WANAFOTO: 2025

05/04/25

Maro Gorky @ Saatchi Gallery, London - "Maro Gorky: The Thread of Colour" Exhibition

Maro Gorky

The Thread of Colour

Saatchi Gallery, London

28 March - 12 May 2025

Maro Gorky

Nesting Peacocks, 2008

Maro Gorky

Flowering Cypress, 2012

Maro Gorky's landscapes are very satisfying to look at. Her stained-glass colour, crisp shapes and compositional majesty instil her syntheses of previous art with the force of an individual intently focused personality. You can't ask much more of art - Roberta Smith, New York Times

Maro Gorky

Connecticut Wedding, 1991

Maro Gorky

The Etruscans, 1991

In the 80s and 90s Maro Gorky’s personal view of the world was expressed in portraits of people she knew and loved. These works strike a deep note when they reflect upon personal memories, such as Connecticut Wedding (1991) which depicts the marriage of her great-grandmother. In The Etruscans (1991) painted in earthy colours, Maro Gorky emphasises her and her husband’s commitment to their home in Tuscany and the local inhabitants, who have become their lasting friends.

Maro Gorky

Valerio, 2003

Maro Gorky

Cosima Pregnant, 2004

Maro Gorky

Saskia Pregnant, 2005

Maro Gorky

The Last Act, 1980

The Last Act (1980), exhibited in Maro Gorky's first London exhibition in 1983 at the Wraxall Gallery with Sarah Long, depicts a young girl with her lover. Amidst the Tuscan landscape, she stands in lovingly painted fronds and petals of wildflowers, and the couple gaze outward in an idealised, romantic pose. Maro Gorky has consistently painted her daughters, Saskia and Cosima, along with their friends and families. Over time, the portraits have become more simplified, and a sense of medieval maternity is often referred to in the portraits of her daughters.

Maro Gorky

Beirut is Burning, 1982

Maro Gorky

Adolescence, 1987

Both Maro Gorky's landscapes and portraits suggest a newfound reverence for the sacred, expressed through simplified shapes while maintaining a focus on the Tuscan landscape's formal structure. Discerning influences and derivations in Gorky's work is complex, as her canvases exude powerful emotions and energy. While Gorky references Byzantine icons, Botticelli, and medieval religious art, her art transcends simple categorisation.

A short film made by Gorky’s daughter Cosima Spender, an award-winning film director, producer and writer, is premiered alongside the Saatchi exhibition. The film explores her mother’s artistic practice and style, delving into her perception of the world and how it translates into her landscapes and portraits. Through Maro Gorky’s own words, the film reveals the artist’s intentions and aspirations behind her life’s work.

Maro Gorky

Olimpic, 1991

Maro Gorky

The New Wing, 2002

Maro Gorky

Autumn Vines, 2025

MARO GORKY

Gorky's work continues a tradition of an academic training fleshed out by modernism that includes André Derain, Leland Bell and Louisa Matthiasdottir - Roberta Smith, New York Times

Maro Gorky was born in New York in 1943, the eldest daughter of the Armenian / American painter Arshile Gorky, one of the originators of Abstract Expressionism. Growing up surrounded by the heroes of Modernism, her first art tutors – before she had properly learnt to walk – were Andre Breton and Roberto Matta. Her father’s suicide when she was five years old, and the subsequent recognition of his epic legacy for American Art, set Maro Gorky on an artistic voyage that seemed both inborn and eternally restless.

Maro Gorky studied at the Slade School of Art, under Frank Auerbach, where she met her husband Matthew Spender, the sculptor and writer. Over the last 60 years, Gorky and Spender have rebuilt and resided in what was once an old ruin of a farmhouse, in the Tuscan village of San Sano in Avane. This house and the surrounding garden have become as much a creative endeavour as Gorky’s painting. One can distinctly see the impression that Gorky and Spender have left on the landscape. Upon approach to the farmhouse, peacocks wander through a profusion of plants, morning glory clambers over the terraces, and the life-size marble and terracotta sculptures by Spender populate the olive groves. Inside the house, Gorky has frescoed the walls, wardrobe panels and even bathroom tiles with animals, plants and patterns as a lasting imprint of her brush.

Describing the setting of the Tuscan landscape as the inspiration for many of Gorky’s paintings would not accurately convey the deep-seated impact that the landscape has had on her artwork. Rather, it is apparent that Gorky, Spender, the farmhouse and the natural surroundings, through maintaining a constant retrospective dialogue with one another over the years, have grown to become inextricably linked; a feeling that is evocatively manifested in Gorky’s landscapes included this exhibition. From the early-romanticised landscapes of undulating Tuscan hills, they move towards an abstracted discourse on colour and pattern, whilst retaining the vibrancy and warmth of the rural Italian environment.

In Maro Gorky’s own words…

Speaking about how living in Tuscany has inspired her work, Gorky says: “You have to be a city slicker to feel romantic about the countryside, but I am not urban. When I think of the word “home,” I see a lit fire – the hearth. And rats in the granary, peacocks, tortoises and turtledoves, hoopoes, swallows and screaming swifts. The “Tusk” of Tuscany, the hunters yelling “qua, qua, qua”, the dogs out of control and the cars called Cherokee. The secret camera in my wood spying on nocturnal animals, counting those breeders in the dark. Terra di Siena being chomped by mechanical dinosaurs reshaping the hills for vines, the sound of rocks grinding as the landscape is de-boned.”

"It has nothing to do with painting and yet it has everything to do with painting. There is intention, there is composition. Green is a usual colour, so you don’t want it, except for peacocks. Green must be split into its fractions, the components of yellow and blue – and we’re back to Agent Orange. The quiet of the country does not exist. There is no such thing as silence. I feel as if we are as we were a hundred years ago, on the verge of revolution.

“Landscape painting used to signify for me a narrative without a beginning or an end, a visual echo of my thoughts. Then I discovered the desert. Near Mount Ouinat, on the frontier of Libya, Egypt and the Sudan, 500 miles from the nearest Egyptian outpost, I observed that the landscape has been ferociously simplified under the irresistible erosion of wind and sand. Crystals cut like jewels were methodically distributed from under my feet, right up to the horizon. This world without human beings was incredibly peaceful.

“Since that moment I have been trying to simplify my landscapes down to their essential underlying structure. The line becomes a path. Colours are what I perceive when I walk along that path. Shapes, as containers in which to place my emotions. Every now and again, like a crystal in the desert, one touch of absolute precision, that last sharp point of white on the pupil of the eye of a Byzantine hermit, painted with a brush made from a special feather found only in a kingfisher’s thumb.” - Maro Gorky

The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Long & Ryle (4 John Islip Street, London, SW1P 4PX) which presents Maro Gorky: Maps of Feeling through 2 May 2025.

SAATCHI GALLERY

Duke of York's HQ, King's Rd, London SW3 4RY

www.saatchigallery.com

Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor @ Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, NYC - "Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved" Exhibition

Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor

The Search for the Beloved

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

Through May 3, 2025

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved, a first-of-its-kind exhibition exploring the impact of the theories of Hungarian psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor on the art of Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990). Fodor’s 1949 book, The Search for the Beloved: A Clinical Investigation of the Trauma of Birth and Pre-Natal Conditioning (New York: Hermitage Press, Inc, 1949) was an early contribution to the field of prenatal psychology, and while many of his theories have lost their currency, the provocative language, vivid imagery, and theories put forth in the book provided Ossorio with, in his own words, “a springboard from which to take off.”[1] From his early surrealist drawings to his celebrated mixed-media assemblages known as Congregations, the works presented in Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved reveal Ossorio’s enduring exploration of themes addressed in Fodor’s book, notably birth, death, suffering, and sex.

In The Search for the Beloved, Nador Fodor argues that prenatal experience and the inherently traumatic upheaval of birth form the foundation of each person’s psyche, instilling in them an innate fear of death and a lifelong, subconscious desire to return to the womb.

In the book’s introduction, Nador Fodor writes: “After nine months of peaceful development, the human child is forced into a strange world by cataclysmic muscular convulsions which, like an earthquake, shake its abode to the very foundations. … In its shattering effect, birth can only be paralleled by death.”[2]

NADOR FODOR -- Born in Beregszász, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Berehove, Ukraine) to a Jewish family in 1895, Nandor Fodor completed a doctorate in law at the Royal Hungarian University of Science in Budapest. After moving to London in 1929 to work as a journalist, Fodor became interested in the work of Sigmund Freud and began publishing his own writing in psychoanalytic journals. By 1949, when he published The Searched for the Beloved, Nador Fodor had developed a reputation as a compelling psychoanalytic thinker writing for a popular audience. Many chapters of The Searched for the Beloved were first published in scientific journals, including The Psychiatric Quarterly, The American Journal of Psychotherapy, and The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Although it is unlikely that Nador Fodor ever met Alfonso Ossorio, his theories had an indelible influence on the artist, who was a voracious reader on a wide range of subjects; notably, Ossorio kept an annotated copy of The Search for the Beloved on his bedside table until the end of his life.

ALFONSO OSSORIO -- Alfonso Ossorio was born in Manila, the Philippines, in 1916 and raised in a devoutly Catholic family. After attending Catholic boarding schools in England and a Jesuit secondary school in the United States, he attended Harvard University, where he completed his senior thesis titled Spiritual Influences on the Visual Image of Christ. Throughout his youth, Ossorio’s irrepressible feelings of same-sex attraction were in conflict with the worldview of his upbringing and the beliefs that had been ingrained in him, leading to immense inner turmoil that he expressed through vividly detailed surrealistic depictions of biblical subjects during the early 1940s. An exemplary selection of these early works is on view in Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved. Executed before the publication of The Search for the Beloved, these early drawings such as Job (1941) and The New Pandora (1944) reveal Ossorio’s lifelong interests in the themes of suffering, birth, and sex that would resonate with Fodor’s book.

Alfonso Ossorio encountered Fodor’s book at a particularly important moment in his life and career. Early in 1950, Ossorio returned to his home in the Philippines for the first time since he was ten, bringing the newly published The Search for the Beloved with him. The official purpose of Ossorio’s trip was the execution of a mural titled The Angry Christ for the Chapel of Saint Joseph the Worker, which his family had built in Victorias, on the island of Negros. The ten months Alfonso Ossorio spent in the Philippines opened up old wounds from his youth that led to a highly productive period and a new direction in his art.

Guided by his reading of The Search for the Beloved as well as his new friendships with Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet, Ossorio composed his Victorias Drawings, a series of abstract paintings on paper executed with a wax-resist technique, which are prominently featured in this exhibition. Distinguished by their vivid colors and pulsating energy, the Victorias Drawings directly address the contents of Fodor’s book through titles and imagery referencing pregnancy, childbirth, coupledom, motherhood, infancy, martyrdom, and yonic forms. Created at the height of the abstract expressionist movement, the Victorias Drawings inspired Jean Dubuffet to author and publish a monographic study on the series, titled Peintures Initiatiques d’Alfonso Ossorio—the only monograph he would ever write on another artist. In 1951, the Victorias Drawings were exhibited at Studio Paul Facchetti in Paris and at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, formally announcing Ossorio’s departure from his detailed surrealist compositions of the 1940s.

Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved illuminates themes manifest throughout Ossorio’s oeuvre, including his final major series: the mixed media assemblages known as the Congregations. In the Congregations, Ossorio brings together such disparate found objects as glass eyes, shells, animal bones, shards of glass, and driftwood into compositions that reveal the enduring influence of Fodor’s thought.

Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved is Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s fourteenth solo exhibition on the work of Alfonso Ossorio, who has been the subject of more solo exhibitions than any other artist in the gallery’s thirty-six-year history. Beginning in 1996 with Alfonso Ossorio – Reflection & Redemption: The Surrealist Decade, 1939-1949, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has consistently presented focused, thematic exhibitions exploring various facets of Ossorio’s extraordinary career, while including his work in eighty-eight group exhibitions since 1992. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery represented the Ossorio Foundation from 1996 to 2007.

[1] Judith Wolfe, Alfonso Ossorio: 1940-1980 (East Hampton, NY: Guild Hall Museum, 1980), 43

[2] Nandor Fodor, The Search for the Beloved, (New York: Hermitage Press, Inc., 1949), 3

MICHAEL ROSENFELD GALLERY

100 Eleventh Avenue @ 19th, New York, NY, 10011

www.michaelrosenfeldart.com

Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York City, February 8 – May 3, 2025

Noah Purifoy @ Tilton Gallery, NYC - "Poetry as Politics: Seeing Beyond the Object - Noah Purifoy and Kindred Spirits" Exhibition

Poetry as Politics:

Seeing Beyond the Object

Noah Purifoy and Kindred Spirits

Tilton Gallery, New York

March 20 - May 24, 2025

Tilton Gallery presents an exhibition of works by NOAH PURIFOY (1917-2004) and a few of his contemporaries who were kindred spirits in their attitudes and philosophy towards art making. The exhibition centers on Purifoy’s signature assemblages and include works never before exhibited in New York. Works range from his important early 1965-66 Watts Remains from the rare group of works made for the exhibition 66 Signs of Neon in response to the 1965 Watts Rebellion to indoor and outdoor works from his period in Joshua Tree.

Additional artists include John Outterbridge, David Hammons, Timothy Washington, John Riddle, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Varnette Honeywood, Betye Saar and Donald Stinson. Many of these works also have rarely, if ever, been shown.

Noah Purifoy and the artists in his circle in Los Angeles from the mid-sixties on, many of whom worked primarily in assemblage, believed in the power of art, the poetry of art to effect change and to propel thought that went beyond the art object to move attitudes in real life and political thinking.

Noah Purifoy has stated: “When you do art, you see beyond the object. That effort of seeing beyond the object is also present in human relations.” He believed that art is a powerful tool for social change and that creativity and activism go hand in hand. John Outterbridge also spoke often about the wrongs of the world and the power of art to touch people and shape change. These artists turned philosophy into the poetry of art.

Works were rarely overtly political, but the artists wove their understanding of history and of their present world, their beliefs and their hopes into constructions and sculptures and collages made from discarded fragments. Materials include found pieces of metal, carved wood, fabric and repurposed objects and partial objects of every kind.

Never didactic, much was left up to the viewer, allowing the strength of the artworks to speak for itself. Direct activism was reserved for real life and channeled into impacting arts education and creating institutions and cultural centers for their community.

Noah Purifoy was Founder and Director of the Watts Towers Arts Center from 1964 to 1975 where he created programs in the arts for the youth of the Watts community. He then sat on the California Arts Council for ten years from 1976 to 1987, promoting the arts and art education around the state.

John Outterbridge (1933-2020) was Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the Compton Communicative Arts Academy in nearby Compton from 1969 to 1975. It was not only a haven for the community, but a center for art, poetry, music, dance and theatre. He then succeeded Noah Purifoy as Director of the Watts Towers Arts Center from 1975 to 1992. He was a panelist for the California Arts Council and for the National Endowment for the Arts and a member of the Advisory Committee for the Getty Institute for Arts Education, all in 1978 to 1980. Other artists participated in different degrees in the activism of the times.

This group of artists worked at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Arts Movement and impacted their contemporaries and generations to come. Not only did many of these artists teach formally, but they were generous in sharing their beliefs and many younger artists were impacted by their elders’ deep thinking. Their influence continues to the present; the Hammer Museum’s most recent Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, found inspiration in the work and life of Noah Purifoy.

TILTON GALLERY

8 East 76 Street New York, NY 10021

www.jacktiltongallery.com

04/04/25

David Hockney @ Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris - Une exposition majeure avec plus de 400 oeuvres de 1955 à 2025

David Hockney, 25

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

9 avril - 31 août 2025

David Hockney

"Winter Timber" 2009

Oil on 15 canvases (36 x 48" each)

274.32 x 609.6 cm (108 x 240 Inches)

Photo Credit: Jonathan Wilkinson

La Fondation Louis Vuitton invite DAVID HOCKNEY, l’un des artistes les plus influents des XXe et XXIe siècles, à investir l’ensemble de ses espaces d’exposition. Cette présentation, inédite par son contenu comme par son ampleur, de plus de 400 œuvres de 1955 à 2025 rassemble, outre un fonds majeur provenant de l’atelier de l’artiste et de sa fondation, des prêts de collections internationales, institutionnelles ou privées. L’exposition réunit des créations réalisées avec les techniques les plus variées – des peintures à l’huile ou à l’acrylique, des dessins à l’encre, au crayon et au fusain, mais aussi des œuvres numériques (dessins photographiques, à l’ordinateur, sur iPhone et sur iPad) et des installations vidéo.

David Hockney s’est totalement impliqué dans la réalisation de cette exposition. Il a lui-même choisi, en collaboration avec son compagnon et studio manager, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, de centrer l’exposition sur les vingt-cinq dernières années de son œuvre sans omettre les œuvres « mythiques » de ses débuts, proposant ainsi une immersion dans son univers, couvrant sept décennies de création. Il a voulu suivre personnellement la conception de chaque séquence et de chaque salle, dans un dialogue continu avec son assistant Jonathan Wilkinson.

David Hockney déclare : « Cette exposition est particulièrement importante pour moi, car c’est la plus grande que j’aie jamais eue – les onze galeries de la Fondation Louis Vuitton ! Quelques-unes de mes toutes dernières peintures, auxquelles je suis en train de travailler, y seront présentées. Ça va être bien, je crois. »[ 1]

L’exposition « David Hockney, 25 » montre combien ces dernières années témoignent du renouvellement permanent de ses sujets et de ses modes d’expression. La capacité de l’artiste à toujours se réinventer à travers des nouveaux media est en effet exceptionnelle. D’abord dessinateur, passé maître dans toutes les techniques académiques, il est aujourd’hui un des champions des nouvelles technologies.

David Hockney

"Portrait of My Father" 1955

Oil on canvas

50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 Inches)

Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt

The David Hockney Foundation

David Hockney

"A Bigger Splash" 1967

Acrylic on canvas

242.5 x 243.9 x 3 cm (96 x 96 x 1.181 Inches)

Tate, U.K.

David Hockney

"Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)" 1972

Acrylic on canvas

213.36 x 304.8 cm (84 x 120 Inches)

Photo Credit: Art Gallery of New South Wales / Jenni Carter

David Hockney

"Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy" 1968

Acrylic on canvas

212.09 x 303.53 cm (83.5 x 119.5 Inches)

Photo Credit: Fabrice Gibert

Sont réunies au rez-de-bassin des œuvres emblématiques des années 1950 aux années 1970 – depuis ses débuts à Bradford (Portrait of My Father, 1955), puis à Londres, jusqu’en Californie. La piscine, thème emblématique, apparaît avec A Bigger Splash, 1967 et Portrait of An Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972. Sa série de doubles portraits est représentée par deux peintures majeures : Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, 1970-1971 et Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968.

Puis la nature prend une place toujours plus importante dans le travail de David Hockney à partir de la décennie 1980-1990 – comme en témoigne A Bigger Grand Canyon, 1998 – avant que l’artiste ne regagne l’Europe pour y poursuivre l’exploration de paysages familiers.

David Hockney

"May Blossom on the Roman Road" 2009

Oil on 8 canvases (36 x 48" each)

182.88 x 487.7 x 0 cm (72 x 192 x 0 Inches)

Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt

David Hockney

"Bigger Trees near Warter or/ou Peinture sur

le Motif pour le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique" 2007

Oil on 50 canvases (36 x 48" each)

457.2 x 1219.2 cm (180 x 480 Inches)

Photo Credit: Prudence Cuming Associates

Tate, U.K.

Ensuite le cœur de l’exposition renvoie aux 25 dernières années, passées principalement dans le Yorkshire où il redécouvre les paysages de l’enfance, ainsi qu’en Normandie et à Londres. On y assiste à une célébration du Yorkshire, l’artiste faisant d’un buisson d’aubépine une explosion spectaculaire du printemps (May Blossom on the Roman Road, 2009). L’observation du rythme des saisons le mène au paysage hivernal monumental peint sur le motif, exceptionnellement prêté par la Tate de Londres, Bigger Trees near Warter or/ou Peinture sur le Motif pour le Nouvel Âge Post-Photographique, 2007.

David Hockney

27th March 2020, No. 1

iPad painting printed on paper, mounted on 5 panels

Exhibition Proof 2

364.09 x 521.4 cm (143.343 x 205.276 Inches)

Dans le même temps, David Hockney poursuit le portrait de ses proches, à l’acrylique ou sur iPad, ponctué de plusieurs autoportraits. L’exposition en compte une soixantaine en galerie 4, associés à des « portraits de fleurs » réalisés à l’iPad mais insérés dans des cadres traditionnels, créant un trouble dont on retrouve l’effet dans le dispositif qui les réunit au mur, 25th June 2022, Looking at the Flowers (Framed), 2022.

Tout le 1er étage – galeries 5 à 7 - est consacré à la Normandie et à ses paysages. La série 220 for 2020, exécutée uniquement sur iPad, est présentée dans une installation inédite en galerie 5. David Hockney y capte, jour après jour, saison après saison, les variations de la lumière. En galerie 6, faisant suite à cet ensemble, on notera une série de peintures acryliques et le traitement très singulier du ciel animé de touches vibrantes, lointaine évocation de Van Gogh. En galerie 7, un panorama composé de vingt-quatre dessins à l’encre (La Grande Cour, 2019) fait écho à la Tapisserie de Bayeux.

Enfin, le dernier étage est introduit par une série de reproductions remontant au Quattrocento constituant des références importantes pour l’artiste (The Great Wall, 2000). La peinture de David Hockney, qui se nourrit de l’histoire universelle de l’art depuis l’Antiquité, est centrée ici sur la peinture européenne, de la première Renaissance et des peintres flamands jusqu’à l’art moderne. La première partie de la galerie 9 témoigne de ce dialogue avec Fra Angelico, Claude le Lorrain, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso... Puis, le public est invité à traverser l’espace de cette galerie-atelier transformée en salle de danse et de musique, comme David Hockney le fait régulièrement, accueillant chez lui musiciens et danseurs.

Passionné par l’opéra, David Hockney a souhaité réinterpréter ses réalisations pour la scène depuis les années 1970 dans une création polyphonique à la fois musicale et visuelle, en collaboration avec 59 Studio, enveloppant le visiteur dans la salle la plus monumentale de la Fondation Louis Vuitton (galerie 10).

David Hockney

"After Munch: Less is Known that People Think" 2023

Acrylic on canvas

48 x 72"

Photo Credit: Jonathan Wilkinson

David Hockney

"After Blake: Less is Known that People Think" 2024

Acrylic on canvas

72 x 48"

Photo Credit: Jonathan Wilkinson

L’exposition se clôt par une salle intimiste où seront révélées les œuvres les plus récentes peintes à Londres, où l’artiste réside depuis juillet 2023 (galerie 11). Celles-ci, particulièrement énigmatiques, s’inspirent d’Edvard Munch et de William Blake : After Munch: Less is Known than People Think, 2023, et After Blake: Less is Known than People Think, 2024, où l’astronomie, l’histoire et la géographie rencontrent une forme de spiritualité, selon les propres mots de l’artiste. Il a souhaité y inclure son tout dernier autoportrait.

[1] “This exhibition means an enormous amount because it is the largest exhibition I’ve ever had – 11 rooms in the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Some of the most recent paintings I’m working on now will be included in it, and I think it’s going to be very good.” -- David Hockney

Commissariat de l'exposition :

Suzanne Pagé, directrice artistique de la Fondation Louis Vuitton et commissaire générale

Sir Norman Rosenthal, commissaire invité

François Michaud, conservateur à la Fondation Louis Vuitton, commissaire associé

Assisté par Magdalena Gemra

Avec la collaboration de Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima et de Jonathan Wilkinson, pour le studio David Hockney

Publication

DAVID HOCKNEY

Édité par Norman Rosenthal

Contributions de Suzanne Pagé, Norman Rosenthal, James Cahill, Magdalena Gemra, Anne Lyles, François Michaud, Simon Schama, Donatien Grau, Eric Darragon, Théo de Luca, Fiona Maddocks et Philippe-Alain Michaud. Publié par Thames & Hudson et la Fondation Louis Vuitton. Relié, 25,9 x 30,5 cm, 328 pages, 484 illustrations, ISBN: 9780500030325

FONDATION LOUIS VUITTON

8, avenue du Mahatma Gandhi,

Bois de Boulogne, 75116 Paris

www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr

Amy Sherald: American Sublime @ Whitney Museum of American Art, New York - A Major Exhibition

Amy Sherald

American Sublime

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

April 9 – August 10, 2025

Amy Sherald

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, 2018

Oil on linen, 72 1/8 × 60 1/8 × 2 3/4 in. (183.1 × 152.7 × 7 cm)

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

The National Portrait Gallery is grateful to the following lead

donors for their support of the Obama portraits:

Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg;

Judith Kern and Kent Whealy;

Tommie L. Pegues and Donald A. Capoccia.

Courtesy of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery

Amy Sherald

Breonna Taylor, 2020

Oil on linen, 54 × 43 × 2 1/2 in.

The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky,

Museum, purchase made possible by a grant from the

Ford Foundation; and the Smithsonian National

Museum of African American History and Culture,

purchase made possible by a gift from Kate Capshaw

The Whitney Museum of American Art presents Amy Sherald: American Sublime, the artist’s debut solo exhibition at a New York museum and the most comprehensive showing of her work. American Sublime considers Amy Sherald’s powerful impact on contemporary art and culture, bringing together almost fifty paintings spanning her career from 2007 to the present. This exhibition positions Amy Sherald within the art historical tradition of American realism and figuration. In her paintings, she privileges Black Americans as her subjects, depicting everyday people and foregrounding a population often unseen or underrepresented in art history. The exhibition features early works, never or rarely seen by the public, and new work created specifically for the exhibition, along with iconic portraits of First Lady Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor—two of the most recognizable and significant paintings made by an American artist in recent years.

Amy Sherald places her work within the lineage of American realism and portraiture, alongside artists like Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, Alice Neel, and Andrew Wyeth—all represented in the Whitney Museum’s collection. The early American realists sought to capture the ethos of American places and people. However, there is an evident absence of Black Americans in theserepresentations. Deeply committed to expanding notions of American identity, Sherald’s compositions center her subjects, inviting viewers to meet them eye to eye and empathetically step into their imagined worlds. Employing props and iconography—a tractor, a beach ball, the American flag, a toy pony, or a teacup—the artist crafts universally relatable narratives, illuminating her subjects’ idiosyncrasies and their unique life experiences. By including symbols that resonate with common ideas of American identity and history, these portraits offer a more complete view of the complexity of twenty-first-century American life. The resulting body of work attests to the multiple facets of American identity, reinforcing Sherald’s profound belief that “images can change the world.”

Amy Sherald

If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It, 2019

Oil on linen, 130 × 108 × 2 1/2 in. (330.2 × 274.3 × 6.4 cm)

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2020.148

purchase with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee,

Sascha S. Bauer, Jack Cayre, Nancy Carrington Crown,

Nancy Poses, Laura Rapp, and Elizabeth Redleaf

Amy Sherald

What's precious inside of him does not care to be known by

the mind in ways that diminish its presence (All American), 2017

Oil on canvas, 54 × 43 × 2 1/2 in. (137.16 × 109.22 × 6.35 cm)

Private collection, courtesy Monique Meloche Gallery

Photograph by Joseph Hyde

Amy Sherald

Planes, Rockets, and the Spaces in Between, 2018

Oil on canvas, 100 x 67 x 2 1/2 in. (254 x 170.1 x 6.35 cm)

Baltimore Museum of Art, Purchase with exchange funds

from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.,

BMA 2018.80.

Photograph by Joseph Hyde

“It is a great honor to work with Amy Sherald, one of the most compelling, generous, and impactful artists of our time,” said Rujeko Hockley, Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum. “Her unwavering dedication and commitment to what she has called the ‘wonder of what it is to be a Black American’ is deeply felt, and I am thrilled to share her visionary work with our audiences.”

“American Sublime is a salve,” said artist Amy Sherald. “A call to remember our shared humanity and an insistence on being seen.”

“Few contemporary artists make images as gripping and indelible as Amy Sherald. Each of her paintings distills the essence of an individual while also conveying a broad sense of humanity,” said Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director. “Over the years that I’ve been in dialogue with Amy, we’ve visited works in the Whitney’s collection by Paul Cadmus, Barkley Henricks, and Edward Hopper, among so many American painters whose legacy she both inherits and extends. I can think of no better home for this important exhibition, which we’re honored to present.”

Amy Sherald

They Call Me Redbone,

but I'd Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake, 2009

Oil on canvas, 54 × 43 × 2 1/2 in. (137.16 × 109.22 × 6.35 cm)

National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC,

gift of Steven Scott, Baltimore, in honor of the artist and

the 25th anniversary of National Museum of Women in the Arts

Photograph by Ryan Stevenson

Amy Sherald

The Rabbit in the Hat, 2009

Oil on canvas, 54 × 43 × 2 1/2 in. (137.16 × 109.22 × 6.35 cm)

Green Family Art Foundation,

courtesy Adam Green Art Advisory

Photograph by Christina Hussey

Amy Sherald

Hangman, 2007

Oil on canvas, 100 × 67 × 2 1/2 in. (254 × 170.18 × 6.35 cm)

Collection of Sheryll Cashin and Marque Chambliss

Photograph by Kelvin Bulluck

Amy Sherald: American Sublime – Exhibition Overview

American Sublime explores the work of one of the most preeminent artists of our time. Arranged chronologically, the exhibition begins with Amy Sherald’s poetic early portraits and leads into the distinct and striking figure paintings for which she is best known. In her intentional privileging of Black Americans as her subjects, Amy Sherald tells stories of a population underrepresented in traditional portraiture. Influenced by her childhood fascination with family photographs—a black-and-white portrait of her grandmother in particular—Sherald aims to portray Black people in quiet, authentic moments. She chooses subjects who vary in age, gender, and identity, placing them in scenes from everyday life to share perspectives she wants to see depicted in the world.

Amy Sherald identifies as an American realist. She tells stories of the American experience through her paintings, much like artists Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. It wasn’t until she saw a painting with a Black person in it at a museum as a child that she realized she hadn’t yet seen herself represented in art history—a pivotal moment that continues to impact her career. Sherald’s portraits contribute new narratives to the collective American story by recasting figures in archetypal American roles, like a cowboy, a beauty queen, or a farmer. While Amy Sherald acknowledges the political dimension of her work, she wants her impact to reach beyond that. Amy Sherald invites viewers to challenge established preconceptions about race and engage with the universal stories told in her portraits, revealing the richness and complexity of humanity. Her signature gray palette for skin tones deemphasizes the focus on race, expanding her subjects’ narratives and demonstrating that there is more to an individual than can be contained in a single image or facet of their identity.

Amy Sherald

Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), 2014

Oil on canvas, 54 × 43 × 2 1/2 in. (137.16 × 109.22 × 6.35 cm)

Private Collection

Photograph by Joseph Hyde

Amy Sherald

The Bathers, 2015

Oil on canvas, 72 1/8 × 67 × 2 1/2 in. (183.2 × 170.2 cm)

Private Collection

Photograph by Joseph Hyde

Amy Sherald

A Midsummer Afternoon Dream, 2021

Oil on canvas, 106 × 101 × 2 1/2 in. (269.24 × 256.54 × 6.35 cm)

Private Collection

Photograph by Joseph Hyde

Photography is an important element of Sherald’s creative process, serving as her sketchbook and the foundation for her compositions. With the exception of her two commissioned portraits of First Lady Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, the artist selects each sitter based on their inherent qualities, such as poise, style, or wit—what she calls their “ineffable spark.” During photoshoots, Amy Sherald allows her models to pose organically, allowing for the synergy to build between them so that she can authentically capture their essence. She curates each scene and styles the subjects in clothing that speaks to the narrative she wishes to craft, creating a sense of magical realism. In titling her paintings, Amy Sherald often draws inspiration from Black women writers and poets like Toni Morrison and Lucille Clifton, reinterpreting their poetry to develop different contexts around the interior worlds of her subjects. Through her explorations, Amy Sherald redefines common beliefs about American identity, weaving a broader visual story of history and belonging. Ultimately, she portrays everyday Black people as individuals, not in contention or inherently politicized, but simply existing.

In addition to the paintings on view in the galleries, Amy Sherald presents work on the facade of the Horatio Street building across from the Museum. The newly commissioned work, Four Ways of Being, brings together four portraits by the artist—some never before seen in New York—and explores the intersection of past, present, and future with each capturing a distinct way of existing in the world.

The Whitney presentation of this exhibition is organized by Rujeko Hockley, Arnhold Associate Curator, with David Lisbon, curatorial assistant. Amy Sherald: American Sublime is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and curated by Sarah Roberts, the former Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Head of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA

Amy Sherald: American Sublime is accompanied by a publication—the artist’s first comprehensive monograph—representing the broad sweep of Sherald’s painting practice and her key influences and inspirations. Contributors include exhibition curator Sarah Roberts, Elizabeth Alexander, Dario Calmese, Rhea Combs, and Deborah Willis. Amy Sherald: American Sublime is published by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with Yale University Press.

THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

99 Gansevoort Street, New York City

whitney.org

03/04/25

Mary Corse @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

Mary Corse

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

April 3 - May 17, 2025

MARY CORSE

Untitled (White Multiband With White Sides, Beveled), 2023

Acrylic and glass microspheres on canvas, 58 x 96 x 4 1/2 inches

“My interest is in more of what I think of as pure abstraction … just as in mathematics, you’ll make a formula. . . asking a question into an invisible world.” –Mary Corse, 2011

Locks Gallery presents its first exhibition with California-based artist MARY CORSE (b. 1945). This presentation features a selection of recent ethereal White Light paintings, a body of work she has been making since 1968.

Mary Corse is one of the few women associated with the 1960s Light and Space movement in Southern California. Her luminous White Light paintings are made of glass microspheres, an industrial material which refracts light and shifts in appearance according to the viewer’s position and environment. Prompted by her studies of quantum physics in the late 1960s, Corse was searching for a way to put light into her paintings. Driving on the Pacific Coast Highway at night, she was captivated by the changing luminosity of the street signs and highway lines. She began combining these tiny glass beads with acrylic paint to create the illusion of light as both the subject and material of her work.

Each of Corse’s paintings is composed of geometries with precise proportions, prompting specific physical and metaphysical experiences of light. The surface of her paintings are rarely pristine; visible brushstrokes reflect the physical labor and systemic application behind each painting. Some works feature vertical bands, activating the verticality of the viewer’s stance. The luminosity of each band shifts in appearance through space, activating a subjective experience of light. Stripes seem to appear and disappear. At times, the surface appears flat while at others, it emits an ethereal light, seemingly radiating from within the canvas. “Nothing’s static in the universe. So why make a static painting?” says Mary Corse. “It’s an outer light, but when you relate to it, it becomes an inner light,” says the artist.

With over five decades of experimentation with her White Light paintings, Mary Corse proves her unrivaled exploration into the abstract nature of human perception. In her paintings, materiality and light is both absent and present, visible and invisible. As put by Art historian Drew Hammond, Corse’s paintings “reveal innumerable oscillating variations between these two poles of unity and multiplicity.”

This inaugural exhibition celebrates Corse’s dedicated exploration of light in her subtle and powerful paintings. Her ongoing and evolving White Light paintings challenge world views based on external fixity and objectivity, honoring the power of subjective individual experiences, embodied perception, and change.

MARY CORSE (b. 1945) lives and works in Topanga Canyon, California. In 2018, Mary Corse: A Survey in Light was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and in 2019 traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her work has been exhibited worldwide and is found in permanent collections including the Dia Art Foundation, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Louise Fishman @ Van Doren Waxter, NYC - "always stand ajar" Exhibition

Louise Fishman

always stand ajar

Van Doren Waxter, New York

April 10 – June 27, 2025

LOUISE FISHMAN

Loose the Flood, 2009

Oil on jute, 66 x 39 in (167.6 x 99.1 cm) (LF 48)

Van Doren Waxter presents LOUISE FISHMAN: always stand ajar, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by the venerable American painter organized with the Louise Fishman Foundation. This is the gallery’s first exhibition of the artist since the announcement of representation in 2024. Accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog that includes an essay by poet Nathan Kernan, this exhibition highlights Fishman’s works titled after Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens’ poems and the artist’s long-standing curiosity about the synthesis of paintings and written language.

Over six decades, Louise Fishman dedicated her career to the pursuit of original, complex, and sincere imagery. As painter Amy Sillman wrote, Fishman was “a serious-ass painter” who held herself to the highest standard of experiment and self-reflection in her studio, tackling each painting with the fullest intention to connect with the surface, the paint, and the movement of her body. Alongside her rigorous and disciplined studio practice, Louise Fishman nurtured friendships with writers and activists such as Bertha Harris, Jill Johnston, and Esther Newton, who created pioneering works in lesbian and queer studies which informed the multifariousness of Fishman’s identity as an artist. While Louise Fishman resonated with the gestural and geometric language of abstract painting, she persistently challenged the boundaries of Abstract Expressionism and averted the disposition towards the removal of personhood in the movement. She maintained consciousness of her state of being, in her own words, “a working-class Jewish Lesbian” and of the impossibility of separating the paintings from her greater experience as a human. Fishman’s energetic yet precisely organized brushstrokes are an advertent extension of her athleticism, caring hands, and earnest inquiry into the mystery of what makes a painting.

The exhibition showcases Fishman’s refined and magisterial works from the final twenty years of her life, which she titled after phrases from poems by American poets Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. She was first introduced to poetry by her paternal aunt, Razel Kapustin, who was also a painter. During her time at Tyler School of Fine Arts, Fishman learned from poet Gerald Stern, with whom she became lifelong friends. She took inspiration from the works of poets, as Grace Hartigan did with Frank O’Hara and Jane Freilicher with John Ashbery. Intuitively and profoundly, Fishman understood the pictorial roots of language and the parallel between text and brushstroke, the legible and illegible.

LOUISE FISHMAN was born in 1939 in Philadelphia. In 1956, she began studying art at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, then at Stella Elkins Tyler School of Art, where she earned her BFA in Painting and Printmaking and a B.S. in Art Education in 1963. She completed her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana and headed directly to New York in 1965, where she lived and worked until her passing in 2021. Her work is represented in many public collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, PA; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; and the Jewish Museum, New York, among many others.

VAN DOREN WAXTER, NEW YORK

23 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021

vandorenwaxter.com

02/04/25

Richard Serra: The Final Works @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Richard Serra

The Final Works

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Until 26 April 2025

RICHARD SERRA

Casablanca #3, 2022

Hand-applied oil stick, etching ink and silica

on Igarashi 430gsm handmade paper

Paper and Image: 167.9 x 152.9 cm - 66 1/8 x 60 1/4 inches.

Edition of 27

Marking the first anniversary of Richard Serra’s death at the age of 85, Cristea Roberts Gallery presents the final works made by the artist.

The first complete showing of these works outside the US focuses on two series of prints made using black oil stick. Serra, one of the most significant artists of his generation, was known for monumental steel sculptures. However, his explorations of form, mass and gravity informed every aspect of his art, including his works on paper.

Casablanca 1-6, 2022 and Hitchcock I-III, 2024 mark the culmination of over fifty years of printmaking. Although described as prints, none of these works passed through a press and the methods used are unlike those of traditional printmaking; Serra’s chosen media undermines our understanding of what constitutes an editioned work.

Each work was made using oil stick, a combination of pigment, linseed oil, and melted wax. The mixture was moulded into large cylindrical sticks, then pressed down into a meat grinder and blended in an industrial dough mixer with silica.

The mixture was applied in layers, by a gloved hand, directly onto handmade paper, pushing and rubbing in a downward direction. Each layer required weeks of drying time before an additional coat could be applied. As a result, each impression varies in its construction.

For each work, layer upon layer of black oil stick was built up so that an intensely textured and rich three-dimensional surface emerges, evoking a large void. This imposing effect of black absorbing and reflecting light, dominates Serra’s prints. When making works on paper Serra remained committed to using a single palette of black to investigate weight, stability, and density.

Richard Serra commented “Black is a property, not a quality. In terms of weight, black is heavier, creates a larger volume, holds itself in a more compressed field. It is comparable to forging.”

The mass of black in each work, which almost fills the entire sheets in Casablanca and Hitchcock, is relieved by thin areas of paper that appear to rise or emerge from curved edges and corners. Serra examines tension and gravity through this unequal balance of heavy mass and handmade Japanese paper. The paper support almost appears precarious; each impression of Casablanca, measuring over 150cm in width, weighs nearly 10 kilograms.

Richard Serra was interested in how an artwork not only exists in space but reorientates it. His sculptures created environments that had to be walked through or around to be fully experienced. Serra’s printmaking extends these investigations, interrogating the physical relationship of mass and the flat surface, and the viewers relationship to it.

The exhibition also features examples of earlier uses of black oil stick and etchings by the artist dating from 2004, and a display of the tools used to create these groundbreaking works.

Richard Serra: The Final Works demonstrates how the artist’s radical techniques and exceptional approach to making editions, remains singular in the history of printmaking.

Since presenting the first exhibition in the UK devoted to Serra’s prints in 2013, Cristea Roberts Gallery has continued to exclusively exhibit the artist’s editions in Europe. The works on show were developed by Richard Serra with Gemini G.E.L., an artists’ workshop and publisher in Los Angeles, where Serra made all his editions, a collaboration that lasted for over fifty years.

RICHARD SERRA - BRIOGRAPHY

Richard Serra (1938 - 2024) was born in San Francisco, USA. He lived and worked in New York, and the North Fork of Long Island, and Nova Scotia. From 1957 to 1961 Serra studied at the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara, and from 1961 to 1964 at Yale University, Connecticut, where he worked with Josef Albers on Albers seminal book, Interaction of Color (New Haven, 1963). His first solo exhibition was held at Galleria La Salita, Rome, in 1966 and the Pasadena Art Museum staged his first solo museum exhibition in 1970.

Serra’s large-scale, site-specific sculptures, featuring monumental arcs, spirals, and ellipses can be found all over the world. Selected solo exhibitions and retrospectives include Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel (2017); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2017); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2014); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2011); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2011); Menil Collection, Houston (2011); Monumenta, Grand Palais, Paris (2008); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2008); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (2006); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2005); Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples (2004); Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis (2003). His works are housed in major collections all over the world.

Richard Serra participated in international exhibitions including Documenta, Kassel (1972, 1977, 1982, and 1987); the Venice Biennale (1980, 1984, 2001, and 2013); and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual and Biennial exhibitions (1968, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1995, and 2006).

Richard Serra was the recipient of many notable prizes and awards. In 2015, he was awarded Les Insignes de Chevalier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur, France, and in 2018 he received the J. Paul Getty Medal, which honors extraordinary contributions to the practice, understanding, and support of the arts. Prior to this he was also awarded Orden de las Artes y las Letras de España, Spain in 2008 and Orden pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste, Federal Republic of Germany in 2002.

Richard Serra passed away aged 85 on 26 March 2024 in New York, USA.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY, LONDON

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

www.cristearoberts.com

Related Posts:

In English

Richard Serra: Every Which Way, David Zwirner, New York, November 7 – December 14, 2024

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 13 – August 28, 2011

Richard Serra: Torqued Ellipses, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, September 25, 1997 - June 14, 1998

En Français

Richard Serra : Casablanca, Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris, 14 mars - 30 avril 2024

Richard Serra : Clara Clara, 1983 , Musée du Louvre, Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, 14 avril – 3 novembre 2008

Richard Serra: The Final Works

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, 13 March - 26 April 2025