Artist Christian Fogarolli @ Galerie Mazzoli, Berlin - "Breakdown" Exhibition

Christian Fogarolli: Breakdown 

Galerie Mazzoli, Berlin

June 4 - July 27, 2024

Breakdown is Christian Fogarolli's second solo exhibition at Galerie Mazzoli's Berlin venue.

In Christian Fogarolli's artistic practice, past and present intertwine in works that hybridize different expressive methods: photography, installation, sculpture, and painting; traces and fragments of an indefinite time bind themselves to vitreous, mirroring, metallic, organic and technological materials.

The exhibition offers the public the opportunity to interact with a body of new installation works in which the separation of body and mind, normality and deviance are questioned, with the intention of stimulating a reflection on the normative attributions of illness, marginalization and categorization in our society.

Breakdown presents a path involving the destruction of images, whether real or false; figures and features are subjected to physical strain through tools, utensils or actions that invade their surface, extracting a living matter from them.

In the large installation entitled Le Pendu, for example, photographic images from old asylums’ archives are manipulated into abstract shapes and subsequently hooked to metal chains and hung from the walls like bodies or shreds of flesh in a butcher’s wearhouse. Le Pendu literally embodies the marginalization of the sick. It epitomizes the annihilation of humanness, transforming a portrait into a severe sculpture, a seemingly organic element that emanates the reminiscence of a useless existence. Similarly, in the works Cut memories and Crush test, metal sheets imprinted with pigments are compressed, cut, and crushed by a dough cutting machine and a bench vise respectively. Such brutal manipulations function as actions of memory destruction as well as metaphors for the constant psychological pressures present in contemporary society.

The technological installation Eternal Return, on the other hand, reflects on the concepts of repetition and individuality. This piece portrays a clock mechanism juxtaposed to a green-colored glass fragment that reproduces itself endlessly through an optical effect. Due to the reflective nature of the work’s surface, the viewer’s own image is reverberating within it. In this case, Fogarolli challenges the representation of the viewer him/herself, whose face is again dehumanized to become part of a living mechanism, a technological contraption reminding us that we exist not only as singularities, but as context-dependent, replaceable and duplicable cogs in clock wheels driven by forces, starting with time, beyond our control.

The above described works exemplify the peculiar traits of the exhibition, and more in general of Christian Fogarolli’s production as a whole, which consistently expounds a form of psychological conceptualism that is polymorphic in nature as much as it is thematically coherent. The title of the exhibition, Breakdown, in its multiple meanings of collapse and classification, perfectly summarizes such traits. In Breakdown the combination of sculpture, painting, print, and found objects allows Christian Fogarolli to reaffirm his fascination with archival practices and human psychology, and to create a set of artworks whose originality is evident as much as is his desire to drive the public to self introspection and criticism.

CHRISTIAN FOGAROLLI - BIOGRAPHY

Born in Trento in 1983, Christian Fogarolli obtained a degree in archeology in 2007 to then pursuing his historical-artistic studies with a master’s degree in 2011 at the University of Trento, alongside a master’s degree in diagnostics and restoration of works of art at the University of Verona. Since 2011, he has been dedicated to studies and research of artistic, philosophical, and historical practices.

The results of his research have been displayed in events such as dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012); MART, Museum of Modern and Contemporary art of Rovereto (2013); The Maison Rouge in Paris (2014); Museum of the Foundation Miniscalchi-Erizzo in Verona (2015); de Appel arts centre of Amsterdam (2015); 5th Moscow International Biennale in Moscow (2016); the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow (2017); Gaîté Lyrique of Paris (2017); Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2017); Les Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles (2018); MAXXI, the National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, Rome (2018); Fortuny Palace Museum, Venice (2018); Musée de Grenoble (2019); Musée d’histoire de la Médecine in Paris (2020); MARe Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucarest (2020); STATE Experience Science in Berlin (2020); Löwenbräukunst Art Center e schwarzescafé Luma Westbau in Zurich (2020); Fondation Gschwandner Reaktor in Wien (2020); GAM Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Turin (2020); MAMM Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow (2020); Benetton Foundation in Treviso (2021); MAMbo, Museo d’Arte Moderna in Bologna (2022); CCCB Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (2022); MART, Galleria Civica, Trento (2014-18-23); Fundación Telefónica in Madrid (2023).

He received research and residency awards at the College of Physicians and Mütter Museum, Philadelphia (2018); Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague (2018); Italian Council Prize granted by the Italian Ministry of the Culture, Rome (2019); A Collection Prize, Vicenza; Boghossian Foundation - Villa Empain, Bruxelles (2024).

GALERIE MAZZOLI

Eberswalder Strasse 30, 10437 Berlin

www.galeriemazzoli.com

Michel McGregor Exhibition @ Hashimoto Contemporary, New York - Voyage, Voyage

Michel McGregor 

Voyage, Voyage 

Hashimoto Contemporary, New York

1 - 22 June 2024

Hashimoto Contemporary presents Voyage Voyage, a solo exhibition by LA-based artist Michel McGregor that explores the aesthetics of travel. Expanding on themes of leisure, luxury, and memory from his monograph ROOM SERVICE (Paragon Books), this exhibition of vibrant oil paintings and “point and shoot” drawings on hotel stationery invites viewers into a world that embraces fact, fiction, and fantasy, threading a needle between irony and sincerity, art and artifice. 

Employing brazen gestures and a vivid palette, Michel McGregor cross-references civilian, cinematic and commercial representations of travel in a series of new paintings and works on paper that confuse reality, fantasy, and desire. Building an atmosphere and color palette from sources like Henry Miller’s 1941 travelog Colossus of Maroussi, Federico Fellini’s film Amarcord, and the creamy hue of Venetian architecture, Michel McGregor recontextualizes that which is ubiquitous and familiar, making the unremarkable glow anew in a foreign light. In homage and with great reverence for the Impressionist and Fauvist painters who developed the genre for the modern age, the painter applies paint directly from the tube, reveals the underpaintings on raw canvas, and captures scenes “en plein air.” In subject matter and technique, Michel McGregor links himself to the history of portraying the world with reverence, optimism, and subtle critique.

The drawings immediately and intimately capture the fleeting moments of travel, while his paintings offer more clarified representations of places and moments, retaining the familiarity of a scene while shifting its essence into something novel, something distinctly different. Having spent the last year oscillating between Corfu, Hydra, Athens, Paris, the South of France, and Sicily, Michel McGregor’s flâneur observations playfully toy with European still life tradition, elevating food, toiletries, travel magazines, and other scenes of life from commonplace to romantic. 

HASHIMOTO CONTEMPORARY NYC

54 Ludlow Street, New York, NY 10002 

www.hashimotocontemporary.com

Artist Riiko Sakkinen @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - "Turborealist Color Theory" Exhibition

Riiko Sakkinen 

Turborealist Color Theory 

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki 

June 7 – August 18, 2024

A turborealist riot of color unfolds in Forsblom's corner gallery, courtesy of Riiko Sakkinen. Sakkinen, an outspoken political artist, is particularly interested in the symbolic meanings behind colors. He has been systematically studying colors and their connotations for over a decade, but this marks his first Finnish exhibition themed entirely around the subject of color.

Riiko Sakkinen is intrigued by the many ways colors are perceived, interpreted, and connected with language. His interest lies not in traditional color theory but in the cultural, political, and economic implications of colors. His exhibition features eleven paintings, each presenting a hue recognized as its own distinct color in most European languages. The spectrum includes all the primary and secondary colors, as well as black, gray, white, brown, and pink. Pink has its own word in many languages, and it is a color that conveys complex symbolism, representing everything from homosexuality to the British Empire and the social democrat movement.

Riiko Sakkinen challenges Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915), which its creator described as an empty space devoid of meaning. Far from representing ground zero, Riiko Sakkinen’s allusions to black invoke various phenomena from jihadism and fascism to Black Friday campaigns. A color is never a complete void. Each color is packed with meaning, symbolism and connotations that vary subtly with the context. The artist states that a color says more than a thousand pictures.

Riiko Sakkinen (b.1976) has been based in Spain since graduating from Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts in 2002. He has exhibited widely both in Finland and abroad. His work is represented in many notable art collections, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, HAM Helsinki Art Museum, and the Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation. His solo exhibition Los moimoi de Fuengirola opens at the Serlachius Museums this June.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

Artist Peter Burns @ Simchowitz Gallery, Pasadena, CA - "Forests of the Night" Exhibition

Peter Burns: Forests of the Night 

Simchowitz Gallery, Pasadena 

June 1 – July 6, 2024

Peter Burns

Wave, 2022

Oil on canvas

16.14h x 16.14w in / 41h x 41w x 2d cm

© Peter Burns, courtesy Simchowitz Gallery

Simchowitz Gallery presents “Forests of the Night”, a debut solo show by artist Peter Burns. The exhibition is on view at the gallery’s newest location - Hill House, Pasadena.

Hailing from the picturesque landscapes of Ireland, Peter Burns’ oil paintings contain elements of sculpture and collage that emanate mythic tales. With this body of work Burns deftly navigates the interplay of light and dark, while seamlessly exploring the complexities of scale and perspective. Evoking the enchantment of fairy tales, Burns successfully transports viewers to fantastical realms.

Spellbinding and occasionally unsettling, ‘Forests of the Night’ captures the imagination by weaving together the familiar and the unfamiliar. In the painting Wave, 2022, a minuscule rowboat battles against the fierce embrace of an enormous wave, whose foamy tendrils extend like arms and eerie eyes seem to observe. Despite the tumultuous sea, the golden hue of the sky imbues the scene with an unexpected sense of safety.

Peter Burns intertwines religion, classical and science fiction through a dislocation of scale and the creation of exotic landscapes. In Abraham and Isaac, 2022, two diminutive figures mounted on animals ride alongside an ominous canyon, flanked by a disproportionately massive mountain scape painted in a mesmerizing array of pink, green, and yellow hues, under a sky aglow with cosmic illumination. The tactile quality of the art, along with its almost three-dimensional layers of paint, draws you in, inviting closer inspection. Peter Burns has an MFA in painting and a BA in sculpture from the National College of Art & Design, Dublin. He has exhibited in solo shows and group shows internationally and is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner grant. 

SIMCHOWITZ HILL HOUSE, PASADENA

Pasadena, CA 91107

www.simchowitz.com

Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration @ Jewish Museum, New York - Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Sasha Gordon, Sara Issakharian, Chella Man, Ilana Savdie, Austin Martin White, Rosha Yaghmai

Overflow, AfterGlow 

New Work in Chromatic Figuration 

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Sasha Gordon, Sara Issakharian, Chella Man, Ilana Savdie, Austin Martin White, Rosha Yaghmai 

Jewish Museum, New York 

May 24 – September 15, 2024 

Ilana Savdie 

Cow, 2023

Oil, acrylic, and beeswax on canvas stretched on panel. 

65 1/8 × 80 1/8 in. (165.4 × 203.5 cm). 

Credit: The Jewish Museum, New York. 

Purchase: Romie and Blanche Shapiro Estates, 

Arts Acquisition Committee Fund, Roberta Pfeufer Kahn Trust, 

and Helfman Contemporary Art Acquisition Fund, 2023-115. 

Photo by Lance Brewer.

The Jewish Museum presents Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration. New works in painting, sculpture, and installation by Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Sasha Gordon, Sara Issakharian, Chella Man, Ilana Savdie, Austin Martin White, and Rosha Yaghmai explore how supernatural color and uncanny luminescence challenge the boundaries of traditional figuration. The exhibition highlights the figure’s malleability and continual metamorphosis, expressing the lived experiences of a multiethnic, multiracial, and otherwise multifaceted group of makers.

Overflow, Afterglow brings together seven young artists who use color to distort the figure and expand cultural norms—whether nodding to pop culture and digital immersion, the vibrancies of their heritages, or spaces of youthful and queer liberation. Responding to the social and political turmoil of the past decade and absorbing input from different backgrounds and histories, these artists articulate new visual vocabularies. The exhibition also builds upon the Jewish Museum’s ongoing practice of exploring contemporary art in real time, providing a platform for each new generation of artists.

The exhibition design for Overflow, Afterglow offers a non-hierarchical experience of the works on view. Each artist presents new and recent work within their own installation space, providing a portal into their individual but connected worlds. About half of the works on view has been newly created for this exhibition.

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman

Born in 1993, New York City; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Bermúdez-Silverman infuses her sculptures with shape-shifting luminosity that radiates beyond their outermost edges. She arrives at her sculptures through rigorous research, exploring postcolonial legacies and tracing the ways they continue to mold contemporary realities. Bermúdez-Silverman starts with an intense interest in the cultural narratives of materials. She often chooses commodities such as sugar and minerals that have a deep relationship to the history of European colonialism. The complex matrix of materials and embodied histories held together in her work juxtaposes elements that are both familiar and eerie, producing a jarring effect.

In Repository I: Mother (2021), a ghostly translucent house molded from the artist’s childhood dollhouse is cast from colored sugar. Its glowing pink surface illuminates the sinister ways that gender silently operates in domestic environments and our everyday lives. Recent explorations include the appropriation of Chinese decorative forms in European Chinoiserie furniture (Heliades, 2024) and the eerie fluorescence of uranium glass, which contains materials that are commonly mined from indigenous lands (Leetso I, 2023).

Sasha Gordon

Born in 1998, Somers, NY; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Sasha Gordon’s surreal dreamscapes are bold representations of the artist’s multifaceted self, populated with her doppelgängers. Their skin tones are often imbued with color to emphasize intense emotional states through electric palettes. Gordon’s compositions visualize an inner monologue expressing her fraught experience growing up in a predominantly white suburb as a queer Korean Jewish American. In recent works, Gordon expresses her defiant strength and transfixing power as an artist through the off-center gaze of her confident figures. In these lush, prismatic, and world-building compositions, they unabashedly take up space and seek out pleasure, making magic out of the mundane.

Her new self-portrait, Head Count (2024), refracts in a dynamic composition that is rendered in intricate detail via two perspectives. The artist’s body is further entangled with that of her partner’s in an intimate and meticulously choreographed love scene. Palette is key to the allure of Gordon’s everyday yet extraordinary scenes; in this case the pink and crimson flesh seem to radiate heat.

Sara Issakharian

Born in 1983, Tehran, Iran; lives and works in Los Angeles, Berlin, and Tehran

In Sara Issakharian’s paintings, violence and mysticism go hand in hand. She depicts atrocious events of our time allegorically, casting anthropomorphic figures in epic scenes of mythological struggle. Among her themes are state-sanctioned violence and the oppression of women in her native Iran, the enduring trauma of war, and the push and pull of emigration. Issakharian works through these painful subjects with a language of forms and figures rendered in both delicate, gentle strokes and bold, propulsive marks of charcoal and pastel. In her monumentally scaled works, clandestine activity, disruption, and apprehensive tranquility all coexist in a dynamic interplay.

Issakharian’s practice is an intensely personal engagement with her own cultural heritage as an immigrant of Iranian Jewish origin. The work And every moment a whole summer (2024) is awash in chromatic and compositional chaos: the figures, drawn from eclectic cultural references, are massed together and detached from their original contexts. She scrambles together characters from Disney films and ancient origin myths, figurines related to classical sculpture, and forest animals drawn from Persian miniatures. In the resulting nebulous pastel cloud, there is a sense of placelessness, unease, and uncertainty, as the figures appear to flee an invisible, timeless force.

Chella Man

Born in 1998, Hershey, PA; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

The notion of identity existing on continuums that cut through the confines of binaries is central to Chella Man’s practice. Myriad and fluid conceptions of the self inform their painting, sculpture, writing, performance, film, and advocacy work, all of which draw from Man’s own lived experience as Deaf, transmasculine, genderqueer, Chinese, and Jewish. Man’s practice is a reclamation and celebration of these inherent multiplicities.

Their most ambitious performance and installation to date, Autonomy, provides an intimate encounter with a clone of their nude body bathed in warm golden-hour light. In a performance co-presented by the Jewish Museum and Performance Space on May 2, 2024, Chella Man painstakingly and lovingly recreated the scars and tattoos that grace their body on the silicone clone, memorializing their long journey of gender transition and exercising autonomy over their own body. The result of this performance is presented in installation form in Overflow, Afterglow. Autonomy does not center trauma, struggle, discrimination, or exclusion (though not for lack of such experiences), and instead foregrounds resilience, remembrance, curiosity, and care—for the self, for others, for family, and chosen families. Man emphasizes joy and rest as defenses against the unsettling backdrop of gender politics in the U.S. and beyond, presenting their body cradled by the afterglow of transformation.

Ilana Savdie

Born in 1986, Miami, FL; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Through chromatic saturation and density of imagery, Ilana Savdie embraces abundance as a strategy to subvert figuration. Her signature palette combines luminous fluorescent colors with the shocking contrast of deep, rich hues. Although Ilana Savdie’s works center on the body, and her canvases contend with figures, they put forth only phantom fragments of realism. Glimpses of torsos and limbs are drenched in sweeping flows of leaky paint, broad-brushed gleaming color, and dimpled, skin-like textures created with wax. Inherited familial legacies of the Jewish diaspora are also at play in her work, guiding her exploration of placelessness; Ilana Savdie’s family came from Egypt, Lebanon, Romania, Poland, and Venezuela, arriving in Colombia as the result of numerous conflicts and expulsions. Drawing on such upheaval and cultural fluidity, she is able to balance multiple contexts and traditions. Ilana Savdie leverages an enveloping scale and dynamic, gestural forms, inviting the viewer to examine intricate details from a state of near disorientation.

A particular interest in Ilana Savdie’s new body of work are the dynamics between predator and prey, autonomy and forced dependence—emblems not only of hierarchical power structures but also interconnected relationships. The painting A carrot laced with cyanide (2024) broaches the perverse human desire to tame the animal world, despite its sublime grandeur. The work departs from an image of a circus ringmaster forcing an elephant to bow at the close of a performance. The stacked forms indicate the power of a larger body, which is subjected to the trauma of being controlled and sensationalized, exposing the sinister underbelly of spectacle. Ilana Savdie’s painting Cow (2023), in the Jewish Museum collection, is also a part of the installation.

Austin Martin White

Born 1984, Detroit, MI; lives and works in Philadelphia, PA

In Austin Martin White’s work, paint oozes out from the surface of the picture plane, escaping its limits. Layers of dense and vibrant color push through and spill over the contours of the figures. The artist draws from a range of colonial-era art historical and ethnographic sources to probe the way their power dynamics are perpetuated in the contemporary moment. He first alters his reference images via hand drawing and digital tools before rendering fragments of them using a repurposed vinyl-cutting machine to generate negative images, similar to printmaking techniques. White then pushes his signature mixture of liquid rubber and pigment through the back of his substrate, a process of manual extrusion which creates a vibrant relief. The resulting compositions are textured and topographical, matte and glossy, brightly colored and darkly shadowed, and at points, glowing. Their seepages of color and light emphasize amorphous shapes over any crisp lines to create figures. White’s process renders his source materials nearly unrecognizable, effectively removing any fixed idea or definition that the original images conveyed. 

The painting runawaydaddy (2024) incorporates elements of figures from the influential mid-20th century painter Bob Thompson’s work as well as ethnographic imagery. Like Thompson, Austin Martin White refutes realist representation in favor of planes of vibrant color that only loosely nod to figuration. He draws focus to the way the picture plane is made through his excessive use of paint, imbuing the surface with texture. Pigment seems to crawl out of his figures, exposing the materiality of his artwork. This work reminds the viewer that artistic forms are always a construction of human hands and imagination, and a product of its maker’s political interests.

Rosha Yaghmai

Born in 1978, Santa Monica, CA; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Rosha Yaghmai’s Afterimage series pushes figuration to its most far-flung possibilities, harnessing layers of pure color to evoke the aura of figures she intentionally removes from her compositions. These works address notions of inheritance and collective memory that are absorbed through the body but become abstracted through generations and over great geographical distances. The blurred swaths of color connect to images that emerge when we stare directly into a bright light and overstimulate our retinas. An inverted, residual copy imprints on our field of vision, unmoored from the physical world. Such afterimages are the direct apparition of what is happening inside the body.

To create her Afterimage series, Yaghmai airbrushes blurry contours and pockets of color onto single layers of fabric. The compositions loosely interpret residual images that have stuck in her mind from past-life visualizations; they are also related to reproductions of historical Persian miniature paintings, from which she digitally removes the figures. These traditional works decorated her childhood home in California in homage to Iran, her father’s homeland, where the artist was conceived but has never visited. The artist arranges layers of painted, translucent fabric, one on top of the other, creating shimmering new compositions that bear only traces of their source material.

Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration is organized by Liz Munsell, Barnett & Annalee Newman Curator of Contemporary Art, The Jewish Museum, and Kristina Parsons, Leon Levy Assistant Curator, The Jewish Museum. The exhibition was designed by Chelsea Garunay.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, designed by Common Name, includes an essay by Liz Munsell, texts on each artist by Kristina Parsons, interviews with the artists, and photography by Mary Kang and Abby Ross. Co-published by the Jewish Museum and Yale University Press, the book will be available worldwide and from the Jewish Museum Shop for $35. Available in August 2024.

JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK

1109 5th Avenue at 92nd Street, New York, NY 10128

thejewishmuseum.org

Artist Leslie Wayne @ Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC - "This Land" Exhibition

Leslie Wayne: This Land

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

June 4 – August 2, 2024

LESLIE WAYNE 

This Land is Your Land, 

from the Rockies to the Cascades, July 6, 2021, 1:39 PM, 2022

© Leslie Wayne, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery

Jack Shainman Gallery presents This Land, an exhibition of two kindred bodies of work by Leslie Wayne that express the nature of the American West through perception and memory. In each piece, Leslie Wayne considers different ways in which we interpret and imagine geological space, exploring landscape both as a vertical, abstracted force and a horizontal, figurative expanse. Named in homage to Woody Guthrie’s heartland ballad “This Land is Your Land,” Leslie Wayne offers a contemporary vision of Manifest Destiny—imbuing her symbolic, and experienced, westward voyages with topographies that are sensorial, memorial, and tectonic. 

In a series of dimensional abstract paintings on large, metronome-like planks, Leslie Wayne uses a dramatic and vibrant palette to mold paint so that it cascades down the wood panel in a multitude of ways. Applying the paint in heavy layers, she encourages the influence of gravity and refines her materials to their most basic form, color, and behavior. Adopting, rather than controlling the rhythm of nature, these compositions are fluid to the viewer's myriad associations with this image of momentum—be it reminiscent of the rush of an avalanche, the swell of hot lava, or the pileup of driftwood on a seashore. 

In her series entitled This Land is Your Land, she creates compact, observational paintings based on snapshots she took from her seat as she flew west over the Rocky Mountains all the way to the Cascade Range in Washington State in 2021. Creating a precise mise-en-scène by placing each painting in a frame that resembles the Boeing 737 window she peered out from, Leslie Wayne transports her viewers into a precise sensation: beholding our nation as the land settles into one continuous, harmonious expanse—stripped down to simple shapes and shades. Her portholes offer a view into a terrain of awe, reminiscence, and omniscience, a collective vision of a region fraught with, and fractured by, territories and borders. 

Extending beyond the format of the airplane-window frame, Leslie Wayne has also created two unique works inspired by the same journey. The first is a twenty-two-foot-long painted scroll entitled From the Rockies to the Cascades, in addition to High Dive, a large-format painting in which she stretches her canvas onto a frame of coiled springs—materials that simulate a bird’s-eye view of the landscape as if seen by a skydiver descending towards a trampoline. The paintings from this series are accompanied by a vitrine displaying Wayne’s special limited edition This Land, a handmade accordion book that illustrates the aerial photographs from her voyage, alongside Taylor Brorby’s poem “The Ages Have Been at Work” and the lyrics to Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”

In German, heimat is a term used to describe not only the characteristics of a place, but the complex and interdependent physical, social, and mental associations with a homeland. For Wayne, this sentiment stretches, folds, and bends from the west coast, her childhood home, to the east coast, where she has resided since 1982. Treading across this land, psychic routes unfold, and Wayne savors “That path [which] is never straight and always various, each time opening new ways of seeing and thinking about the world we occupy, the ways we inhabit nature, and the legacies we leave behind.”        

LESLIE WAYNE (b. 1953 in Landstühl, Germany) is an artist who lives and works in New York, NY. In her practice, she explores the many ways a painting can imply all the functions, desires and associations we have for the world around us by transporting you through its artifice. She uses both trompe l’oeil and verisimilitude to explore the range of possibilities for the representation of an illusion in a multitude of ways, while still remaining undeniably within the confines of a traditional painting. Wayne grew up in Southern California and studied visual arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She took a year off to live and work in Paris, and five years to live in Israel before moving to New York where she earned her BFA with honors in Sculpture at Parsons School of Design. She was an early member of 55 Mercer, one of New York’s first artist-run cooperatives in SoHo, and following her second solo show there, joined Jack Shainman Gallery.

Leslie Wayne has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad and her work is in numerous public collections, including the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; la ColeccionJumex, Mexico City, Mexico; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris, France; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC; the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum Smithsonian Library, New York, NY; The Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR; the Davis Museum of Art, Wellesley, MA; the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; and the Parrish Art Museum, Watermill, NY, among others. 

Throughout her career she has received awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2017), Joan Mitchell Foundation (2012), New York Foundation for the Arts (2018, 2006), Buhl Foundation for abstract photography (2004), New York State Council on the Arts Projects Residency (1993), Yaddo Artists Residency (1992), the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (1994) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1985). In 2017 she was awarded a commission from the New York City MTA Arts and Design program to create windows for the Bay Parkway Station subway platform on the Culver (F) line in Brooklyn, NY. Besides being a visual artist, Leslie Wayne is also an occasional curator and writer and her reviews and interviews with artists have been published in BOMB, artcritical, and Two Coats of Paint.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

513 W 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

jackshainman.com

Artist Ana Karkar @ Almine Rech London - "Whole Cookie" Exhibition

Ana Karkar: Whole Cookie

Almine Rech London

May 30 — July 27, 2024

Almine Rech London presents Ana Karkar's second solo exhibition with the gallery, Whole Cookie.

The exhibition unveils a new series of figurative paintings by the French-American artist, in addition to an installation piece comprised of video, sculpture and literature. Composed as a temple to eroticism, it explores and universalises the many complex paradoxes of Ishtar, the ancient Mesopotamian goddess of both love and war, as well as fertility and sensuality. As the goddess of paradox, Ishtar is the model of unity in multiplicity.

Each of us reflects some of her discordance in ourselves, and this exhibition, Whole Cookie, explores how we strive to gather these conflicting parts into a semblance of order. Ishtar’s polarities and contradictions feed the creative spirit, but they also provoke insecurity and disruption. She represents chaos, going against order and principle, however this also opens up to possibility and potential. The destructive and harsh in balance with the empowering and transformative; society coexisting side by side with the cosmic.

Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are faced with the painted image of a sphinx, the guardian of the temple – and its riddle:

MINA (reads): ‘Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permissions of another’?

SPHINX: It’s a Madonna quote. From ‘Justify My Love’… Can we call room service?

MINA: Gosh, yes, I remember the video. Rather a Helmut Newton pornographic soiree situation.

SPHINX: So sick, yeah. I think I was conceived to that, maybe? (Laughs) In the desert.

MINA: Your father was a lion and your mother was an eagle owl— correct?

[Excerpt from an accompanying text written by Charlie Fox]

In Ana Karkar’s method of seeing others in the show exploring the interaction between humans and hybrid figures. Her gestural work is imbued with colour relationships, as expressed by a vibrant palette in which her bodies are twisted and blended in a dance macabre that evoke the work of Egon Schiele.

Ana Karkar’s work is influenced by cinematography and images in the collective unconscious, especially horror and erotic movies. Filmic elements are often noted in her paintings, however for this show, for the first time Karkar is exhibiting film work, in the video piece Queen of the Night in relation to her painting. This then takes its title from a particular terracotta relief from the Old Babylonian period, from Mesopotamia (now at the British Museum). Pervaded by ancient symbolism alongside post-Punk elements and underground culture references, the film tells the story of the divinely complex marriage of Ishtar and Dumuzi and is set to the soundtrack of Berlin-based band Noj remixed to the Witch house genre.

Like an altar, the film is presented as the backdrop to Karkar’s own sculpture of a goddess, subversively titled Queen of the Nightlife, under whose feet is positioned a text written by Karim Massoteau, MY ANGER, A HARROW WITH GREAT TEETH, HAS TORN THE MOUNTAIN APART, folded and marked ‘REUNIFICATION IN PROCESS’. Visitors can take a copy of this text with them as they leave the altar.

“Now clad in terror, opening her chest, she demands the destruction of the mountain but is met only with resounding silence.

Whiffs of Cypress and Cedar are smelled.

Fist clenched, she then summons all life in her body and weaves a storm, fury assembles in her heart, her folds, her veins, her very blood, and lava dribbling from her lips, unleashes the shockwaves of her orgasm all around.

She blows one blast of pitiless, pulsing, stroboscopic, energy.”

[An excerpt from Karim Massoteau's text]

Ana Karkar, via Ishtar, is insisting we face our shadowy contradictions. That we acknowledge who we are, in all our painful and wonderful complexity. At the same time, she steps forward to do the same.

ALMINE RECH LONDON

Grosvenor Hill, Broadbent House, W1K 3JH London 

www.alminerech.com

Artist Jacob Hashimoto @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - "Dreams No Dreams" Exhibition

Jacob Hashimoto: Dreams No Dreams 

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki 

June 7 – August 18, 2024

Jacob Hashimoto's latest works are a unique blend of seemingly endless streams of images woven together in infinite tangles. His art is a rich tapestry of visual references, ranging from East Asian crafts to Atari circuit boards and from the complex shapes of leaves to the architecture of churches and mosques from the plague era. This profusion of visual references raises intriguing questions: how can a limitless stream of images shape our identity? How does one create a sense of selfhood amidst the visual cacophony of the digital age? These are the themes that Jacob Hashimoto, a Japanese-American artist, explores in his work as he grapples with his fractured cultural heritage.

Jacob Hashimoto's art is a unique blend of sculpture and painting, combining the compositional principles of painting with traditional Japanese bamboo and rice paper handicrafts. His sculptures, made up of countless small paper kites, are not static objects but dynamic entities that subtly move and respond to the space and light around them. This interactive element, along with the myriad abstract patterns and carefully designed graphic details, creates a captivating visual experience within his organic, multi-layered spatial tapestries.

Jacob Hashimoto's exhibition presents a selection of his smaller works alongside a vast installation. Filling up the entire gallery space, the installation forces the viewer to adapt to its imposing presence, requiring us to dodge and watch our step. Thus, movement is brought into the space in a physical dance of give and take.

Jacob Hashimoto (b. 1973) has held numerous exhibitions worldwide at venues including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Governors Island in New York, Turku's Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, and the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea in Rome. Hashimoto's work is found in prestigious collections such as the LACMA Tacoma Art Museum, the Saastamoinen Foundation, and the Schaufler Foundation. The artist is based in New York.

GALERIE FORSBLOM 

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

Thomas Chapman, Alejandro Garmendia, Louis Jacquot, Lucy Mullican, Milko Pavlovelana @ Pace Gallery, Seoul - "Illusive Places" Exhibition Curated by Cy Schnabel

Illusive Places 

Thomas Chapman, Alejandro Garmendia, Louis Jacquot, Lucy Mullican, Milko Pavlovelana 

Curated by Cy Schnabel

Pace Gallery, Seoul

May 11 - June 15,  2024

Alejandro Garmendia 

Jessica Descending & Ascending in the North Sea, 2007 

© Alejandro Garmendia 

Pace presents Illusive Places: Thomas Chapman, Alejandro Garmendia, Louis Jacquot, Lucy Mullican, Milko Pavlov, a group show curated by Cy Schnabel, at its gallery in Seoul. This exhibition brings together works by artists who, in one way or another, share an interest in reinventing landscape painting. These five artists—Thomas Chapman, Alejandro Garmendia, Louis Jacquot, Lucy Mullican, and Milko Pavlov—use landscape as a point of departure to create nuanced approaches to subject matter, form, and content. 

Throughout this exhibition, natural settings turn into imaginary realms that suggest new perspectives of the physical world and life in general. An abstracted sense of space in the pictures on view gives way to unstable compositions that are charged with desire, fantasy, and sometimes loneliness. A range of psychological views carry their own resonances and connect through each artist’s interest in presenting a distinct irreality in their work. Utopias, nightmares, hallucinations, and fragmented memories all materialize in these illusive places.

Cy Schnabel

Cy Schnabel (b. New York, 1993) is an independent curator and the founder and director of Villa Magdalena, a gallery based in San Sebastian, Spain since 2020. The gallery focuses on contemporary Spanish painting and works with international mid-career and emerging artists. In 2017, Schnabel worked as an assistant curator at the Centro Cultural de España en México (CCEMX) in Mexico City, making his curatorial debut with the group show Horizontes Imaginarios. In 2018, Schnabel co-curated the posthumous retrospective Alejandro Garmendia: Paisajes, enigma, y melancolía at the Sala Kubo Kutxa in San Sebastian. Schnabel has presented two exhibitions at Galería Mascota in Mexico City—Mie Yim: New Works on Paper (2022) and Lucy Mullican: Veils (2023)—which marked each artist’s first solo exhibition in Mexico. In collaboration with Spazio Amanita, Schnabel curated Felicidad Moreno: Form and Formlessness (Miami, 2022) and Cristina Lama: Música para un murciélago (New York, 2023), both artists’ first solo presentations in the United States. He was also the author and co-curator of Schnabel and Spain: Anything Can Be a Model for a Painting at the CAC Málaga, a 2022 survey of 23 paintings made by his father between 1997 and the present, showing the artist's works in the context of Spanish painting and the evolution of his practice during this period.

Cy Schnabel’s curatorial writings on the five artists in the show follow below.

Thomas Chapman

After experimenting with shaped canvases for more than 20 years, Thomas Chapman (b. 1975, San Diego, California) has returned to figurative painting, developing a style that is heavily influenced by his drawings of everyday life. Like his Lake Paintings, the works on view in Illusive Places are voyeuristic studies of leisurely moments. Layered imagery resulting in a dense atmospheric haze makes the figures who populate these invented scenes barely perceptible. Throughout his oeuvre, found fabrics, collage, stolen typographies, markers, paint, pencil markings, glue, and many other elements comprise the surfaces of his paintings. The unorthodox shapes of some of Chapman’s early canvases are inspired by a variety of subjects: astronomy, mythology, and ancient history. Taking an unconventional approach to painting, Chapman makes use of supports and many layers of sometimes conflicting visual information as common features in his diverse practice.

Alejandro Garmendia

The two works on view by Alejandro Garmendia (b. 1959, d. 2017, San Sebastian, Spain) are from his Pinturas Sucias (Dirty Paintings) series. But why dirty? Surely it has to do with the murky appearance of these paintings. Their messy execution with a muddy color palette, which reflects the artist’s embrace of accidents and imperfections as part of his practice, confirm that his process for these works is consistent with their conceptual underpinnings. The very idea of a landscape as “dirty” suggests that Garmendia was questioning the legitimacy of the act of painting itself, and, more specifically, the impulse to make something even remotely pastoral in contemporary times. This was yet another ironic and subversive gesture, illustrating an awareness of the risk involved in his chosen subject, given that the pictures seem so opposed to avant-garde tendencies and the general trajectory of contemporary art. In any case, these works serve as pretexts to his experimentations with the surrealist lineage he so admired, along with other art historical references. Garmendia documented the nonexistent, created physically impossible compositions, and ultimately presented a distanced metaphysical vision of the world that evokes estrangement and disorientation.

Louis Jacquot

Louis Jacquot’s (b. 1994, Paris, France) practice hinges on relationships between objects and pictures. The artist’s sculptural paintings combine minimalist gestures with iconographic elements. Blinky (2022) and Imi (2022), the two works present in this exhibition, turn intimate spaces and domestic objects on their sides to create illusive perspectives. In Jacquot’s hands, the intimate subject transcends the image to encompass the entire painting. Both the material— bedding—and the shape of the canvases—like that of a pocket notebook—speak to direct contact with the body. In the past, during his BFA at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the artist maintained a workspace more akin to a woodworker’s shop than a painter’s studio. He avoided his “own” mark-making in favor of objects that were practically devoid of any graphic elements. In the few cases where pigments are applied, Jacquot chooses images that could belong to anyone. His previous works show an impersonal vocabulary of generic found symbols appropriated from the street—any universal emblems became subjects of interest for him.

Lucy Mullican

Lucy Mullican’s (b. 1994, New York) paintings use the horizon line as a compositional device to create a tension between gravity and the human spirit, which, in contrast to the former, is always in a state of ascension. We can trace maps of ethereal worlds in her works, which are ultimately self-portraits. The artist has experienced a spiritual transformation that is evident in her departure from painting waterfalls, islands, and rivers in favor of a more contemplative, inward consideration of the mind and the organs. Exterior environments blend with bodily forms, creating anthropomorphic landscapes. Her delicate paintings on wood consist of many layers of mineral pigments and pulsating lines, which create translucent surfaces. What the artist refers to as “pockets” or “holes” within her compositions function like portals, allowing the viewer to travel back and forth between pictures. The natural pigments of the watercolor and the wood receivers become one, reflecting the artist’s innate ability to understand her medium and employ technical fluidity. Mullican’s penetrating vision goes beyond the surface to reveal what we cannot see and bring us closer to what we feel. Transient moments flooded with light embody the artist’s representation of spirit.

Milko Pavlov

Milko Pavlov’s (b. 1956, Aytos, Bulgaria) paintings depict an imaginary natural world where rock formations, trees, water, and other organic matter have been rendered unrecognizable. The artist’s pictorial blend of naturalistic representation and abstraction creates a vast scale within the picture plane that is an everchanging way of seeing. In Pavlov’s oeuvre, form, surface, and composition develop in response to paint itself as a subject. His black and white frottage works—a technique he now applies to canvas—are continuations of the graphic work he was making in Bulgaria in the early 1990s. The artist’s colorful palette derives from his early exposure to 18th and 19th century Bulgarian Icon painters, which shifted his attention towards religious works of art instead of assimilating formal ideas related to the socialist realist aesthetic dominant in the country in the 1970s. With his titles, Pavlov is interested in a conceptual dimension that reflects an intersection of different moments in time. In many cases, his artwork titles can contain multiple dates yet to come, as with 2133-2 МРП 2042 (2024) and B.V 2099 МРП 2065 (2022), both of which are included in the exhibition at Pace in Seoul. Through these references to futuristic times, Pavlov is challenging the life expectancy of everything: himself, the viewer, the painting itself. The way the artist organizes space in his paintings—in other words, the composition—loosely resembles mountains or landscapes, a subconscious gesture which perhaps illustrates the mountainous nature of his native country.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 

www.pacegallery.com

Best of German & Pop Art Auction @ Ketterer Kunst, Munich - 70th Anniversary Auction

Best of German & Pop Art 

Ketterer Kunst, Munich 

Anniversary Auction June 7/8, 2024 

The seventieth anniversary of KETTERER KUNST is celebrated with a sensational array of works. The highest estimate price tag in the house’s history has been put on Alexej Jawlensky’s marvelously elegiac "Spanische Tänzerin" in a blazing red dress, called up in the Evening Sale on June 7. Made in 1909, the pivotal work from the formative years of German Expressionism, in private hands for over ninety years, had only been known from a black-and-white photograph. Estimated at 7 to 10 million euros, it is particularly convincing for the fact that it is new to the market, as well as for the highly stylized Murnau landscape study it boasts on its reverse. A second market sensation is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's "Tanz im Varieté" from 1911, a time when the artist group "Brücke" set out to revolutionize the art world from its new base in Berlin. With unknown whereabouts for a long time, its existence was only documented by a black-and-white photo. Family-owned for eighty years, it is now up for sale at an estimate of 2 to 3 million euros.

Traditionally, German Expressionism is among Ketterer Kunst's core fields of expertise. Accordingly, the strong range of works in both our Evening Sale and Day Sale (June 8) featuring key works of Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Pechstein, Heinrich Campendonk and Gabriele Münter, most of which are priced in five- to six-figure realms. In addition, the auction also includes works on paper from the legendary Hermann Gerlinger Collection, which Ketterer Kunst has sold over the past three years.

Savvy collectors and informed investors alike will find plenty of reasons to make a purchase in this anniversary auction, reflecting on the singularity of an artwork even in challenging times and duly assessing its quality, provenance and novelty on the market. And eventually seize the opportunity. Needless to say this is also true for works of post-war and contemporary art, works like those of Ernst Wilhelm Nay from the 1960s as well as Konrad Klapheck's machine paintings (an artist for whom Ketterer Kunst set a new price record in the last auction). There is still more, for example, a large-scale "Finger Painting" by Georg Baselitz from 1972 and a portrait that Gerhard Richter made of his artist friend Günter Uecker in a grayish sfumato in 1964.

In addition to a number of Kirchner objects, a remarkable private collection compiled with intellectual focus and curiosity, includes a series of Henry Moore sculptures. In the course of a lengthy relationship with the artist, Dr. Theo Maier-Mohr has acquired 'Sheep Pieces' that include maquettes and large outdoor sculptures, as well as prime pieces of Moore's 'Family Groups', hence covering and honoring the central themes that drove the great sculptor.

This time around, we also put a strong focus on American Pop Art, however, rather in terms of quality than quantity. The key piece in this array is a monumental, ironically provocative motif by James Rosenquist ("Playmate", 1966), while Andy Warhol's complete series of ten color silkscreens "Flowers" from 1970 and an impressive wall sculpture by the late Pop veteran Frank Stella follow suit. Robert Rauschenberg, a decidedly flexible maverick among the pop art rebels, quickly found his own path. The evidence we provide in our auction is the bicycle ("Bicycloid VII", 1992) with colored neon tubes, which is now doing its rounds in an auction for the very first time. 

Highlights Contemporary Art

James Rosenquist 

Playmate, 1966 

Oil on canvas in four parts, wood, metal wire 

Estimate price: € 1,000,000 - 1,500,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Rare on the auction market: Striking eroticism in an over-sized format from the heyday of American Pop Art. The work "Playmate" (1966) by James Rosenquist - the protagonist of American Pop Art with a great sense of humor – was part of the legendary "Playboy" magazine campaign "Playmate as Fine Art" in 1967. Other contributing artist were, among others, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and George Segal.

Andy Warhol 

Flowers (10 sheets), 1970 

10 color silkscreens 

Estimate price: € 800,000 - 1,200,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Andy Warhol's ten-part series "Flowers" is another icon of American Pop Art and rarely comes to the market as matching set. 

Georg Baselitz  

Finger Painting - Birch, 1972 

Oil on canvas.

Estimate price: € 800,000 - 1,200,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Georg Baselitz's "Finger Painting - Birch" from 1972 is one of his early works with the characteristic "upside down" motif. Works from this pioneering creative phase are extremely rare.

Henry Moore 

Working Model for Sheep Piece, 1971 

Bronze with green-brown patina.

Estimate price: € 600,000 – 800,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

One of Henry Moore's rare large-scale outdoor sculptures on the auction market. Further casts of our work can be found in museum collections in California, Michigan and Japan. Part of the same German private collection since its creation. Further works from the Dr. Maier-Mohr Collection are offered in the Evening Sale and the Contemporary Art Day Sale on Friday, June 7, 2024, as well as in our Modern Art Day Sale on Saturday, June 8, 2024 (see extra catalog "A Private Collection - Dr. Theo Maier-Mohr"). 

Gerhard Richter 

Herr Uecker, 1964 

Oil on canvas.

Estimate price: € 450,000 – 650,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Gerhard Richter's sought-after early black-and-white paintings from the 1960s are based on photographs. Richter subsequently "inpainted" his motifs in the moist paint enlarged to the dimensions of the canvas, dissolving the contours into soft blackand-white modulations. The famous painterly blur that would become his artistic trademark, first appeared in Richter's paintings of the early 1960s. Gerhard Richter's portrait of his fellow artist and friend Günther Uecker, the important "ZERO" protagonist, was created in the context of a small series of portraits that Richter created on the initiative of the legendary Düsseldorf gallery owner Alfred Schmela for his first solo exhibition in September 1964. "Herr Uecker" is one of the last early Richter portraits still in German private ownership.

Ernst Wilhelm Nay 

Ene mene ming mang. 1955 

Oil on canvas 

Estimate price: € 400,000 – 600,000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Ernst Wilhelm Nay's painting "Ene mene ming mang" is of museum quality, showing a particularly harmonious color scheme in a large format from the group of the famous "Scheibenbilder" (Disk Paintings). As early as in 1957, Nay showed two works from this series in the exhibition "German Art of the Twentieth Century" at the Museum of Modern Art. Comparable works can be found in, among others, the Museum Folkwang, Essen, the Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 

Frank Stella 

The Pequod Meets the Rosebud (D-19, 1X), 1991 

Mixed media on aluminum 

Estimate price: € 200,000 – 300,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

As an important representative of Minimal Art and Abstract Expressionism, Frank Stella's work "The Pequod Meets the Rosebud (D-19, 1X)" from the important Moby Dick series unfolds an overwhelming expansive monumentality with an explosion of form and color.

Robert Rauschenberg 

Posse Stir (Galvanic Suite), 1989 

Mixed media. Acrylic and lacquer on galvanized steel 

123,5 x 306 cm, incl. the original frame.

Estimate price: € 200,000 – 300,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Robert Rauschenberg 

Bicycloid VII, 1992 

Bicycle, with colored neon tubes on aluminum base. 151 x 190 x 56 cm.

Unique piece from a series of 7 bicycle sculptures.

Estimate price: € 100,000 – 200,000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

Robert Rauschenberg's collaged compositions realized in silkscreen were groundbreaking for Pop Art. Our Evening Sale includes both a large-format radiant work from Rauschenberg's important "Galvanic Suite" (1988-1991) as well as the bicycle sculpture "Bicycloid VII", a futuristic hybrid between ready-made and neon sculpture. Both works were acquired directly from the artist through the Swiss gallery Jamileh Weber and have been part of an important southern German private collection since.

Konrad Klapheck 

Die Technik der Eroberung, 1965 

Oil on canvas 

Estimate price: € 180.000 – 240.000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

'Die Technik der Eroberung' is a masterful presentation of a surreal puzzlement as a symbol of a sensual-erotic quest. Konrad Klapheck tells a story of seduction in subtle colors with surprising accents in green and red. The work has featured in several important Klapheck exhibitions since 1966 

Highlights Modern Art

Alexej von Jawlensky 

Spanische Tänzerin, 1909 

Oil on cardboard

Estimate price: € 7,000,000 – 10,000,000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

"Spanische Tänzerin” (Spanish Dancer) - An ecstatic and exuberant expressionist masterpiece by Alexej von Jawlensky. In 1909, he was at the absolute peak of his creativity. Paintings from this short and colorful creative phase are almost exclusively owned by international museums today. A powerful avant-garde double strike: the radiant, highly stylized oil study on the reverse is reminiscent of the painting "Murnauer Landschaft" from 1909, created in a smaller format the same year, it is part of the collection of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich today. Shortly after it was made, the painting found a home in the renowned modern art collection of Josef Gottschalk in Düsseldorf, and remained in the family for over nine decades. 

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 

Tanz im Varieté, 1911 

Oil on canvas

Estimate price: € 2,000,000 – 3,000,000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Spectacular rediscovery: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's "Tanz im Varieté" has been hidden in a German private collection for 80 years. Until now, the work was only known from a black-and-white photograph. The grand painting from the best "Brücke" period was part of the seminal "Brücke" exhibition at the Fritz Gurlitt Art Salon in Berlin (1912) shortly after it was created.

Heinrich Campendonk 

Landschaft mit Tieren, around 1913 

Oil on cardboard, laid on fiberboard and mounted on the stretcher

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

Heinrich Campendonk's "Landschaft mit Tieren" (Landscape with Animals), around 1913, dates from the artist's most innovative creative period: he showcased his talent in exhibitions of the "Blue Rider" and the Rhenish Expressionist in 1911 and 1913. In dialog with Franz Marc, he developed his distinctive pictorial language. This largeformat work was presented in major exhibitions at the leading galleries of the time (Walden and Flechtheim) and is now offered with an estimate price of € 600,000 - 800,000.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 

Im Wald, 1910 

Oil on canvas

Estimate price: € 400,000 – 600,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

Erich Heckel 

Zwei Menschen im Freien, 1909/10 

Oil on canvas

Estimate price: € 400,000 – 600,000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

A rare opportunity! Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein spent the summer of 1910 at the Moritzburg Ponds with a number of friends and models, painting in the woods and by the ponds. In the forests and lakes around Moritzburg, the artists occasionally set up their easels in a row to capture one and the same scene, which explains why the naked couple in Kirchner's painting "Im Wald" is also depicted in Heckel's "Zwei Menschen im Freien".

Hermann Stenner 

Kaffeegarten am Ammersee, 1911 

Oil on canvas

Estimate price: € 90,000 – 120,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

From the Hermann-Josef Bunte Collection: This auction puts Stenner in the foreground with 14 important works from a total of 27 lots from the Bunte Collection. In addition, works by other artists from the Hölzel circle are also on offer. Ackermann, Kinzinger, Graf, Eberhard, as well as works by Sagewka and Böckstiegel again.

In "Kaffeegarten am Ammersee", Stenner boldly combined impressionist lightness and bright colors with highly concentrated surfaces. This works should become one of his most accomplished paintings from the summer sojourn in Dießen on Lake Ammer.

Highlights 19th Century Art

Max Liebermann 

Die Colomierstraße in Wannsee, 1917 

Oil on canvas

Estimate price: € 200.000 - 300.000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the house on Wannsee, hidden in the picture on the right, became Max Liebermann's artistic retreat. This was where he created his most sought-after works. Our painting also boasts an important provenance: it was part of the estate of Albert Janus, important collector and patron of the Folkwang Museum. In 2010, it was exhibited on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Liebermann Villa on Wannsee.

Max Liebermann 

Wannseegarten - Haus mit roten Stauden, 1926 

Oil on canvas

Estimate price: € 400,000 – 600,000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

In his celebrated paintings of the garden at his Wannsee villa, Max Liebermann liberated form and color in an unprecedented way. Wannsee paintings of this luminosity are extremely rare on the auction market.

Franz von Stuck 

Der Engel des Gerichts, around 1922 

Oil on panel

Estimate price: € 100,000 – 150,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

For over 20 years, Franz von Stuck's " Der Engel des Gerichts" (The Angel of Judgement) was on permanent loan at the Künstlerhaus am Lenbachplatz in Munich. A fascinating interpretation and daring modernization of the age-old motif in the rebellious zeitgeist prevailing at the turn of the century. The work has been privately owned since its creation and is now available on the auction market for the first time.

DATES

June 7, 2024 Contemporary Art Day Sale, Evening Sale in Munich

June 8, 2024 19th Century, Modern Art Day Sale in Munich

Until June 15, 2024 Online Sale - parallel to the saleroom auction

Preview Shows of the Top Lots in Munich

Ketterer Kunst, Joseph-Wild-Str. 18, 81829 Munich

June 1, 2024 12 - 6 p.m.

June 2, 2024 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.

June 3 - 4, 2024 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.

June 5, 2024 10 a.m. - 8 p.m.

June 6, 2024 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.

KETTERER KUNST

www.kettererkunst.com