Yuka Kashihara @ Acquavella Galleries, Palm Beach - 'Stardust' Exhibition

Yuka Kashihara: Stardust

Acquavella Galleries, Palm Beach

October 15 - December 8, 2025 

"Everything is connected, and everything is one. Painting, for me, is a way of knowing who I am. Tracing that history back, it became clear to me that I, too, am made of stardust; and that realization felt profoundly natural. The primeval landscapes I have encountered in my life, too, if traced back far enough, were once stardust."

- Yuka Kashihara

Acquavella Galleries presents Stardust, a solo exhibition of fifteen paintings by the Japanese artist Yuka Kashihara in its Palm Beach gallery.

This suite of acrylic and oil paintings on canvas marks a continuation of the artist’s interest in imagining the otherworldly, while looking even farther to the cosmos. Her work is often sparked by instigating moments and views observed while traveling or walking, which she then blends with conjured vistas. In her new paintings, Kashihara explores our connection with the ancient and cosmic, combining the two ideas by exploring the origin of all organic matter, beginning deep in space.

Yuka Kashihara cites Marcus Chown’s book, The Magic Furnace, as an inspiration for her new work. He states: “Every atom in our bodies has an extraordinary history. Our blood, our food, our books, our clothes–everything contains atoms forged in blistering furnaces deep inside stars, which were blown into space by those stars’ cataclysmic explosions and deaths…The birth of every atom was marked by cosmic events on an enormous scale, against a backdrop of unimaginable heat and cold, brightness and darkness, space and time.” The artist’s newest body of work draws on this idea of celestial kinship.

In Universal Stardust (2025) and Universal Stardust - II (2025), the artist layers vivid shades of acrylic and oil that evoke watercolors in their blurred softness. The strokes and colors bleed and interconnect like the atoms that connect all organic matter. Kashihara simultaneously blends human interconnectedness with deep space, where clusters of atoms or constellations intertwine with what could be ancient flora and fauna deep on the ocean floor or from another planet.

Regarding this body of work, Yuka Kashihara also pays homage to her purposeful commitment to painting as exploration from a young age. The artist states: “When I was seventeen and unsure of my future, I made one clear decision: I would devote myself to painting. I pictured that wish sailing to the edge of the galaxy, like a handful of stardust cast into the night.”

Harnessing the boundless raw material of creation, Kashihara’s paintings offer a duality of the origin of life and its comic roots.

Yuka Kashihara: Stardust is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay by poet, critic, and curator John Yau.

Artist Yuka Kashihara (b. 1980)

Born in Hiroshima Prefecture in Japan, Kashihara received her B.F.A. in Japanese Painting from the Musashino Art University in Tokyo in 2006 before moving to Germany that year. Studying at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, Germany, she received her Meisterschüler (Master Graduate) in 2015.

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES, PALM BEACH

340 Royal Poinciana Way, Palm Beach, FL 33480 

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Nicole Wittenberg @ Acquavella Galleries, NYC - 'All the Way' Exhibition + Book

Nicole Wittenberg: All the Way

Acquavella Galleries, New York

October 16 - December 5, 2025

“I think good paintings are moving images, because they’re not static. Great paintings move.”

—Nicole Wittenberg

Acquavella Galleries presents All the Way, Nicole Wittenberg’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and her first at Acquavella’s New York location. Wittenberg’s return to Acquavella follows the artist’s three solo museum exhibitions over this summer: Maison La Roche, Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris; the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, Maine; and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine. Several works from Wittenberg’s museum exhibitions in Rockland and Ogunquit  appears in All the Way.

All the Way explores painting’s ability to capture the sensation of a singular moment extended over time. Nicole Wittenberg's painting practice takes scenes, elements, and encounters with the natural world as its subject matter. Her landscapes and twisting florals explore the medium’s ability to capture temporal moments as impressions that retain the energy of the experience.

The paintings in this exhibition give the viewer the somatic sensation of immersion—to be in a world within the painting. In this respect, Nicole Wittenberg draws on the work of Paul Cézanne and the Post-Impressionists, as well as the Fauvist challenge to traditional color. For Wittenberg “white is not as bright as yellow or certain shades of orange or even certain shades of green or pink. They’re brighter than white. I wanted light that was just as intense as daylight to replicate the sensation of actual light and actually being there.”

Wittenberg’s process often begins with pastel drawings, small oil paintings and ink studies, which display an economy of gesture and an expert handling of the relationship between light and color. Both her drawings and her paintings show a resistance to perspective and a tension with figuration.

Art historian Suzanne Hudson connects Wittenberg's approach to the work of Venetian colorists, such as Veronese: “Sometimes the grounds are exposed more fully, and at others, outline other forms in residual slivers of crackling intensity, further elaborating color ranges and relations.”

Artist Nicole Wittenberg (b. 1979)

Nicole Wittenberg is an artist, curator, professor, and writer who was born in San Francisco and is currently based in New York City. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003.

In 2012, Wittenberg received the coveted John Koch Award, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters to a young artist making figurative work. From 2011 to 2014, she served as a teacher at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture and the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, and in 2017, she was a professor in the Critical Theory department at the School of Visual Arts.

Wittenberg’s works are included in prominent collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Albertina, Vienna; the Portland Museum of Art, Maine; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut.

Nicole Wittenberg

Texts by Suzanne Hudson, David Salle, Devon Zimmerman, 

and an interview by Jarrett Earnest

Published by Monacelli, 2025

256 pages, 250 illustrations

Hardback, 29 cm x 25 cm

ISBN: 9781580936811

Photo courtesy of Phaidon

www.phaidon.com

The artist’s first comprehensive monograph was published this summer by Monacelli Press, coinciding with her recent solo exhibitions in Maine and France.

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES, NEW YORK

18 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075 

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Miquel Barceló @ Acquavella Galleries, New York - Paintings and Ceramics Exhibition

Miquel Barceló

Acquavella Galleries, New York

April 24 - May 30, 2025

Acquavella Galleries presents MIQUEL BARCELÓ, the renowned Spanish artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition presents over two dozen new paintings and a selection of recent ceramic works, featuring the artist’s signature use of layered materiality, vivid color, and richly textured surfaces.

Over the past four and a half decades, the Spanish artist Miquel Barceló (b. 1957) has explored a diverse range of media, including painting, works on paper, ceramic, bronze sculpture, large-scale installation, and performance. In addition to his deep-rooted connection to Spain and his native Mallorca, Miquel Barceló draws inspiration from his global travels, continuously experimenting with new materials and techniques influenced by ancient and contemporary cultural traditions. Throughout his practice, the artist’s fascination with the natural world has been central, resulting in textured canvases filled with earthly materiality, tactile surfaces, and compositions inspired by the effects of light and ever-changing colors of the sea.

MIQUEL BARCELÓ

Par terre avec as de coeur, 2024

Mixed media on canvas

63 1/4 x 63 1/4 x 2 3/4 inches (160.5 x 160.5 x 7 cm)

© Miquel Barceló, courtesy Acquavella Galleries

In his latest series of paintings, Miquel Barceló deepens his engagement with organic subject matter, drawing inspiration from the sea surrounding Mallorca, where he lives and works in addition to Paris. In densely layered surfaces, Barceló’s new “still life” paintings feature scenes filled with tropical fish, crabs, shells, crustaceans, and marine vegetation that emerge from layers of muted chromatic grays in brilliant hues of red and blue. Traces of human presence also appear within these aquatic compositions as Barceló often incorporates found materials including matchbooks and postage stamps amid hundreds of layers of paint. In Par terre avec as de coeur (2024), for instance, a playing card appears alongside crabs and shells, seamlessly blending into the composition. As Miquel Barceló explains, the process is almost geological, “like waves washing over a beach.”

MIQUEL BARCELÓ

Reloj parado, 2023-2024-2025

Mixed media on canvas

45 1/8 x 64 x 3 1/8 inchs (114.5 x 162.5 x 8 cm)

© Miquel Barceló, courtesy Acquavella Galleries

Alongside Barceló’s still lifes are striking underwater scenes, inspired by both the open sea as well as aquariums. Although a lifelong diver, the prescribed environment of the aquarium offers the artist a unique opportunity for experimentation. In works like Scene (2025) and Peixos exotics (2025), Miquel Barceló creates powerful compositions teeming with tropical aquatic life in swirling brilliant color. As the artist observes, an aquarium is a “closed space where colors, shapes, and materials evolve in improbable combinations. For me, that’s a good definition of painting.”

The exhibition also includes a selection of new paintings from the artist’s corrida series, depicting the circular space of the bullfighting ring, which offers Barceló a similarly enclosed space to experiment. In Reloj parado (2023-2024-2025), two lone figures stand at the center of a yellow ground, encircled in the ring by vibrant reds, greens, and blues. Miquel Barceló builds each composition in multiple layers of saturated color where the dramatic interplay between “life and death” and “light and shadow” unfold.

Barceló’s ceramic practice similarly emerged from his surroundings. He began experimenting with the medium in the 1990s in Mali, where he studied ancient Dogon earthenware techniques unique to the country’s central region. Drawn to clay for its humble materiality, he embraced it as a medium of experimentation, describing ceramics as “a form of painting.” Barceló’s distinctive forms and contours, molded by the artist’s hands, are painted in vivid colors and often revisit the subjects and material qualities of his paintings. In Tectònic (2024), a simple vessel is coated in dense crags as if it slowly emerged from the earth, while in Copinyes (2024), shells and crustaceans appear from soft, bubbling surfaces glazed in violet. These works show Barceló’s expressive and free-wheeling hand, and much like his paintings, they illustrate his engagement with the materials, traditions, and environments endemic to his surroundings.

Miquel Barceló is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue co-published by Rizzoli.

About Miquel Barceló (b. 1957)

Miquel Barceló was born in Felanitx, Mallorca in 1957 and currently lives and works in Mallorca, Spain, and Paris, France. The youngest artist to ever show at the Musée du Louvre, Miquel Barceló represented Spain at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and participated in Documenta VII in Kassel, Germany in 1982. He has had retrospectives at renowned institutions, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain; and is included in many esteemed public and private collections worldwide. Miquel Barceló has had several solo exhibitions in recent years, including one featuring his ceramics at the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche, Faenza in 2019, a solo exhibition titled Metamorphosis at the Museo Picasso, Málaga in 2021, and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in 2022.

Along with his exhibition at Acquavella, Miquel Barceló will present three other solo exhibitions this year at the Fondation Jan Michalski, Montricher, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art of Eivissa, Spain; and the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic.

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES NEW YORK

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Makoto Saito @ Acquavella Galleries, Palm Beach - in Time E.H.

Makoto Saito: in Time E.H.

Acquavella Galleries, Palm Beach

April 14 - May 28, 2023

Acquavella Galleries presents its first solo presentation of works by the renowned Japanese artist MAKOTO SAITO. On view at Acquavella’s Palm Beach location, in TIME E.H. features twelve new and recent paintings inspired by the noted American artist Edward Hopper, marking the international debut of this body of work.

Makoto Saito’s deep interest in Hopper’s oeuvre goes back nearly forty years, to when he first saw Hopper’s painting House by the Railroad (1925) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Compelled by Hopper’s ability to capture the American ethos of the early 20th century, and by the narrative qualities of his paintings, Saito began exploring this series a decade ago, and only recently returned to transcribe the works onto canvas. In these paintings, Saito extrapolates Hopper’s world into his own, conceptually merging the timelines of the two, transcending temporalities.

“As I gazed at [Hopper’s] works, I found my consciousness and body naturally enter the paintings, enabling me to musingly journey through time and space as if in the world of science fiction,” says Makoto Saito. “Hopper’s paintings are so lonesome to the extent of sheer melancholy. They evoke an air of solitude regardless of whether people are depicted there or not, yet at the same time they speak to me as if every piece has its own story.”

Makoto Saito’s process is both painstaking and arduous. It involves producing countless hand-painted dots to mimic the printing process, culminating in scenes that are at once structured and ethereal. The artist deconstructs Hopper’s iconic paintings through his use of pointillism, which he employs as a method of engagement with the world within the painting itself. At close range, the subject is indiscernible—only the small dots that comprise the image are visible—yet as one moves further away the composition coalesces as one of Hopper’s scenes, which he then alters through changes in scale and color and also intervenes with his own painterly passages.

In his exploration of Hopper’s oeuvre, Makoto Saito frequently revisits the artist’s most iconic paintings as starting off points for his works. Shadow (2022) is instantly recognizable as an interpretation of A Woman in the Sun (1961, Whitney Museum of American Art), Hopper’s painting of a nude woman staring out the window of an empty apartment. Saito’s rendition, which utilizes his signature pointillist technique in shades of blue, is decidedly reticent, with pieces of the original composition lost to a void that fills the center of the frame. The same phenomenon is seen in Office (2022) and Bed (2022), which reference Hopper’s Office at Night (1940, Walker Art Center) and Excursion into Philosophy (1959, Private Collection), respectively. In these paintings, Saito brings to the fore the loneliness, emptiness, and melancholy characteristic of Hopper’s worlds. In additional paintings, Saito omits aspects of Hopper’s larger composition to explore the minutiae of a scene.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue including an introductory essay contributed by the artist.

Born in 1952 in Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan, MAKOTO SAITO lives and works in Tokyo. His major solo exhibitions include Criticality, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Fukuoka (2019), and MAKOTO SAITO: SCENE [0], 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2008). His works are housed in the collections of numerous museums in Japan and elsewhere, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

ACQUAVELLA

340 Royal Poinciana Way, Palm Beach, FL 33480

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Pablo Picasso @ Acquavella Galleries, NYC - PICASSO: Seven Decades of Drawing

PICASSO: Seven Decades of Drawing

Acquavella Galleries, New York

Through December 3, 2021

Arguably the most influential artist of the 20th century, over the course of his career Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) pioneered successive artistic innovations that shaped the development of modern art. He was prolific in a wide range of mediums, including painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, and printmaking. Born in 1881 in Spain, the son of an art teacher, Pablo Picasso exhibited his first paintings in Barcelona at the age of 12. After an earlier trip to Paris, he left Barcelona in 1904 and moved permanently to France, where he would live until his death in 1973. 

Acquavella Galleries presents PICASSO: Seven Decades of Drawing, a survey of significant drawings by painter, draftsman, sculptor, printmaker, and ceramicist, Pablo Picasso. Curated by Olivier Berggruen, the show features over 80 drawings spanning seven decades of the artist's career, including works in an array of mediums such as charcoal, crayon, colored pencil, collage, graphite, gouache, ink, pastel, and watercolor. 

Drawing was the foundation of Pablo Picasso’s practice throughout the many stages of his stylistic development. The son of an art teacher, Picasso began to sketch at an early age; it is said that his first word was “piz,” short for “lápiz,” the Spanish word for pencil. He began his formal training at the age of seven, quickly mastering the techniques of classical draftsmanship. 

Pablo Picasso’s drawings reflect the artist’s lifelong quest to innovate and experiment; they also demonstrate his virtuosic ability to switch between styles, techniques, and mediums. Guided by his intuition and innate understanding of line, in his drawings Picasso imaginatively experimented and pioneered the development of radical ideas, innovating new approaches to form and expression in the process.

Several works on view provide insight into the evolution of his most influential, large-scale paintings, such as Les demoiselles d’Avignon, while others stand alone as virtuoso, independent works showcasing Picasso’s mastery of line, form, and medium. Developed in concert with his monumental paintings Les demoiselles d'Avignon [1907, The Museum of Modern Art, New York] and Les trois femmes [1908, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia], three drawings in the exhibition—Les demoiselles d'Avignon: Nu jaune (Étude) [1907, Collection of John and Gretchen Berggruen, San Francisco], Nu à genoux [1907-1908, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York] and Nu debout (Étude pour 'Les trois femmes') [1907-1908, Private Collection]—illustrate Pablo Picasso’s development of the striking, geometric female figures whose fragmented forms paved the way to Cubism. The watercolors, studies of the female form in motion, mark a radical break from traditional composition and perspective in painting. These bold and confrontational depictions of form became a seminal point in the development of Cubism and modern art. 

One of the most recurring subjects in Pablo Picasso’s oeuvre is the tête de femme or buste de femme (the female head or bust of a woman). The subject serves not only as a motif to explore the artist’s stylistic development, but also to chronicle his personal life and relationships. The notorious lothario’s rapid and often dramatic changes of style are frequently attributed to the presence of a new love interest, the waning of an old one, or both. Numerous examples of the motif of the buste de femme abound in the exhibition, including early portraits evincing his study of archaic sculpture; fragmented, Cubist representations; more naturalistic, classicizing portraits; biomorphic Surrealist abstractions; and later, more erotic portraits. In his early drawing, Buste de femme nue (1906), a representation of his mistress and muse Fernande Olivier, Picasso fused Fernande’s striking face with his study of ancient Iberian masks and Romanesque sculpture, while Buste de femme (1907) betrays Picasso’s increasing interest in African masks, a formative influence in his development of Cubism. The evocative Tête de femme (1921), reflects the artist’s study of Classical sculpture and art history after World War I, when he was married to Olga Khoklova, while the sensual Portrait de femme endormie, III (1946), reflects Picasso’s later impassioned affair with Françoise Gilot and his spurring rivalry with Henri Matisse.

PICASSO: Seven Decades of Drawing

Exhibition Catalogue, November 2021

A fully illustrated hardcover catalogue will be produced for the exhibition featuring critical essays by historian and curator Olivier Berggruen and historian Christine Poggi.

Seven Decades of Drawing is supported by loans from The Art Institute of Chicago, The Cleveland Museum of Art; Fondation Beyeler, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Morgan Library & Museum; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Para el Arte (FABA), Madrid. 

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES

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Eva Hesse / Hannah Wilke @ Acquavella Galleries, NYC - Erotic Abstraction - Curated by Eleanor Nairne

Eva Hesse / Hannah Wilke

Erotic Abstraction 

Curated by Eleanor Nairne 

Acquavella Galleries, New York 

Through June 18, 2021 

Acquavella Galleries presents Eva Hesse / Hannah Wilke: Erotic Abstraction, the first exhibition to present these two pioneering artists side by side. Curated by Eleanor Nairne of the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the show features 23 works made between 1965 and 1977, including foundational works in the history of post-Minimalist and feminist art. 

Living in New York in the 1960s, Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke seemed at times to be working on parallel, if not entirely synchronized, tracks. Both turned to sculpture in the mid-1960s, and both became renowned for their experiments with form and materials, teaching sculpture at the School of Visual Arts at different times. Neither artist felt fully at ease with the language of Minimalism, which was ascendant in the New York art scene. As Eleanor Nairne writes, “Hesse and Wilke shared in the desire to adopt and subvert the strict geometries of Minimalism; softening the language of cool detachment with a sense of physical touch.” Bringing a bodily sensibility to the rigid and sterile structures of Minimalism, each artist in her own way created work that was evocative, organic and sensual. 

Central to this pursuit for both artists was the embrace of materials not widely used in sculpture in the 1960s, such as fiberglass and liquid latex. Erotic Abstraction features groundbreaking works from each artist in this highly expressive medium, as well as hybrid relief paintings and experimental works on paper. Ringaround Arosie (1965), made the first year that Hesse became fully engaged in sculpture, features a pair of mounds coming to a point at the center, each made of a spiral of electrical wire. Wilke’s Ponder-r-rosa 1 (1974) is the earliest work still extant by the artist made of liquid latex, a then newly-available industrial material whose use Hesse had pioneered a few years earlier. Presenting blooms made of folded circles of the soft black material bound together by metal fasteners, Ponder-r-rosa 1 shares not only innovative construction techniques with Ringaround Arosie, but also playful titles hinting at the works’ corporeal forms.

The exhibition includes important loans from The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Williams College Museum of Art, The Hannah Wilke Collection and Archive, Los Angeles, as well as many private collections.

A fully illustrated hardcover catalogue accompanies the exhibition featuring critical essays by curator Eleanor Nairne, professor and author Jo Applin, art historian Anne M. Wagner, art historian and curator Amy Tobin, and gallery director Michael Findlay.

ELEANOR NAIRME joined the Barbican Art Gallery in London as Curator in 2015. Her exhibitions include Imran Qureshi: Where the Shadows are so Deep (2016), Basquiat: Boom for Real (2017-18) and, most recently, the acclaimed retrospective Lee Krasner: Living Colour, which was shown in 2019 at the Barbican and the Shirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and in 2020 at the Zentrum Paul Kee, Bern, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. She has just opened Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty. Nairne is also a writer for publications including the London Review of Books and The New York Times.

EVA HESSE was born January 11, 1936, in Hamburg. Her family fled the Nazis and arrived in New York in 1939. She attended the School of Industrial Art, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and Cooper Union before receiving her B.F.A. from the School of Art and Architecture at Yale University in 1959. After returning to New York, Hesse worked as a textile designer, and in 1961 she was included in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and at the John Heller Gallery, New York. Her first solo show of sculpture was presented at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, in 1965. Hesse began to use latex to make sculpture in 1967, and then fiberglass the following year. By the late 1960s, she gained critical recognition with solo shows at the Fischbach Gallery, New York, and inclusion in many important group exhibitions. In 1969, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and after three operations within a year, she died on May 29, 1970.

Related Post:

Eva Hesse: Sculpture, Jewish Museum, New York, May 12 - September 17, 2006

HANNAH WILKE was born Arlene Hannah Butter in 1940, in New York. She attended the Stella Elkins Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, graduating with a BFA in 1961 and B.S. in Education in 1962. She used various mediums to challenge prevailing notions of femininity, feminism, and sexuality, and was one of the first artists to use vaginal imagery in her work with the purpose of directly engaging with feminist issues. From the late 1950s through the early 1970s, Wilke worked on creating a type of female iconography based on the body, constructing abstract, organic forms, often displayed in a highly organized and repetitious manner that recalled Minimalism. A large selection of her early terra cotta sculptures was first shown in 1971 at Feigen Downtown in Ten Painters, One Sculptor, curated by Michael Findlay. During the 1970s, Hannah Wilke began to use her own body for performance pieces as well as photographic work that she called her "performalist self-portraits." She exhibited widely both in the United States and abroad during her lifetime. In the late 1980s Wilke was diagnosed with cancer and struggled with the illness for the last years of her life. Before her death, she documented the ravaging effects of her illness and cancer treatments on her body in a series of self-portraits. These large, color photographs were some of Hannah Wilke's last works before she died on January 28, 1993.

Related Posts:

Hannah Wilke: Friendship, LaiSun Keane Gallery, Boston, February 18 - April 10, 2021

Hannah Wilke, Alison Jacques Gallery, London, 27 September - 21 December 2018

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES

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Lucian Freud @ Acquavella Galleries, NYC - Monumental

Lucian Freud: Monumental
Acquavella Galleries, New York
Through May 24, 2019

Acquavella Galleries presents Lucian Freud: Monumental, a loan exhibition focusing on the artist’s naked portraits, a subject that has long enjoyed special significance in his oeuvre. Curated by the artist’s longtime studio assistant and friend, David Dawson, Monumental includes thirteen major paintings, including depictions of his most important models from the 1990s and 2000s.  

The exhibition begins with work from 1990, when Lucian Freud began painting the performance artist Leigh Bowery, who is featured here in two works. Inspired by Bowery’s impressive physique, Freud began working on a larger scale that emphasized the physical presence of his subjects. These large-scale portraits ushered in a new sense of monumentality in the artist’s body of work. Also on view is Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, one of two paintings in the show from the mid-1990s of Sue Tilley, the other essential model from this pivotal time in Lucian Freud’s career. David Dawson himself as well as Lucian Freud’s familiar whippets also make multiple appearances in paintings in the exhibition. 

Despite the grand scale, Lucian Freud’s subjects are depicted with a sense of intimacy, penetrating honesty and psychological depth. This was due in part to the extraordinary amount of time the artist spent with his sitters. Ria, Naked Portrait required the art handler Ria Kirby, whom Lucian Freud met while installing a show at the Victoria & Albert Museum, to come to the studio nearly every day for 16 months in 2006 and 2007.  

Being naked has to do with making a more complete portrait, a naked body is somehow more permanent, more factual…. When someone is naked there is in effect nothing to be hidden. Not everyone wants to be that honest about themselves, that means I feel an obligation to be equally honest in how I represent them. It is a matter of responsibility, in a way I don’t want the painting to come from me, I want it to come from them. It can be extraordinary how much you can learn from someone by looking very carefully at them without judgement. — Lucian Freud 

The show includes important loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Lewis Collection, in addition to other private collections. 

This is the sixth solo exhibition over the course of Acquavella Galleries’ longstanding relationship with Lucian Freud and, since the artist’s death in 2011, his estate. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog featuring essays by Dawson and Michael Auping, longtime chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, who interviewed Lucian Freud between May 2009 and January 2011. 

David Dawson was Lucian Freud’s assistant from 1991 through 2011, and he is now director of the Lucian Freud Archive. He co-edited last year’s two-volume survey of the artist’s work published by Phaidon. He is currently preparing an exhibition of Freud’s self-portraits for the Royal Academy, London, in October. Dawson also continues to work as a painter in his own right.  

Lucian Freud (1922–2011) was one of the most significant painters from the postwar period through the first decade of this century. A grandson of Sigmund Freud, he was born in Berlin and moved with his family to London in 1931. He served in the British navy during World War II, and immediately after began working full time as a painter. Committed to figurative painting for the entirety of his career, Lucian Freud built a formidable reputation as a painter of portraiture. 

The work of Lucian Freud is represented in major private and public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and the Art Institute of Chicago as well as the Tate and National Picture Gallery in London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid; among many others. 

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES
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Jean-Michel Basquiat Drawing: Work from the Schorr Family Collection at Acquavella Galleries, New York

Jean-Michel Basquiat Drawing: Work from the Schorr Family Collection 

Acquavella Galleries, New York 

May 1 - June 13, 2014

Acquavella Galleries presents Jean-Michel Basquiat Drawing: Work from the Schorr Family Collection, an exhibition of works by Jean-Michel Basquiat curated by Fred Hoffman from May 1 to June 13, 2014. The show will feature 22 works on paper and two paintings from the collection of Herbert and Lenore Schorr, who were the artist’s devoted collectors, supporters, and friends. "We have had the pleasure of knowing Herb and Lenore Schorr for over thirty years, and are delighted to present the first exhibition on their important collection of works by Jean-Michel Basquiat,” said William Acquavella. “Focusing on the significance of drawing in Basquiat's practice, we are pleased to show these remarkable works on paper, many of which are being exhibited to the public for the first time."

Herbert and Lenore Schorr began collecting the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1981, before his first New York exhibition. “During the artist’s seminal years 1982-83 the Schorrs acquired several of his most important paintings, but in contrast to virtually every other early collector, the Schorrs also pursued and acquired a great number of works on paper both directly from the artist and from his early dealers,” explained curator Fred Hoffman. “The Schorrs astutely understood that working on paper was equally central to his practice as painting on canvas. Their collection demonstrates both the focus and ambition that the artist invested in the medium of drawing.”

Jean-Michel Basquiat showed an affinity for drawing at an early age and this practice was a central component of his artistic output. Between 1980-88, the artist produced approximately 1000 works on paper, which articulate complex narratives, revealing flawed power structures and hinting at fundamental failings in social discourse.

The portrait of Herbert and Lenore Schorr that will be included in the exhibition highlights the impact their support had on the artist’s short but prolific career. “We had so much confidence in him from the beginning and couldn’t understand why other people couldn’t see it,” explained Lenore Schorr. “A wonderful exhibition that he did at Fun Gallery in 1983 didn’t receive a single review and we were the only ones to buy a painting.” That painting, Leonardo da Vinci’s Greatest Hits is now considered a seminal example of the artist’s work and will be one of two paintings on view. 

Curator Fred Hoffman, Ph.D. met Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1982 and worked closely with him during the artist’s residency in Venice, California from 1982-84. With Hoffman's help, Basquiat produced five editions of prints, published in 1983 by New City Editions. Hoffman also assisted in the production of the artist’s 1984 silkscreen paintings and co-curated Basquiat’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 2005. He is the Ahmanson Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 

Jean-Michel Basquiat (b.1960 d.1988) has been the subject of numerous major museum exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. In 2005, a retrospective exhibition, Basquiat, opened at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and subsequently traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. A 2010 retrospective, organized by the Fondation Beyeler in collaboration with the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, marked what would have been Basquiat’s 50th birthday. His work is included in private and public collections throughout the world, including The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museu d' art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

A fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Fred Hoffman will accompany the exhibition.

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES, NEW YORK

www.acquavellagalleries.com