WANAFOTO: 11/2025

21/11/25

Friedrich Kunath @ Pace Gallery, NYC - 'Aimless Love' Exhibition

Friedrich Kunath: Aimless Love

Pace Gallery, New York

Through December 20, 2025

Friedrich Kunath

You Told That Joke Twice, 2024-2025

Photography by Evan Walsh

Pace presents an exhibition of new paintings by Friedrich Kunath at its 510 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This is the artist’s first solo show in the city since 2019 and his debut presentation with the gallery, which began representing him in May 2025. The exhibition coincides with the release of a new monograph from Monacelli tracing Kunath’s work from the last 30 years. This publication features a new essay by Naomi Fry, staff writer at The New Yorker.

Known for his layered, lyrical work across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video, the German-born, Los Angeles-based artist reimagines rich and diverse source material in cathartic images and objects. Many of Kunath’s paintings depict vibrant landscapes of worldly beauty, often incorporating poetic phrases and quotations from music, film, and literature. Drawing inspiration from Romanticism, popular culture, and his own personal history, he imbues his art with a myriad of seemingly disparate references and resonances, navigating the murky spaces between irony and sincerity, tragedy and comedy. Thereby, Kunath sees himself as a composer of ideas and images across mediums, working fragments into artworks that become worlds unto themselves.

His first presentation at Pace in New York, Aimless Love, meditates on coming and going, free from intent, with aimless momentum. The works are inspired by the artist’s memories of listening to music while traveling by train or car as a child, looking out the window and watching the world pass by. With his new paintings, Friedrich Kunath aims to immortalize the sense of total presence in those memories and experiences, while acknowledging the paradox of trying to hold onto an inherently fleeting, ephemeral feeling.

Installed in ascending and descending orientations that evoke an airplane’s trajectories during takeoff and landing, Kunath’s latest paintings lean more heavily into a meditative, contemplative space than his past bodies of work. These filmic, deeply personal compositions depict expansive seas and crashing waves, rugged cliffsides, scenic roads, and sweeping vistas, exploring moments of connection and loneliness, love and longing, absurdity and wonder. Seen through the windshield or mirrors of a car, the outside world takes on new resonances in the new works. In I Hope Future Me Is Happy (2024–25), a car rounds the bend of a mountain highway, about to disappear but still in sight. In another, a plane glides through a golden sky with the setting sun blazing through its windows. With Have Love, Will Travel (2025), Friedrich Kunath situates the viewer on the passenger side of a car, a decision that reflects his view of his artistic role.

Kunath’s process for these paintings brings forth a dialogue between the unconscious and the representational image. At the start, he embeds abstractions and writings into wet impasto on his canvases. These underside paintings are made in isolation of the image that is created on top, but, in the end, there is a miraculous synchronicity between the two layers— his writings in the dried, textural impasto are legible in his finished paintings, bringing new meanings and juxtapositions to his compositions. With this “voice coming from behind the image,” Kunath says, he invites the viewer to make their own readings of the work.

In addition to paintings, Aimless Love includes a new sculpture titled Following the Feeling (2025), comprised of one pair of dress shoes, shoelaces, wire, and nylon string. This work is a more somber, existential take on Kunath’s 2009 installation LA Trainer (Permanent Reminder Of A Temporary Feeling)—a new iteration of an artwork that he produced early in his career.

Beyond his exhibition at Pace in New York, Kunath’s work can be found in the collections of the city’s Museum of Modern Art and the Marieluise Hessel Collection at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson.

Artist Friedrich Kunath

Friedrich Kunath (b. 1974, Chemnitz, Germany) works across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video to create resonant, evocative, and often melancholy compositions. Based in Los Angeles since 2007, Friedrich Kunath creates work grounded in his experiences on the West Coast of the United States and his enduring relationship with Europe. His art combines references to German Romanticism and American popular culture, and it is informed, in part, by his interests in music, tennis, cars, and the practice of collecting. Kunath's paintings depict vibrant landscapes of otherworldly beauty, and he often incorporates poetic phrases and quotations from music or film into his canvases, forging a visual language distinguished by interplays of wit, emotional depth, and cultural memory. The artist graduated from Braunschweig University of Arts, Germany, in 1998.

Recent solo exhibitions of his work include Friedrich Kunath: Coming Home Was as Beautiful as Going Away, KINDLCentre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2023); Friedrich Kunath: I Remain Exhausted, Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium (2024); Friedrich Kunath: I Need Solitude, But I Also Need You, Nassima Landau, Tel Aviv, Israel (2024); Friedrich Kunath: AT THIS POINT IN MY LIFE (I'LL HAVE THE CALAMARI), G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig, Germany (2024); and Friedrich Kunath: One Day I’ll Follow the Byrds (Tutto Pasta), Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2024).

Friedrich Kunath’s work is held in prominent public collections worldwide, including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, among others.

PACE GALLERY NEW YORK

510 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Friedrich Kunath: Aimless Love

Pace Gallery, New York, November 7 – December 20, 2025

20/11/25

We AmeRícans @ Claire Oliver Gallery, NYC - Exhibition Curated by Ruben Natal-San Miguel - A multivocal portrait of Puerto Rican identity and its diasporic reach

We AmeRícans

Claire Oliver Gallery, New York

Through January 3, 2026

Dave Ortiz

Gallo, 2025

Acrylic on Canvas, 24 x 24 inches | 60.96 x 60.96 cm

Dave Ortiz

Barnito Vicente, 2025

Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches | 60.96 x 60.96 cm

Claire Oliver Gallery presents We AmeRícans, a group exhibition curated by acclaimed photographer and curator Ruben Natal-San Miguel, on view through January 3, 2026. Opening during National Puerto Rican Heritage Month, the exhibition brings together multiple generations of Puerto Rican and Puerto Rican-descendant artists whose work reflects the history, resilience, and cultural contributions of the Puerto Rican community in New York City and beyond. The exhibition title is inspired by the celebrated 1985 poem AmeRícan by Tato Laviera, a pioneering Nuyorican poet whose work embraced cultural hybridity, identity, and pride. We AmeRícans features artists whose practices span painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, textiles, and mixed media, creating a multivocal portrait of Puerto Rican identity and its diasporic reach.

“This exhibition is a celebration and an act of preservation, documenting the creativity, strength, and ongoing impact of Puerto Rican artists across generations,” says curator and artist Ruben Natal-San Miguel. “Through their work, we see not just personal narratives, but the collective story of migration, labor, resilience, and cultural pride.”

Claire Oliver adds, “We are honored to present this important exhibition during National Puerto Rican Heritage Month, continuing our mission to support artists whose work expands our understanding of history, identity, and community.”

Ruben Natal-San Miguel

Home Ruins, La Perla, Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2017

Huracán Architecture Series

Color serigraph/photo silkscreen on canvas, 24 x 36 in

Among the participating artists are internationally celebrated figures such as Carlos Betancourt, known for his performative installations staged worldwide, including a major takeover of South Beach during Art Basel Miami Beach 2024. James Cuebas is a member of the Rafael Tufiño Printmaking Workshop in East Harlem, under the direction of artist Nitza Tufiño, and a member of the Lower East Side Printshop. He is presently working and experimenting with the following techniques: gum bichromate, lithography, silkscreen, and monoprinting. Enoc Perez, a contemporary Puerto Rican Artist best known for his paintings and oil stick renditions of Modernist architecture, depicts his subject matter as a “witness” to historically relevant locations and events, while pioneering artist Nitza Tufiño, co-founder of El Museo del Barrio and Taller Boricua Printmaking Studio, grounds the exhibition in a lineage of cultural activism and institution building. Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, an interdisciplinary Afro-Latinx artist whose practice draws from European portraiture, comics, performance, and folkloric traditions to confront race, trauma, and healing, has exhibited at major institutions including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, and the Manifesta and Performa biennials.

Elsa María Meléndez

Milk, 2020

Canvas with silkscreen and embroidery, 96 x 81 x 15 in

Erica Morales

You're Gonna Lose The House, 2024

Spray paint, fabric collage and pencil on paper, 30 x 22 in

The exhibition also highlights artists who have been central to expanding the visual language of Puerto Rican identity. Textile artist Elsa María Meléndez, winner of the Smithsonian’s People’s Choice Award at American Portraiture Today, presents works that weave personal and political narratives. Erica Morales, recipient of the 2022 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, reflects on her dual role as educator and practicing artist in New York City. Painter Beatriz Williams, the youngest participant, bridges the divide between her Puerto Rican roots and her family in New York, evoking a poignant longing for the Island’s traditions and histories. Felix Plaza, meanwhile, makes his gallery debut, offering audiences the discovery of a fresh and urgent voice in printmaking and painting.

Anchoring the exhibition is the curatorial vision of Ruben Natal-San Miguel, an acclaimed photographer whose own works are housed in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Studio Museum of Harlem, and El Museo del Barrio. His perspective as both artist and cultural historian brings together these intergenerational practices to tell a story of migration, labor, resilience, and cultural pride.

The exhibition draws historical grounding from the Great Migration of Puerto Ricans to New York City, a transformative wave beginning in the mid-20th century when hundreds of thousands migrated from Puerto Rico to the mainland. Factors such as economic hardship, increased job opportunities in New York, and the accessibility of air travel fueled this movement, making New York City the largest Puerto Rican cultural center outside of the island. By the mid-1960s, more than one million Puerto Ricans had settled in the United States, with the majority residing in New York City.

We AmeRícans also pays tribute to Puerto Rican women who were instrumental in the garment industry of New York City, particularly in the Lower East Side’s garment district, where their skill, creativity, and resilience shaped an industry and provided economic stability for their families and communities.

CLAIRE OLIVER GALLERY

2288 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, New York, NY 10030

www.claireoliver.com

Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Seeing Silence: The Paintings of

Helene Schjerfbeck

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

December 5, 2025 – April 5, 2026

Helene Schjerfbeck (Finnish, 1862‒1946)

Self-Portrait, 1912

Oil on canvas, 17 1/8 × 16 1/2 in. (43.5 × 42 cm)

Finnish National Gallery Collection,

Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki (A-2016-51)

Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Yehia Eweis

Beloved in Nordic countries for her highly original style, Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946) is relatively unknown to the rest of the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck is the first major exhibition in the United States dedicated to the artist’s work. Featuring nearly 60 works on canvas—including generous loans from the Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum, other Finnish museums, and private collections in Finland and Sweden—the exhibition will be on view December 5, 2025, through April 5, 2026.

Born in Helsinki, Helene Schjerfbeck witnessed civil war and two World Wars as well as the burgeoning of Finland’s national identity following independence from Russian rule in 1917. Despite many personal hardships, Helene Schjerfbeck never wavered in her determination to pursue her passion, painting for most of her life in a remote Nordic country, far removed from Europe’s centers of cultural upheaval and renewal. She once said resolutely, “All that I desire to do is to paint… there is always something to conquer.”

“Seeing Silence highlights the work of an extraordinary artist who, though long celebrated in Norway and Sweden as the most outstanding female painter of her time, has not yet achieved well-deserved visibility on this side of the Atlantic,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “The exhibition invites audiences here to experience Helene Schjerfbeck’s mesmerizing works and distinctive vision for the first time at a major U.S. museum, showcasing the remarkable perspective and introspection of an artist wholly dedicated to her craft over the course of eight decades.”

Dita Amory, Robert Lehman Curator in Charge of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Met, said, “Painting in remote Finland without recourse to broader culture and the exchange of contemporary ideas, Schjerfbeck created her own language every day at her easel by sheer force of will. Seeing Silence looks beyond art history’s cultural mainstream to one woman who overcame immense struggles to produce a powerful body of work, highlighting her rightful place in the story of modernism.”

Seeing Silence traces Schjerfbeck’s artistic development from her early years in Helsinki to the end of her life in Sweden, illuminating the artist’s evolving style from traditional subjects in a naturalist vein to a painterly language of spare, often densely worked imagery. Schjerfbeck sanded and scratched through layers of paint, sometimes exposing the rough weave of her canvases as she experimented with her materials. As a valuable voice among the many strands of modernism at play throughout the world in the early 20th century, Schjerfbeck expressed a unique visual language that deserves recognition in the codified narratives of art history.

The exhibition unfolds thematically, beginning with an exploration of Schjerfbeck’s early years. Recognized as a prodigy at a young age, she won several grants to study in Paris and from there she took excursions to Concarneau in Brittany and later St Ives in Cornwall. Many of her early figure studies were painted in the art schools of Paris, while her more sentimental genre subjects reflect her rural travels. Schooled among artists working in naturalism, she created figure painting and landscapes that followed in step. Within a few years, she was showing paintings at the Salon, Paris’s annual art exhibition, and testing the boundaries of conservative painting.

In the next section, several large-scale canvases commemorate Finnish heritage. After centuries of Swedish occupation, followed by Russian rule, Finland was affirming its cultural identity. A history painting won Schjerfbeck a grant to study in Paris. Later, her compelling allusion to the Jewish festival of Sukkot earned her entrée to the annual state-sponsored Salon in 1883.

In 1902, Helene Schjerfbeck moved to Hyvinkää, a small railroad town several hours north of Helsinki, to care for her aging mother. The isolation of a rural setting enabled her to paint without the disruptions of city life. In modest accommodations and without access to professional models, she painted some of her most affecting canvases, often single figures dressed in black with little color to interrupt their dark silhouettes. Her mother, despite having no interest in her daughter’s vocation, was co-opted to model on several occasions. By this point in her career, Helene Schjerfbeck had radically redefined her aesthetic language. Soft brushwork characterizes these quiet paintings. Whether sitting or standing, reading or sewing, her subjects fill the picture plane and avert their gaze. Often bathed in raking light, her figures appear lost in thought and lost in time. Helene Schjerfbeck investigates formal language—light, space, volume—not the soul of the sitter. She told her models to look away as she painted them, demanded their silence, and refused to show them the end result. Essential to her practice at the start of a painting, the models were dismissed when Schjerfbeck’s inventive powers took charge.

A subsequent section presents a sequence of portraits from the 1920s and 1930s. Helene Schjerfbeck rarely noted a sitter’s name in her titles, and it is very likely that she suppressed her sitters’ identities for the same reasons she eschewed mimetic portraiture: in the few instances when she strove to transfer a likeness to canvas, her efforts often frustrated her until she got it right. Many of her sitters sport modish dress, evidence of Schjerfbeck’s lifelong interest in French fashion. After reading a 1912 article in an art magazine, she fell for the paintings of El Greco (1541–1614). Though she had no access to the originals, she worked up rather stylized transcriptions of his Madonnas and other sacred subjects, a preoccupation that intensified during World War II.

In 1894, the Finnish Art Society sent Schjerfbeck to Vienna and Florence to copy works by the painters Holbein, Velázquez, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, and Giorgione. While in Italy, she painted several ethereal landscapes of Fiesole, perched on a hill above Florence. There, no doubt, she studied the beautiful yet degraded frescoes decorating the city’s churches.

Spanning 50 years of Schjerfbeck’s career, still-life paintings illustrate the artist’s shifting creative language. The Red Apples (1915), unique in her career for its glowing palette, demonstrates the artist’s distinctive technique of layering and removing paint to achieve complex structures. By the 1930s, the artist had reduced her still-life palette to more somber tones, exploiting her fruits to further her surface experiments. In her final still life, painted in 1944, blackening apples metaphorically reference the devastation of World War II and the chaos of upheaval.

Helene Schjerfbeck interrogated her likeness in 40 self-portraits across her lifetime. Her canvases trace the arc of her artistic development as they materialize her physical growth and decline. From youthful expressions in a naturalistic language to facial distortions that anticipate the haunting finale of this series, Schjerfbeck captures her self-image with increasing idiosyncrasy and self-confidence.

In Schjerfbeck’s final years, as war raged throughout Finland, her art dealer persuaded her to relocate to Sweden. From 1944 to her death in 1946, she resided in a hotel in Stockholm. There she painted 20 of her 40 self-portraits. Few other series in the history of modern art articulate mortality with such candor, as the artist used thin, glazed color to produce monochrome representations that are at once haunting and magnificent meditations on the effects of age and illness.

Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck is curated by Dita Amory, Robert Lehman Curator in Charge of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Met. Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff, director of the Ateneum Art Museum, is the consulting curator.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

This exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with the Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum. The exhibition is made possible by Elsa A. Brule.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 964

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028

www.metmuseum.org

19/11/25

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey @ ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia - Univesity of Pennsylvania - A Site-Specific Installation

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey

ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia

Through August 9, 2026

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey

Photo courtesy of the artist and Maharam

In July 2025, the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (ICA), unveiled a striking new public artwork as part of ICA’s annual Entryways commission by visionary artist Xenobia Bailey. Spanning 400 square feet, the site-specific installation transforms ICA’s façade with a “Funktional” design and visionary illusion inspired by domestic crochet, natural cosmologies, masquerading culture, and local Philadelphia legend Sun Ra’s artistic philosophy. Entryways: Xenobia Bailey was developed in partnership with Maharam, North America’s leading creator of textiles for interiors, and is on view through August 9, 2026.

“Entryways: Xenobia Bailey continues our partnership with Maharam to transform ICA’s entrance into a space for experimentation,” said Hallie Ringle, ICA’s Daniel and Brett Sundheim Chief Curator and Interim Director. “ICA champions exploration and public engagement in meaningful ways, and local artist Xenobia Bailey’s site-specific work will do just that, inspiring visitors and redefining the way we remix, and they encounter, our space.”

For the Entryways commission, Xenobia Bailey began by crocheting decorative elements of vibrant yarn, before draping these crochet afghans over a ladder and photographing them. These images were digitally composed into the work’s centerpiece: a figure of Afrofuturist musician Sun Ra, whose Philadelphia-based jazz group Sun Ra Arkestra embodied a holistic Black cosmology and philosophy. Bailey drew inspiration from masquerading traditions—used to channel ancestral spirits—and memories of homemakers such as her mother, who transformed household furniture pieces by draping colorful crochet textiles over them. Astrological symbols orbit the figure and reappear across the building’s surface. Later this year, Xenobia Bailey will also introduce a digital element to her process for the first time. An Augmented Reality (AR) feature extend the installation into an interactive realm and virtually suspend the masquerade designs, underscoring their multidimensionality and further evolving a “Funktional” Black aesthetics into the future. Deploying intuitive, organic improvisation, Xenobia Bailey translates the frequencies of Sun Ra’s music into a symphony of crochet stitches, colors, and forms that come to life through AR. Honoring Sun Ra’s ability to bring the frequency of a Black cosmic aesthetic into material culture and lifestyle and using textiles as animating masks that energize space, Bailey’s Entryways design reimagines ICA’s façade as that of Sun Ra’s spirit welcoming visitors and passersby.

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey

Photo courtesy of the artist and Maharam

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey

Photo courtesy of the artist and Maharam

“In this expansive new commission, Xenobia Bailey draws on the legacies of Black utilitarian makers, including her own maternal lineage, from whom she inherited her ‘Funky’ textile aesthetics. She brings her medium of crochet, which she associates with domestic and sharecropping textile craft, into conversation with the architecture of ICA,” remarks Denise Ryner, ICA’s Andrea B. Laporte Curator. “Bailey carries this spatial expansion into the all-encompassing experimental cosmos of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, who surveys Philadelphia from above. Bailey adds to this Funk-tional orbit a towering masquerader.”

Entryways is a continuation of Bailey’s ongoing, multi-part, research project Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk, a series she began in 1999 to build a distinctly African American aesthetic—one she experienced in her childhood, but had not seen represented in her academic industrial design education. Bailey’s body of crochet work, developed since 1984, stands as a testament to evolving textile material culture “funktioning” simultaneously as a source of sanctuary, comfort, historical preservation, and cultural identity. Born in Seattle and raised in rural and urban Washington, Bailey’s early life was shaped by Northwest forestry seasonal rhythms and land and stream-based living, guided by tools like the farmer’s almanac. Informed by this upbringing of being in sync with the natural environment, as well as thorough research on independent historical and contemporary radical elite Black communities, Bailey's work contributes to an ongoing dialogue on the material culture of funk, and emphasizes research, experimentation, development, and sustainable socio-economic models.

Artist Xenobia Bailey

Internationally recognized artist Xenobia Bailey (b. 1955, Seattle, WA) produces artworks and installations inspired by urban material culture and rural African-American homemakers. A student of ethnomusicology and industrial design, Bailey is well known for her crocheted sculptural headwear, wall hangings, and tents that articulate the utilitarian material crafts of the funk counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s. Using fiber and found items as her primary materials, Bailey produces a range of pieces that frequently riff on traditional home furnishings with inventive twists of color and texture.

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey is commissioned by The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (ICA) and developed in partnership with Maharam as an initiative of Maharam Digital Projects. The installation is curated by Denise Ryner, ICA’s Andrea B. Laporte Curator.

ICA PHILADELPHIA - UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

118 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104

icaphila.org

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey

Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (ICA)

July 12, 2025 –– August 9, 2026

Ana Mendieta @ Marian Goodman Gallery, NYC - 'Back to the Source' Exhibition

Ana Mendieta

Back to the Source

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Through 17 January 2026

Ana Mendieta

Untitled: Silueta Series, 1977

Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery

Plugging into Mexico was like going back to the source, being able to get some magic just by being there. – Ana Mendieta

Marian Goodman Gallery presents Back to the Source, the gallery inaugural exhibition of the work of Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) which is on view in their Tribeca space through 17 January 2026.

Back to the Source presents seminal works from 1972-1985, a prolific period of Mendieta’s work, spanning stages of time spent in Iowa, Mexico, and Cuba, including ten digitally remastered films, photographic works, newly available photographic prints and drawings, and ephemeral sculpture.

Ana Mendieta was a pioneer and innovator whose oeuvre spanned painting, drawing, photography, film/video, sculpture, and site-specific works. Her singular interventions in the landscape embraced nature and disrupted societal conventions. Exiled from her homeland of Cuba where she was born in 1948, Ana Mendieta spent her childhood and formative years in Iowa, in the 1960s. She later studied art at the University of Iowa, first as a painter, then later in performative art, a move which would ultimately change her approach as an artist. Her body of work testifies to a passionate engagement with themes of exile and displacement, reconnecting with the earth, and the search for belonging and origin, through power, magic and the universal.

Creating a rich and diverse body of work that included ephemeral sculptures, Ana Mendieta, in her film and photographic works, captures time and process through direct actions which transport her beyond conventional materials to the realm of the intangible and impermanent, using nature as a collaborator. With her body as material, and driven by nature’s symbolic meaning, she sought to integrate power, magic and knowledge into her work, using natural materials as well as the four elements –earth, air, fire, and water. Feathers, flowers, branches, moss, fireworks and gunpowder were easily accessible and were often part of ritual practices to return her to the land and connect her to the universal. These obsessive acts of reasserting my ties with the earth is really a manifestation of my thirst for being. In essence my works are the reactivation of primeval beliefs. The photographs become the afterimage of primordial remembrances at work within the human psyche. – Ana Mendieta, Proposal for Rome Prize Fellowship, 1983

Using the earth as a sculptural medium – which she molded, impressed, and burned – Ana Mendieta conveyed notions of existence, resurgence and renewal through site-inclusive works that were exquisitely ethereal and transitory. Contemplative and existential meditations on mortality and the natural world, these works were part of living processes.

An interest in themes of transformation – birth, life, death, regeneration – is evident throughout her oeuvre, and can be seen in Ñañigo Burial, 1976, installed in the first floor gallery. Comprised of black candles which originally outlined the contours of the artist’s body, its title points to the influence of the Abakuá society of Cuba, also known as Ñañiguismo, which offers spiritual protection to its members. Drawn to this and Afro Cuban Santeria traditions, which blend the Yoruba religion of West Africa, Roman Catholicism, and Spiritism, Ana Mendieta sought magic and the divine to regenerate life within her work and through nature.

Ana Mendieta developed the Silueta Series from 1973-1980, first inspired by a visit to Mexico, in a signature period of expression in which she utilizes her own body, prior to removing herself from it. Moving away from traditional notions of sculpture as object, and towards the experience of living process and geological time as a medium, Ana Mendieta rendered silhouettes through hieroglyphs of imprints, outlines, and absences within the earth, which were left to erode and return to it.

Their timeless memory is preserved through related photographic works, such as Silueta Sangrienta, 1975, a new print. Other silueta works followed in 1976-79, such as Silueta Series (Tree of Life), 1978, and a selection which are presented here. A color print, Incantation to Olokun-Yemaya Encantación a Olokún-Yemayá (Incantation to Olokun-Yemaya), 1977, depicts a silueta in the earth, invoking two identities of the West African Yoruba goddess known as a river mother and fertility deity. A work from 1978 shows a spiral impression in the earth, creating a metaphorical association with land-based work- in this case with a human scale silueta at its center. In other works, figures are carved into the earth, such as in Black Venus, 1980, a black and white photograph which features an earthen imprint of a female form. Its title refers to a legendary symbol against slavery, an affirmation, as Ana Mendieta writes, of those who are free and refuse to be colonized. This work is in dialogue with La Venus Negra, 1981, which also features a detailed imprint resembling the human form, created on a rock surface — its deliberate placement on stone suggesting a connection between the human form, nature and the earth. Black and white photographs of two Sandwoman works from 1983 document outlines of organic female forms hand carved in the sand, reiterating temporality and impermanence. A newly framed and never before seen small-scale drawing of the hand with heart — imparts the artist’s fascination with ancient Egypt, hieroglyphs, and cave drawings, reiterating her journey “back to the source.” These works are accompanied by an additional selection of Untitled works on paper from 1978-79 and 1983-1985, depicting organic forms.

I have thrown myself into the very elements that produced me, using the earth as my canvas and my soul as my tools. - Ana Mendieta, Proposal for the New York State Council on the Arts, 17 March 1982

On view are ten films created between Iowa and Mexico which span from 1972 to 1978, and in which we see a representation of the various elements – from fire, water, and air, to gunpowder, and blood. The earliest of these, Chicken Movie, Chicken Piece, 1972, originally filmed in Super 8, documents a primitive action in which Ana Mendieta holds a decapitated chicken, a familiar form of sacrifice in Santería resulting in a splattering of blood, which thematically connects to universal and spiritual power. The theme of self-transformation is introduced in Blood + Feathers, captured in a recently discovered 1974 color photo in which Ana Mendieta initiates a transfer of energy, covering her body in feathers and blood, as if to divine herself as an unearthly avian spirit, becoming a bird or, as she had said, “the white cock.” Silueta del Laberinto (Laberinth Blood Imprint), 1974, shot the same year, begins with a silueta outline on a ceremonial site near Oaxaca, Mexico, the contours of which are flooded beyond their recessed lines, spilling beyond the corporeal outline to resemble an organic shape. In Silueta del Laberinto, one of the first films in which Ana Mendieta uses a silhouette to stand in for her own body, she also circumnavigates the site's labyrinthian architecture with a handheld camera, anticipating later works.

Energy Charge, a silent 16 mm film from 1975, evokes an avatar of Laberinth Blood Imprint, by featuring a figure with upraised arms emerging from a dark landscape which transforms into a bright red silueta shape before vanishing, the polarizing color recalling its memory. Two more films, each from the Silueta Series, are additionally sanguine in nature. Silueta Sangrienta, made in Iowa City in 1975, shows the artist naked and face up with uplifted arms in the excavated earth, which is later emptied, then re-filled with red pigmented liquid, in which she lies face down and partially submerged. Untitled: Silueta Series, 1978, filmed at Old Man’s Creek, Iowa, introduces the element of fire, showing hands created from clay emerging from a tree trunk which then becomes engulfed with rising flames. Silueta de Arena, 1978, depicts a silueta emerging from the shallow waters of a riverbank, forming an island unto itself.

On the second floor, the suite of color photographs, Body Tracks, 1974, traces an early action documented in Iowa prior to Mendieta’s move into nature. Here Ana Mendieta uses tempera to create imprints of her hands, repeated through a performative gesture of kneeling and dragging her red hands down to create markings in two parallel tracks on pink fabric.

In Grass Breathing, made in Iowa in 1975, Ana Mendieta becomes one with the earth, positioning herself beneath a mound of earthen sod in a meadow, inhaling and exhaling, the movement of her body causing the grassy verdant mound to rise and fall, then rest.

Upcoming solo exhibitions include a significant retrospective at the Tate Modern opening in July 2026 that will feature many important works, along with newly remastered films, early paintings, and late sculptural pieces, many of which will make their U.K. debut.

Ana Mendieta’s work has been exhibited in important solo exhibitions and museum retrospectives; exhibitions include those at MUSAC, León, Spain (2024); SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, Brazil (2023); Baltimore Museum Of Art, Baltimore, Maryland (2020); Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2019); Middleheim Museum, Antwerp, Belgium (2019); Institute for Contemporary Art, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (2018); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany (2018); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California (2016) The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel (2014); Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, United Kingdom (2013); Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (2013); Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (2011); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2004); Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2004); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California (1998); Helsinki City Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland (1996); Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (1996); New Museum, New York, New York (1987).

Ana Mendieta received many prestigious awards in her lifetime, including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1977 and 1980) and Fellowship (1982); Creative Arts Program Services Grant, New York Foundation for the Arts (1979); John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1980); New York State Council on the Arts Grant (1982); Rome Prize, American Academy in Rome (1983); Award in the Visual Arts, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Salem, North Carolina (1984). A Visual Arts Lifetime Achievement Award was posthumously bestowed by The Cintas Foundation, New York in 2009.

A catalogue will be published on occasion of the exhibition and released in early 2026. Pre-orders will be available online and in the gallery.

MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY

385 Broadway, New York, NY 10013

www.mariangoodman.com

Ana Mendieta: Back to the Source

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 7 November 2025 - 17 January 2026

18/11/25

'Small is Beautiful' Exhibition @ Flowers Gallery, London + Online - 43rd Edition Featuring 140 Artists

Small is Beautiful - 43rd Edition

Flowers Gallery, London + Online

21 November 2025 - 10 January 2026

Katie Mawson (b. 1963)

Colour Narratives, 2025

Vintage book cloth, 18 x 18 cm

Alexandra Baraitser (b. 1971)

By Lamp Light, 2025

Oil on board, 21.5 x 18 cm

Adam Taylor (b. 1979)

Circle, two, 2025

Oil on panel, 22.5 x 17 cm

Flowers Gallery presents the 43rd edition of their renowned Small is Beautiful exhibition, taking place at the Cork Street gallery and online. Established in 1974, Small is Beautiful invites selected contemporary artists from all disciplines to contribute works with a fixed economy of size, each piece measuring no more than 7 x 9 inches.

Heidrun Rathgeb (b. 1967)

Cocoon, 2020

Egg tempura on gesso panel, 24 x 18 cm

Ayumi Matsuba (b. 1977)

Towards Home, 2025

Acrylic on canvas, 20.3 x 20.3 cm

Unskilled Worker

Milo wears his Crown, 2025

Gouache, pastel, pen, ink and charcoal

on Fabriano paper, 21 x 16 cm

An occasion for artists to explore scale in relation to their own practice, since its inception the exhibition has provided a rare opportunity to showcase smaller pieces by internationally-recognised names and discover new talents.

Here is a small selection of other works featured in this exhibition:

Maria Koshenkova

Faun's Flesh 02, 2016

Blown sculpted glass, hand polished, 14 x 21 x 14 cm

Sheila Vollmer

Pezzo, 2025

Wood found Piano keys, hinges, paint, 20 x 19 x 21 cm

Terence Wilde

Devine, 2020

Ceramic and mixed media, 19 x 14 x 9 cm

Sarah Longworth-West

After Endless, 2025

Oil paint, oil pastel and spray paint

on pigmented gesso panel, 23 x 18 cm

Monique Lovering

Fleeting, 2025

Mixed media, 23 x 18 cm

Kristin Schnell

Birds on Stage 13A, 2022-2023

Photography Hahnemühlen Photo Rag Paper, 21 x 16 cm

Sue Kennington

Split, 2025

Oil on linen, 18.4 x 15.2 cm

Pippa Young

Threads of history that cling to me, 2025

Oil on cradled panel, 18 x 12.5 cm

Jennifer McRae

Boy Fish Kite, 2025

Oil on linen, 22.9 x 17.8 cm

Karolina Albricht

As Day is Equal Night, 2025

Oil on panel, 16 x 12 cm

Gill Rocca

REALM XVI, 2025

Oil on birch ply, 11 x 16 cm

Small is Beautiful features approximately 140 artists, with notable inclusions from Olivia Bax, Ken Currie, Helen Downie (Unskilled Worker), Elger Esser, Nigel Hall, Maggi Hambling, Claerwen James, Laurence Noga, and Tai Shan Schierenberg, amongst many more.

FLOWERS GALLERY

21 Cork Street, London W1S 3LZ

www.flowersgallery.com

Joan Mitchell @ David Zwirner, NYC - 'To define a feeling: Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965' Exhibition Curated by Sarah Roberts

To define a feeling

Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965

Curated by Sarah Roberts

David Zwirner, New York

November 6 — December 13, 2025

Joan Mitchell

Untitled, c. 1963

I’m trying for something more specific than movies of my everyday life: To define a feeling.
—Joan Mitchell in ARTnews, April 1965

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) that focuses on the years 1960 to 1965, a brief but critical juncture in the artist’s development. Capping off a yearlong celebration of the centennial of the artist’s birth, this presentation is curated by Sarah Roberts, senior director of curatorial affairs at the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and brings together a significant group of works from public and private collections, as well as that of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

During these years, Joan Mitchell spent many weeks each summer and fall living on a sailboat and exploring the Mediterranean from a home base along France’s Côte d’Azur with her companion, painter Jean Paul Riopelle, and her works from this period are inflected by these voyages and the sites of the Mediterranean. Back in her Parisian studio, Mitchell drew on the experience of looking out at the water, horizon, and rocky coasts, resulting in paintings that depart radically from those of the preceding years, and are distinct from those that would follow. Characterized by dark, central masses of swirling brushstrokes in deep greens and blues partially obscuring rich tonal colors embedded beneath, these turbulent canvases exchange the grounding armature that had structured much of her previous landscape-inspired work for more experimental compositional strategies. Constituting, as the poet John Ashbery described, “an unhurried meditation on bits of landscape and air,” the profound, dramatic works on view offer insight into Mitchell’s distinctive process in evolving the structural and chromatic composition of her paintings, while dynamically engaging many of the key themes and motifs that extend throughout her oeuvre.

As Sarah Roberts notes of the exhibition:

For Joan Mitchell, abstract painting had a singular capacity to capture and communicate multiple layers of human experience—things seen, touched, felt, and remembered—in a single visual field. From 1960 to 1965, her days and nights included frequent Mediterranean sailing trips to Corsica and Italy with her partner Jean Paul Riopelle, time spent reading and discussing poetry with friends, deep thinking about painting, and keenly felt losses of loved ones, as well the assassination of John F. Kennedy and growing social unrest in both the US and France. Reflecting on this tumultuous period later in life, Mitchell named all these events as impacting the direction of her work. Never seeking to create direct representations of particular moments or to simply channel a single emotion or thought, she sought instead to render in paint something new that articulated the sum of experiences in all their complexity and ambiguity—to define a feeling.

The selection of paintings and drawings gathered here shows Mitchell at work from 1960 to 1965, responding to the sea’s expanse and surrounding landscapes, and generating fresh ideas about painting itself. Central masses of densely applied paint in somber tones began to emerge in her canvases in 1960. By 1962, she had narrowed the range of hues to the darkest greens, browns, and blues, colors so deep that this group of works has frequently been referred to as the “black paintings,” though true black was rarely included. Mitchell concentrated her swirling central masses into floating islands of color within subtly varied, off-white fields. Within just two years, she would shift again, opening the concentrations into constellations of loose, squared forms and tangled brushwork as she continually experimented.

Reflecting on recent work in her 1965 oral history with art historian Dorothy Seckler, Mitchell noted, “Clement Greenberg said there never should be a central image, so I decided to make one.” With this body of work, Mitchell also patently challenged prevailing conventions of balanced composition and harmonious color, choosing an enigmatic palette with flashes of sharp contrast, shifting her “central” forms slightly off axis, and playing with backgrounds and corners. Echoes of Mediterranean light and rocky, shrub-studded coastlines were met with the turbulence and toughness in her painting technique, giving rise to one of Mitchell’s most daring, moody, and probing bodies of work.

Highlights from the exhibition include Mandres, c. 1962 (Private Collection, courtesy of McClain Gallery), an important transitional work that shows Mitchell beginning to experiment with central forms; Untitled, 1963 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), an expansive triptych characteristic of Mitchell’s growing engagement with multi-panel works during this period; as well as a selection of small-scale paintings that were inspired by stations on the Paris Metro and debuted in her 1965 solo exhibition at Stable Gallery, New York, including one on loan from the Hofstra University Museum of Art. Also on view are several large-scale paintings from the collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation that span these years, as well as a grouping of rarely seen works on paper made using charcoal and crayon—sometimes in combination with watercolor—that extend Mitchell’s exploration of form and color in a different medium.

The exhibition is supplemented by a selection of primary materials from the archives of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. A fully illustrated catalogue with new scholarship on this period by Sarah Roberts and other authors is forthcoming from David Zwirner Books.

Artist Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) established a singular visual vocabulary over the course of her more than four decade career. While rooted in the conventions of abstraction, Mitchell’s inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately conjure individuals, observations, places, and points in time. Her prodigious oeuvre encompasses not only the large-scale abstract canvases for which she is best known, but also smaller paintings, drawings, and prints.

Born in Chicago and educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which she received a BFA (1947) and an MFA (1950), Joan Mitchell moved to New York in 1949 and was an active participant in the downtown arts scene. She began splitting her time between Paris and New York in 1955, before moving permanently to France in 1959. In 1968, Joan Mitchell settled in Vétheuil, a small village northwest of Paris, while continuing to exhibit her work throughout the United States and Europe. It was in Vétheuil that she began regularly hosting artists at various stages of their careers, providing space and support to help them develop their art. When Mitchell passed away in 1992, her will specified that a portion of her estate should be used to establish a foundation to directly support visual artists.

In 1951, Joan Mitchell became one of the few female members of the exclusive Eighth Street Club, and, that spring, her work was included in The Ninth Street Exhibition, organized by charter members of The Club with the assistance of Leo Castelli, which helped to codify what became known as the New York School of primarily abstract painters. During her lifetime, Mitchell’s work was exhibited in solo presentations at numerous influential galleries in the United States and Europe, including Stable Gallery, New York (1953, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1961, 1965); Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles (1961); Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris (1967, 1969, 1971, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1992); Martha Jackson Gallery, New York (1968, 1972); Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York (1976, 1977, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1985, 1986); and Robert Miller Gallery, New York (1989, 1991). The Joan Mitchell Foundation was previously represented by Cheim & Read, New York, where the artist’s work was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, in 1997, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2014, 2016, and 2018.

Her first institutional solo exhibition, My Five Years in the Country, was held in 1972 at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York. Subsequent museum presentations during Mitchell’s lifetime were held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1974, 1992); Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1982); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (traveled to Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; and La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, California; 1988–1989).

In 2002, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized a posthumous retrospective of Mitchell’s work, which traveled to Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; and Des Moines Art Center, Iowa. In 2010, the Joan Mitchell Foundation organized Joan Mitchell in New Orleans, which included a symposium on her life and work, and three concurrent exhibitions held at Tulane University’s Newcomb Art Gallery, New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans. In 2015, Joan Mitchell Retrospective: Her Life and Paintings was presented at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, and subsequently traveled to Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Additional recent museum solo presentations include those at Kunsthalle Emden, Germany (2008; traveled to Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy and Musée des Impressionnismes, Giverny, France, 2009); Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (2010); and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, France (2014). In 2017, Mitchell / Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation opened at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2018); and Fonds Hélène et Édouard Leclerc, Landerneau, France (2018–2019).

A comprehensive Joan Mitchell traveling retrospective was co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The retrospective was first on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2021, before traveling to the Baltimore Museum of Art the following year. The exhibition was subsequently presented at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, through 2023, where the complementary exhibition, Monet – Mitchell, was also on view. The Saint Louis Art Museum presented an adaptation of Monet – Mitchell in 2023, featuring eight works by Mitchell and two by Monet.

Mitchell’s work can be found in prominent institutional collections worldwide, including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Anderson Collection at Stanford University, California; Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nakanoshima Museum of Modern Art, Osaka, Japan; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

DAVID ZWIRNER

537 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.davidzwirner.com

17/11/25

Kang Seok Ho @ Tina Kim Gallery, NYC - 'Hold Still' Exhibition

Kang Seok Ho: Hold Still

Tina Kim Gallery, New York

November 20, 2025 – January 24, 2026

The winter sea the eyes have seen is wider than itself.
—Kang Seok Ho, Seeing, 2017

Tina Kim Gallery presents Kang Seok Ho: Hold Still, the gallery’s second solo exhibition of the late Korean artist. Bringing together Kang’s Couple and Nude paintings—created between the mid-2010s and 2021—the exhibition traces the artist’s sustained engagement with the human figure as a site for exploring painterly surface, materiality, and form. Depicting bodies and intertwined faces yet stripped of narrative and erotic intent, these works reflect Kang’s deep fixation on painting itself—and his fascination with how the effort to see and depict another contains the paradox of closeness and distance inherent in human relationships.

Kang Seok Ho (1971–2021) studied sculpture at Seoul National University and trained under Jan Dibbets at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, receiving his MFA in 2001 before returning to Seoul. His contemporaries included Park Chan-kyong, Haegue Yang, Chung Seoyeong, and Kim Beom, among others. At a time when the critical discourse in Korea revolved around multimedia and conceptual practices, Kang Seok Ho turned instead to the language of painting itself. He studied the Old Masters—both Western and Eastern—and was particularly drawn to the techniques of Piero della Francesca, Giorgione, and Tintoretto, whose treatment of color and light he admired in their depictions of skin. Yet Kang deliberately resisted virtuosity, developing a distinctive method of tapping a brush dipped in thinned paint to build up delicate, uniform layers, creating textured surfaces where pigment both reveals and mimics the weave of the linen beneath. Informed by the philosophy of East Asian landscape painting—which privileges the subjective interpretation of nature over direct representation—Kang approached every subject, including the human figure, as a kind of landscape: a terrain for exploring gesture, surface, and dimensionality in paint.

Kang’s methods, however, were distinctly contemporary, exemplified by his use of photographic sources—first explored in his Get Up series, which zoomed in on clothed torsos and buttocks, omitting faces and other identifiers. Working from photographs—some his own, others drawn from media—he isolated and enlarged fragments of images, taping off sections to re-angle and translate them onto canvas. Focusing on details such as the wrinkles in denim where thighs meet or the beads of a necklace resting against a collarbone, the Get Up paintings became Kang’s first anonymous portraits, turning the body into a rhythm of folds, seams, and reflections: quiet abstractions that reveal his fascination with the everyday as a site of intimacy.

This process of cropping and re-framing became central to his later Couple and Nude series. For the Couple paintings, begun after 2016, Kang Seok Ho focused on compositions of two figures sharing a single frame, zooming into moments of touch and proximity in photographs drawn from social media or film stills. What might appear to mark a turn toward narrative was, for him, a continuation of his formal and material concerns—now directed toward the tension and harmony between forms sharing a pictorial surface: clasped hands, entwined arms, and faces pressed together. His interest lay not in depicting two individuals, but in capturing the fleeting moments of convergence or intimacy between them.

These investigations of the body as landscape evolved into the Nude series, where the artist magnified his gaze still further, turning his attention to the texture, creases, and folds of skin. Cropped tightly on the décolletage, navel, or buttocks, these paintings subvert the conventions of the nude, lingering between disclosure and restraint. In one painting, a few strands of ebony hair splay across a softly dappled expanse of skin; in others, peaches and grapes—perhaps a nod to nudes in Western art—partially obscure the body, leaving the viewer uncertain of what is being revealed or withheld. Viewers often interpreted these works as erotic, a reading Kang Seok Ho resisted.

In the late 2010s, Kang Seok Ho pushed the compositions of the Couple paintings further inward, enlarging his canvases to focus on the eyes of two individuals. In some, two faces adjoin edge to edge, their shared boundary forming a seam; in others, one face passes another, half-visible, half-withheld. Eventually, the faces nearly overlap, merging into a single eye-like form—a meeting point of color and light akin to a solar eclipse. In his final group of Nude paintings, created for a 2021 exhibition shortly before his death, Kang Seok Ho concentrated his gaze on the belly button—the body’s physical and metaphorical center. Perhaps his most intimate works, these paintings anchor folds and crevices of skin within expanses of color that verge on abstraction.

The exhibition’s title, Hold Still, refers to Kang’s working process of selecting an image and re-framing it to fit the proportions of his canvas. This became a way of reconstructing chance, visually compelling moments encountered amid the sensory excess of contemporary life and translating these images from the immediacy of photography to the slower temporality of paint. The images, held still by the artist’s intention, become his paintings—and in turn, invite viewers to look with the same attentiveness.

Although Kang’s work has only recently begun to receive wider international recognition, his influence within Korea’s painting community was deeply felt during his lifetime. As an artist, curator, and writer, he helped shape the discourse on contemporary art, organizing group exhibitions such as Good Form (Insa Art Space, 2005), Manner in Korean Paintings (Hite Collection, 2012), and When Words Fail (Hite Collection, 2016). His writings on everyday experiences—plainspoken yet lyrical—echoed the tone of his paintings, reflecting an ongoing search for clarity that always left space for uncertainty.

Kang’s passing in 2021 left his inquiries open-ended. Yet in his Couple and Nude paintings—where forms meet, merge, or drift apart—he captured something of the fragility of connection itself. His paintings do not seek to resolve the tension between self and other, painter and viewer, figure and ground; rather, they hold that tension quietly, discovering comfort in the unsettled.

Artist Kang Seok Ho

Kang Seok Ho received his Bachelor of Fine Art in sculpture at Seoul National University, then left for Germany to study with Jan Dibbets (b. 1941) at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he received his Masters of Fine Art in painting. After winning the UBS Art Award in Basel, Switzerland in 2000, he returned to Korea and won the Seoknam Art Prize (Seoul, Korea) in 2004, and he was the selected artist for Young Korean Artists 2008: I AM AN ARTIST by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. From 2003 to 2020, he held 16 solo exhibitions at Insa Art Space, Kumho Museum of Art, and Mimesis Art Museum. Beyond his artistic practice, Kang Seok Ho was also active as a curator, organizing group exhibitions featuring his peers and younger artists, as well as design shows inspired by his personal passion for modern European and American design. Exhibitions curated by Kang include Good Form (Insa Art Space, 2005), Manner in Korean Paintings (Hite Collection, 2012), When Words Fail (Hite Collection, 2016), and Bauhaus and Modern Life (Kumho Museum of Art, 2019). Not separating his daily life and art, he led meetings to interact with fellow artists on the subjects of painting, books, music, hiking, and fishing. He taught as a professor at Seoul National University of Science and Technology from 2018 to 2021, and his first retrospective, seok ho kang: Three Minute Delight (2022-2023) was held at the Seoul Museum of Art in the first year after his untimely death in 2021. His debut solo exhibition with Tina Kim Gallery was held in 2023.

TINA KIM GALLERY

525 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

tinakimgallery.com