Dominic Chambers @ Lehmann Maupin, London - "Meraki" Exhibition

Dominic Chambers: Meraki

Lehmann Maupin, London

October 8 – November 9, 2024

When the sprites of ideas enter the studio and marry themselves to resolve of the artist committed to fully realizing them, one enters the summoning world—a state of creative immersion, that inner greenfield home to those things that shimmer: ideas, memory, dreams, and bodies without form or language, and perhaps angels live there too.

—Dominic Chambers

Lehmann Maupin presents Meraki, an exhibition of new work by American artist Dominic Chambers, in the gallery’s permanent space at Cromwell Place in London’s South Kensington neighborhood. Marking the artist’s first solo presentation in the United Kingdom, Meraki spans two floors and includes expansive paintings, brightly colored studies, and several works on paper. Dominic Chambers, born in St. Louis, MO and currently based in New Haven, CT, is best known for his vivid, colorful paintings that frequently depict scenes of leisure and contemplation as a mode for exploring ideas of personal interiority. In this exhibition, the artist expands his lens to the realm of devotion, engaging themes of inspired connection to work, art, and the natural world.

In creating his latest body of work, Dominic Chambers took the idea of meraki, a Greek word meaning “to pour one's soul into one's work,” as an origin point. As the title of the exhibition, Dominic Chambers uses this concept as a frame of inquiry, contemplating what it might mean to pour oneself into a creative endeavor and how the concept of the soul, or one’s own interiority, can intersect with ideas of devotion. These themes are poetically illustrated in The Summoning World (Studio Angel) (2024), a large-scale painting that blends the artist’s studio with a serene landscape, populated by a single, reclining angel. Chambers identifies this angel as Gabriel, of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, referencing the long tradition of angels functioning as messengers. Often acting as divine intermediaries bearing important news or a spark of inspiration, the figure of the angel has appeared for centuries across religious texts, literature, and art history—from the work of Leonardo Da Vinci to that of Kerry James Marshall. While Dominic Chambers’ warm, yellow-orange tones in The Summoning World (Studio Angel) suggest the golden settings of Fra Angelico, the scene, which is hung with artworks in various states of completion, also recalls Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio (1911). Astute viewers note that some of the paintings depicted can be found hanging in the gallery exhibition. Here, Chambers places the painter in the role of the summoner, bringing images and objects into the material world from another realm. 

Dominic Chambers also looks to the natural world as a space of devotion and replenishment. In his new Thunderscape (2024) series, the artist depicts minute figures amidst landscapes of rolling hills and colossal trees, with each canvas drenched in rich, vibrant color. These works in particular reveal the influence of Magical Realism in Chambers’ practice—in naming the series, he envisioned a surreal vista, where the shadows from tree branches became lightning bolts. In this world, the electrified landscape comes alive with sound, creating the titular thunderscape. 

Dominic Chambers’ Thunderscapes also feature flying kites, some tethered, others autonomous, racing through the skies. These kites recall those in the paintings in his exhibition Leave Room for the Wind, which opened at Lehmann Maupin New York in early 2024. Their presence in the Thunderscapes series suggests they have escaped those picture planes to enter new canvases; they function as avatars, for either the artist or the creative spirit, time traveling across exhibitions and bodies of work. 

Throughout Meraki, Dominic Chambers expands his explorations of leisure and interiority begun in earlier exhibitions—from the mental and physical leisure seen in Soft Shadows (2022) to the kinetic leisure in Leave Room for the Wind. In Meraki, he finds a new site for the replenishment of personal interiority in devotion, considering the spiritual as well as the bodily and intellectual, painting beyond the figurative and capturing the psyche. 

LEHMANN MAUPIN LONDON

1 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, SW7 2JE London

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Robert Longo @ Pace and Ropac, London - "Seachers" Exhibition

Robert Longo: Searchers 

Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac, London 

October 9 – November 9, 2024 

ROBERT LONGO

Untitled (Hunter), 2024

© Robert Longo, courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

The idea of montage has always been in my vocabulary… When you put images next to each other, what happens? I’m not interested in pastiche or collage. I’m interested in collision. - Robert Longo, 2024

Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac present Searchers, a two-part exhibition of new work by Robert Longo, on view at both Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac’s London galleries. Each presentation includes a new Combine—monumental, five-panel multimedia wall works that return to the artist’s 1981-89 series of the same name—in addition to a large-scale charcoal drawing, a small graphite drawing, and a film. By rupturing and reassembling the symbols of a collective cultural mythology, these works advance Robert Longo’s long-standing investigation into the relationship between the individual to society.

Robert Longo is widely recognized for his ambitiously scaled, hyperrealistic charcoal drawings. These monochromatic works often depict images from art historical sources, as well as scenes of protest, civil unrest, violence, war, and other social and political events. A key figure in the Pictures Generation of the 1970s and 1980s, his critical relationship to the media culture of his formative years has only intensified amid ever-more sophisticated methods of image distribution and an increasingly tumultuous global climate. Sourcing from television, film, news photography, personal photographs, and the internet, Robert Longo carefully selects, alters, and enlarges these images, freezing their immediacy through the deliberate, time-intensive process of drawing. In doing so, he prompts viewers to reconsider their roles as consumers within today's image-saturated landscape. 

Informed by Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage and John Berger’s influential text Ways of Seeing (1972), Searchers grew out of Robert Longo’s desire for his charcoal drawings to be and do more. For the exhibitions at Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac, he has revisited his Combines, which he envisions as a tool in which to overcome the visual and conceptual limitations of two-dimensional images. Referring to Robert Rauschenberg’s earlier series of the same name, these large-scale, three-dimensional works bring together a range of materials (such as paint, stone, plaster, cast bronze, glass) and media (such as sculpture, drawing, film, photography) in a single work. The disparate parts are arranged in the way that Robert Longo believes we encounter the world: as a bombardment of images and information that pervade our environment and consciousness.

The five-panel work at Pace, Untitled (Hunter) (2024), is composed of the following, from left to right: a film still of Keanu Reeves from the movie John Wick, a hyper-violent film about vengeance; a cascading sculptural relief made up of dense vertical strips of black and red plexiglass with dangerous, irregular, and highly reflective edges; a painting using 3D printing of cut-and-pasted protest images; a video of a sparkling blue-black current installed behind a steel frame with seven horizontal openings receding in perspective; and a charcoal drawing based on a grainy telephoto image of refugees at the Belarus-Polish border, appearing like a ring from Dante's Inferno.

Internally, Robert Longo’s Combines resist simple resolution. Each constituent image of Untitled (Hunter) captures a moment of acute, visually violent motion. Their formal symbolism, suspended like a staccato edit in a film, undergoes a further stage of translation as they are entwined with their respective mediums. By applying scale and sequential structure to these familiar yet incompatible images, Longo challenges the viewer to interpret the work and, by extension, the expansive array of images that surround us. In this endeavor, Robert Longo echoes Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s theory that ‘the medium is the message,’ highlighting how these images are mediated shapes our understanding and response to them.

Accompanying the Combine at Pace is Untitled (Black Peony) (2024), a large-scale charcoal drawing. Robert Longo describes flowers as “at once feminine yet masculine; sweet yet venomous; explosive yet temporal events.” Another drawing, Untitled (After Navalny) (2024), based on a photograph of a protest following the unlawful imprisonment and subsequent death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, is also included in the exhibition. Measuring 6 x 8 1/8 inches (15.2 x 20.6 cm), this work once again transforms scale to challenge the viewer’s process of meaning-making. The final element of the exhibition is a black-and-white, ultra-fast-paced, looped film presenting the onslaught of the image storm from one day of international news: July 4, 2024. The rapid flood of images is interrupted randomly by computer-generated stops, creating an experience with no beginning and no end, only different ways of looking and seeing.

Concurrent with his exhibitions in London, Robert Longo is the subject of a major retrospective at the ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna, on view through January 26, 2025. At the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, the artist is presenting work from the last ten years within the broader scope of his career and in comparison to other art historical genres such as history painting. This exhibition, titled The Acceleration of History, is on view from October 25, 2024, through February 23, 2025.

ROBERT LONGO - BIOGRAPHY

Robert Longo (b. 1953, Brooklyn, New York) grew up in Long Island, New York. ln 1973, Robert Longo enrolled at Buffalo State College, where he worked for artists Paul Sharits and Hollis Frampton, who introduced him to structuralist filmmaking. Along with Charles Clough, Longo also co-founded Hallwalls (1974-ongoing), an alternative non-profit art exhibition space where he organized shows and talks with artists such as John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Robert Irwin, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Serra. 

Robert Longo has had one-persan exhibitions at the Musée d'art moderne et d'art contemporain, Nice; Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany; Albertina, Vienna; Isetan Museum of Art, Tokyo; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Menil Collection, Houston. He has been included in Documenta 7 and 8, the 1983 and 2004 Whitney Biennials, and the 47th Venice Biennale. 

Continuing to work with characteristic scale, precision, and perceptiveness, Robert Longo achieves visually striking images of people, places, events, and animais. He slows his images dawn through the venerable medium of charcoal, often capturing images that would not otherwise be possible ta see with the hu man eye. Through his large-scale hyperrealistic charcoal drawings, Longo has cemented himself as a preeminent artist of his generation. His work is held in multiple collections worldwide including, The Albertina Museum, Vienna; The Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Modern; London, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 

PACE GALLERY LONDON

5 Hanover Square, London W1S 1HQ 

www.pacegallery.com

Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film @ LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Digital Witness  

Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film

LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

November 24, 2024 - July 13, 2025

Melanie Willhide 

With the Exception of Blue, 2013, 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 

purchased with funds provided by LENS: Photography Council 

© Melanie Willhide, digital image courtesy of the artist 

and Von Lintel Gallery, Los Angeles 

April Greiman 

Pacific Wave, 1987 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 

Decorative Arts and Design Council Acquisition Fund 

and Ralph M. Parsons Fund 

© April Greiman, digital image © Museum Associates/LACMA 

Steven Spielberg (director), 

Dennis Muren (visual effects superviser), 

Industrial Light & Magic (production studio), 

Universal Pictures (studio), 

Still from Jurassic Park, 1993 

© 1993 Universal City Studios, Inc. 

and Amblin Entertainment, Inc., 

courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film, which examines the impact of digital image manipulation tools from the 1980s to the present through the works of nearly 200 artists, designers, and makers. Assessing, for the first time, simultaneous developments and debates in the fields of photography, graphic design, and visual effects, the exhibition illuminates today's visual culture where digital editing tools are more accessible than ever before.

Over the last four decades, image-editing software has radically transformed our visual world. This relatively compressed period has taken us from the rise of early paint programs, to the development of both commercially packaged softwares and open-source alternatives, and now the ascension of Al image generators. The increasing ease with which images and text can be digitally generated and altered has enabled new forms of creative experimentation, while also introducing aesthetic and ethical issues across mass media, politics, and advertising. Digital Witness traces these developments with more than 150 photographs, posters, publications, videos, moving image files, film clips, and interactive software experiences. The exhibition charts the emergence of distinctive digital aesthetic strategies, examining how they have altered the patterns, flow, and stakes of visual communication.

Digital Witness: Exhibition Highlights

Organized in three thematic sections, Digital Witness raises questions such as: Where have artists advanced, exploited, or disrupted available means of digital creation and transmission? In what ways can software lead artists, and in what ways can artists shape software? As we are now several decades into the software revolution, can the historical context of "the digital" help us understand its future manifestations?

The exhibition's first section, Blur and Sharpen: Digital Realism, traces artists' efforts to emulate the three-dimensional world and hide evidence of digital interventions. Groundbreaking films from Jurassic Park (1993) to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) and beyond integrated computer graphics with live action and motion capture, embedding fantastical scenarios within otherwise familiar settings or building internally coherent worlds in 3D digital space. Meanwhile, amid initial resistance from traditional darkroom practitioners, photographers including Andreas Gursky and Loretta Lux explored the realm between fact and fiction, seamlessly refining or distorting reality in ways that tested viewers' perceptions and comfort.

Morph and Warp: Computer Aesthetics looks at creators who embraced the rough textures of technology, from April Greiman and John Maeda to Petra Cortwright and Todd Gray. Their work aestheticized glitches such as jagged edges and jerky movements, positing the digital world as its own entity rathert han an imitation of analog life. In some cases, this took a surrealistic form, with distorted shapes and colors that foregrounded technological possibilities and explored the extremes allowed by the new medium. In particular, motion graphics such as title sequences, kinetic typography, music videos, and advertisements were sites of experimentation.

The final section, Cut and Paste: Digital Collage, highlights artists like Keith Piper, Lucas Blalock, and Casey Kauffmann, who found creative potential in editing advances, taking analog art forms—collage in particular, with its potential for surreal juxtapositions—to digitally enabled extremes. In contrast, examples throughout the exhibition demonstrate how artists have resisted dominant commercial softwares, developing open-source alternatives such as Urs and Jürg Lehni's Scriptographer plug-in.

Publication: The exhibition is accompanied by a substantial, image-packed catalogue, co-published by LACMA and DelMonico Books/D.A.P., featuring Q&As with noted visual artists, filmmakers, and designers David Fincher, Copper Frances Giloth, April Greiman, MANUAL, LaJune McMillian, Rosa Menkman, Sert Monroy, Casey Reas, Thomas Ruff, Kyuha Shim, Raqi Syed, and Cesar Velazquez. The publication is edited with an introduction by Britt Salvesen and Staci Steinberger, and includes scholarly essays by Kim Beil, Hye Jean Chung, Carolyn L. Kane, Briar Levit, Staci Steinberger, and Anuradha Vikram. It was created as part of the PST ART: Art & Science Collide series.

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Digital Witness is presented as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, a landmark regional event exploring the intersections of art and science, both past and present. The exhibition is co-curated by Britt Salvesen, Department Head and Curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and Prints and Drawings, and Staci Steinberger, Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, at LACMA.

LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036

BCAM, Levels 1 & 2

lacma.org

ACK - Art Collaboration Kyoto 2024. Directed by Yamashita Yukako @ Kyoto International Conference Center

ACK - Art Collaboration Kyoto 2024 

Directed by Yamashita Yukako

Kyoto International Conference Center

November 1 - 3, 2024

ACK main venue, 2023 

Photo by Moriya Yuk

Art Collaboration Kyoto - ACK - is an art fair held in Kyoto with collaboration at its core. One of the leading art fairs in Japan specializing in contemporary art, Art Collaboration Kyoto presents unique collaborations forged between Japanese and international galleries; government and private sectors; and fine arts and other cultural spheres in Kyoto. Hosted in the Kyoto International Conference Center, the fair consists of two sections: “Gallery Collaborations”, which pairs a local Japanese gallery with its international peer in a shared booth; and “Kyoto Meetings”, which features artists with distinct connections to Kyoto. Beyond the fair, special exhibitions and public programs are held in Kyoto City.

Art Collaboration Kyoto is organized by the ACK Executive Committee, which includes the Kyoto Prefecture; Association for the Promotion of Contemporary Art in Japan; Contemporary Art Dealers Association Nippon; Culture Vision Japan Foundation Inc.; Kyoto Chamber of Commerce and Industry; and the Kyoto Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Held annually since 2021, the fourth edition of Art Collaboration Kyoto (ACK) will continue with Yamashita Yukako as Program Director, and will be held in the Kyoto International Conference Center.

Yukako Yamashita 

ACK Program Director 

Photo by Yoshimi Ryo

Yamashita Yukako said: I am very pleased to be able to continue as ACK Program Director in 2024.

With the trust ACK has gained over the past three years, I will maintain ACK’s identity as an art fair focused on Kyoto and collaboration, while bringing something fresh and surprising to all.

ACK is committed to creating something that can only be experienced here in Kyoto in this era, together with the power of art and culture. By hosting an international art fair, we aim to raise awareness of Kyoto as an important city in the global art world, in addition to enriching the art ecosystem in Japan and beyond. While continuing to pursue these goals, we will continue to work with galleries, artists, visitors, and all of ACK's partners with the aim of further strengthening ACK’s mission.

Together with you, I hope ACK and its community here in Kyoto can make a positive impact on the international art world and society through art.

Yukako Yamashita

Photo Courtesy of ACK

About Yukako Yamashita

Born in 1988 in Tokyo to a family that runs a tea ceremony utensils business in Kyoto, Yukako Yamashita completed an MA in Art Business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London, then joining Sotheby’s Japan where she oversaw the sales of contemporary art. From 2017 to 2022, Yukako Yamashita was the managing director of THE CLUB, a contemporary art gallery in Tokyo, Japan. She has served as a visiting professor at Kyoto University of Arts since 2020 and was appointed Program Director of Art Collaboration Kyoto and Kyoto City Growth Strategy Promotion Advisor in 2022.

ART COLLABORATION KYOTO

a-c-k.jp

Kyoto International Conference Center

Takaragaike, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto City

Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now 

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

November 17, 2024 – February 17, 2025

FRED WILSON (American, born 1954) 

Grey Area (Brown Version), 1993 

Brooklyn Museum, 

Bequest of William K. Jacobs, Jr. and 

bequest of Richard J. Kempe, by exchange

The major exhibition Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now examines how Black artists and other cultural figures have engaged with ancient Egypt through visual, sculptural, literary, musical, scientific, scholarly, religious, political, and performative pursuits. The multisensory exploration of nearly 150 years of artistic and cultural production will feature nearly 200 works of art in a wide range of media from The Met collection and public and private collections, including critical international loans from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Europe. Thematic sections will trace how Black artists and other agents of culture have employed ancient Egyptian imagery to craft a unifying identity, the contributions of Black scholars to the study of ancient Egypt, and the engagement of modern and contemporary Egyptian artists with ancient Egypt. 

“Ancient Egypt is a symbolic source for people of the African diaspora that continues to inspire. This groundbreaking exhibition brings to light a modern history that has developed over nearly 150 years and is also an active creative tradition existing outside the walls of the Museum and in daily life,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Unprecedented in scope, the exhibition broadly lays out the many ways in which Black artists and cultural figures have engaged and continue to engage with ancient Egypt as a point of reference, inspiration, and connection. Our hope is that it furthers and deepens exploration of this topic.” 

“This is a modern history of how an ancient civilization became a wellspring of inspiration for Black creatives to craft a unifying identity after generations of it being underrepresented and undervalued,” said Ford Foundation President Darren Walker. “This is an exhibition that only The Met can do by pulling inspiration from its own collection stretching back 5,000 years and connecting it to today and our communities in New York City and beyond.”

“The exhibition takes its title from The Met’s painting Flight into Egypt (1923), an emblem of fugitivity and timeless creativity by the expatriate artist Henry Ossawa Tanner—the first internationally recognized African American painter—who traveled to Egypt in 1897, and includes works as recent as Madeline Hunt-Ehrlich’s film Cleopatra at the Mall (2024), which reflects on the rediscovery of Edmonia Lewis’s major sculpture The Death of Cleopatra (1876),” said Akili Tommasino, Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met and the curator of the exhibition. “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now challenges Eurocentric constructions of ancient Egypt, offering a more expansive history that celebrates the contributions of cultural figures of African descent.”

Beginning in the late 19th century, the era of emancipation, Black Americans started to look to ancient Egypt as evidence of an undeniably great ancient African culture to ennoble Black identities, having been systematically stripped of any knowledge of specific African heritage through the transatlantic slave trade, generational enslavement, and dehumanization in American civic life and society. This exhibition will illuminate how modern Black artists and cultural figures asserted affinity with ancient Egypt—in opposition to the prevailing definition of 19th-century Egyptology that distinguished ancient Egypt from “Black Africa” and instead characterized it as proto-European—from the late 19th century to the efflorescence of Afrocentric visual art during the Harlem Renaissance, to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and artistic tendencies of the ensuing decades, to the present day.

While most of the stories in Flight into Egypt are about individuals of African descent born and active in the United States, the work of artists of the Caribbean, Egypt, and other African-born artists active in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere indicate the worldwide resonance of ancient Egypt in the African diaspora—the global dispersion of people of African descent. The exhibition will present both well-known and emerging artists, new works and works new to The Met collection, while also reintroducing rarely displayed works of art and resurfacing obscure objects and documents. 

Artists whose work are on view include: Terry Adkins, Ghada Amer, Ayé Aton, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Thomas Biggers, Barbara Higgins Bond, LaKela Brown, Rashida Bumbray, René Burri, George Washington Carver, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Ed Clark, Irene Clark, Robert Colescott, Houston Conwill, Renee Cox, Shani Crowe, Jamal Cyrus, Damien Davis, Karon Davis, Noah Davis, Charles Clarence Dawson, C. Daniel Dawson, Jeff Donaldson, Aaron Douglas, Emory Douglas, Louis Draper, Dream The Combine (Jennifer Newsom Carruthers and Tom Carruthers), Oasa DuVerney, The Egyptian Lover, Tremaine Emory, Awol Erizku, Fred Eversley, Derek Fordjour, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Genevieve Gaignard, Ellen Gallagher, Sam Gilliam, Chet Gold, Lauren Halsey, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Chester Higgins, EJ Hill, Lonnie Holley, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Gregston Hurdle, Iman Issa, Steffani Jemison, Malvin Gray Johnson, Rashid Johnson, Loïs Mailou Jones, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Armia Malak Khalil, Jas Knight, Solange Knowles, Simone Leigh, Glenn Ligon, Maha Maamoun, Eric Mack, Julie Mehretu, Mahmoud Mokhtar, Ronald Moody, John W. Mosley, Lorraine O'Grady, Gordon Parks, Kamau Amu Patton, Robert Pruitt, Richard Pryor, Baaba Heru Ankh Ra Semahj Se Ptah, Sun Ra, Betye Saar, Mahmoud Saïd, Addison N. Scurlock, Lorna Simpson, Ming Smith, Tavares Strachan, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Henry Taylor, Mildred Thompson, Kara Walker, Laura Wheeler Waring, William T. Williams, and Fred Wilson.

In a first for The Met, performance will be an integral part of the exhibition in the form of a dedicated gallery. Organized in collaboration with MetLiveArts, the Performance Pyramid will both present a documentary history of Black performance art animated by ancient Egyptian themes and serve as the locus for live performances on select days throughout the run of the exhibition. The Performance Pyramid will be activated by Sidra Bell, Rashida Bumbray, Karon Davis, Kahil El'Zabar, Zekkereya El-magharbel, Steffani Jemison, Rashid Johnson, Clifford Owens, Kaneza Schaal, Luke Stewart, Kamau Amu Patton, and M. Lamar and The Living Earth Show, with others to be announced. 

The exhibition catalogue features scholarly essays by Akili Tommasino, Andrea Myers Achi, Makeda Djata Best, and Mia Matthias; artist biographies by Kai Mora; and contributions by artists and musicians: Erykah Badu, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Awol Erizku, Lauren Halsey, Iman Issa, Solange Knowles, Julie Mehretu, Jennifer Newsom, Matthew Shenoda, and Fred Wilson. The catalogue is published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and will be available at The Met Store. It will be distributed throughout the world by Yale University Press.

Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now is organized by Akili Tommasino, Curator, with McClain Groff, Research Associate, in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met.

The Met Fifth Avenue, New York 

The Tisch Galleries, Gallery 899 Floor 2

www.metmuseum.org

Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection @ Museum of the City of New York

Above Ground 

Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection

Museum of the City of New York 

November 22, 2024 – August 10, 2025

“There are people who see the graffiti experience as a vocation of adolescence, rites of passage without a sense of direction... But I saw it early on as a catalyst to develop as a painter and explore the other horizons outside of a 40-foot subway car.” – Lee Quiñones

The Museum of the City of New York presents Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection, an extraordinary exhibition tracing the evolution of graffiti art from its roots on the streets of New York City in the early 1970s to recognition and celebration in galleries and museums worldwide. 

Above Ground showcases work drawn from the Museum's substantial graffiti art collection, complemented by loans from private collections. It highlights the transition many graffiti artists made from tagging subway cars to creating paintings on canvas, marking a pivotal moment in the movement's evolution as it entered broader public awareness and significantly influenced global culture. 

The exhibition highlights many never seen donated 30 years ago by the visionary artist and collector Martin Wong – including works in aerosol, ink, and other mediums by key figures such as Keith Haring, Futura 2000, Fab 5 Freddy, Rammellzee, Lee Quiñones, Haze, Crash, Lady Pink, and Tracy 168.

“Above Ground celebrates the 30th anniversary of Martin Wong’s donation to the museum and the 10th anniversary of MCNY’s initial City as Canvas exhibition,” says Sean Corcoran, Senior Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York. “This show offers a renewed and expanded look at graffiti’s journey from NYC streets to the most prestigious galleries around the world.”

The exhibition is organized into several sections, highlighting the origins of graffiti and its broader cultural impact, particularly the Post-Graffiti movement. The exhibition touches on the East Village scene, and the impact of early indie galleries such as Fun Gallery, Fashion Moda, and others that showcased graffiti on canvas. It considers the art form’s initial international success and underscores the legacy of Martin Wong and his commitment to preserving the art form.

Select exhibition highlights include:

• Martha Cooper’s photographs of work by Keith Haring and more;

• Lee Quiñones’ monumental painting, A Life Takes a Life (1983);

• TRACY 168 from ESSY Studio sketch pad (1980);

• Rammellzee’s Atomic Note (1986) and Atomic Futurism (1987);

• A-One’s spray paint on canvas work, Beauty of a Beast (In Memory of Bear 167) (1987);

• Photographs from Henry Chalfant’s Subway Art series, including Skeme and Daze and Kel Crash;

• DAZE spray paint on canvas pieces, Phobia (1983) and French Dream. Life Below Aerosol (1984);

• Several pieces from KAWS’ collection, including DONDI’s Bishop of Battle (1985); and Martin Wong’s Sharp and Dottie (1984);

• A documentary by Charlie Ahearn on Martin Wong’s collection, offers a deeper understanding of the art and its historical context.

Stephanie Hill Wilchfort, Ronay Menschel Director and President of the Museum of the City of New York, adds, “Born in New York City, graffiti is now a global phenomenon This exhibition not only celebrates the artistic contributions of graffiti artists, reflects the dynamic and everevolving culture of our city, and explores how New York’s art and popular culture influences the world.”

MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK

www.mcny.org

Millet: Life on the Land @ National Gallery, London

Millet: Life on the Land

National Gallery, London

7 August – 19 October 2025

The first UK exhibition in nearly 50 years dedicated to Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) will open at the National Gallery in autumn 2025. 

The show will coincide with the 150th anniversary of Millet’s death – by which time his works were well known in the UK and beginning to be eagerly collected by an enthusiastic group of British collectors, resulting in a significant body of his work in UK public collections.

Millet: Life on the Land will present around 13 paintings and drawings from British public collections. It will include the National Gallery’s The Winnower (about 1847‒8), and the exceptional loan of 'L’Angelus' (1857‒9) from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The exhibition will range from Millet’s last years in Paris through to his images of workers on the land during the 1850s following his move to the village of Barbizon in the Fontainebleau Forest in 1849, when he became one of the most significant painters associated with the 19th-century Barbizon school. Two drawings of shepherdesses from the Cooper Gallery (Barnsley) and the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge) will be shown together for the first time.

'The Winnower', which was acquired by the National Gallery in 1978, is one of Millet’s first paintings to treat the theme of rural labour. It was exhibited at the Salon of 1848 and was well received. However, later works exhibited at the Paris Salon produced extreme reaction. While Millet’s own political convictions are unclear, many critics appropriated his work for their own progressive agenda while others labelled him as subversive. Yet there is no doubt that he had sympathy with the workers around him and wrote in 1851 of the ‘human side’ that touched him most. 

In 'L’Angelus', a man and a woman are reciting the Angelus, a prayer which commemorates the annunciation made to Mary by the angel Gabriel. It is traditionally cited at morning, noon and evening, when it marks the end of the working day.  Never collected by its original commissioner, it followed an extraordinary journey through several collections and sales. The two quiet figures silhouetted against land and sky, the profound sense of meditation underscored by a beauty of light have turned it into a world-famous icon in the 20th century. 

Sarah Herring, Associate Curator of Post 1800 Paintings, says ‘Millet endowed rural labourers with dignity and nobility, depicting them in drawings and paintings with empathy and compassion.’ 

Jean-François Millet (1814–1875)

Jean-François Millet was born at Grouchy (Manche) and was a pupil of Paul Delaroche in Paris by 1837. For some years he painted chiefly idylls in imitation of 18th-century French painters. Becoming, like Honoré Daumier, increasingly moved by the spectacle of social injustice, Millet turned to peasant subjects and won his first popular success at the Salon of 1848 with The Winnower. From the following year he was chiefly active at Barbizon and associated with the Barbizon school of landscape painters.

His work was influenced by Dutch paintings of the 17th century and by the work of Jean-Siméon Chardin and was influential in Holland on Jozef Israëls and on the early style of Vincent Van Gogh.

Barbizon school

The Barbizon school of painters were part of an art movement toward Realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870. It takes its name from the village of Barbizon, France, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where many of the artists gathered. Most of their works were landscape painting, but several of them also painted landscapes with farm workers, and genre scenes of village life. Some of the most prominent features of this school are its tonal qualities, colour, loose brushwork, and softness of form.

The leaders of the Barbizon school were: Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, Jules Dupré, Constant Troyon, Charles Jacque, and Narcisse Virgilio Díaz. Jean-François Millet lived in Barbizon from 1849, but his interest in figures with a landscape backdrop sets him rather apart from the others.

NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

www.nationalgallery.org.uk

Helen Lundeberg @ Louis Stern Fine Arts, West Hollywood - "Inner/Outer Space" - PST ART 2024 Gallery Program Participant

Helen Lundeberg: Inner/Outer Space

Louis Stern Fine Arts, West Hollywood

September 14 – November 2, 2024 

Throughout a career spanning six decades, Los Angeles-based artist HELEN LUNDEBERG (1908-1999) held an enduring fascination with the patterns and cycles which underpin the natural world and the universe beyond it. From her early botanical and zoological illustrations to the hard-edged abstract landscapes and planets she painted in her later career, Helen Lundeberg traced shared conceptual and structural concerns across terrestrial and cosmic orders of magnitude. Relying as much on calculated formal composition as on the subjective engagement of the viewer, her work straddles the permeable borders between observation and memory, perception and imagination, and physical and psychological space.

Helen Lundeberg began to explore the possibility of a career in the arts against a backdrop of significant and rapid scientific development centered around her hometown of Pasadena, CA. Research performed at the California Institute of Technology, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Mount Wilson Observatory would fundamentally and irrevocably shift humanity’s understanding of the nature of physical matter and the Earth’s relative scale within the cosmos. Helen Lundeberg imagined at first that she might become a scientific illustrator, after courses she took in astronomy and zoology initiated a lifelong interest in recording the appearance and behavior of living things and cosmic phenomena. This academic preoccupation found its creative counterpart when she began studying fine art under Lorser Feitelson in 1930. Feitelson instructed Lundeberg in the principles of formal pictorial composition in drawing and painting, mirroring her fascination with the organization of patterns in nature. Armed with this knowledge, Helen Lundeberg found that she had the means to apply her technical skills and analytical mind to the creation of artworks with meaningful subjective content.

Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg co-founded the Post-Surrealist movement in 1934. Rejecting the European Surrealists’ focus on automatism and the unconscious, they promoted the imposition of deliberate formal structure onto symbolic imagery to induce a conscious introspective experience in the viewer. This artistic approach encouraged Helen Lundeberg to explore intellectual and metaphysical themes that had long engaged her. Juxtaposed studies of seed pods and human embryos provoke contemplation of analogous form and function amongst seemingly unrelated organisms. An interior scene of a spherical object on a table dissolves into a vast night sky illuminated by a glowing moon, suggesting adjacent views of the same object expressed at telescoping levels of magnification. These vignettes visually mirror the murky boundaries between the physical world and psychological experience, focusing the role of human perception in constructing meaning from observed reality.

In 1950, Helen Lundeberg began to shift toward the geometric abstract style that would characterize the rest of her career. She pursued the subjective content of these works through dreamlike references to landscape, architecture, and planetary bodies expressed in calculated arrangements of hard-edged color. Helen Lundeberg’s 1960s Planet paintings conjure fantastical alien worlds, swirling with brilliant colors and dissected to reveal their labyrinthine cores. Her cosmic inventions, created at the height of the Space Race, represent figments of humanity’s imagined future amongst the stars. Lundeberg’s abstractions of terrestrial environments condense mountains, dunes, and shorelines to their most essential forms, enhanced or modified by considered color choices to generate a particular sensory atmosphere or mood. These constructions, not painted directly from life but fabricated from Helen Lundeberg’s accumulated observations of natural patterns, are resolved through the synthesis of perception, memory, and an instinctive visual understanding shared by artist and viewer.                                                                                                   

Louis Stern Fine Arts is the exclusive representative of the Estate of Helen Lundeberg.

Louis Stern Fine Arts is part of PST ART as a Gallery Program Participant. Returning since September 2024 with its latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, this landmark regional event explores the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit pst.art

LOUIS STERN FINE ARTS

9002 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood, CA 90069

www.louissternfinearts.com

Genesis Belanger @ Pace Gallery, London - "For In the Right Conditions we are Indistinguishable" Exhibition

Genesis Belanger

In the Right Conditions we are Indistinguishable

Pace Gallery, London

October 9 - November 9, 2024

GENESIS BELANGER

Self-awareness, 2024 

© Genesis Belanger, courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery  

Photography by Pauline Shapiro.

Pace presents the first solo exhibition of works by GENESIS BELANGER in the UK at its Hanover Square gallery in London. For In the Right Conditions we are Indistinguishable, Genesis Belanger probes the shifting complexities of self-curation, domestic labor, and our relationship with nature through fourteen new sculptural groups. These works, rendered in the artist’s most saturated palette to date, mark an exciting evolution of subject and material in Genenis Belanger’s practice.

Working across porcelain and stoneware, metal, wood, and painting, New York based Genesis Belanger creates tableaux that draw from, and critique, the aesthetics of capitalist production and consumption. Her work is characterized by an idiosyncratic visual language that repurposes everyday objects into often seductive, yet unsettling, surrogates for human emotions and societal anxieties. Informed by her experience as a prop-styling assistant, Genesis Belanger’s installations mimic the semiotic strategies of advertising—using beauty, nostalgia, and humor to evoke psychological responses. Yet, in Genesis Belanger’s hands, these familiar symbols are recontextualized, shifting from tools of persuasion to agents of critical reflection.

For her exhibition at Pace, Genesis Belanger presents a series of installations that transform the gallery space into a labyrinth of altered everyday vignettes. Throughout this staging, motifs repeat and evolve, each configuration offering new perspectives on the themes of the work. Complicating notions of interiority and exteriority, elements of domestic furniture—a vanity table, the contents of a fridge, and a vacuum cleaner—is punctuated by life-size trees bearing porcelain cherries and melons. These eerily anthropomorphic objects suggest narratives about the human condition while also exploring nature's reduction to backdrop. In works like the mosaic 16 Bit Eden (2024), where video game-like pixelation merges with floral motifs, depictions of the natural world are relegated to embellishments, reflecting our desire to commodify and shortcut direct engagement with organic reality.

The absence of the human body is a recurring theme in Genesis Belanger’s work. While never explicitly present, its remnants and suggestions permeate the scenes. In Sentimental Attachment (2024), manicured fingers form the teeth of a green comb, evoking a tactile sensuality that is both intimate and disconcerting. This absence is felt throughout the exhibition, where everyday objects—groceries, candles, and pills—become proxies for the body, reflecting the complexities of identity, desire, and the labor associated with maintaining both.

Throughout the installations, symbols of fecundity and fulfilment call attention to the body as an instrument of consumption. Fruits and cakes, rendered in a state of near-grotesque perfection, straddle the line between the delicious and the disturbing. The oversized cakes of I Had to Try Them All (2024), for instance, with bites taken out of them, suggest excessive indulgence. The playful seduction of tongue-tied cherry stems atop pristine fruit grows increasingly compulsive and absurd with each identical repetition.

The symbolism extends to the motif of pills, whose coloring mirrors those of the cakes. This juxtaposition underscores the duality of consumption—where nourishment and medication, pleasure and necessity, coexist in tension. Pills, as objects, are deeply personal yet ubiquitous, representing both the promises of modern medicine and the burdens of a society increasingly reliant on pharmaceutical solutions. In Genesis Belanger’s work, these pills become symbols of the extreme measures we take to manage and escape the pressures of contemporary life.

Working primarily in ceramics, Genesis Belanger employs techniques that emphasize the tactile, hand-made quality of her work, in deliberate contrast to the mass-produced objects her sculptures often mimic. She mixes pigment directly into the clay before rolling it out into flat sheets and shaping them into three-dimensional forms. This labor-intensive process imbues each piece with a sense of individuality and imperfection, resisting the homogenization of consumer goods.

In addition to ceramics, Genesis Belanger has incorporated a range of materials—fabric, wood, metal—into her new sculptures. For example, Cause and Effect (2024), a stoneware vacuum cleaner made with silk cashmere suit material, elevates the mundane object to a status of luxury while also questioning the gendered expectations associated with domestic tools. By articulating her conceptual investigations through the very medium of her work, Genesis Belanger sharpens her exploration of how context shapes our understanding of nature, labor, and identity.

GENESIS BELANGER (b. 1978, USA) stages psychologically charged mise-en-scènes composed of idiosyncratic versions of everyday objects. Working in a multitude of materials and techniques, including porcelain, stoneware, metal, wood, upholstery, and painting, Belanger creates tableaux often poised in liminal spaces, infusing scenes with a sense of lobotomized capitalist productivity.

Genesis Belanger's work considers the ways in which American advertising manipulates psychology; the dynamics of consumption; issues of privacy in our increasingly online world; and coping mechanisms for the overwhelm. Her pieces often act as surrogates for human feeling or experience. Belanger's three-dimensional work, although situated within the legacy of Claes Oldenburg and Robert Gober, is concerned with the manifestation of capitalist myths on a gendered psyche.

Genesis Belanger has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Consortium in Dijon, France (2021); the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in Ridgefield, Connecticut, USA (2020) and in the New Museum’s Storefront Window, New York, USA (2019).

 

PACE GALLERY LONDON

5 Hanover Square, London

www.pacegallery.com

Artist Eeva Peura @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - "FLEURS DE MAI" Exhibition

Eeva Peura: FLEURS DE MAI

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

September 27 – October 20, 2024

In the spring of 2024, EEVA PEURA spent three months at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, where she devoted most of her time to working on paper. The works on paper she produced during her residency might be described not as sketches of the future but more as visual notes on imagined realities, taking inspiration from inner experiences evoked by such things as a color, like red, or a word like papillons (butterflies).

While in Paris, Eeva Peura would often visit the tapestries at the museum of medieval art, where her gaze would trace the silhouettes of the exquisitely woven hawks, horses, flowers and maidens. Observing the tapestries led her to reflect on their makers and the invisible threads connecting them to the viewer, herself. Back at her studio, she would then create her own tapestries and imagined worlds in the soft, painterly medium of crayon.

Working as an artist in residence is an eye-opening experience for Eeva Peura, as it lends her an outsider’s perspective that can lead to the discovery of new ways of seeing as well as insights into the process through which observations and ideas are transformed into artworks. Eeva Peura is intrigued by the way the visible world becomes intermingled with sensations and mental impressions that shape both the art-making process and her artistic identity. Working as a loner and outsider can ideally serve as a positive shake-up, forcing an artist-in-residence to search for wholly new approaches to creating art.

Eeva Peura (b. 1982) graduated as a painting major from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2011. She has presented her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Finland, including venues such as the Mänttä Art Festival and Turku Art Museum. In 2019, she was chosen as the recipient of the William Thuring Foundation Prize. Her work is held in many of Finland’s most prestigious art collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Turku Art Museum and Vantaa Art Museum Artsi.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

Dawn Black, Victoria Dugger, Raheleh Filsoofi, Jiha Moon, Judy Rushin-Knopf, Tori Tinsley, Mie Yim - "emotion" Exhibition Curated by Jiha Moon & Veronica Kessenich @ Laney Contemporary, Savannah

emotion

Dawn Black, Victoria Dugger, Raheleh Filsoofi, Jiha Moon, Judy Rushin-Knopf, Tori Tinsley, Mie Yim

Curated by Jiha Moon & Veronica Kessenich

Laney Contemporary, Savannah

September 17 - November 2, 2024

Laney Contemporary presents emotion, a group exhibition guest curated by artist Jiha Moon and art historian and curator Veronica Kessenich, founder of CARCIOFI and former director of Atlanta Contemporary.

The selected artists, named below, are Moon and Kessenich’s response to an oft-spoken truism that women are emotional ... and not in a good way. Effectively, the friendship of these two curators – and their shared histories of having to be quietly demonstrative – inspired a collaboration to exhibit art by women at a woman-owned gallery, that astutely plays to the clichés while eviscerating women’s socially prescribed ‘role.’

In September of 2022, Jiha Moon and Veronica Kessenich talked about a not-so-distant past when their lives were fundamentally different. Marriages and moves, departures and opportunities (and the need to remain ‘professional’ through it all) highlighted the fact that women often ‘suppress’ to ‘succeed.’ Jiha Moon soon identified seven artists (a number which is linked to intellect and not emotion) who represent the duality of what it means to exist today.

Empowering both individuals and groups is of special interest to Dawn Black. Her use of collected source material, as seen in her Conceal Project: For and Against Grabbers and First Rebels Descending, takes on perceived gender roles, the mythology of women (as creators and destroyers), and the necessity to transcend proscribed constraints. Utilizing gouache, ink, and watercolor, her works on paper invoke a thunderously quiet protest.

Mirrors and the human gaze offer Victoria Dugger the opportunity to present viewers with newly perceived realities. Her worldview as a disabled Black woman informs her richly layered surfaces, beautifully rendered anthropomorphic figures, and lumpy sculptures adorned with the trappings of femininity. The strength of Victoria Dugger’s imagery emerges from her visions of alternate worlds, ones in which ambiguity and experience lead the audience to places where the grass may be a little greener.

The physical bite of artist Raheleh Filsoofi is her act of resistance and resilience. She uses her own body, hands, and mouth to transcend the colonialism, history, and labor of clay. She slowly, methodically, sinks her teeth into clay artifacts that she makes, leaving a permanent mark as protagonist, antagonist, observer, and participant in the narrative of life.

Reappropriating and reconsidering Eastern and Western motifs, including Keanu Reeves, the color yellow, Roy Lichtenstein’s brush stroke, Buddhas, peaches and fortune cookies, is both a modus operandi and an oversimplification of the technical genius in Jiha Moon’s work. Her paintings and ceramics do not fit within any defined canon. Jiha effectively acts as cartographer, charting her own journey from immigrant to citizen, daughter to mother, student to teacher. Her playfully fierce works resist simple definitions – getting to know her is akin to finding the key on the map.

Instability, balance, and the energetic continuum are represented through three textile works by artist Judy Rushin-Knopf. Her Vital Signs series came about at a time of suspended reality where the illness of a loved one, combined with the trauma of the pandemic, necessitated an exploration in materiality. Using cloth, which can be read as both comforting and oppressive, her works evoke the importance of time and its numerous stages.

Often using imagery from her children’s drawings, Tori Tinsley’s paintings and sculptures traverse childhood innocence alongside the caregiving roles essential to daughter and mother. Her Sleepers series, presented in this exhibition, utilizes bold and expressive painting techniques to represent the uninhibited demands of giving, receiving, and the ultimate loss of love.

Mie Yim’s paintings navigate abstraction and representation, her imagery seemingly lacking focal points while achieving connections. Her visual vocabulary is informed by her childhood trauma as an immigrant. Her iconography of bubbles, crevices, excavations, and blankets, combined with gutsy color choices and supernatural creatures, are intended to overwhelm and disorient. By extending her marks to the edges of the paper she allows no room to breathe, no space to relax. Just a fascinating discomfort.

These seven artists are expressive, aggressively colorful, and boldly shy. Their emotion vibrates with the energy of who they are as mothers, daughters, teachers, people of color, and immigrants.

About the Curators:

Veronica L. Hogan (née Kessenich) is a museum director, curator, art historian, educator, collector, former art dealer, fundraising consultant and writer. Drawn to the history of art at a young age, she became fascinated with the language of art (color, line, shape, form … ) and the inspiration behind artists and their works. She earned an M.Phil in Art History from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland (2004) and her BA in Art History from Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN (2001) and has taught since 2006 at Agnes Scott College (Atlanta), SCAD-Atlanta, the Art Institutes of Atlanta and Decatur, and has lectured at the University of Georgia, Emory University, Oglethorpe University, and others.

Jiha Moon is from DaeGu, Korea and lives and works in Tallahassee, Florida. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa and is currently Assistant Professor of Art at Florida State University. Her works have been acquired by Asia Society, the High Museum of Art, the Mint Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institute, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Weatherspoon Museum of Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, the Taubman Museum of Art, the Mint Museum of Art, and the Cheekwood Museum of Art, among other places. She has been included in group shows at the Kemper Museum, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Asia Society, The Drawing Center, White Columns, Smith College Museum of Art, and the Weatherspoon Museum of Art. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023.

LANEY CONTEMPORARY

1810 Mills B. Lane Blvd, Savannah, Georgia 31405

www.laneycontemporary.com

Conrad Egyir @ Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC - "In Jubilant Pastures" Exhibition

Conrad Egyir: In Jubilant Pastures

Miles McEnery Gallery, New York

5 September - 26 October 2024

CONRAD EGYIR

Menorah’s Volta; A Light that Speaks, 2023 

Oil, acrylic, and glitter on canvas 

72 x 66 inches, 182.9 x 167.6 cm

© Conrad Egyir, courtesy Miles McEnery Gallery

Miles McEnery Gallery presents In Jubilant Pastures, an exhibition of new paintings by Detroit-based artist CONRAD EGYIR. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Charles Moore.

In Jubilant Pastures, Conrad Egyir’s first solo exhibition with Miles McEnery Gallery, presents a body of eleven paintings that interrogate themes of identity and belongingness. Born in Ghana, Conrad Egyir’s exploration of self and others shines through, questioning what it means to assimilate to a new land while maintaining one’s roots. The deeply iconographic work combines religious symbols, Ghanaian visual lexicon, migration ephemera, and nods to Black contemporary and historical artists.

Conrad Egyir’s subjects are those from the Afro-diaspora close to him—his family, friends, and colleagues—rendering them regal in brilliant hues and often applying illuminating glitter. His palette is personal—each color pulled from dreams and lived experience alike. Each portrait crafts narratives enlivened with empathy and spirituality, both through visual and written language. In some, Conrad Egyir will paint the same subject twice, furthering the concept of duplicity in identity. Idyllic landscapes sweep the background, his figures sometimes gazing out at the sprawling lands, other times turning away. Themes of displacement and migration shine through, placing the viewer in the shoes of those depicted, caught between nostalgia for the past and hope for the future.

Charles Moore writes that, “the artist explores the meaning of Blackness, digging into his personal history as an African man in the U.S., where Black Americans note their ability to identify foreigners by their accent, speech patterns, and style of dress, and honing in on what it means to be different. The desire to assimilate—to blend into Black American spaces—resonates with the artist; accordingly, in his work, he invites his subjects to occupy the places they wish to inhabit, and storytelling lays the foundation for this process.”

CONRAD EGYIR (b. 1989 in Accra, Ghana) received his Master of Fine Arts from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Judson University, Elgin, IL.

Conrad Egyir has been the subject of recent solo and two-person exhibitions at Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; MCLA Gallery 51, North Adams, MA; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, San José, CA; 8 Bridges, San Francisco; Anastasia Tinari Projects, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI.

His work has been included in recent group exhibitions at David Klein Gallery, Detroit, MI; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; TOA Presents, Minneapolis, MN; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; Ross + Kramer Gallery, New York; and Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI.

Conrad Egyir’s work may be found in the collections of the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; JP Morgan Chase Art Collection; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, MI; Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine, Pasadena, CA; Pérez Art Museum Miami; and the Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada.

Conrad Egyir lives and works in Detroit, MI.

MILES McENERY GALLERY

520 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

www.milesmcenery.com

Exceptional Picture Frames @ Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Exceptional Picture Frames

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

7 October 2024 - 21 January 2025

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza is presenting a display of eleven paintings from its permanent collection dating from the 14th to 17th centuries with frames - three of them the original ones - that reveal the artistic importance of this element. Made in Spain, France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, they exemplify a wide variety of styles which reflect both the artistic period in which they were made and changing tastes, principally in relation to furniture, while contributing additional aesthetic value to the works they accompany, embellish and protect. 

While the collection does not include a large number of the original frames, it does feature many old and important examples. Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza paid particular attention to this aspect of collecting and in the 1980s commissioned two scholarly studies of the frames in his collection. The examples chosen for the present exhibition are of a high technical and stylistic level, making them unique and valuable objects in themselves. They also provide additional information which assists in a more complete understanding of the historical and artistic context of the works they surround. 

Lorenzo Veneziano 

Portable Triptych with a central Crucifixion, ca. 1370 - 1375 

Tempera and gold on panel

Central panel: 83.6 x 30.7 cm

Lateral wings: 83 x 15 cm

Venician frame from 14th century

Carved and gilded wood. Original

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Jan van Eyck

The Annunciation Diptych, ca., 1433-1435

Oil on panel

Left wing ( The Archangel Gabiel): 38.8 x 23.2 cm

Right wing (The Virgin Mary): 39 x 24 cm

Frame: Flemish, 15th century

Carved and polychromed wood. Original

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Of the eleven paintings included in the exhibition, three have their original frames. One is the Portable Triptych with a central Crucifixion (ca. 1370-75) by Lorenzo Veneziano. Its frame, of a type termed “architectural”, is carved from the same panel on which the artist painted the work and imitates the portico of a Gothic church. Secondly, The Annunciation Diptych (around 1433-35) by Jan van Eyck falls within the tradition of Northern European Renaissance altarpieces and is unique in the fact that the artist painted two, trompe-l'oeil frames; a principal one imitating reddish marble and a secondary one that simulates grey stone, seemingly marble or alabaster. 

Wolfgang Beurer 

Portrait of Johann von Rückingen (recto), 1487

Oil on panel, 37,3 x 27.5 cm

Frame: German, 15th century

Carved wood. Original

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Wolfgang Beurer 

Figure with Coat-of-arms (verso), 1487

Oil on panel, 37,3 x 27.5 cm

Frame: German, 15th century

Carved wood. Original

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Finally, Portrait of Johann von Rückingen (recto) and Figure with Coat-of-arms (verso) (1487) by Wolfgang Beurer has a typically German Renaissance frame with pictorial decoration on the vertical moulding, indicating that it was made specifically for the painting.

Jacopo Bassano

The Parable of the Sower, ca., 1560

Oil on canvas, 139 x 129 cm

Frame: Tuscan, ca. 1650-1700

Curved and gilded wood

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

The frames in this display have characteristics and elements which reveal the diversity of styles and techniques used in the different geographical areas and chronological periods in which they were made. These features include the different types of decoration; from the zigzags and circular motifs on the possibly Spanish frame used for Portrait of a Young Man (1490s) by Andrea Solario to the foliate motifs on others such as the frame employed for Portrait of Doge Francesco Venier (ca. 1554-56) by Titian, made in Italy in the 17th century, and that of The Parable of the Sower (around 1560) by Jacopo Bassano, a style of decoration known as “Auricular Medici” which was devised to re-frame the paintings displayed by Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici in the Pitti Palace in Florence.

El Greco 

Christ with the Cross, ca. 1587 - 1596

Oil on canvas, 66 x 52.5 cm

Frame: French, Louis XIII style

Curved and gilded wood

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Foliate decoration is also to be seen on the moulding of the two works by El Greco present in the exhibition, which furthermore create interesting interplays of light and shade that add volume to the paintings and frames as a whole. These are Christ with the Cross (ca. 1587-1596), which has a French, Louis XIII-style frame, and The Immaculate Conception (ca. 1608-14), painted in collaboration with the artist’s son Jorge Manuel Theotokópoulos, which has a typical Spanish Baroque frame. 

Also notable is the use of parcel-gilt or luminolegno on the frame of View of a River Port with the Castel Sant'Angelo by the Master of the Monogram IDM, a technique employed in the Veneto based on the interaction of the gilding and the wood, and the sobriety of The West Façade of the Church of Saint Mary in Utrecht (1662) by Pieter Jansz. Saenredam, which has a Baroque frame typical of Holland and southern Germany, of a dark tone and made in hardwood with a decoration known as Dutch ripple.

The most recent frame in the exhibition is the one surrounding the painting by Michiel Sweerts Boy in a Turban holding a Nosegay (ca. 1658-61), which dates to between 1735 and 1750. Made in Rome, this type of frame was widely used in the 18th century and was named after two Italian painters, Carlo Maratta and Salvator Rosa. 

Curator: Mar Borobia, head of Old Master Painting at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Technical curator: María Eugenia Alonso, curator of Old Master Painting at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza

Room 17 of the Permanent Collection

Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014, Madrid

www.museothyssen.org

Maysha Mohamedi @ Pace Gallery, Tokyo - "yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste" Inaugural Pace's Tokyo Gallery Exhibition + Book

Maysha Mohamedi 

yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste

Pace Gallery, Tokyo

September 6 – October 16, 2024

Maysha Mohamedi with sketchbook 

and corresponding painting (Bait, 2023) 

at her Los Angeles studio 

Photo by Megan Cerminaro

© Maysha Mohamedi, courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of new, never-before-exhibited paintings by American artist Maysha Mohamedi to mark the grand opening of its Tokyo gallery in the city’s Azabudai Hills.

The show, titled Maysha Mohamedi: yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste, showcases the artist’s ability to use color and calligraphic abstraction as means for storytelling. To accompany this exhibition, Pace Publishing produces a facsimile of the studio sketchbook she used for the works in her Tokyo show, featuring a new text by writer Brian Dillon.

Maysha Mohamedi

yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste

PACE PUBLISHING, 2024

Text by Brian Dillon

Design by Tara Stewart

Spiral Bound Softcover, 72 pages, 11.6 x 9.5 in.

© Image courtesy of Pace Publishing 

Maysha Mohamedi—whose work can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami—is a self-taught artist raised in San Luis Obispo, California, who trained as a neuroscientist before pursuing a career as a painter. Now based in Los Angeles, she is known for her atmospheric abstractions that reflect her own thinking about universal ideas and experiences. In her paintings populated with idiosyncratic, spirited forms that unfold, unspool, and reveal themselves over time, she explores relationships between color, shape, language, matter. Invention and discovery lie at the center the artist’s approach to mark making, and her paintings are invested in a kind of excavation, in which she carves out space around and through contour. A subtle mystery resides in the core of each of her works—for Mohamedi, this essence is what guides her towards different forms in her painting process, leading her to a sort of untouchable, sacred truth that defies easy articulation and rationalization.

Functioning as maps of cognition and experience, Maysha Mohamedi’s compositions are made up of her uncannily crisp brushstrokes and painterly flourishes, which she builds up intuitively and contemplatively. Moments of rupture and embrace can be traced across her abstractions, forged through collisions of her own hand and body with the surfaces of her canvases. Using memories, ideas, words, and feelings as origins for her painted abstractions, she draws from a personal lexicon of geometric shapes to express details and anecdotes from her own life in ineffable, intangible, and universal terms. Mohamedi’s approach to color also grounds her works in her own world—‘collecting’ and archiving colors for her paintings as part of her daily experiences and observations, her chromatic storytelling animates her canvases with a sense of vitality and harmony.

Maysha Mohamedi’s first solo show in Japan and all of Asia, this presentation spotlights paintings produced in 2023 and 2024. For these works, she drew inspiration from her diary chronicling her brief time working in Japan two decades ago. In creating her new paintings—half of which are named for people and places that she encountered and wrote about in her journal during that trip—the artist reentered and reactivated the psychic space of her 20s, weaving together coincidences and serendipitous situations from her formative experience abroad and the present circumstances of her life. In this way, the works on view in Tokyo will shed light on one of the hallmarks of Maysha Mohamedi’s practice: her use of abstraction to forge a patchwork of stories and scenes from her daily life and interpersonal relationships.

Vibrant and playful, MAYSHA MOHAMEDI’s (b. 1980, Los Angeles) innovative practice points toward a new mode of atmospheric abstraction that registers certain conditions specific to Los Angeles—and American life as a whole—in the early 21st century. Reflecting her personal history, everyday experiences, and key constellations in her own cultural matrix, her palette is both purely abstract and directly connected to the patchwork of landscapes, objects, and environments that comprise her life. These range from an Ojai, California playground the artist visited with her children, clippings from cookbooks and magazines, to sea glass found on the shore. Maysha Mohamedi’s works are reflections of her own thinking, crystallized as moments of haptic communion. The artist’s academic background in neuroscience is found in the liveliness and expansiveness of her paintings. Liberated from the constraints and dictates of the threedimensional world, her immersive works exude a sense of freedom and illimitability. For Maysha Mohamedi, the viewer is an equal creator in this shared universe of boundless possibilities.

Maysha Mohamedi received a Bachelor of Science in 2002 from the University of California, San Diego, where she studied cognitive science, specializing in neuroscience, and she earned a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2011. Maysha Mohamedi’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles; Massimo De Carlo, Paris; and The Lodge, Los Angeles. She has also been included in group exhibitions at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, Oregon; Mu.ZEE, Ostend, Belgium; and other spaces. Mohamedi lives and works in Los Angeles.

PACE GALLERY TOKYO

1F; Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A

5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo

www.pacegallery.com