Raúl Díaz @ Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole - "Bote de Piedra" Exhibition

Raúl Díaz: Bote de Piedra

Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole

December 20, 2024 - February 9, 2025

Raúl Díaz 

Neblina, 2014-2016 

Mixed media on wood panel, 53 x 67 3/8 inches

© Raúl Díaz / Courtesy Maya Frodeman Gallery

Raúl Díaz 

Lago III, 2017 

Mixed media on wood panel, 50 3/8 x 64 3/4 inches

© Raúl Díaz / Courtesy Maya Frodeman Gallery

Raúl Díaz 

Desparramados, 2022

Bronze, 14 ½ x 16 x 10 inches

© Raúl Díaz / Courtesy Maya Frodeman Gallery

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY presents Bote de Piedra, a solo exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Argentine artist RAUL DIAZ, on view at the gallery's downtown location. 

Bote de Piedra brings together both painting and sculpture by the Argentine artist. Through his works, Raúl Díaz invites us to seek refuge in a secret universe that exists within each of us – a soothing, friendly space characterized by the presence of beauty and the solitude of personal soul searching that rarely surfaces amidst the chaos of contemporary life. Evoked by the artist’s memories of his childhood, the mystical quietude of Díaz’s artworks is deeply personal and indicative of his own spiritual adventure. The images produce a sense of nostalgia and stillness that compels the viewer to reflect on their own life and their place within the endless story of history.

The surface of Raúl Díaz’s paintings are wooden panels, embossed on handmade papers. He uses unique mixed techniques to produce a tactile impression on the surface of wood and paper that contributes to his otherworldly images. This exhibition also presents sculptural work by the artist that, taking the images into three dimensions, creates a new experience for the viewer and expands Díaz’s own technical prowess. In his practice, he leans into experimentation throughout his oeuvre, employing wood, bronze, resin, stone, marble, ceramics, handmade paper, dry pigments, chalk, acrylic, and watercolor. In what he calls his “permanent search”, Díaz explores and manipulates new materials so that they deftly suit his distinctive style and themes.

Since his first exhibitions in the early 1980s, Raúl Díaz has shown an inclination towards expressing himself through the human figures. Díaz’s construction of the figure is forged from an abstracted ethereal conception rather than an anatomical representation of the human form. The characters that appear in his works are planar, out of scale silhouettes in poses of peaceful work or contemplation. The depth of color and textures in the backgrounds of Díaz’s artworks create a dream-like atmosphere, whether they be serene mountains or stacked kites or boats. Drawing imagery from his childhood memories of lake fishing with his father and grandfather, the sight of wooden fishing boats, either dotting the water or stacked on the beach, is indelible in the artist’s memory, and these same vessels frequently appear in the work. The simplicity of the figures against these dynamic, yet still harmonious, backgrounds instill a sense of calm in the viewer that is distinctive of Díaz’s works.

RAUL DIAZ was born in 1952 in Córdoba, Argentina. In 1990, he moved to Unquillo in the province of Córdoba, where he continues to live and produce his art. Although Raúl Díaz studied architecture, he could not avoid the overwhelming calling he had within himself to be a painter. Self-taught, Díaz has emerged as one of Argentina's most prominent artists. Since 1995, he has participated in National and International Art Fairs, and in numerous group exhibitions in Argentina and abroad. He has had individual exhibitions in Córdoba, Buenos Aires, the United States, Holland, Spain and Italy. He has also received important awards, including the Grand Prize from the National Painting Salon of the Pro-Arte Foundation, Córdoba (1990). In 2005, he held a solo exhibition at the Sivori Museum of Plastic Arts in Buenos Aires, and in 2010, Díaz had a solo exhibition at the Emilio Caraffa Museum in Córdoba. His works are found in important private and museum collections in the countries where he has exhibited his works.

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY

66 South Glenwood Street Jackson Hole, Wyoming 83001

www.mayafrodemangallery.com

Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi and Miné Okubo @ Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC+ Other venues

Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi and Miné Okubo

Pictures of Belonging

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

November 15 - August 17, 2025

“Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi and Miné Okubo” is an unprecedented exploration of three trailblazing Japanese American artists of the mid-20th century who, until now, have been excluded from the story of modernism in the United States. The exhibition asserts their place in American art and reveals a broader picture of the American experience by presenting their artworks and life stories in dialogue with each other for the first time.

The exhibition is on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s main building in Washington, D.C. The museum’s presentation is the second stop on a national tour, organized by the Japanese American National Museum with exhibition curator ShiPu Wang, Coats Family Chair in the Arts and professor of art history at the University of California, Merced. “Pictures of Belonging” is coordinated at the Smithsonian American Art Museum by Melissa Ho, curator of 20th-century art, with Anna Lee, curatorial assistant for Asian American art.

“The Smithsonian American Art Museum plays a leadership role in telling richer and deeper stories about art in the United States, featuring new voices and presenting a more inclusive narrative of American art through acquisition campaigns, reimagined permanent collection galleries, new scholarship and special exhibitions,” said Jane Carpenter-Rock, acting director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “I am delighted that SAAM is able to partner with the Japanese American National Museum to share with audiences in Washington, D.C., the incredible work of Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi and Miné Okubo.”

The exhibition highlights the paintings of Hayakawa, Hibi and Okubo, complemented by drawings, sketchbooks, archival material and video footage. The artworks span eight decades, revealing the range and depth of these three artists’ careers and connections that have not been explored previously. A visual timeline puts their life events in context with each other and with key moments in U.S. history. The prolific careers of Hayakawa, Hibi and Okubo are remarkable considering that they lived through the Exclusion Era (1882–1965), a period characterized by U.S. laws that restricted immigration, prevented Asians from becoming naturalized American citizens and contributed to the mass displacement and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Hayakawa, Hibi and Okubo were the three most visible and critically acclaimed Japanese American women artists in the United States in the 1930s. During World War II, all three were forced from their homes in California. The federal government imprisoned Hibi and Okubo in incarceration camps, first in California and then in Utah; Hayakawa relocated to New Mexico. Yet all three remained committed to making art, their creative work a vital means of navigating their experiences and building bonds of community.

By tracing the artistic development of Hayakawa, Hibi and Okubo before, during and after World War II, the exhibition offers the first nuanced and in-depth view of how each developed a distinct painting style. Hayakawa, who died young at age 53, displayed a special affinity for painting people early on and was known for her sensitive, luminous portraits. Hibi, over time, evolved from painting landscapes and still lifes to creating symbolically freighted canvases activated by abstract marks of color. Okubo, best known for her 1946 graphic memoir of wartime removal and incarceration, Citizen 13660, operated within the mainstream of American social realism in the 1930s, but turned to bold color, simplified forms and whimsical images of children and animals in later years. Collectively, their art, produced during tumultuous decades in U.S. history, carry powerful stories of resilience, beauty and connection.

“‘Pictures of Belonging’ demonstrates that the artists’ experience of mass incarceration and relocation during WWII, while pivotal, did not define them,” Ho said. “These women continued to evolve and challenge themselves as artists throughout their lives.”

The exhibition includes works by Hibi and Okubo recently acquired for Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection, part of a multi-year initiative to expand and enrich the representation of Asian American experiences, perspectives and artistic accomplishment in public displays and new scholarship.

National Tour

The exhibition opened at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City. Following the presentation in Washington, D.C., it will travel to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia; the Monterey Museum of Art in Monterey, California; and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.

“Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi and Miné Okubo” is organized by the Japanese American National Museum.

Publication

The accompanying catalog, co-published by the Japanese American National Museum and the University of California Press, includes essays by Ho; Wang; Becky Alexander, archivist at the San Francisco Art Institute Legacy Foundation + Archive; Rihoko Ueno, archivist at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art; Patricia Wakida, associate editor of the Densho Encyclopedia project and a contributing editor to the Discover Nikkei website; and Cécile Whiting, professor emerita and Chancellor’s Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine. The book is available for purchase ($50) in the museum’s store and online.

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM - SAAM

8th and G Streets, NW, Washington, DC 2000

americanart.si.edu

Ursula Reuter Christiansen @ ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishoj - "I Am Fire and Water" Exhibition

Ursula Reuter Christiansen

I Am Fire and Water

ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishoj

22 August 2024 - 5 january 2025

Ursula Reuter Christiansen 

Jeg er ild og vand, Installation photo

ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art 

Photo Anders Sune Berg

Jeg er ild og vand Ursula Reuter Christiansen 

Photo Kavian Borhani

Jeg er ild og vand Ursula Reuter Christiansen 

Photo Kavian Borhani

Ursula Reuter Christiansen 

Vred brud (angry bride), 1971

Museum Jorn

The exhibition I Am Fire and Water offers a unique opportunity to explore new works by Ursula Reuter Christiansen and reflect on how we humans navigate a world filled with both hope and despair.

How can we retain our essential humanity in a world where hope and courage are constantly beset by cruelty and despair? What do we do when children are robbed of their lives in war? And how do we say goodbye to this world, poised between love and the abyss?

These are some of the weighty and highly topical questions raised by Ursula Reuter Christiansen – one of Denmark’s most significant living artists – in her installations and paintings in the exhibition I Am Fire and Water.

Says curator Dorthe Juul Rugaard: ‘Ursula Reuter Christiansen is one of Denmark’s greatest contemporary artists. She is a keen observer of the times in which we live, and she uses her art to say important and poignantly relevant things about the world we share while world history is being written before our eyes.’

Over the course of more than six decades, Ursula Reuter Christiansen (b.1943 in Trier, Germany) has enriched the art world with works in which beauty wrestles with the demonic and light meets darkness. Her narrative, expressive, and poetic works reflect the human condition while also speaking directly to the political and climatic crises unfolding in the world right now.

‘Ursula Reuter Christiansen is in a league of her own, and the rest of Europe is beginning to see that too. Her prominence as an artist is matched by her feminist credentials; for example, she was a leading activist of the Redstockings movement in Denmark. As an artist, she has upheld a feminist point of view in her criticism and her outlook on the world,’ continues Dorthe Juul Rugaard.

‘Having said that, Ursula Reuter Christiansen has also expanded her scope and reach beyond the gender debate and is now more concerned with humanity as such: in her art, she embraces our existential conditions on this globe, a world in a state of crisis – not only as regards the climate, but also in relation to atrocities such as the war in Gaza, where the children are the main victims.’

Ursula Reuter Christiansen 

Flüchte, Flige, Entrinne, 2024

Installation photo. 

ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art

Photo Anders Sune Berg

Ursula Reuter Christiansen

Courage, 2023

ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art

Photo Anders Sune Berg 

The exhibition I am Fire and Water is an impressive feat on the part of Ursula Reuter Christiansen, a tour de force that presents installations and paintings from the earliest years of her career in the 1960s to the present day. Brand new works were created especially for the exhibition at ARKEN.

Ursula Reuter Christiansen invites audiences on a journey through seven installations that reflect various facets of life. The exhibition ranges from the colossal installation Rotten Eggs Against Bombs to Washed Out Faces, the latter consisting of white sheets with faces painted onto them: here, trauma and pain have been scrubbed and washed out and the demons hung out to dry. Among the new installations is Es Ist Zu Spät (It Is Too Late), which invites visitors along on the artist’s personal journey through the fog – perhaps ending in a farewell to the world.

ARKEN MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Skovvej 100, 2635 Ishøj

www.arken.dk

Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits @ Denver Art Museum

Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits

Denver Art Museum

November 17, 2024 – May 11, 2025

DAWOUD BEY

A Young Man Resting on an Exercise Bike,

Amityville, NY, from the series Street Portraits, 1988 

Pigment print 

Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago 

© Dawoud Bey

DAWOUD BEY

A Couple in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY,

from the series Street Portraits, 1988 

Pigment print 

Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago 

© Dawoud Bey

The Denver Art Museum (DAM) presents Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits, featuring 37 portraits by celebrated photographer and 2017 MacArthur Fellow DAWOUD BEY (American, born 1953).

From 1988 to 1991, Dawoud Bey collaborated with Black Americans of all ages whom he met on the streets of various American cities. He asked a cross section of people in these communities to pose for him, creating a space of self-presentation and performance in their urban environments.

“We’re pleased to present the first standalone museum show of this important work,” said Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography for DAM. “Dawoud Bey’s Street Portraits mark a turning point where the deliberate, closely observed portraits he had been making with a handheld camera began to contain what he has called ‘the kind of lush physical description’ he wanted his pictures to convey—and that is a consistent part of all the work he has made since. The slower process of working with a camera on a tripod invited collaboration between the artist and his subjects, making each picture both an experiment and a discovery.”

Dawood Bey used a large format tripod-mounted camera and a unique positive/negative Polaroid film that created both an instant print and a reusable negative. Bey considers photography an ethical practice that requires collaboration between the artist and his subjects. To reciprocate with the people who posed for him, he gave each person a small black-and-white Polaroid print.

"This is the first standalone museum show of Bey’s Street Portraits," said Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography for the DAM. "Each picture is an experiment, a discovery that describes people and the places where they live. At the same time, these photos are attentive to the quality of light on a particular day and the way the artist orchestrates all those things through his camera. This was a transformational work that evolved through the 20 years of Dawoud’s signature photography."

The exhibition is organized by the community the photographs were made: Brooklyn; Washington, D.C.; Rochester; Amityville; and Harlem. Defying racial stereotypes, the resulting photographs reveal the Black subjects in all of their psychologically rich complexity, presenting themselves openly and intimately to the camera, the viewer, and the world.

DENVER ART MUSEUM

100 W. 14th Avenue Pkwy, Denver, CO 80204

denverartmuseum.org

Chicago Style Exhibition @ Georges Adams Gallery, NYC - Featured Joanna Beall, Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Miyoko Ito, Ellen Lanyon, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Barbara Rossi, H.C. Westermann, Karl Wirsum

Chicago Style

Joanna Beall, Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Miyoko Ito, Ellen Lanyon, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Barbara Rossi, H.C. Westermann, and Karl Wirsum

George Adams Gallery, New York

December 13, 2024 – February 8, 2025

The George Adams Gallery presents Chicago Style, a group exhibition highlighting key figures from Chicago’s vibrant mid-to-late 20th century art scene. The show features works by Joanna Beall, Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Miyoko Ito, Ellen Lanyon, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Barbara Rossi, H.C. Westermann, and Karl Wirsum. 

This exhibition traces the development of a unique Chicago aesthetic, shaped by artists from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and the Hyde Park Art Center. These artists rejected the dominant trends of New York and the West Coast, creating diverse and unconventional work in movements like surrealism, figuration, abstraction, and social commentary. 

The exhibition also reflects their overlapping careers and collaborations, such as the 1949 Exhibition Momentum organized by Golub and Lanyon, which included Ito. The spirit of collaboration continued with the founding of Superior Street Gallery by Ito and Lanyon in the 1950s.

Allan Frumkin Gallery, which opened in Chicago in 1952, played a key role in supporting many of these artists and elevating their work beyond the city. Frumkin gave Leon Golub, and H.C. Westermann their first solo exhibitions in Chicago, and employed Ellen Lanyon as a restorer and Jim Nutt as an art handler, fostering a dynamic creative community. By showcasing these artists in both his Chicago and New York galleries, Frumkin helped establish the unique aesthetic that defined Chicago’s mid-20th-century art scene. 

Works in the exhibition includes paintings from the late 1950s by Golub and Ito, works from the 1960s by Lanyon and Beall, and examples from the 1970s by Brown, Nilsson, Paschke, Rossi, and Wirsum. Of special note is Westermann’s The Death Ship (Black Tar Death Ship) from 1974 that has never been offered since it was acquired by a private collector in the late 1970s. 

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY

38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Gerold Miller @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

Gerold Miller

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

January 17 – February 16, 2025

Now exhibiting in Finland for the first time, GEROLD MILLER is a German sculptor known for his minimalistic, geometric works exploring intersections of space, form, and perception. His practice revolves around space and time, stagnancy and movement, subject and object, with the viewer becoming merged an an integral part of the artwork. His art is distinctive for its precision, clean lines, and the use of industrial materials such as aluminium and lacquer. It blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture, challenging traditional distinctions and thus inviting the viewer into a dialogue with the visual experience.

The sculptures and wall reliefs featured in the exhibition represent a reduced notion of pictoriality, a key role being played by their placement in time and space. Much depends on the viewer’s perspective in the space and how they position themselves in relation to the work. The merging of the sculpture and the viewer is an ever-evolving process: when encountering Miller’s works, the viewer can experience the world as being simultaneously mirrored and real, while themselves occupying both simulated and real space. In this way, Miller interweaves space and time, stagnancy and movement, subject and object, viewer and sculpture, as a holistically integrated artwork.

GEROLD MILLER (b. 1961) studied sculpture at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design, graduating in 1989. His work has been exhibited and is held in museums and private collections around the world, including the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, NOMA New Orleans Museum of Art in the United States, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in Germany, Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Takasaki Museum of Art in Japan, Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris, the Musée de l’Art et de la Histoire Neuchâtel in Switzerland, and the Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Italy.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki 

www.galerieforsblom.com

Leena Nio - Exhibition @ Helsinki Contempory - "Dwellers"

Leena Nio: Dwellers

Helsinki Contempory

10 January - 2 February 2025

Leena Nio

Crowded I, 2024

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Oil on canvas, 170 cm x 150 cm

© Leena Nio, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Leena Nio

Composition with a red dress shirt and yellow 

handmade sweater, 2023-2024

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Oil on canvas, 170 cm x 150 cm

© Leena Nio, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Leena Nio’s practice is underpinned by the pleasure of painting and looking. As she paints, she surrenders herself to the magic of colour and an abundance of details and intertwined brushstrokes. She plays with tensions between concealment and exposure, the personal and the universal, and juxtapositions of contrasting textures.

Leena Nio’s latest exhibition consists of still life compositions capturing scenes of quotidian daily existence. Many are composed around a laundry basket, a mundane household item that is rarely celebrated in art, yet nevertheless an object in which there is beauty, softness and nuances to be discovered. A human presence is suggested indirectly through cropped fragments of garments and laundry.

Leena Nio’s complexly layered paintings straddle between abstraction and representation. Things hidden behind façades are central to her recent paintings, many of which literally contain peepholes evoking the duality of daily existence: behind the public façade is a private world that is revealed only to one’s closest loved ones. Fluffy jumpers and other items of clothing appear as recurring symbols of the softening buffers that we erect between ourselves and external reality.

Leena Nio’s layered paintings bring to light the interconnected nature of reality. As if braiding hair or knitting strands of woollen yarn, she visually juxtaposes and interweaves meticulously executed details, inviting viewers to reflect on the inextricable oneness of the objects, people, and other living beings in our lives.

Leena Nio’s paintings seem to ponder the way our lives unfold almost like a series of still life compositions. An object such as a laundry basket is a theatre stage upon which we perform our daily existence in an ever-changing procession of clothing, while we ourselves observe this theatre of life as onlookers in the sidelines.

HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY

Bulevardi 10, 00120 Helsinki

helsinkicontemporary.com

Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes @ The Hepworth Wakefield + Book

Forbidden Territories: 

100 Years of Surreal Landscapes

The Hepworth Wakefield

23 November 2024 – 27 April 2025

The Hepworth Wakefield presents Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes. This major exhibition marks 100 years since Surrealism began with the publication of André Breton’s ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ in 1924. Taking its title from André Breton’s description of the Surrealist project as “the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territories”, thisis the first UK survey to explore the role of  landscape in one of the most influential artistic, intellectual and literary movements of the twentieth century.

The exhibition brings together over 100 surrealist works, featuring a wide array of British and international artists working across mediums, from Breton’s circle in the 1920s, through to Surrealism’s ongoing resonances in contemporary art. Artists on display include Salvador Dalí, Eileen Agar, Lee Miller and Max Ernst, alongside later Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington, Edith Rimmington, Marion Adnams, Conroy Maddox, Desmond Morris, and contemporary artists working within the legacy of Surrealism such as Shuvinai Ashoona, Stefanie Heinze, Helen Marten, Nicolas Party, and Wael Shawky. Presented in transhistorical groupings, Forbidden Territories explores how Surreal ideas can turn landscape into a metaphor for the unconscious, fuse the bodily with the botanical, and provide means to express political anxieties, gender constraints and freedoms.

Central elements of André Breton’s manifesto, including automatism and psychoanalysis of childhood memories, became a route into re-visioning landscape painting for many Surrealists. Well-known paintings by Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy, which draw on the artists’ formative memories of the forests of Bavaria and seashores of Brittany respectively, will be displayed, alongside the first UK site-specific mural by Swiss artist Nicolas Party. Party is known internationally for hismonumental, immersive murals made with soft pastel, a medium  which holds vivid colours to create fantastical environments. Party will select historic Surreal landscapes to install on the mural, offering a contemporary twist on the Surrealist strategy of collage and juxtaposition.

As well as works by central figures from the movement, such as René Magritte and Francis Picabia, Forbidden Territories foregrounds previously neglected artists and narratives. These include the relationship between Surrealism and ecology, drawing prescient connections topresent day environmental concerns. Visual conversations will be drawn between the humananimal-botanical hybrids of Desmond Morris and Leonora Carrington from the 1950s, to those of Shuvinai Ashoona and Stefanie Heinze working today. Forbidden Territories also includes the first presentation of a new gift of Jean Arp’s plaster sculptures, at The Hepworth Wakefield, generously donated to Wakefield’s art collection by the Jean Arp Foundation. The plasters span several decades of the artist’s career and exemplify the surrealist biomorphism at the heart of his practice.

Surrealism responded to times of political upheaval. A series of works, made around the period of WWI, by Salvador Dalí, Gordon Onslow Ford and Mervyn Evans convey political tensions through uncanny landscapes. This section of the exhibition will also feature several sculptures and paintings by Egyptian contemporary artist Wael Shawky. These are presented alongside Lee Miller’s photographs of Egypt taken during WWI, creating a dialogue between these diverse surreal depictions of the landscapes of North Africa with undertones of political and societal tensions.

Forbidden Territories features a solo presentation of works by Mary Wykeham, a now underrecognized Surrealist artist who decided to become a nun in 1950, at the height of her career. The display includes her paintings, drawings, etchings on paper and copper printing plates, and is the largest public showing of Wykeham’s work since her solo show of 1949 at Galerie des Deux Îles, Paris. It marks the donation of a large group of works by Wykeham to The Hepworth Wakefield by her family, a body of work preserved by the convent where she spent her final years.

A final section of the exhibition brings together new work by contemporary artists María Berrío and Ro Robertson alongside Surrealists Ithell Colquhoun, Eileen Agar and Dora Maar, to explore ideas of gender identity and autofiction within bodies of water. 

Eleanor Clayton, Head of Collection and Exhibitions, said: ‘This unique survey will take visitors on a fantastical journey through an array of surrealist landscapes, some well-known and some rarely seen. Bringing exceptional modern art in dialogue with the best of contemporary practice is at the heart of our programme at The Hepworth Wakefield. We are delighted to be showing long-established masterpieces in Wakefield for the first time, alongside newly commissioned artwork, showing that the influence of Surrealism – one of the most dynamic and wide-reaching art movements of the twentieth century – is still alive to this day.’

Forbidden Territories: 

100 Years of Surreal Landscapes

Published by Thames and Hudson

A book of the same title is published by Thames and Hudson and edited by The Hepworth Wakefield’s Head of Collection and Exhibitions, Eleanor Clayton to accompany the exhibition. The book includes essays by Clayton, Patricia Allmer, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh; Anna Reid, Senior Lecturer History of Art at the University of Leeds; and Tor Scott, Curatorial Assistant, National Galleries of Scotland. It is interspersed with texts by artists including André Breton, María Berrío, Helen Marten, Ro Robertson and Mary Wykeham offering contemporary and historical perspectives on Surrealism.

Forbidden Territories at The Hepworth Wakefield is presenting concurrently with The Traumatic Surreal at Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. The Traumatic Surreal brings together work made after 1960 through to the present day to explore the radical appropriation and development of surrealist sculptural traditions by women artists in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Luxembourg.

THE HEPWORTH WAKEFIELD

Gallery Walk, Wakefield, West Yorkshire WF1 5AW

hepworthwakefield.org

Irving Penn @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "Kinship" Exhibition Curated by Hank Willis Thomas

Irving Penn: Kinship

Curated by Hank Willis Thomas

Pace Gallery, New York

November 15 – December 21, 2024

IRVING PENN

Three Dahomey Girls (with Bowls), 1967

Photograph © The Irving Penn Foundation

IRVING PENN

Three Single Oriental Poppies, New York, 1968

Photograph © The Irving Penn Foundation

Pace is pleased to present Irving Penn: Kinship, an exhibition of work by the famed photographer IRVING PENN, curated by artist Hank Willis Thomas, at its 508 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This show spotlights works produced by Irving Penn throughout his 70-year career, including selections from his Worlds in a Small Room series, his iconic portraits of artists, actors, and writers, and other genres of his images. These photographs are exhibited within an installation designed by Hank Willis Thomas to replicate a structure that Irving Penn used to photograph many of his high-profile subjects.

Working for Vogue for nearly 70 years, Irving Penn left an indelible mark on the history of photography. His inventive fashion photographs, which transformed American image-making in the postwar era, continued to appear in the magazine up until his death in 2009. The artist was also highly accomplished and experimental in the darkroom, having engineered, among other innovations, a complex technique for making platinum-palladium prints.

A trained photographer, Hank Willis Thomas, widely known for his galvanizing public works around the US, is deeply interested in both the making and consumption of images. His investigations into subjectivity and perception inform his work in photography and other mediums, including sculpture, screenprinting, video, and installation. Penn’s Worlds in a Small Room works—for which he journeyed to Cuzco, Crete, Extremadura, Dahomey, Cameroon, San Francisco, Nepal, New Guinea, and Morocco to capture people’s portraits within a tent he used as a portable studio—have been particularly influential for Hank Willis Thomas, who was part of the artistic team behind the traveling, participatory installation In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth), which debuted in 2011 and has since been presented around the world.

Often investigating the ways that framing and perspective can shape our experiences of the world around us, Hank Willis Thomas situates Irving Penn’s photographs within a bespoke, star-shaped structure with intersecting corners, created using a material similar to the plywood flats of the photographer’s original studio for his portraits in a corner. Displayed on the structure’s exterior walls and within its central interior space, Irving Penn’s images will invite viewers to inhabit a similarly intimate, enclosed space as the subjects of his portraits captured across the globe—through Thomas’s vision, this room becomes a new world of its own.

Showcasing the varied but interconnected motifs and ideas that Irving Penn returned to time and again over the course of his life, the images selected and paired by Hank Willis Thomas speak to a transcendent, universal quality that can be traced across the photographer’s vast oeuvre. His arrangement of Penn’s works is guided by a kind of “visual muscle memory,” which he describes as “the notion that an artist’s eye and hand retain the imprints of past works, unconsciously shaping new creations.” The diverse photographs on view, for Thomas, are marked by their stillness and dignity, their shared interest in capturing and communicating the human experience in a single frame.

“In Penn’s work, I see a profound reverence for the overlooked and the mundane,” Hank Willis Thomas writes in a curatorial statement for the show. “His fashion photography, often celebrated for its clean lines and sculptural compositions, shares a surprising kinship with his still lifes of discarded objects. By juxtaposing these images, I want to highlight how Penn’s meticulous attention to detail elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary. It’s as if each image, regardless of subject, carries an echo of his broader artistic ethos: the belief that beauty and meaning can be found in even the most unlikely places.”

Concurrent with this curated presentation in New York, Hank Willis Thomas’s solo exhibition of his work at Pace’s London gallery, Kinship of the Soul, is on view through December 21. A retrospective of Penn’s work, organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with The Irving Penn Foundation, is on view through May 1, 2025 at The Marta Ortega Pérez (MOP) Foundation in A Coruña, Spain.

Hank Willis Thomas’s work is currently featured in the group exhibitions Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through February 18, 2025 and Grow It, Show It: A Look at Hair from Diane Arbus to TikTok at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, through January 12, 2025. At the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, The Gun Violence Memorial Project—a collaboration between Boston-based MASS Design Group and Songha & Company, where Thomas is Creative Director, in partnership with the gun violence prevention organization Purpose Over Pain—is on view through January 20, 2025.

PACE GALLERY NEW YORK

508 West 25th Street, New York City

pacegallery.com

Marie-Claude Deffarge & Gordian Troeller @ Museum Folkwang, Essen - "No Pictures to Dream of" Retrospective exhibition - Stern-Features and Documentaries

Deffarge & Troeller

No Pictures to Dream of

Stern-Features and Documentaries

Museum Folkwang, Essen

15 November 2024 - 23 February 2025

Marie-Claude Deffarge and Gordian Troeller, around 1965 

Anonymous photographer

Silver gelatine print, 13,5 x 13,8 cm

© Ingrid Becker-Ross Troeller

Marie-Claude Deffarge & Gordian Troeller 

Caracas, Venezuela, 1961 

From the Stern-report: Kennedy against Castro 

© Ingrid Becker-Ross Troeller

The Museum Folkwang presents No Pictures to Dream of brings, the Stern features and documentaries by Marie-Claude Deffarge (1924-1984) and Gordian Troeller (1917-2003). This retrospective is presented for the first time in a major museum exhibition. Since the 1950s, the two journalists have reported on riots, wars and social grievances from more than 55 countries. The estate is being presented to the public for the first time on the occasion of Marie-Claude Deffarge's 100th anniversary.

No Pictures to Dream of brings together over 300 works, including photographs, documentary films, personal documents and written material, and offers a comprehensive insight into Deffarge and Troeller's half-century of reporting. Since the 1950s, the two reportage journalists have been documenting social injustice, conflicts and political crises all over the world - from Japan to Yemen and Peru. The exhibition not only presents photographic and film reportages, but also criticises capitalist perspectives and the lack of feminist perceptions, working methods and the division of labour. At a time when objective reporting was in the foreground, Deffarge and Troeller pursue a sometimes subjective, perceptive and often controversial documentary style.

Initially, Marie-Claude Deffarge and Gordian Troeller concentrated on West Asia. They published newspaper reports and a first book project: Persia without a Mask. From 1959 to 1969, they reported on social grievances, unrest and wars for Stern magazine, but were particularly successful with The Women of the World. From the mid-1960s, the team produced their first documentary films alongside the Stern features. From 1973 onwards, they become known in German-speaking countries for their films, particularly through their collaboration with Radio Bremen. The documentary series In the Name of Progress, Women of the World and Children of the World were broadcast during prime time until 1999 and reached a large audience. Among other things, they address the devastating consequences of European colonial rule and the patriarchal structures responsible for oppression and exploitation worldwide. The photo and film reportages are an important source of information for understanding the roots and causes of the global consequences of climate change, environmental destruction, economic crises, migration flows and political influence in our time.

In the year of Marie-Claude Deffarge's 100th birthday, the Museum Folkwang is dedicating the first comprehensive museum retrospective to the work of the journalist team. It is based on the photographic estate of Deffarge and Troeller, which was transferred to the Museum Folkwang and the film holdings at the Centre national de l'audiovisuel (CNA) in Luxembourg in 2017. The exhibition highlights not only the reportages and films, but also the working methods and team structures that contributed significantly to their success. A special role is played by Ingrid Becker-Ross, who accompanied many of the trips as a sound recordist and is now also involved in the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue. The exhibition also offers perspectives from people from the countries covered in the reports. Raika Khorshidian and Heidar Zahedi, for example, have edited the extensive material on Iran and summarised their views in two film documentaries.

A 296-page exhibition catalogue will be published by Scheidegger & Spiess (price € 48).

The exhibition is a co-operation between the Museum Folkwang and the CNA, Luxembourg. It is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen) and the Gouvernement Du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg, Ministère de la Culture.

The exhibition will be shown at the Centre national de l'audiovisuel (CNA), Luxembourg, from 2 May to 14 September 2026.

MUSEUM FOLKWANG

Museumsplatz 1, 45128 Essen

www.museum-folkwang.de

Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern - Exhibition @ MoMA, New York + Book

Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern

MoMA, New York

November 17, 2024 – March 29, 2025

Lillie P. Bliss. c. 1924 

The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

The music room in Bliss’s apartment, 

1001 Park Avenue, c. 1929–1931

The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

Installation view of the exhibition 

“The Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934.”

May 14, 1934 – September 12, 1934

The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

Installation view of Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern 

on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York 

from November 17, 2024, through March 29, 2025 

Photo: Emile Askey

The Museum of Modern Art presents Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern, an exhibition focusing on the collection and legacy of LILLIE P. BLISS, one of the Museum’s three founders and an early advocate for modern art in the United States. The exhibition which marks the 90th anniversary of Bliss’s bequest coming to MoMA, includes iconic works such as Paul Cézanne’s The Bather (c. 1885) and Amedeo Modigliani’s Anna Zborowska (1917). The exhibition, which features about 40 works as well as archival materials, highlights Bliss’s critical role in the reception of modern art in the US and in the founding of MoMA.

Paul Cézanne

The Bather. c. 1885 

Oil on canvas. 50 x 38 1/8″ (127 x 96.8 cm) 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York 

Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934 

Conservation was made possible by the Bank of America 

Art Conservation Project 

Photo: John Wronn

Amedeo Modigliani 

Anna Zborowska. 1917 

Oil on canvas. 51 1/4 x 32″ (130.2 x 81.3 cm) 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York  

Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934

Photo: John Wronn

When it opened in 1929, The Museum of Modem Art was a destination where visitors could see groundbreaking temporary exhibitions, but it did not have a significant collection. Just two years later, when Lillie P. Bliss died, she left approximately 120 works to the Museum in her will. In an effort to ensure the Museum's future success, Bliss stipulated that MoMA would receive her collection only if it could prove that it was on firm financial footing within three years of her death. 

In 1934 the Museum was able to secure the bequest, which became the core of MoMA's collection. This included key works by Paul Cézanne, Georges-Pierre Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Odilon Redon, Marie Laurencin, and Henri Matisse, as well as a selection of paintings by Bliss's friend, the American artist Arthur B. Davies. 

Georges-Pierre Seurat 

Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbor. 1888 

Oil on canvas. 21 5/8 x 25 5/8″ (54.9 x 65.1 cm) 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York 

Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934

Odilon Redon 

Silence. c. 1911 

Oil on prepared paper. 21 1/2 x 21 1/4″ (54.6 x 54 cm) 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York 

Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934

Bliss's bequest also allowed for the sale of her works to fund new acquisitions, facilitating the purchase of many important artworks, including Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night, which is featured in the exhibition. Other favorites wholly or in part funded through the Bliss bequest, such as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans, are on view in the collection galleries.

Vincent Van Gogh

The Starry Night. Saint Rémy, June 1889

Oil on canvas. 29 x 36 1/4″ (73.7 x 92.1 cm) 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York 

Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange), 1941 

Conservation was made possible by the Bank of America 

Art Conservation Project 

Photo: Jonathan Muzikar

At the end of her life, Lillie P. instructed her bother Cornelius Newton Bliss Jr. to burn her personal papers, making it challenging for future generations to recognize the essential part she played in the history of modern art. The exhibition showcases archival materials from MoMA's Archives and other collection, reconstructing Bliss's life before MoMA, including her passion for music, her involment in the Armory Show of 1913, and her interactions with fellow collectors and artists. It also highlight Bliss's critical role in MoMA's founding, and her continued impact on the Museum going forward, through scrapbooks, journals, photographs, and letters.

"It has been a joy to explore the life and work of this courageous woman whom we have known as little more than an important name. We are eager to share our discoveries, and to shine a spotlight on Lillie Bliss for the first time since 1934, when MoMA organized an exhibition to celebrate the new bequest," says Ann Temkin.

Inventing the Modern: 

Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modern Art

by Romy Silver-Kohn (Editor), Ann Temkin (Editor), 

Anna Deavere Smith (Foreword by), 

Mary Schmidt Campbell (Text by), Sloane Crosley (Text by)

Published by The Museum of Modern Art, 2024

384 p. - ISBN 9781633450790

 

The exhibition is presented on the occasion of the release of Inventing the Modem: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modem Art, a revelatory account of the Museum's earliest years told through newly commissioned profiles of 14 women who had a decisive impact on the formation and development of the institution. Inventing the Modem comprises illuminating new essays on the women who, as founders, curators, patrons, and directors of various departments, made enduring contributions to MoMA during its early decades (especially between 1929 and 1945), creating new models for how to envision, establish, and operate a museum in an era when the field of modem art was uncharted territory.

Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern is organized by Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, and Romy Silver-Kohn, co-editor with Ann Temkin of Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modern Art, with Rachel Remick, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture.

MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York

11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019

moma.org

Artist Kevin Lowenthal @ Derek Eller Gallery, NYC - "Mannequins in Audience" Exhibition

Kevin Lowenthal

Mannequins in Audience

Derek Eller Gallery, New York

October 25 - December 21, 2024

KEVIN LOWENTHAL

Through the Window, Through the Door, 2024

Oil on cotton on linen, 80 x 64 inches

© Kevin Lowenthal, courtesy Derek Eller Gallery

Derek Eller Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by KEVIN LOWENTHAL entitled Mannequins in Audience in the North Room of the gallery. With a background in weaving and textile, Lowenthal encrusts his surfaces with a textured mixture of cotton and layered oil paint, creating a rich, fibrous ground on which to build worlds, investigate forms, and uncover signifiers.

Confined to liminal, compact interiors, Lowenthal’s architectural dreamscapes are often inhabited by lingering, faceless figures. Provoking a sense of theatricality, curtains frame each scene, setting the stage for domestic interiors bound together in one enigmatic space. In 2 Blonde Mannequins in Conversation, the pattern of the figures’ hair matches that of the curtains. Rather than acting as hard, definitive boundaries, the curtains appropriate the fluidity of hair. This malleable relationship of forms ignites a cyclical reinforcement of performance and body, of object and texture. The settings in which these shapes and objects exist possess a vastness akin to a free-roam video game where viewers can choose to stay within the limits of a prefabricated narrative or enter portals that go beyond.

In fact, the initial source of Lowenthal’s imagery derives from the survival-horror video game Silent Hill. In some of the rooms in Silent Hill, wall paint peels away to expose bare concrete. This fracturing inspires the rip, or the glitch, in the painting Patched Overworld. Reminiscent of the energy fields and the jagged dramas of Clyfford Still, Kevin Lowenthal leaves parts of the canvas untouched in order to expose the pale, raw cotton surface. As if to provide a window into the canvas, Kevin Lowenthal pulls back the curtain to expose the thingness of the painting itself.

As in a theatrical presentation, Kevin Lowenthal controls how much information he exposes. In Through the Window, Through the Door, architectural forms are taken out of context and reduced to only their signifiers: a rectangle becomes a door because of the presence of a doorknob; a grid becomes a window only because of its transparency. Modeled after plastic heads, the human-like figure, or mannequin, calls attention to the synthetic nature of doors, windows, and furnishings. These familiar objects and their vacant resemblance to the real world create an overall atmosphere which is both mysterious and unsettling.

KEVIN LOWENTHAL (b. 1994, Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in New York, NY. Lowenthal received a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. Lowenthal recently had a solo exhibition at 243 Luz in Margate, UK. Recent group exhibitions include Brigette Mulholland, Paris, France; Anton Kern Gallery, New York, NY; and Ruby/Dakota, New York, NY. This is his first solo exhibition in New York City.

DEREK ELLER GALLERY

38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.derekeller.com

Martha Diamond @ The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield - "Deep Time" Exhibition

Martha Diamond: Deep Time 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum,  Ridgefield 

November 17, 2024 - May 18, 2025 

MARTA DIAMOND 

Untitled, 1973 

Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72 inches 

Collection of Jasper Campshure 

Photo: Jason Mandella 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents Deep Time, a traveling survey of five decades of work by MARTA DIAMOND, marking the artist’s first solo museum presentation in thirty-six years. Martha Diamond: Deep Time is accompanied by the artist’s first major monograph. 

Martha Diamond’s ties to The Aldrich extend back to 1972 when Larry Aldrich, the Museum’s founder, visited the artist’s Bowery studio and purchased the sevenby-six-foot acrylic on canvas painting, Untitled, 1972, marking her first museum acquisition. This painting was included in Martha Diamond’s debut exhibition, Contemporary Reflections 1972-73, an annual series at the Museum that spotlighted emerging artists with no gallery representation. Aldrich bought another painting from Martha Diamond a year later, Untitled, 1973. It would be included in three more exhibitions throughout the 1970s and 1980s at The Aldrich. Now in the Museum’s 60th anniversary year, Untitled, 1973 makes its return as the earliest work in Deep Time. 

Martha Diamond, who passed away in December 2023, is among the most perceptive painters of the last five decades. Her work’s formal concision and painterly bravado reflect an inner dialogue with generations of abstract artists, and the results are exceptional: an inimitable handling of gesture and space that reimagines the landscape tradition while deftly sliding between abstraction and representation. Encompassing paintings, works on paper, and monotypes, this focused survey of Diamond’s career proposes “deep time” as a new way of understanding her contribution to American painting. 

Deep time is a concept used to explore thousands of years of human civilization and billions of years of planetary history. In conversation with ancient monuments and the modern skyscraper, the exhibition emphasizes Martha Diamond’s commitment to capturing the emotional character of built space, tracking throughlines across mediums and methods to reveal a process that combines spirited experimentation with perceptive observation. Martha Diamond’s relationship to the built landscape of New York was surely informed by her more than 50 years spent maintaining her studio in the Bowery, demonstrating her tremendous perseverance as an artist and her rootedness in a single place over time. 

The exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s first major monograph, an amply illustrated catalogue that includes an original essay by the exhibition’s co-curators, a chronology, and texts reprinted from some of Diamond’s most insightful critics: New York poets steeped in the visual arts. Martha Diamond: Deep Time documents the inspirations that converge in, and are transformed by, Diamond’s enigmatic and utterly original work. 

Martha Diamond: Deep Time is co-organized by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and the Colby College Museum of Art, and co-curated by The Aldrich’s Chief Curator, Amy Smith-Stewart and Colby’s Katz Consulting Curator, Levi Prombaum. 

MARTHA DIAMOND (1944-2023) received a BA from Carleton College in Minnesota in 1964 and, after a period of living abroad in Paris, an MA from New York University in 1969. She was an active participant in New York’s art and poetry scenes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her work has been shown at major New York galleries and institutions from the mid-1970s on, including solo exhibitions at Robert Miller Gallery, Brooke Alexander Gallery, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and the New York Studio School, and important group shows at Skarstedt, the Hill Art Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She also had concurrent solo exhibitions in 1988 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, and the Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Her work is in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine; the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Her work was in the former collection of The Aldrich and was exhibited at the Museum in group exhibitions in 1973, 1974, 1985, and 1988. She is currently represented by David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles and New York. 

ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877

www.thealdrich.org

Heidi Lampenius @ Helsinki Contemporary - "Ground Color" Exhibition

Heidi Lampenius: Ground Color

Helsinki Contemporary

22 November - 21 December 2024

Heidi Lampenius

Stairs I, 2024

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Clay paint on canvas, 200 cm x 130 cm

© Heidi Lampenius, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Heidi Lampenius

Stairs II, 2024

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Clay paint on canvas, 200 cm x 130 cm

© Heidi Lampenius, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Heidi Lampenius

Stairs IV, 2024

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Clay paint on canvas, 200 cm x 195 cm

© Heidi Lampenius, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Heidi Lampenius

Color Chart I, 2024

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Clay paint on canvas, 165 cm x 165 cm

© Heidi Lampenius, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

“I like the way the paint glistens when it is wet, like dew-kissed mornings, but when it is dry, the colours become muted as the clay enfolds them in its own harmonious palette. Here lies the secret, the secret of the clay, the secret of the earth, conveying a sense of everything invisible in nature that we feel but cannot see.”

- Heidi Lampenius

Ground Color presents new clay paintings by Heidi Lampenius. They reprise her signature symbolic language of painting that is based on the natural sciences and her experience of nature. The title of the exhibition is ambiguous: ‘ground’ can mean ‘earth’, but it can also refer to the surface used for painting. In this exhibition, earth serves as the ‘ground’ both conceptually and literally.

In her past paintings, Heidi Lampenius gave a visible form to invisible natural phenomena such as wavelengths of sound and light. The artist’s new explorations in clay reflect her quest for a new sense of groundedness – her desire to return to tangible basics. The paintings in the exhibition are composed around simple geometrical shapes that enclose folds and diagrams. Her abstract paintings conceptually represent her investigations into the hidden world of clay. While her forms are angular, there is great tenderness to her painting style and tonal scale.

The artist’s enduring themes – time, nature and memory – are revisited in series such as Stairs, in which the viewer can make out the shape of stairs simultaneously leading up and down, and in multiple directions all at once. For Heidi Lampenius, stairs symbolize harmonious cycles, their circular movement representing reassuring continuity and harmony  –  an endless cycle where what is at the ‘top’ and at the ‘bottom’ are inextricably linked.

Clay paint has the special quality of being temporally layered. Earth minerals are among the oldest pigments known to humankind. Clays, ochres, and earth and mineral pigments are born through cycles of elements spanning vast expanses of time. Heidi Lampenius thus takes the viewer on a long journey across peatlands, fields and bedrock, through millennia of folklore, and through geological epochs stretching far back beyond human history.

HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY

Bulevardi 10, 00120 Helsinki

helsinkicontemporary.com