a diasporic migratory life. The works included in the exhibition speak to the potentiality of healing and transformation that could take place despite or rather, through mobility and rootlessness. Through abstraction, Lee’s work fluctuates between states of being settled and states of change.

All works presented in this exhibition stem from a material process that is at once tactile and painterly. The Bondage Baggage sculptures were originally developed in reference to the luggage seen on conveyor belts at the international airport in Kathmandu, where the artist spent her childhood. As objects that witness and endure limitations of physical borders, the parcels appear to the artist as containers of stories and ideas. Linen, clothing, and used materials are bunched together, covered with plastic, tarps, burlap or canvas, then meticulously fastened with rope-like cord in order to create the sculptures. The soft surfaces of these bundles often bulge and strain, evoking the fundamentals of containment and constraint, but also that of fortitude and resilience. Installed throughout the galleries, the physical qualities of these works evince notions of self-preservation, protection, and manifestation.

Some Bondage Baggage sculptures do not remain in these forms. The canvas layer of the sculptures is painted in ink and left to seep around and through the ropes. These ropes are then cut, allowing the “skin” of the sculptures to be unfurled, revealing Lee’s Bondage Baggage paintings. Summoning the appearance of leather or aging skin, each painting reveals track-like imprints that evidence the act of bondage performed on it previously. Although creases and traces are visible, they maintain an energetic, almost entropic charge. Often structured as burst-like compositions, the paintings seemingly radiate from an internal center outward. Describing these works as “vital embodiment of change, mutation, and growth,” the artist has conceptualized these paintings as visceral expressions of expansion and aliveness. These paintings stand in contrast to the second sculptural series on view: empty, shell-like “pods”  that are suspended and scattered within the gallery space. Made from the discarded ropes cut away from the body of the original Bondage Baggage sculptures, these works can be seen as the exoskeletal structure shed during the work’s metamorphosis. Remaining as fragile subjects, they bear only the vestiges of the items they once served to protect.

The exhibition’s title refers to a quote in writer Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1987 text “Borderlands/La Frontera”. Although Anzaldúa likens having a diasporic identity to having an open wound, she writes that “the skin of the earth is seamless, the sea cannot be fenced, el mar does not stop at borders.” In “The Letter”, a new video that Lee made for the exhibition, she stitches together footage of old family videos shot by her father in her rural hometown of Nepal. Subtitled with text from Lee’s personal letters written between 2020 through 2022, the seemingly mundane moments captured in the video provoke questions and concerns surrounding the home, family, spiritual inheritance, language, and translation. A tender and poignant portrait of one’s interior self, the exhibition centers migration as a generative, powerful force for creation.

MAIA RUTH LEE has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (CO), Francois Ghebaly Gallery (LA), and Jack Hanley Gallery (NY). Lee has participated in numerous group exhibitions including the Aspen Art Museum (CO), 2019 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, Helena Anrather Gallery, CANADA gallery, Studio Museum 127, Salon 94 in New York, and Overduin & Co. Gallery, and Roberts & Tilton Gallery in Los Angeles. Lee attended Hongik University in Seoul, and the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada. Lee was the recipient of the Gold Art Prize in 2021 and the Rema Hort Mann grant in 2017. Her work is held in the public collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

TINA KIM GALLERY

525 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

www.tinakimgallery.com

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Art Düsseldorf 2023 - Art Fair - Fifth Edition

ART DÜSSELDORF 2023

March 31 – April 2, 2023 

Andrew Gilbert 

Kabul-Democracy Burger, 2022

Acrylicwatercolor and fineliner on paper, 42 x 30cm

Courtesy Sterling

Oska Gutheil

Auf der Bank, 2022

Oil on canvas

66 9/10 x 98 2/5 in / 170 x 250 cm

Courtesy Gallerie Krinzinger

With its fifth edition, Art Düsseldorf 2023 presents itself as a platform for the most insightful and essential artistic developments of our time, and as a vibrant meeting place for the art world. 

With the announcement of the 95 participating galleries, Art Düsseldorf 2023 confirms its importance for the contemporary art market. The fair emphasizes this with a significant curatorial program that will characterize the 2023 edition:

This year, galleries were able to apply not only for the MAIN SECTION but also for the new NEXT and SOLO PROJECTS sections.

NEXT is aimed at galleries that have existed for less than ten years and show current works by up-and-coming artists. The SOLO PROJECTS section features artists with outstanding solo presentations on one of the following three focus themes:

• Sustainability

• Diversity

• Rhineland Connections

With the new sections, the fair presents a sharpened profile that reflects the everchanging art world.

„The Art Düsseldorf team attaches great importance to a diverse and attractive program. We communicate this consistently in our contact with the galleries and, in return, receive very open-minded feedback. We are pleased that we have succeeded in putting together such a diverse and multifaceted program,“ sums up Walter Gehlen, Director of Art Düsseldorf.

Walter Gehlen

Photo Sebastian Drüen

Among the exhibitors, many galleries are being welcomed back for the second time. Overall, the number of exhibitors has grown and 11 new places have opened up, so that 95 exhibitors will participate this year. With 35 newcomers exhibiting for the first time at Art Düsseldorf, there will be even more diversity within the fair schedule. Additionally, 29 galleries from the region — including 17 from Düsseldorf — confirm the strong position of the Rhineland. Berlin forms a strong counterweight with 30 galleries, southern Germany and Austria are represented by 15 galleries, and 34 galleries with international locations attest to the fair‘s appeal far beyond Germany. For this edition, galleries from London, Madrid, Lisbon, Copenhagen, New York, Istanbul, Kolkata, and Buenos Aires, among others, are represented. 

The high-quality selection confirms Art Düsseldorf‘s reputation as a dynamic platform for emerging and established galleries, and an essential meeting point for collectors, explorers, and art professionals. 

„The 2023 edition has a special significance for us: The great demand on the part of national and international galleries, their top-class artistic portfolio, our sophisticated digital offerings, the appealing art city of Düsseldorf (surrounded by the lively scenes of the Rhineland), and the inviting positive atmosphere in our lightflooded halls in the Böhler area are raising great expectations. We firmly believe that both encounters and discoveries, plus business and lively conversations will once again take place here at the highest level. We look forward to welcoming our many guests“, says Walter Gehlen, who eagerly looks ahead to the 2023 edition.

Gallery List Art Düsseldorf 2023

A+B Gallery, Brescia, MAIN

Achenbach Hagemeier, Düsseldorf, MAIN

alexander levy, Berlin, MAIN

Aurel Scheibler, Berlin, MAIN

Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art, Düsseldorf, MAIN 

Berthold Pott, Cologne, MAIN

boa-basedonart, Düsseldorf, NEXT

Buchmann Galerie, Berlin / Lugano, MAIN

Carolina Nitsch, New York, MAIN

Claas Reiss, London, NEXT

Copperfield, London, MAIN

COSAR, Düsseldorf, MAIN

DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM, Berlin, MAIN

Dürst Britt & Mayhew, The Haag, SOLO PROJECTS

EIGEN + ART, Leipzig / Berlin, SOLO PROJECTS

EMAMI ART, Kolkata, NEXT

Encounter, Lisbon, NEXT

fiebach, minninger, Cologne, SOLO PROJECTS

Galeria Senda, Barcelona, MAIN

Galerie Anton Janizewski, Berlin, NEXT

Galerie Bene Taschen, Cologne, MAIN

Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck, MAIN

Galerie Boisserée, Cologne, MAIN

Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne, MAIN

Galerie Dr. Dorothea van der Koelen, Mainz / Venice, MAIN 

Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Innsbruck, MAIN 

Galerie Friese, Berlin, MAIN

Galerie Georg Nothelfer, Berlin, MAIN

Galerie Jochen Hempel, Leipzig, MAIN

Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, MAIN

Galerie Karin Guenther, Hamburg, MAIN

Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, MAIN

galerie lange + pult, Zurich, Auvenier, MAIN

Galerie Löhrl, Mönchengladbach, MAIN

Galerie Ludorff, Düsseldorf, MAIN

Galerie Michael Haas, Berlin, MAIN

Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin, NEXT

Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin / Stockholm / Mexiko City, MAIN 

Galerie Rupert Pfab, Düsseldorf, MAIN

Galerie Russi Klenner, Berlin, NEXT

Galerie Tobias Naehring, Leipzig / Berlin, MAIN

Galerie Volker Diehl, Berlin, MAIN

GALLERIA ALLEGRA RAVIZZA, Lugano, Milano, MAIN

Gebr. Lehmann, Dresden, MAIN

Gether Contemporary, Copenhagen, MAIN

Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, MAIN

Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt, MAIN

JahnundJahn, Munich / Lisbon, MAIN

JO VAN DE LOO, Munich, MAIN

JUBG, Cologne, MAIN

Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf, MAIN

kajetan, Berlin, SOLO PROJECTS

Kicken Berlin, Berlin, MAIN

Klemm´s, Berlin, MAIN

Knust Kunz Gallery Editions, Munich, MAIN

KOENIG2 by_robbygreif, Vienna, SOLO PROJECTS

Konrad Fischer Galerie, Düsseldorf / Berlin, MAIN

KOW, Berlin, MAIN

Krobath, Vienna, MAIN

LEVY, Hamburg / Berlin, MAIN

LINN LÜHN, Düsseldorf, MAIN

LIVIE GALLERY, Zürich, NEXT

Lucas Hirsch, Düsseldorf, NEXT

MARIO MAURONER CONTEMPORARY ART, Salzburg, MAIN 

Matèria, Rome, MAIN

MATHIAS GÜNTNER, Hamburg, MAIN 

max goelitz, Munich / Berlin, MAIN

Max Mayer, Düsseldorf, MAIN

mike karstens, Münster, MAIN

Office Impart, Berlin, NEXT

Persons Projects, Berlin, MAIN

Petra Rink, Düsseldorf, MAIN

Philipp von Rosen Galerie, Cologne, MAIN

Priska Pasquer, Cologne / Paris, SOLO PROJECTS

Produzentengalerie Hamburg, Hamburg, MAIN

PSM, Berlin, MAIN

Robert Grunenberg, Berlin, NEXT

Ruttkowski;68, Cologne / Paris / Düsseldorf / New York, MAIN

Sabrina Amrani, Madrid, MAIN

Schönewald Fine Arts Gmbh, Düsseldorf, MAIN

SETAREH, Düsseldorf / Berlin, MAIN

SEXAUER, Berlin, MAIN

Shore Gallery, Vienna, NEXT

Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf, MAIN

Société, Berlin, MAIN

Soy Capitán, Berlin, MAIN

Sperling, Munich, MAIN

TATJANA PIETERS, Ghent, SOLO PROJECTS

Thomas Rehbein Galerie, Cologne, MAIN

Van Horn, Düsseldorf, MAIN & SOLO PROJECTS

W—Galería, Buenos Aires, SOLO PROJECTS 

Walter Storms Galerie, Munich, MAIN

Zeller van Almsick, Vienna, MAIN

Zilberman, Istanbul / Berlin, SOLO PROJECTS

ART DÜSSELDORF

Areal Böhler, Hansaallee 321, 40549 Düsseldorf

www.art-dus.de

Jeppe Hein @ SMK - National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen - Under the Surface

Jeppe Hein: Under the Surface 

SMK - National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen

1 April – 22 October 2023

Jeppe Hein painting his breath onto a wall 

Photo by Hendrik Hähner / Studio Jeppe Hein

Courtesy: Jeppe Hein

Jeppe Hein

Breathe with Me at Moderna Museet, 2022 

Courtesy: KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, 303 GALLERY, New York, 

and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen 

Photo: Åsa Lundén

Jeppe Hein

Breathe with Me at Moderna Museet, 2022 

Courtesy: KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, 303 GALLERY, New York, 

and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen 

Photo: Åsa Lundén

How are you today? How do you feel about the world around you? Can you let go of your thoughts and just be in the moment?

SMK Thy launches its new season presenting an exhibition created by the internationally renowned artist Jeppe Hein (b. 1974) who encourages the museum’s visitors to pause, open their minds, take a deep breath and notice how they feel.

Mingling humour and serious reflection, he invites you to enter a world with plenty of room for play, dialogue, creativity and contemplation. Here, visitors have the opportunity to put their personal stamp on the exhibition’s four interactive works, all of which rely on the guests’ participation to fully unfold.

“This is an invitation to activate your senses, to be inspired, to share your perspective, to open up your heart, to do something you are maybe not used to do, to step out of your comfort zone and to find out something about yourself that you were not aware of. What is under your surface? The answer is within you!” says Jeppe Hein.

Jeppe Hein

Today I feel like … Right Here Right Now, 2022 

Courtesy KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, 303 GALLERY, New York, 

and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen 

Photo: WebStyleStory

Jeppe Hein

Today I feel like … Right Here Right Now, 2022 

Courtesy KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, 303 GALLERY, New York, 

and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen 

Photo: WebStyleStory

On display in ‘Pakhuset’ at Doverodde Købmandsgård, the participatory works include Breathe with Me, which has been shown all over the world in places such as New York, Beijing and Stockholm.

Here, Jeppe Hein asks the guests to take a brush, dip it in blue paint and paint vertical brushstrokes on the wall in time with their exhale. During the exhibition period, a growing number of lines will appear, reflecting how we are all connected through our breathing and how we breathe the same air, regardless of where in the world we live.

In Today I feel like… visitors can pick up a piece of chalk from a local limestone quarry and use it to draw their current mood in one of the many circles marked out on the walls.

The museum also presents an all-new work created specifically for the exhibition in Thy. Here, Jeppe Hein collaborates with the photographer and local Thy resident Fredrik Clement, who has photographed the west coast of Thy with its crashing waves, surfers and sand. Under the Surface features five of these photographs, displayed on a grand scale. Using brush and paint, Jeppe Hein has added new details and layers to the scenes, and visitors are invited to do the same on smaller posters.

Jeppe Hein, 2022. 

Photo: Jan Strempel Photography

JEPPE HEIN (b. 1974) is a graduate from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the Städelschule – Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt. He is particularly known for his interactive works, where he makes use of surprising and captivating elements that place the audience at the centre of events and focus on their perception of the surrounding space.

Jeppe Hein has exhibited all over the world, including at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Rockefeller Center, New York City, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Permanent installations by Jeppe Hein can be found at ARKEN, Ishøj, La Guardia Airport, New York, and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, among others.

SMK - STATENS MUSEUM FOR KUNST

NATIONAL GALLERY OF DENMARK

Sølvgade 48-50 - 1307 Copenhagen

www.smk.dk

Seyni Awa Camara, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Martin Disler, Bettina Pousttchi, Rosemarie Trockel, Masaomi Yasunaga @ Buchmann Galerie, Berlin - Keramik

Keramik 

Seyni Awa Camara, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Martin Disler, Bettina Pousttchi, Rosemarie Trockel, Masaomi Yasunaga

Buchmann Galerie, Berlin

17 March — 22 April 2023

© Buchmann Galerie

With Keramik, the Buchmann Galerie presents an exhibition of ceramic sculptures by seven artists who have each made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary ceramic art: Seyni Awa Camara, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Martin Disler, Bettina Pousttchi, Rosemarie Trockel and Masaomi Yasunaga. 

Dating back to the Palaeolithic period around 24,000 BCE, ceramic art is one of the earliest forms of cultural expression. Ceramic materials have always been used for decorative and utilitarian purposes as well as for pure artistic expression, lending the medium an ambivalence that visual artists have so often found in their relationship to it. Too closely associated with craft and design for some, others have found ways to use ceramics and transform them into modes of free artistic expression. Both artists’ embrace of the ceramic arts and their rejection of it have happened in the context of the many artistic phases since 20th-century modernism. Today, ceramics are once again in focus despite the conclusiveness of the global digitization of our lived environment. Although they have found their way into aviation and medical technologies, the originality of ceramic materials and the archaic nature of their processing, which has not changed significantly since its inception, appears like a counter-image to an artificial world of pixels and algorithms.

Exhibitions such as The Flames at the Musée d’art Moderne in Paris in 2021 or Toucher Terre at the Fondation Villa Datris in 2022 have each engaged this wide range of ceramic referents. The exhibition Keramik at the Buchmann Galerie focuses on the work of artists whose ceramic experiments go beyond the materials’ utilitarian connotations, instead exploring the technical limits imposed by each substance and its application. Visitors to the exhibition will have the opportunity to see ceramic sculptures from large-scale installations to smaller, more intimate works. 

Initiated as a child into traditional ceramic techniques by her mother, the practice of Seyni Awa Camara (b. 1945 in Bignona, Senegal) quickly moved away from the utilitarian to the artistic. Camara has evolved her own distinct and expressive form of sculpture in which she creates works that range in size from just over 40 centimetres to a more totemic scale of up to 180 centimetres tall. Modelled by hand, the sculptures are fired on a wooden pyre in the yard in front of the artist’s house, sometimes adding ore or treating the clay with putrefied tree pods to create a burnished finish on the surface of the terracotta. Camara’s figurative work is based on legends, observation, objects and landscapes as well as on her own personal experiences. 

The glazed sculpture In Camera by Tony Cragg (b. 1949 in Liverpool, UK) and the sandblasted white porcelain sculpture Silent Conversation – featuring two figurines of Chinese noblemen – explore the possibilities of form and texture with dissonant results. Protected by a thick metallic glaze, In Camera reminds one of some unknown piece of machinery whose function remains open. This invented form contrasts with the two found decorative porcelain figures of Silent Conversation and the perforated white surfaces that highlight the fragility of their material. A peculiar silence is inherent in this latter sculpture, which seems like a contrast to the strong rhythmical form of In Camera.  

The work Flat 59 by Richard Deacon (b. 1949 in Bangor, Wales, UK) is a large, flat rectangular plate of fired ceramic material, which leans against a stand like an unhung full-size mirror or large picture frame. The plate’s size and technical perfection is exceptional. Deacon combines the minimalist form with an expressive and painterly glaze of many colours, surrounded by a thin red glaze around the edges. This contrast accentuates the object’s invocation of boundaries and lines of demarcation. 

Martin Disler (1949, Seewen, Switzerland–1996, Geneva, Switzerland) has always evinced a fascination with ancient legends and myths. In Martin Disler’s works, the expression of life, love and death plays a central role, as is the case in this large terracotta vase. Drawings of skulls and faces were scratched into the wet clay and remain as traces of the artist’s hand, even after being fired. 

The sculptures of Bettina Pousttchi (b. 1971 in Mainz, Germany) often reference architecture and its social implications. Stemming from the artist’s interest in transforming functional objects, these works take inspiration from architectural cornice stones whilst utilizing a dense coloured glaze. In the use of prefabricated modules lies a conceptual connection to Minimal Art and a reference also to Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades.

Like much of her oeuvre, Rosemarie Trockel’s (b. 1952 in Schwerte, Germany) intricate and visually captivating ceramic works engage with themes of gender and identity. She plays with traditional forms and techniques – one sculpture is completely covered by black and white glazes while the other work remains unglazed – creating abstract shapes that challenge the viewer’s imagination. The evocative work entitled Kinderkrippe inspires an array of associations, displaying openly visible traces of the artist’s fingers that show the force and energy with which the material was modelled.

The inventive works by Masaomi Yasunaga (b. 1982 in Osaka Prefecture, Japan) challenge the presumed functionality of the materials used in ceramic art, thus advancing its sculptural directive. His most recent works cannot technically be categorized as ceramic, as there is no clay present in his finished forms. Unlike pottery, usually made of clay and finished with a glazed surface, Yasunaga sculpts glaze as the primary material of his objects that are pit-fired, buried in sand and combined with unique raw materials such as feldspar, glass and metal powders. The viscous glaze melts, collapses and aggregates with these materials, hardening to a stone-like consistency in the kiln. The resulting objects, mostly non-functional vessels, shells and empty containers, have the appearance of lost and found archaeological relics. 

BUCHMANN GALERIE

Charlottenstrasse 13, 10969 Berlin

www.buchmanngalerie.com

Dorothea Lange: The Family Collection @ Phillips, NYC

Dorothea Lange: The Family Collection

Phillips, New York

Online Auction: 29 March - 5 April, 2023

DOROTHEA LANGE

White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, 1933

Estimate: $15,000 - 25,000

Image Courtesy Phillips

DOROTHEA LANGE

Women Workers, Richmond Shipyard, 1943

Estimate: $6,000 - 8,000

Image Courtesy Phillips

DOROTHEA LANGE

Street Demonstration, San Francisco (Down with Sales Tax), 1934

Estimate: $3,000 - 5,000

Image Courtesy Phillips

Phillips announces the second session of Dorothea Lange: The Family Collection, a trove of 50 photographs coming directly from the descendants of this seminal American photographer. This sale follows Phillips’ first offering from the Family Collection offered in October 2022. Part Two is open for bidding from 29 March to 5 April, 2023.

The sale features some of Dorothea Lange’s most indelible images from her multi-decade career in photography, as well as many images which will be new to collectors. All were in the photographer’s collection at the time of her death, passed along to her descendants, and represent the entirety of her career, from the first socially conscious images she made outside her portrait studio in San Francisco, through her work for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression, to her post-war documentary projects, much of it done in the company of her husband and collaborator Paul Taylor.

DOROTHEA LANGE

Paul S. Taylor with Farmer, circa 1936

Estimate: $3,000 - 5,000

Image Courtesy Phillips

DOROTHEA LANGE

Migratory Cotton Pickers, Eloy, Arizona, 1940

Estimate: $7,000 - 9,000

Image Courtesy Phillips

DOROTHEA LANGE

Vietnam, 1958

Estimate $3,000 - 5,000

Image Courtesy Phillips

Born in Hoboken in 1895, Dorothea Lange learned to photograph as a young woman before her departure for the west coast in 1918. Talented and ambitious, Dorothea Lange opened a portrait studio that catered to San Francisco’s upper crust. After witnessing first-hand the social upheaval caused by the Depression, she took to the streets with her camera, taking images of labor demonstrations, the newly unemployed, and men, women, and children who were without home or income – images that would set the trajectory for the rest of her career.

During the Depression she traveled the country under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration, documenting the poverty endured by Americans and creating some of the most culturally relevant images of the 20th century. She brought her incisive and empathetic documentary style to a variety of national and international subjects during and after World War II. Dorothea Lange was witness to a world in transition and her camera captured it all. Her photographs show that the story of the 20th century is the story of individuals: their struggle, their success, and their perseverance.

Online Auction: 29 March - 5 April

Auction Viewing: 432 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022

Estimates do not include buyer’s premium; prices achieved include the hammer price plus buyer’s premium.

PHILLIPS NEW YORK

432 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022

www.phillips.com

Tyler Hobbs - QQL: Analogs @ Pace Gallery, NYC

Tyler Hobbs

QQL: Analogs

Pace Gallery, New York

March 30 – April 22, 2023

TYLER HOBBS

QQL: Analog #2, 2023 

© Tyler Hobbs, courtesy Pace Gallery 

(Pictured: NFT version of QQL: Analog #2, 

to be accompanied by related painting)

Pace Gallery announces details of an exhibition of new work by leading generative artist, creative coder, and painter TYLER HOBBS. Presented under the banner of Pace Verso, the gallery’s web3 hub, this show features large-scale paintings based on Tyler Hobbs’ own experimentations with the new QQL NFT algorithm he developed in collaboration with fellow generative artist Dandelion Wist. QQL: Analogs marks Pace’s first exhibition dedicated to an individual artist’s web3 project.

Tyler Hobbs—who is known for his virtuosic work in computational aesthetics—utilizes algorithms, mechanical plotters, and paint in his practice. One of his most acclaimed projects is the Fidenza NFT series, which was presented on the generative art platform Art Blocks, a partner of Pace Verso since 2022. Fidenza is widely regarded as a landmark generative art project, ushering in a new level of code complexity and compositional structure within generative and digital art. The artist’s work has been influenced as much by figures like Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin—whose methodical approaches to art making, mathematically-minded compositions, and other contributions to Minimalism and Conceptualism influenced the rise of generative art in the mid 20th century—as the ever-expanding technological landscape. Hobbs, who studied Computer Science at the University of Texas, Austin, has exhibited at NFT.NYC; Art Dubai; the Seattle Art Fair; Bright Moments Gallery in New York; Unit London; and other international events and venues. His work has also figured in auctions by Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips.

Through the QQL project, Tyler Hobbs invites collectors to become co-creators of generative art NFTs in an innovative and collaborative process that harnesses the power of unpredictability and happenstance in web3. In September 2022, QQL launched a dedicated website, accessible at qql.art, that serves as a space for intuitive play where visitors can experiment with generating NFTs through Hobbs’ algorithm, using various bespoke tools that encourage interplay between elements of control and chance. Density, flow, and scale are among the mutable attributes that can be manipulated to explore a huge range of formal possibilities generated by the algorithm. Since it went live, the QQL website has seen 21.5 million QQL outputs from users around the world.

Tyler Hobbs’ exhibition with Pace in New York—coinciding with the 2023 edition of NFT.NYC—showcases 12 large-scale paintings that are physical representations of the artist’s own QQL outputs. Created using a combination of traditional painting techniques and robotic tools, including a plotter adapted with mechanical customizations by the artist himself, these works reflect enactments of both chaos and order, foregrounding the vast possibilities of systematic approaches to art making. As part of a process that unites programmed digital equipment with the human touch, Hobbs feeds code through the plotter to forge his compositions and then refines details by hand directly on the canvases. His resulting works feature a wide spectrum of visual effects, forms, and moods, from minimal to maximal and contemplative to exuberant.

While Tyler Hobbs’ paintings are derived from the QQL algorithm, they are also unique artworks in their own right, bearing aesthetic traces of both the machine and the artist’s paint strokes. Tyler Hobbs’ methodology for these works aligns with his deep interest in system-based artistic practices from the past century—in particular, the work of Sol LeWitt, Martin, John Cage, Richard Diebenkorn, and Bridget Riley.

QQL: Analogs is accompanied by an online exhibition—presented by Pace—that brings together QQLs minted by artists within and beyond the gallery’s program. 

Pace’s presentation of QQL: Analogs coincides with Tyler Hobbs’ debut UK exhibition, Mechanical Hand, on view at Unit London from March 7 to April 6 and featuring new and recent paintings on canvas and drawings on paper by the artist. Revealing an intimate, contemplative side to his varied practice, Tyler Hobbs’ Unit London show meditates on synergistic relationships between humans and machines, focusing on the imaginative possibilities of these exchanges.

The artist’s complementary exhibitions in London and New York sheds light on his distinctive approach to abstraction: while Unit London’s show offers a holistic view of the artist’s expansive formal experimentations in painting and drawing, Pace’s presentation spotlights a new, singular body of work derived from his innovative QQL algorithm. Together, the two shows mark an important moment in Tyler Hobbs’ career, showcasing the breadth of the artist’s practice as well as his deep and longstanding interest in system-based art making.

As the first major international art gallery to accept cryptocurrency for both digital and physical artworks, Pace made an early commitment to web3. With Pace Verso, the gallery builds on its 60-year history of innovation and ongoing support of artists who have cultivated advanced studio practices engaged with new technologies. Pace Verso has presented NFT projects by Jeff Koons, Tara Donovan, Loie Hollowell, John Gerrard, A.A. Murakami, Zhang Huan, Glenn Kaino, DRIFT, Lucas Samaras, and other artists in its first year, during which Pace Verso also launched a dedicated Discord server to directly engage web3 communities.

PACE GALLERY

508 West 25th Street, New York, NY

www.pacegallery.com

Erika Blumenfeld: Tracing Luminaries @ Inman Gallery, Houston

Erika Blumenfeld: Tracing Luminaries

Inman Gallery, Houston

March 9 – April 29, 2023

Erika Blumenfeld

Plate no. I6914 (Small Magellanic Cloud), 2022

From the portfolio Tracing Luminaries

A portfolio of six intaglio prints with cyanotype, chine collé, and

24k gold leaf on Hahnemuhle Copperplate

Portfolio size: 17 ¼ x 15 in

Erika Blumenfeld inspects one of the engraved acrylic plates

Photograph by Jake Eshelman

Inman Gallery presenst Erika Blumenfeld: Tracing Luminaries, a solo presentation of her Tracing Luminaries potrfolio of six cyanotypes, accompanied by a singe print from a stand-alone edition. 

Tracing Luminaries is a new print edition by Houston-based artist Erika Blumenfeld created in close collaboration with Island Press in St. Louis, MO. The project centers on the Women Computers who, beginning in the late 1800s, worked at the Harvard College Observatory with the institution's growing Astronomical Photographic Glass Plate Collection. These women brought their keen attention and passion for discovery to the task of examining and cataloguing hundreds of thousands of stars and deep space objects, revolutionizing astronomy and astrophysics in the process. In their careful examination of the glass plates, the women hand-inked their research directly onto the glassy surface of countless photographic plates, literally drawing connections across the night sky in lyrical gestures .

In an effort to digitize this collection of 500,000 glass plates to benefit time-duration astronomy research efforts, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics initiated what is known as the DASCH project, which, in the process of creating clean scans of the collection, permanently removed the women's marks from the plates. While a group of the Women Computer's marked plates were set aside for posterity, and those markings were documented photographically before being wiped off, the majority of the women's original marks no longer exist. Upon learning of this history, Blumenfeld was moved to artistically intervene. Combing photography, printmaking, and experimental conservation, Blumenfeld worked with Island Press to return the women's marks to the stars through the language of materials. Using theelement of pure gold-which is forged by the stars-and direct sun-exposed cyanotype "lightrecordings," the Tracing Luminaries prints reveal the women's drawn notations as a poetic starfieldamidst a deep blue expanse.

Erika Blumenfeld writes:

“The rich historic data of the stars captured on the photographic emulsion and the collection’s continued import in contemporary astronomical research are inseparable from the historical inked ephemera illustrating human exploration and knowledge seeking, our longing to learn the stars, and the people who carried that vision to us.”

She continues:

“The entanglement of these star-made materials alongside interwoven ideas of latency and presence, of human and cosmic timescales, and of elemental reciprocity has coalesced as a kind of alchemy throughout the making of this work. In this way, their marks—these interstellar drawings—once again become embodied fluid topographies, embedded by the gravity force of the press as it orbited the intaglio plate and paper, finally revealing the women’s marks as elevated. Then, the elemental form of pure gold coalesces with the embossed ink layer forming a material bond that renders the text as star matter—and raised, as it would be, above the print’s own horizon line; their marks become, once again, star-bound.”

ERIKA BLUMENFELD holds a BFA in Photography from Parsons School for Design and an MSc in Conservation Studies from University College London. Both a Guggenheim and Smithsonian Fellow, Blumenfeld’s studios include laboratories, observatories, and extreme environments, and she has collaborated with scientists and research institutions, including NASA, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, McDonald Observatory, and the South African National Antarctic Program. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Lannan Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts; The Polaroid Collection; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; University College London and the University of Texas. Her work has been featured in National Geographic, Art in America, Nature, ARTnews, New Scientist, and The New York Times, among others. In 2022, the artist was elected as Full Member of the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society for her artistic practice’s contributions to science.

INMAN GALLERY

3901 Main Street, Houston, TX 77002

www.inmangallery.com

Paul Anagnostopoulos, Jonni Cheatwood, Katie Hector, Justine Otto, Adrienne Elise Tarver @ Hollis Taggart, NYC - Reminisce

Reminisce

Paul Anagnostopoulos, Jonni Cheatwood, Katie Hector, Justine Otto,  Adrienne Elise Tarver 

Hollis Taggart Contemporary, New York 

March 23 - May 6, 2023 

Hollis Taggart Contemporary presents Reminisce, a group show featuring new and recent work by Paul Anagnostopoulos, Jonni Cheatwood, Katie Hector, Justine Otto, and Adrienne Elise Tarver. Exploring the depth and breadth of contemporary portraiture, the exhibition celebrates the myriad ways identity can be expressed and portrayed through both painting and sculpture. Reminisce is the first exhibition in Hollis Taggart’s recently expanded flagship at 521 West 26th Street curated by Paul Efstathiou, the gallery’s Director of Contemporary Art, since the gallery consolidated its main Chelsea and satellite Southport, CT, locations. 

While the artists included in Reminisce come from very different backgrounds, they are united by their shared desire to push the bounds of portraiture, one of the oldest and most common genres of art. Featuring both portraits of specific people as well as of anonymous individuals, the faces and figures in Reminisce at times pose and directly confront the viewer, and at others look away or are blurred, withholding direct eye contact. There are figures pictured in domestic spaces and in elaborate landscapes, as well as some who have become one with their surroundings. Taken together, Reminisce offers a view into the diversity of approaches to portraiture taken by young artists today. Details on each artist’s work follows below.

“The five artists in Reminisce represent the cutting edge of contemporary portraiture, and I am so excited to be returning to New York City with a show of their most recent work,” said Efstathiou. “Following more than two successful years in Southport, CT, I am looking forward to returning to Manhattan to curate Hollis Taggart’s contemporary division and to present it alongside the gallery’s stellar modern and more historic programming. Looking back at one of the oldest artistic genres through a contemporary lens, Reminisce is the perfect show to celebrate the consolidation of the gallery’s divisions into one flagship space.”

Working in acrylic and oil painting, the Greek-American artist Paul Anagnostopoulos (b. 1991 in Merrick, NY; based in New York, NY) reexamines and reclaims Greco-Roman imagery to celebrate queer intimacy and storytelling in the contemporary moment. His paintings combine figures from ancient art, queer erotica, and life drawing in fantastical landscapes that transcend time. Reminisce will feature new and recent paintings by Anagnostopoulos as well as new terra cotta vases by the artist, in which he updates the traditional form with vibrant scenes of gay romance and melancholy.

Jonni Cheatwood (b. 1986 in Thousand Oaks, CA; based in Los Angeles, CA) is a self-taught painter who mixes oil, oil sticks, acrylics, and textiles to create characters that are at once unrecognizable and universally relatable. Cheatwood’s painted scenes incorporate found textiles, resulting in unexpected textures and shapes that reference both interior and exterior spaces. Reminisce will feature Cheatwood’s most recent works, including Mama T’s Wall O’Crosses (2023), a painting reflecting the complex web of relationships between people and nature that encourages viewers to contemplate their own place within this interconnected system.

The works of Katie Hector (b. 1992 Lawrenceville, NJ; based in Los Angeles, CA) are composite portraits in which she layers bleach and dye, building up and erasing her materials to create blurred figures that have a glowing and almost ghostlike effect. Referring to her portraits as “allegories for longing, intimacy, and grief in response to isolation and dissociation,” the three works in Reminisce were all made this year, and reflect upon contemporary feelings of isolation and dissociation within our collective image-dominant culture.

The paintings of Justine Otto (b. 1974 in Zabrze, Poland; based in Hamburg, Germany) straddle abstraction and figuration, with hints of faces and figures emerging from abstract shapes and forms. Reminisce will feature both individual and group portraits by the artist, demonstrating her ability to apply her unique visual language to detailed studies of individuals as well as elaborate populated scenes. Reminisce will include new and recent paintings by the artist. Otto has been represented by the gallery since summer 2022.

Returning to Hollis Taggart for the first time following the successful two-person exhibition History Reclaimed in early 2020, Adrienne Elise Tarver (b. 1985 in NJ; based in Brooklyn, NY) will present recent works in which she continues to engage with the invisibility and complexity of Black female identity. Reminisce includes two large-scale collage works in which the artist uses water and the tropics as a starting point to reflect on the mythology of origin stories and histories of displacement of the Black diaspora.

HOLLIS TAGGART CONTEMPORARY

521 West 26th Street, New York, NY

www.hollistaggart.com

___________

Byron Kim Exhibition @ Kukje Gallery Busan - Marine Layer

Byron Kim: Marine Layer

Kukje Gallery Busan

March 17 -  April 23, 2023

Swimming in the open ocean gave me a new relationship to my body. Normally, I privilege imagination and mind space over the body, which corresponds with my tendency toward abstraction. Depending on my body as a vehicle brought me away from abstraction—in a strange way, it was grounding, and brought me towards representation.

– Byron Kim

Byron Kim (b. 1961)

B.Q.O. 31 (Canyonview, UCSD), 2022

Acrylic on canvas

208 x 152 cm

Courtesy of the artist and Kukje Gallery

Photo: Chunho An

Image provided by Kukje Gallery

Byron Kim (b. 1961)

B.Q.O. 27, 2022

Acrylic on canvas

182.9 x 121.9 cm

Courtesy of the artist and Kukje Gallery

Photo: Chunho An

Image provided by Kukje Gallery

Kukje Gallery presents Marine Layer, a solo exhibition of new works by Byron Kim. Five years since his first presentation, Sky, in the gallery’s Seoul space, this also marks the artist’s first exhibition in Busan.

Byron Kim's painting practice adeptly balances formal ingenuity with conceptual sophistication. Through keen observation of the prosaic yet profound details in everyday life, Kim explores the relationship of parts to a whole, teasing insightful meaning from otherwise ordinary elements. Often worked out through open-ended series, the artist uses seriality and intimate focus to capture layered phenomenological studies of identity and place.

His breakthrough work Synecdoche (1991-ongoing), first shown at the 1993 Whitney Biennial, epitomizes this approach. Composed of nearly five hundred uniformly sized panels, each monochrome canvas faithfully reproduces the unique skin tone of a single subject. In its minimal expression, the fragmented bodies depicted in these works enclose the sensuous history of portraiture, as well as issues of representation and identity. In a similar vein, Sunday Paintings is a series that Kim has worked on every week since 2001. Painted from observation, each canvas renders the sky accompanied by a few lines of diaristic entries, his works serving both as a personal testament and a meditation on how the experience of the sky might connect those separated by vast distances. While his imagery is often reduced to an abstract vocabulary, Kim’s works remain figurative, functioning as pictorial devices that embody the tension between conceptualism and observation, and between abstraction and that which is rooted in the body.

The new series of works presented in Marine Layer shares this combination of site and physical presence. Named B.Q.O., the title is an abbreviation for Berton, Queequeg, and Odysseus, three literary characters from famous oceanic narratives: Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and Homer’s Odyssey, respectively. These heroic figures, who struggle with the oceans in each story, sparked Kim’s imagination as the artist re-read these texts during his stay on Captiva Island at the Rauschenberg Residency in January 2020. Kim lived on this small island off the coast of Florida for an entire month, spending time in and on the water kayaking, swimming, and paddleboarding. For Kim, immersed in this environment, the three characters symbolized the way the sea is a metaphor for human struggle and perseverance.

In each of the B.Q.O. paintings, three panels are stacked vertically: the upper panel encapsulates the sky seen from the water; the middle panel shows the water’s surface and its reflections; and the bottom panel reveals a view from underwater. The subtle changes of hues and delicate brushstrokes evoke both abstraction and the material specificity and atmosphere of water, symbolizing the medium of painting itself and how it occupies a unique threshold that slips in and out of legibility.

If former B.Q.O. works captured the mythic fantasy of battling the oceans, Kim's newest works in the gallery’s Busan space present a more direct study of water—based on the simple and concrete activity of swimming that the artist embraced during the lockdown. For a year, Kim and his family settled in San Diego—where the artist was introduced to the ocean as a child and where his elderly parents still reside. Tentatively, yet gradually, Kim found solace in proximity to water as he engaged in regular open-water immersions with his wife, Lisa. Henceforth, Kim found himself gravitating towards various bodies of water—from La Jolla Shores Beach along the Pacific Coast, Tobey Pond in northwest Connecticut, to indoor swimming pools in New York and San Diego—engaging the balance of immersion, observing the water’s surface, and pondering his affinity with water. In this way, Kim came to synthesize his new passion with his longstanding interest in perception by drawing upon the natural world and the body as primary subjects.

Responding to the power of water in these tripartite compositions, Kim provides viewers with an immersive and visceral experience of being submerged. Installed as a group, these works impart a powerful experience of being in and in-between the elemental forces of nature. As in his earlier canvases in Synecdoche and those in Sunday Paintings, Kim’s works from the B.Q.O. series become part of a larger ongoing whole. Of this recurring framework, Kim has said, “My work has mostly been concerned with the relationship of a part to the whole. How am I connected to the others in the world, and how are we all connected to the greater whole?” Oscillating between his innermost experience and the expansive connection between human and nature—as the title and the literary references suggest—these paintings offer a space for meditation while simultaneously raising many questions regarding our relationship with nature through the overpowering, yet silent presence of the painting.

BYRON KIM - Short Biography

Byron Kim (b. 1961) was born in La Jolla, California, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Kim received his BA in English Literature from Yale University in 1983 and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 1986. He is currently a Senior Critic at Yale University School of Art.

Byron Kim has held solo exhibitions at numerous institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2019), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2015), Columbus College of Art & Design (2012), Berkeley Art Museum (2006), Rodin Gallery, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2005), and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1999). He has participated in group exhibitions at institutions around the world including the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago (2022), Brooklyn Museum, New York (2021), Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (CHAT), Hong Kong (2020), Anyang Public Art Project 5 (2016), Sharjah Biennial 12 (2015), New Museum, New York (2013), Tate Liverpool (2009), and Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008).

Among Kim’s numerous awards are the Skowhegan Medal for Painting (2022), Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize (2019), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Fine Arts (2017), Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (1997), and National Endowment for the Arts Award (1995). Kim’s works are in numerous public and private collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Berkeley Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

KUKJE GALLERY BUSAN

F1963, 20 Gurak-ro, 123Beon-gil, Suyeong-gu, Busan, South Korea

www.kukjegallery.com