Andy Warhol: Vanitas @ The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

Andy Warhol: Vanitas 

The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh 

October 10, 2025 – March 9, 2026 

Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait, 1986 

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

Andy Warhol, Sleep, 1963 

© The Andy Warhol Museum

The Andy Warhol Museum presents Andy Warhol: Vanitas, an exhibition which explores the ephemeral nature of life as seen through the eyes of one of the most iconic artists of the 20th century. Andy Warhol, a pivotal figure in the Pop Art movement, was strongly influenced by his Byzantine Catholic upbringing and the religious iconography that pervaded his early life. This spiritual undercurrent appears throughout his oeuvre, where themes of mortality, vanity and the passage of time are recurrent motifs.

Andy Warhol 

Details of Renaissance Paintings 

(Leonardo da Vinci The Annunciation 1472), 1984 

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

This exhibition examines Warhol’s contemplation of life’s transient nature through the lens of three themes: Mortality, Vanitas and Temporality. Each theme offers a lens through which his fascination with death, the fleeting nature of beauty and the passage of time can be understood. Warhol explored these themes in his work with seriousness, and he infused them with irony and humor, showcasing his unique, often philosophical and contemplative, perspective.

“Museum audiences have increasingly taken an interest in exploring other aspects of Warhol’s career beyond his well-known Pop Art masterpieces,” said Amber Morgan, director of collections and exhibitions. “Andy Warhol: Vanitas, while perhaps seeming a bit dark in theme, speaks to Warhol’s willingness to confront universal big questions and explore multiple paths in his search for answers.”

Andy Warhol, Skull, 1976 

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

Andy Warhol, Skull, 1976 

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

Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait with Skull, 1978

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

Vanitas, derived from the Latin word for “vanity”, refers to a genre of still-life painting that thrived in the 17th century, amongst others in The Netherlands and Flanders. It typically features collections of symbolic objects representing the transience of life, the emptiness of worldly pleasure and the inevitability of death. These works are designed to remind viewers of their mortality and the insignificance of worldly goods and pleasures. Rich in symbolic imagery, vanitas prints often depict skulls, extinguished candles, wilting flowers, soap bubbles and timepieces, all serving as memento mori (Latin for “remember that you must die”). The Vanitas theme was a constant subject for Warhol in works featuring skulls, disasters and tragic beauty. The exhibition includes a small selection of vanitas Dutch artworks on loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam

“The SCHUNCK Museum is grateful to collaborate with The Warhol on this exhibition, inspired by the 17th-century Dutch and Flemish Vanitas tradition in painting,” said Fabian de Kloe, artistic director at the SCHUNCK museum. “Vanitas invites reflection on themes such as faith, identity and mortality—echoing not only the Catholic heritage of the Southern Netherlands but also the personal and spiritual explorations in Andy Warhol’s work. Rooted in two post-industrial cities, Pittsburgh and Heerlen, this partnership creates space to reflect on our shared histories and how these timeless questions continue to shape our lives today.”

Andy Warhol: Vanitas is curated by Patrick Moore, former director of The Warhol, in collaboration with the SCHUNCK museum.

THE ANDY WARHOL MUSEUM

117 Sandusky Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15212

www.warhol.org

Osi Audu @ Skoto Gallery, NYC - " Magic Box" Exhibition

Osi Audu: Magic Box

Skoto Gallery, New York

March 20 - May 3, 2025

Skoto Gallery presents Magic Box, an exhibition of recent drawings and paintings by the Nigeria-born artist Osi Audu. This is his sixth solo exhibition at the gallery.

Osi Audu’s recent work builds on his long-standing exploration of the dynamic relationship between line, form and color while remaining firmly rooted in the Yoruba philosophical concept of the human head as the locus of dreams, imagination and phenomenal experiences. Like the Magic Box, the human head holds a very powerful fascination for the artist, which has to do with its significance as a site of one’s identity and seat of the brain which coordinates the activities of the body including perception and communication. He uses his poetic sensibility effectively to explore his highly conceptual imagery of the head as a container of consciousness, combining minimalist geometric and organic forms with achromatic and contrasting colors to further underscore the interplay of the conscious, subconscious and superconscious in experiential responses, thereby obliging the viewer to look beyond the surface for deeper meanings.

Osi Audu’s work demonstrates unassuming techniques and depth of resonance. He combines complex compositional organization with spatial dynamics that eschew flatness, with a strong conviction in the spiritual energy of color to create works that continue to refine and re-define the language of abstraction. There is a physical as well as an emotional presence in his work that brings together a hierarchy of forms drawn from a range of sources including nature, classical African art, geometry and science combined with a willingness to reduce forms and ideas to their essence while simultaneously preserving an overall fluency, energy and beauty inherent throughout the body of work in this exhibition. There is a clarity of form in his work that is highly characteristic and easily recognizable.

Osi Audu’s work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions including Kwangju Biennale; Venice Biennale; The Africa-America exhibition at the Tobu Museum, Japan and the Museum of the Mind at the British Museum. He was educated in Nigeria and the United States. His work is in several public and private collections including the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, The Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ. The British Museum, Horniman Museum and Wellcome Trust, all in London; The Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire and the Mott-Warsh Collection, Flint. Michigan, among others. Corporate collections include SONY Classical, New York; Fidelity Investment Corporation, Boston, MA

SKOTO GALLERY

529 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.skotogallery.com

Robert Indiana: The Shape of the World @ Pace Gallery, Hong Kong

Robert Indiana

The Shape of the World

Pace Gallery, Hong Kong

Mach 25 - May 9, 2025

Robert Indiana 

Ginkgo, 2000 

© Star of Hope Foundation, Vinalhaven, Maine

Pace presents Robert Indiana: The Shape of the World, an exhibition of work by celebrated American artist ROBERT INDIANA (1928–2018), who first emerged as a key figure in the Pop art movement, at its Hong Kong gallery.

This presentation, coinciding with the 2025 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, includes important sculpture, paintings, and prints from throughout Robert Indiana’s career, showcasing his graphic visual vocabulary that made him one of the most inventive and enduring figures in the history of American art. Robert Indiana: The Shape of the World focuses on Indiana’s deep interest in numerology, literature, geometry, color, and form, and will be Pace’s first exhibition of the artist’s work since it began representing The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative in 2024. 

Following the show in Hong Kong, the gallery will mount a major presentation dedicated to Robert Indiana at its New York flagship, featuring a distinct group of rarely seen paintings and sculpture that speak to the flexibility of Indiana’s practice and one of the most central themes in his work: the triumph and tragedy of the American dream. 

At the vanguard of Pop art and assemblage, Robert Indiana made use of words and numerals in his bold signature style exploring American identity and iconography as well as the universal power of abstraction. Indiana referred to himself as an “American painter of signs,” developing a visual vocabulary that—imbued with literary, political, and spiritual depth—made him one of the most important figures in the history of art. 

Born Robert Clark in the state of Indiana in 1928, he began his career as part of the community of artists—including Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, and Jack Youngerman—working in the Coenties Slip, once a major port on the southeast tip of Manhattan, in the 1950s. The following decade marked a turning point in his career with the success of his famous LOVE image, which debuted at New York’s Stable Gallery and has since become a cultural icon in its own right, remaining as relevant today as when first created 60 years ago. In 1978, Robert Indiana chose to remove himself from the New York art world, settling on the remote island of Vinalhaven in Maine, where he worked until his death in 2018.

“Numbers are ageless, there is no social comment involved, very simply, numbers chart the world’s course,” Robert Indiana once said.

Pace’s exhibition of Indiana’s work in Hong Kong focuses on the artist’s connection to language and numbers, drawing attention to form and symbolism. Bringing together a curated selection of paintings, sculpture, and prints created by the artist between the 1960s and early 2000s, this presentation is organized thematically with an emphasis on numerology and the universality of numbers. Holistically, the show is also shed light on the relationships—in terms of both form and scale—between the artist’s paintings and sculpture.

Among the works on view are three of Indiana’s painted bronzes, translations of works he conceived in the early 1960s. Referred to by the artist as “herms,” after the sculptures that served as boundary markers at crossroads in ancient Greece and Rome, these works feature brightly colored numbers painted using 19th-century brass stencils that Robet Indiana scavenged on the streets of New York. Considering bronze to be one of the most noble of materials in the tradition of sculpture, Indiana selected eight of his herm sculptures to be cast in bronze in 1991. TWO (1960–62, cast 1991), one of the bronze herms in Pace’s Hong Kong show, was presented in Robert Indiana: The Sweet Mystery, an official Collateral Event of the 60th Venice Biennale and one of the most significant exhibitions of his work in Italy to date, in 2024. 

The gallery’s exhibition is also highlight two examples of Indiana’s most admired LOVE sculptures—LOVE (Red Outside Blue Inside) and LOVE (Red Outside Gold Inside), both conceived in 1966 and executed in 1999 in polychrome aluminum. Also included is ONE Through ZERO (The Ten Numbers) (1978–2003), a stainless steel work composed of ten individual numbers that reflects the artist’s enduring interest in the symbolic, allegorical, and formal resonances of numbers. Indiana’s number sculptures illuminate the different meanings and associations that numbers can conjure, the relationship between numbers in his art to events in his own life—such as highway routes or buildings where he lived—and more universal ideas about the cycle of life. 

Paintings created by Robert Indiana between the 1960s and early 2000s are also featured in Pace’s presentation in Hong Kong. Among these works is one of the first LOVE paintings, a small-scale, 12 x 12 inch work from 1965. Several paintings in the exhibition have unique resonances in Hong Kong: Ginkgo (2000), a hard-edge composition depicting a ginkgo leaf design that Indiana, inspired by the leaves on the trees he saw around the Coenties Slip, began exploring in 1957, and Four Diamond Ping (2003), a dynamic, diamond-shaped work containing the Mandarin word for “peace” as well as biblical phrases in English.

These sculptures and paintings complemented by a selection of ten prints, each featuring one number between zero and nine, that Robert Indiana produced in 2001 and 2011. Derived from his Decade Autoportrait series of paintings, which the artist began in 1971, these works were conceived as portraits of Indiana’s life during the 1960s, each named for a different year in the decade and containing references to important names, places, and events in his world of significance within the artist’s life.

Today, Indiana’s work can be found in the permanent collections of museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Menil Collection, Houston; Tate Modern, London; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien), Vienna; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, among many other institutions around the world.

Established in 2022, The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative aims to increase awareness of and appreciation for the depth and breadth of the work of Robert Indiana and is the leading entity dedicated to the advancement of the artist’s work. Represented worldwide by Pace Gallery, The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative also manages the website www.robertindiana.com and is responsible for The Robert Indiana Catalogue Raisonné, which is now available online www.ricatalogueraisonne.org.

PACE GALLERY - HONG KONG

12/F, H Queen's - 80 Queen's Road Central, Hong Kong

www.pacegallery.com

Tabboo! Early Works @ Karma & Gordon Robichaux, New York

Tabboo!

Early Works

Karma, New York

Gordon Robichaux, New York

January 8/12 – February 28, 2025

Karma and Gordon Robichaux present Early Works, an multisite exhibition by Tabboo! on view in New York at 172 and 188 East 2nd Street, and 41 Union Square West, respectively. On view at both galleries through February 28, 2025, Early Works opens on January 8 at Karma and January 12 at Gordon Robichaux. 

In the summer of 1982, Tabboo! arrived in New York City. Against a backdrop of Neo-Expressionism, Pictures postmodernism, graffiti, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Tabboo! developed an aesthetic universe of painting, performance, and text that would become foundational to the city’s new avant garde and its rearticulation in popular culture at large. His early work emerged from a collision of his longstanding interests—1960s psychedelia, pop divas, the black-and-white drawings of Aubrey Beardsley—and the downtown queer art scene he became an integral part of, alongside fellow Boston School friends such as Jack Pierson, Mark Morrisroe, and Pat Hearn. Over the course of the next decade, he would create exuberant paintings and works on paper; produce flyers and backdrops for now-legendary East Village venues like Pyramid Club, where he also performed; make a glitter-soaked banner for the pioneering drag festival Wigstock; and design lettering for the covers of dance group Deee-lite’s smash single “Groove is in the Heart” and album World Clique. 

Text—rendered in his idiosyncratic calligraphic script—connects decades of Tabboo!’s work across media. He developed his signature lettering, characterized by its spiraling, curvilinear details, in reaction to the predominance of hard-edged, sans-serif fonts that dominated the visual culture of the early 1980s. Letters pirouette and curlicue across supports ranging from paper to textiles, gelatin silver prints to wood. His spirals extend and repeat beyond their linguistic tethers, forming borders reminiscent of Greek keys—known as meanders—around images or multiplying across the surfaces of works. Darkly witty and abundant with references to the era’s underground culture, Tabboo!’s writing appears on flyers for club nights, tarot cards, and advertisements for local boutiques like Fiorucci and Patricia Field; in speech bubbles that animate his illustrations; and adorning clothing from Willi Smith’s label Williwear, examples of which are on view at Gordon Robichaux. Enacting the performative nature of speech, language in his work variously punctuates, describes, and subverts the visual, with phrases like “sports at the Pyramid: drag racing” accompanying an image of a figure running out of the frame in platform heels. Untitled (tres chic) (1986), created for a Williwear window display, transforms a camp utterance into a wall sculpture that acts as a floating speech bubble for anyone, or any mannequin, who stands beside it. 

The monumental Wigstock Banner (1990) on view at Karma features an array of illustrated queens that meld with the swaths of thinned-out acrylics that interact to create its ground. Painted for the the sixth annual outdoor drag festival organized by the legendary Lady Bunny, the twelve-foot-long canvas invigorates the abstract washes of Color Field painting with an unabashed embrace of neon hues and campy figuration. Many of the looks from his performances in drag, one of which was put to tape 1995’s Wigstock: The Movie, are recorded in a series of drawings that catalogue his numerous personae. Throughout the eighties, Tabboo! used self-portraits, in and out of drag, to explore iterations of his own subjectivity. Drawing equally from the psychological intensity of German expressionism and the camp of popular culture, Tabboo! depicted himself in glasses with stubble and hair standing on end in the impasto-laden Untitled (Self-Portrait) (1982), bewigged and grinning in the Pop-inflected Self-Portrait in Drag as Popcorn (1983), and with a tumbling fall of electric-blue hair in Classical Beauty (1984).

As with his self-portraits, Tabboo! treats his depictions of friends, collaborators, and pop culture heroes with an approach to painting that he would come to call “emotional realism.” He created the gestural, sharpie and housepaint on cardboard Keith Haring (1983) during a live caricature night at the Pyramid Club, paring the artist’s likeness down to simple lines that nonetheless capture his essence. This and works such as Connie Francis at San Janero Festival (1982) and Tammy Wynette (1983), dispense with naturalism, instead communicating affect through the artist’s insistent brushwork, distorted faces, and vibrant palette. Other, more traditionally “realist” paintings, like the still lifes Guido and Vita-Chick (both 1986), introduce perspective and modeling while retaining their emotional charge. 

This survey of Tabboo!’s prescient 1980s output across media attests to his prolific production during his first years in New York. Over the following three decades, his influence—on art, graphic design, fashion, and popular culture—cemented itself as central to the identity of the city he still calls home.

KARMA

188 & 172 East 2nd Street, New York City

karmakarma.org

GORDON ROBICHAUX

41 Union Square West, New York City

www.gordonrobichaux.com

Yalla Yalla! See You in Egypt - Exhibition @ Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Yalla Yalla! See You in Egypt

Teylers Museum, Haarlem

19 October 2024 - 9 February 2025

Willem de Famars Testas (1834-1896) 

Streetscape with coffee house in Cairo, ca 1860-1872.

Teylers Museum collection

Image courtesy Teylers Museum

At the exhibition 'Yalla Yalla! See You in Egypt', Teylers Museum puts the work of the nineteenth-century artist Willem de Famars Testas centre stage in a whole new way. The oldest museum in the Netherlands has plotted a journey in the exhibition, in collaboration with Dutch-Egyptian actor and theatre-maker Sabri Saad El-Hamus, prizewinning podcaster Tjitske Mussche and internationally known scenographer and maker Theun Mosk of studio Ruimtetijd. With Testas’s work as its guide, they take visitors along on a journey across the boundaries of time, space and cultures.

Willem de Famars Testas

In 1858, the young and as yet unknown artist Willem de Famars Testas (1834-1896) embarked on a long, life-changing journey to Egypt. The scents, colours, sounds, mosques, the povery, the climate – everything was different, as the diary he kept and the letters he sent also reveal: ‘The hustle and bustle of this place is quite strange: everywhere one meets camels, donkeys and horses, laden with all kinds of things, and also swarms of donkeys, which one sees everywhere with their boys.’ The scenery of this new world inspired him to make paintings, watercolours, sketches and drawings. Many of them are held in the collections of the Rijksmuseum, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and Teylers Museum.

Terry van Druten and Sabri Saad El-Hamus 

at a burial chamber in Koerna, Thebe, February 2024

Photography: Tjitske Mussche

Journey to Egypt 2024

Scenes of distant countries were a popular feature of European art in the nineteenth century, but they also convey a certain stereotypical image. How relevant is Testas’s image of Egypt today, and what do we make of his descriptions now?

Curator Terry van Druten – a huge fan of Testas’s work for fifteen years – Sabri Saad El-Hamus and Tjitske Mussche travelled to Egypt in Testas’s footsteps last February. They visited places where Testas made drawings and looked to see how those places had changed. They spoke with Egyptians and with each other about Egypt then and now. Mussche processed their adventures into an audio travelogue focusing on multiple perspectives. Not only Testas’s view of Egypt, but also, for example, El-Hamus’s view of the Netherlands, foreign to him when he first arrived here as a ‘bearer of good fortune’ at the age of 21. Sabri Saad El-Hamus: 'When I read the travel diary, I was surprised by his view of the Egyptians. Sometimes he seems utterly out of touch, or plainly racist. Still, he also says things about Egypt that are true, even today. I also recognized something in him: I, too, had those feelings of alienation and homesickness when I came to the Netherlands as a young man in a completely new world.’

Exhibition

In Theun Mosk’s exciting space – with paintings, drawings, film footage and photographs – visitors to Teylers Museum can listen to dialogues between Van Druten and El-Hamus, and fragments from Testas’s diary, read out by actor Florian Myjer. The music was composed especially for this exhibition by the young composer Youssra El Hawary of Cairo. Testas’s work challenges visitors to make a voyage of discovery in Egypt and encounter ‘the other’ and themselves.

TEYLERS MUSEUM

Spaarne 16, 2011 CH Haarlem

teylersmuseum.nl

Richard Serra @ David Zwirner, NYC - "Every Which Way" Exhibition + Biography

Richard Serra: Every Which Way 

David Zwirner, New York

November 7 – December 14, 2024

David Zwirner presents Every Which Way, a major installation from 2015 by RICHARD SERRA (1938–2024), at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street space in New York.

The work comprises sixteen vertical steel panels, each measuring six feet wide and twelve inches thick. These stand at varying heights of either seven, nine, or eleven feet tall and are arranged in a staggered grid formation that spans the exhibition space.

As Richard Serra described: “In Every Which Way you confront the frontality of each cluster of plates first, and then turn depending on how much attention you pay. You’re led to make a horizontal shift instead of just walking diagonally or straight ahead. Turning around, walking backward, sliding across—that happens a lot in [my work from this period]. Also, due to its verticality—five of the sixteen slabs are eleven feet high—Every Which Way has more of an architectural reference than prior pieces.… It’s always there, not here. Even when you’re right up against it, it always evades you.… Like [being in the midst of a] city, Every Which Way forces you to make countersteps, twists, and turns continuously.” --Richard Serra, “Passages and Intervals,” in Richard Serra and Hal Foster: Conversations about Sculpture, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018, 144.

Richard Serra was born in San Francisco and lived and worked in New York, the North Fork of Long Island, and Nova Scotia. His first significant solo exhibition was held at the Leo Castelli Warehouse, New York, in 1969. His first solo museum exhibition took place at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1970. Serra subsequently participated in numerous international exhibitions, including Documenta (1972, 1977, 1982, and 1987) in Kassel, Germany; the 1980, 1984, 2001, and 2013 editions of the Venice Biennale; and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual and Biennial exhibitions of 1968, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1995, and 2006.

Solo exhibitions of Richard Serra’s work have been held at numerous public institutions worldwide, including, among others, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (1980); Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris (1984); Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany (1985); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1986); Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, Germany (1987); Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich (1987); Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands (1988); Kunsthaus Zürich (1990); CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux (1990); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1992); Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (1992); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1997); Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro (1997–1998); Trajan’s Market, Rome (2000); Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis (2003); and Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples (2004).

In 2005, The Matter of Time, a series of eight large-scale works by Serra from 1994 to 2005, was installed permanently at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and in 2007, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented the retrospective Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years. Promenade, a major site-specific installation, was shown at the Grand Palais, Paris, for Monumenta 2008. In 2011, the artist’s large-scale, site-specific sculpture 7 was permanently installed opposite the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar. In 2014, the Qatar Museum Authority presented a two-venue retrospective survey of Serra’s work at the QMA Gallery and the Al Riwaq exhibition space, Doha, and East-West/West-East (2014) was permanently installed in the Brouq Nature Reserve in the Zekreet Desert, Qatar. In June 2020, a new major sculpture by Richard Serra was installed on the West Quad of Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio. In 2022, Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland, opened a new building designed by Thomas Phifer in collaboration with the artist to house Four Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure, the monumental sculpture that Richard Serra debuted at David Zwirner in 2017.

Museum exhibitions that have focused on the artist’s drawings include Richard Serra: Tekeningen/Drawings 1971–1977, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1977); Richard Serra: Zeichnungen 1971–1977, Kunsthalle Tübingen, West Germany (1978); Richard Serra: Drawings, Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk, Denmark (1986); Richard Serra: Tekeningen/Drawings, Bonnefantemuseum, Maastricht, the Netherlands (1990); Richard Serra: Drawings, Serpentine Gallery, London (1992); Richard Serra: Drawings and Prints, The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (1994); Richard Serra: Rio Rounds, Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro (1997–1998); and Richard Serra: Drawings: Work Comes Out of Work, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2008). A major traveling retrospective dedicated to the artist’s drawings was presented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and The Menil Collection, Houston (which was the organizing venue), in 2011–2012. The Courtauld Gallery, London, presented Richard Serra: Drawings for The Courtauld in 2013, and Richard Serra: desenhos na casa da Gávea was on view at Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro, in 2014. Richard Serra: Drawings 2015–2017, a significant overview of the artist’s recent works on paper, was on view at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 2017. In 2022, the Guggenheim Bilbao presented Serra/Seurat. Drawings, an exhibition pairing a selection of Richard Serra’s recent drawings alongside those by Georges Seurat.

Richard Serra was the recipient of many notable prizes and awards, including a J. Paul Getty Medal (2018) awarded in honor of extraordinary contributions to the practice, understanding, and support of the arts; the Chevalier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur, Republic of France (2015); Orden de las Artes y las Letras de España, Spain (2008); Orden pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste, Federal Republic of Germany (2002); Leone d’Oro for lifetime achievement, Venice Biennale (2001); Praemium Imperiale, Japan Art Association (1994); Carnegie Prize (1985); a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1974); and a Fulbright Grant (1965).

In 2013 in New York, David Zwirner presented Richard Serra: Early Work, a critically acclaimed exhibition that brought together significant works from 1966 to 1971. The accompanying catalogue extensively covers this period of the artist’s career with a compendium of archival texts and photographs and an essay by Hal Foster. In 2014, the gallery presented an exhibition of new drawings, Richard Serra: Vertical and Horizontal Reversals; a catalogue accompanied the exhibition and included an essay by Gordon Hughes. Richard Serra: Equal, an installation in forged weatherproof steel, was presented at David Zwirner, New York, in 2015. That work is now in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2016, David Zwirner Books/Steidl published Richard Serra: Forged Steel, which surveys the artist’s work in forged steel since 1977 and features scholarship by Richard Shiff and texts by the artist. In 2017, the gallery presented an exhibition of new sculpture and drawings by the artist at its New York location. In 2018, David Zwirner presented a series of new drawings by Serra in Hong Kong. In 2022, a forged steel work titled 2022 was presented at David Zwirner, New York, alongside a series of drawings by the artist; these two presentations were accompanied by the publication Richard Serra: 2022. In 2024, the gallery presented Six Large Drawings at David Zwirner’s London location. 

Work by Richard Serra is held in important public and private collections worldwide.

DAVID ZWIRNER GALLERY

537 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.davidzwirner.com

Robert Longo @ Albertina Museum, Vienna

Robert Longo

The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna

September 4, 2024 – January 26, 2025

 

As an artist, I feel a moral imperative to preserve

the images of our shared dystopic present

with the hope that something will one day change. -- Robert Longo [1]

The ALBERTINA has a special connection to Robert Longo: “It was around 20 years ago that we were able to reopen the Albertina in 2003 with Robert Longo's exhibition ‘The Freud Drawings’. In my last year as General Director of the Albertina, we are looking back on these beginnings and dedicating a comprehensive retrospective to the outstanding American artist. The repositioning of the Graphic Art Collection began with Robert Longo. Instead of continuing to collect conventionally in cassette format and seeing the drawing primarily as a sketch or study that prepares the actual work of art, since this Longo exhibition in 2003 we have for the first time made the development of contemporary art towards the monumental, drawn ‘picture’ the guiding principle of a contemporary collection and museum mission: Franz Gertsch, Anselm Kiefer and many others, who had previously been ignored by the Albertina because of their large-format works, defined our new self-image from this point onwards”, says ALBERTINA General Director Klaus Albrecht Schröder.

The show features important key works from the various periods of his production, beginning with Men in the Cities, the series that made him famous overnight and embodied the zeitgeist of early 1980s New York like few other works. The exhibition also presents the Bodyhammers, in which the artist expresses his unease with gun culture in the United States, as well as works from the Freud cycle. The latter is based on photographs secretly taken in Freud’s office and apartment for documentation purposes, before he had to flee from the Nazis to London in 1938. Also featured are works from God Machines, in which Robert Longo addresses monotheistic world religions, and The Destroyer Cycle, in which he takes up events from global politics.

Robert Longo: Monuments in black and white

Robert Longo is known for his monumental hyperrealistic works: powerful, dynamic charcoal drawings whose virtuoso technique and the visual force of the motifs mesmerize the observer. For his models, Robert Longo uses photographs that record dramatic situations at the moment of their greatest tension. The artist is concerned here with the depiction of power—in nature, politics, history. He utilizes visual material that has been reproduced thousands of times, and which has long been a part of pop culture, of our collective visual memory. Longo isolates and reduces the motifs so as to raise their visual impact to a higher power. By enlarging the subject and intensifying the lighting into a dramatic chiaroscuro, we find ourselves before gigantic, previously unseen theatrical images. Longo draws on existing images, references reality secondhand, and creates impressive “copies” of the original black-and-white photographs, which pale beside their transformation into colossal charcoal drawings.

The dramatic lighting and shadow effects of the charcoal drawings emphasize the objects’ plasticity and the spatial depth. They make the motif appear as real as it is unreal. The deep black of the charcoal rubbed into the paper swallows up all of the light. Paradoxically, Robert Longo is ultimately capable, like no one else, of evoking brightness and radiant light, transparency, and differentiated materiality with the blackness of charcoal.

Robert Longo and the Pictures Generation

In the late 1970s Robert Longo belonged to the so-called Pictures Generation, a loose grouping of New York artists that critically engaged with mass media and pop culture in their works. His iconic large-scale series of drawings Men in the Cities (1979–83; pp. 31–39) in their extreme, dynamic poses aptly expressed the fragile mood— fraught with tension—of the 1980s. New York in those days was dominated as much by financial wealth, a real estate boom, and yuppie culture as it was by rising criminality, drug problems, and social inequality, polarizing the city. The neoconservative politics of the Reagan era and the threat posed by the Cold War contributed to a climate of insecurity. Longo’s severely formal drawings echo this sentiment. The figures are dressed in “urban uniforms and Film Noir attire” [2] against a white background, in an empty space, each one isolated, frozen in a moment of intense movement and physical contortion. The artist found a correspondence in the intensely stylized representation of black-and-white contrasts, originating in news media and black-and-white films. [3] Robert Longo prefers these abstract symbols to be installed as a group in order to create a rhythmic tension. He thereby also articulates their individually experienced inner turmoil in a collectively lived structure marked by tension and pressure.

The dramatics and the composition of an image play a central role in Longo’s work. For the God Machines (2008–11; pp. 110–15), his portrayal of places of worship, he creates an atmosphere of reverence and sublimity through overwhelming size, through light and shadow, as well as through the perspective that expresses the power of religious institutions. A detailed elaboration of a bullet hole in close-up (pp. 15, 102/103), which allows the observer to recognize every crack and every splitter in the glass, literally draws us into the violence of the moment. By precisely rendering the mushroom cloud (p. 87) in central perspective, the artist transmits not only the enormous power, brutality, and destructive force of the catastrophic event of an atom bomb exploding, but also the feeling of fascination in the face of the terrifying beauty of this phenomenon.

Longo’s visual universe is fueled by personal impressions, influences, and topics connected with U.S. society, politics, and pop culture, as well as significant global events. Police brutality and racism, war and terrorism, the exercise of power, repression, and violence all find expression in his works. Yet even if the motifs appear personal, the artist is not concerned alone with the expression of an individual emotion.

Robert Longo: Raft at Sea

It is one of Robert Longo’s most impressive and at the same time most poignant works: Untitled (Raft at Sea) (2016–17; pp. 12/13, 184/185) depicts a rubber dinghy on the high seas, overloaded with its cargo of refugees and dangerously low in the water. The people in it, mostly men, sit on the edge of the rubber ring, disturbingly close to the water’s surface. They wear caps, hats, and thick jackets under their life vests, indicating the inhospitable temperatures. The composition situates the boat on the horizon line in the upper third of the image, on the central panel of the monumental charcoal drawing. The entire area underneath is the dark sea with its turbulent waves, to which the dinghy and its passengers are exposed. An overcast sky stretches above, becoming less clouded over to the right—at least promising a little hope. We observe the scene not from a secure perspective from above, from a larger ship, or from the air, but on the same level as the rubber raft. We might, therefore, be in a similar dinghy or even in the water amid the waves. The artist has thus placed us in the same predicament as the people shown in his drawing, who are risking their lives to flee.

For Raft at Sea, Robert Longo draws on an image we have often seen in the media in recent years. Yet in the whirlwind of images that swirl around us every day, we no longer perceive the situation in all of its harrowing intensity, because we have, to a certain degree, become accustomed to it. Through the artist’s altered composition and the enormous size of the work, Longo forces us to look once more and to engage with what is presented.

In his charcoal drawings, he appropriates the pathos, aesthetics, and narrative of film, the visual language of the cinema. Drawing on his experience as a film director and his work on music videos for bands such as New Order and R.E.M., Robert Longo often brings a cinematic gaze to the creation of his works. His motifs recall film stills that capture a moment of tension, an emotional climax. This dramatic component is experienced anew every time we see a work, as if it is happening right now, thereby acquiring a timeless quality. 

[1] Robert Longo in conversation with the author on June 27, 2024.

[2] The information and the following quotations are from a conversation between the artist and the author on February 22, 2024.

[3] In addition to film and television, Robert Longo was also influenced by the energy of the downtown punk and New Wave music scene. See the essay by Holger Liebs in this publication: Jerking into Now. Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities and the “Pictures Generation,” 23.

Curator: ELSY LAHNER 

Assitant: MELISSA LUMBROSO 

ALBERTINA MUSEUM

Albertinaplatz 1, 1010 Vienna

www.albertina.at

Updated Post - 09-07-2025

Jiro Takamatsu @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "The World Expands" Exhibition - Shadow and Perspective Artworks

Jiro Takamatsu: The World Expands

Pace Gallery, New York

September 20 - November 2, 2024

JIRO TAKAMATSU

Shadow, 1989/1997 

© The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, 

courtesy Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo, 

Pace Gallery, New York and 

Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

Photograph by Richard Gary

Pace presents its first exhibition of JIRO TAKAMATSU (1936-1998)—a profoundly influential artist, theorist, and teacher who emerged in postwar Japan in the early 1960s—since its representation of the artist’s estate this year. The presentation at the gallery’s 540 West 25th Street flagship in New York focuses on Jiro Takamatsu’s Shadow and Perspective concepts—throughout his entire oeuvre, Jiro Takamatsu used the term “concept” to denote certain ideas or phenomena. Bringing together a selection of his paintings, drawings, and sculptural objects dating from 1966 to 1997, this exhibition showcases his inventive, deeply philosophical practice and his important role in the development of Conceptual Art.

A prolific artist who produced thousands of works over the course of his 40-year career, Jiro Takamatsu worked across painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and performance, exploring questions about perception, space, existence, and absence. Early in his practice, during the 1960s, he staged performative interventions in public spaces around Tokyo as part of the artist collective Hi Red Center, liberating art from its traditional context and shaking the foundations of the Japanese art world at the time. Presenting politically minded actions in public spaces throughout postwar Tokyo, Hi Red Center sought to dissolve boundaries between art and life—producing what the group called a “descent into the everyday”—through experimental and unorthodox approaches to making. It was also during this decade, in 1968, that Jiro Takamatsu represented Japan at the 34th Venice Biennale, cementing his status as a key figure within the international avant-garde.

Viewing the act of creating as an intensely intellectual endeavor, Jiro Takamatsu adopted a somewhat reclusive, solitary lifestyle as part of his practice. Grounded by his thoughts about and observations of the world around him, the artist’s highly conceptual works often examine ideas about reality and the self, matter and space, and presence and absence. Producing diverse bodies of work simultaneously, he examined these concepts through various mediums and forms. In one of Takamatsu’s best-known bodies of work—his iconic Shadow paintings, which he created from 1964 up until his death in 1998—he explored questions of perception and dimension as they relate to our experience of matter. In these illusionistic paintings depicting shadows of figures and objects, he presents a visual summation of the complex relationships between that which is at once existent and nonexistent, tangible and intangible, in both physical and metaphysical terms.

A selection of the artist’s Shadow paintings and drawings figures in Pace’s presentation, alongside works from his lesser-known Perspective series. Jiro Takamatsu began creating his Perspective paintings, drawings, and sculptures in the mid-1960s in tandem with his Shadow works, and the relationship between these two concepts hinges on the illusionistic potential of space, when perspective is bent by human intervention. While many of his two-dimensional, mathematically minded Perspective works depict silhouetted figures occupying geometric structures within different planes, some of these compositions are devoid of figures, focusing instead on the ways that combinations of shapes can imply interiority, exteriority, and depth. Several material objects from the Perspective series on view in the gallery’s show shed light on the ways in which Jiro Takamatsu extended these inquiries into three dimensions, imbuing his painted abstractions with a physicality that makes them all the more surreal.

JIRO TAKAMATSU: Biography

Engaging with histories of Dadaism and Surrealism through a minimalist visual language, Jiro Takamatsu’s (b. 1936, Tokyo; d. 1998, Tokyo) art centers on metaphysical ideas and concepts related to time, space, and emptiness. Over the span of his four-decade career, the artist engaged with a range of mediums, including sculpture, photography, painting, drawing, and performance art, through which he explored concepts related to perception, space, and objecthood. Jiro Takamatsu studied at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he cultivated an interdisciplinary artistic practice after graduating in 1958. In the following years, he helped establish the collective known as Hi Red Center (1963–64), which sought to dissolve boundaries between art and life through politically minded actions in public spaces. Jiro Takamatsu was also a leading figure in the Mono-Ha (School of Things) movement, centering on materiality and material conditions through non-representational art. Through his practice, Jiro Takamatsu investigated how painting could serve as a tool for critical inquiry, questioning the role of perceptual and visual phenomena in constructing notions of reality.

An influential figure of the Japanese avant-garde, presenting numerous solo exhibitions during his lifetime, Jiro Takamatsu is once again the subject of international attention, his practice lauded by scholars and curators across institutions globally. In 2014, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo opened Jiro Takamatsu: Mysteries, which traced three distinct phases of his career; in 2015, the National Museum of Art in Osaka mounted the major retrospective Jiro Takamatsu: Trajectory of Work. Takamatsu has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, United Kingdom (2017) and the Royal Society of Sculptors, London (2019). The artist’s work is held in important public collections worldwide, including Aomori Museum of Art, Japan; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate, London; among others.

PACE NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Leon Kossoff @ Xavier Hufkens, Brussels - "Close Encounters: Paintings and Drawings" Exhibition

Leon Kossoff

Close Encounters: Paintings and Drawings

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

2 February — 30 March 2024

Xavier Hufkens presents the gallery’s first exhibition dedicated to the work of the British painter LEON KOSSOFF (1926-2019). Featuring paintings and drawings made over a four-decade period,  the presentation highlights two significant bodies of work showcasing major themes in Leon Kossoff’s oeuvre, namely London cityscapes and his ‘translations’ of works by Old and Modern Masters. The exhibition presents a comprehensive overview of Leon Kossoff’s practice as well as its stylistic evolution.

Leon Kossoff was a leading member of the London School, a loose association of artists that also included Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, and David Hockney. Although stylistically diverse, they all focused on figuration and expressive realism at a time when abstraction and minimalism were the dominant forces in contemporary art. Kossoff painted London almost obsessively. The works in the exhibition include scenes from the north of the city, where he lived and worked, and the East End, where he was raised. Painted between 1971 and 1992, they chronicle Kossoff’s fascination with the city’s post-war renewal. He was especially drawn to places of transformation and transit, such building sites and stations, as evidenced by Demolition of YMCA Building No. 2, Spring (1971), Booking Hall, Kilburn Underground Station No. 4 (1978) and Outside Kilburn Underground Station, November (1984). Separated by a period of six years, the Kilburn paintings not only bear witness to the artist’s unwavering interest in his everyday surroundings but also the way in which even the most familiar subjects are in a state of permanent flux.

The artist additionally depicted buildings and places that evoked specific memories for him, such as Red Brick School Building, Winter (1982). This was a type of school building familiar to many English children growing up in the post-war period, and which reminded him of the primary school he himself attended in Spitalfields. The nearby church, one of London’s grandest baroque edifices, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, was the subject of another of his paintings, Christ Church, Spitalfields, Early Summer (1992). For Kossoff, these subjects were not just physical landmarks but ones in which there is a constant interplay between past and present, underscored by the charged and ever-moving brushwork. Leon Kossoff painted London all year round and always from life. Light and the weather determine the atmosphere of his works, together with his gestural technique and characteristic use of impasto. In an oeuvre that chronicles the ebb and flow of life in one of the world’s largest metropolises over the best part of a century, time and memory are important touchstones. While many of the locations that Kossoff painted have long since vanished, the places immortalised in the paintings on exhibition — the Red Brick School Building, (Willesden), Christ Church, Spitalfields, and Kilburn Underground station — can all be seen today.

Leon Kossoff is also renowned for his ‘translations’ of paintings by Old and Modern Masters. While he visited and drew in the National Gallery in London on a weekly basis, and had done from a young age, the drawings in this exhibition were mainly made from works shown in Royal Academy exhibitions: Francisco Goya’s paintings and Courbet’s The German Huntsman were included in the retrospectives dedicated to these artists in 1978 and 1994 respectively, while Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas (c. 1570-1576) was exhibited in Venetian Painting in 1983. Here too, Leon Kossoff worked from life: he made his drawings in the galleries before the actual paintings. Yet these are anything but academic copies. Leon Kossoff’s rapid, dynamic technique and repetitive strokes are unmistakably his own and the sketches, whilst faithful to the originals, are never identical to them. Hence the term ‘translation’. Captivated by certain Old Masters, or canvases by pioneers such as Cézanne and Courbet, Kossoff strove to analyse the psychological and emotional impact of the paintings by recreating it in his own work. It was both an intellectual engagement and an educational exercise. He wrote in 1987: “In my work done in the National Gallery, and elsewhere from the works of others, I have always been a student. From the earliest days…my attitude to these works has always been to teach myself to draw from them, and, by repeated visits, to try to understand why certain pictures have a transforming effect on the mind.” Leon Kossoff was particularly drawn to dramatic and intense works, or those depicting a struggle, as can be seen in the exhibition.

LEON KOSSOFF began his artistic training at St. Martin’s School of Art in 1943 but left in 1945 to complete three years of military service. He returned to St. Martin’s in 1949 and followed David Bomberg’s classes at Borough Polytechnic from 1950 to 1952. He then completed his training at the Royal College of Art between 1953 and 1956. Leon Kossoff represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and was the subject of a retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1996. His work is held in major public and private collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Tate Gallery, London.

XAVIER HUFKENS

107 rue St-Georges | St-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussels

www.xavierhufkens.com

Sterling Ruby @ Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels - "DROWSE MURMURS" Exhibition

Sterling Ruby 

DROWSE MURMURS 

Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels 

Through 16 December 2023 

DROWSE MURMURS is Sterling Ruby’s most comprehensive exhibition with the gallery to date. Featuring four distinct bodies of new work—drawings, sculptures, paintings and ceramics—it provides a broad overview of the latest developments in his oeuvre. The presentation not only highlights the sweeping nature of his practice but also its material and thematic complexity. The contrasts that have shaped Ruby’s life—between his European roots and American upbringing, between rural Pennsylvania and urban Los Angeles, and between his father’s work for the military and his parents’ involvement with the hippie subculture—all serve as a catalyst for works in which the personal and political coincide. The title is borrowed from Allen Ginsberg’s poem Drowse Murmurs (1965) that echoes some of the most prescient themes of the exhibition, most notably the dialectic between war and peace, destruction and beauty.

Central to the exhibition are Sterling Ruby’s monochrome drawings, which he is showing for the first time. Executed in ink or graphite, they constitute an entirely new body of work. Raw and volatile energy fills each sheet in the same way Allen Ginsberg’s excoriating words hit the page. The Beat Poet coined the phrase ‘first thought, best thought’ to describe a type of truth-telling born from naked experience. Sterling Ruby’s stream-of-consciousness images, which also eschew artistic self-censorship, evoke explosions, cyclones, and nets. Yet fragile glimpses of nature can also be detected amidst their frantic lines, such as a spider’s web or flower.

Flowers also appear in the artist’s cast aluminium sculptures. The FP in the title stands for ‘Flower Power’, a slogan used in the 1960s and 70s to denote passive resistance to the Vietnam War. Ginsberg invented the phrase in 1965, the year in which he wrote Drowse Murmurs, and it served to transform war protests into peaceful affirmative spectacles. An iconic photograph of a man placing a carnation inside the barrel of an M14 rifle, taken by Bernie Boston in 1971, captures the ethos. This image also featured on a poster in the Ruby household. Sterling Ruby’s sculptures are permeated with the same uneasy tension. Their slender forms—which reference his earlier wooden reliefs—resemble gun shafts and bayonets. They are typical examples of the artist’s regenerative practice and cast from assemblages of wood and other materials. Ruby salvages scrap from his creative projects and endlessly repurposes it, meaning that old works give rise to new. The flowers and foliage, all gathered from around the artist’s home and studio, were cast from life. Through these sculptures, Sterling Ruby also introduces a modern material into his work: aluminium. Synonymous with the space age, it is now a ubiquitous part of everyday life, thanks to its lightness and strength. But it also has extensive military applications. The metal played a significant role in the Vietnam War, for example, when it was used to manufacture people carriers and bombs. With their skeletal, almost spectral appearance, Sterling Ruby’s sculptures stand on the threshold of past and present. By establishing an analogy between militarism and activism, the works also raise questions about the conflicts that define our own epoch.

Other aluminium sculptures are shaped like windmills, a structure symbolic of progress and sustenance. Historic examples still punctuate European landscapes as reminders of a bygone age. Different versions arose in the US: the distinctive water-pump windmills that allowed farmers to conquer America’s ‘breadbasket’, the Great Plains. Both are turbines, although the latter have all but disappeared from the American landscape. On another level, Sterling Ruby’s sculptures also speak to rich visual and literary traditions. From the windmills of Hobbema and Vermeer to those of Malevich and Mondrian, or from Don Quixote to Alfred Daudet’s Letters from My Windmill, this is a machine whose power reverberates down the ages.

Sterling Ruby’s latest TURBINE paintings also include windmill-like forms. They relate to his earlier WIDW series, which included a motif that resembled a window. The shape has now acquired a rotational axis and been set in motion. The transformation is open-ended: are these blasted out windows, propellers or wind turbines? Devoid of references to time or place, the cruciform structures carve the pictorial plane into quadrants. Bold colours, some menacing and others more hopeful, create an indeterminate and volatile visual field. Clouds, wind, fire, smoke, smog, storms and dust all spring to mind. If these are indeed wind turbines, then they are ambiguous emblems. Whilst promising clean and sustainable energy, they also bear witness to the ecological ramifications of turbine-driven industrialisation and war. Other paintings in the series contain coruscating bands of colour, which Ruby achieves by pounding pure pigment into the canvas. It creates the impression of speed and velocity, or explosions and bombs. Here, the collaged motifs are geometric shapes that suggest airplane fuselages, border fortifications such as dragon’s teeth, or nodding donkey oil pumps.

In his recent ceramics, Sterling Ruby continues his exploration of the four-petalled flower motif, or quatrefoil. This archetypal image has multiple spiritual and heraldic connotations, including an association with the four cardinal winds. Ruby has also made a visceral series of ‘flowers’ with lobe-like ‘petals’, and articulated stems that resemble vertebrae. With their gnarled and pockmarked surfaces, and their similarity to arrowheads, they resemble archaeological finds from a post-apocalyptic age. Lucio Fontana’s ceramic crucifixes, in which form and matter dissolve through the pressings and mouldings of the artist’s hands, were a reference point when making these works. Sterling Ruby has worked the clay just as intensely, pounding it in the open air so that it gathers traces, both positive and negative, of the world outside the studio. Like excavations or aerial views of ravaged landscapes, they follow on from the shattered topographies of the artist’s Basin Theology series.

DROWSE MURMURS features works that are not pictorial, figurative or didactic, but which still contain identifiable and thought-provoking elements that say something about the world right now. The formal and material contrasts, together with the slippages between past and present, build into a rich visual terrain that touches upon some of the most burning issues of the day. When Allen Ginsberg published Drowse Murmurs in 1967, it was part of his Planet News collection: a penetrating and an unflinching reportage on his life and times. Sterling Ruby channels that same spirit, anno 2023.

STERLING RUBY was born in 1972, holds American and Dutch citizenship, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Sterling Ruby’s sculpture DOUBLE CANDLE (2018) is installed permanently at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. Exhibitions include DROPPA BLOCKA, Museum Dhondt- Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (2013); STOVES, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris (2015); Belvedere, Vienna (2016); Ceramics, Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (2018, travelled to Museum of Arts and Design, New York); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2019–20, travelled to Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston). In 2014 he participated in the Gwangju Biennale, Taipei Triennale, and Whitney Biennial.

XAVIER HUFKENS

6 rue St-Georges | St-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussels

www.xavierhufkens.com

Ruth Asawa @ Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC + Menil Drawing Institute, Houston - Ruth Asawa Through Line

Ruth Asawa Through Line

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

September 16, 2023 - January 15, 2024

Ruth Asawa Through Line is the first exhibition to examine Ruth Asawa’s oeuvre through the lens of her lifelong drawing practice. Co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Menil Collection, this presentation reveals the complexity and richness of the materials and processes she experimented with, emphasizing the foundational role that drawing played in developing her distinct visual language. While now widely recognized as a sculptor, Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) practiced drawing daily, referring to the act as her “greatest pleasure and the most difficult.” Through drawing, Ruth Asawa explored the world around her and the boundaries of the medium itself, turning everyday encounters into moments of profound beauty and endowing ordinary objects with new aesthetic possibilities.

Positioning drawings, collages, and watercolors alongside stamped prints, copper foil works, and sketchbooks, the exhibition exposes the breadth of Ruth Asawa’s innovative practice through over one hundred works from public and private collections, many of which have not been previously exhibited. Organized thematically, the presentation begins with foundational lessons the artist absorbed and built upon at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s. Subsequent galleries examine the function of repetition and the development of specific motifs and approaches—from the Greek meander to the paper fold—and how they recur throughout her work. The exhibition shows how drawing emerged as a cornerstone of Ruth Asawa’s practice in San Francisco, later becoming a key component of her role as an educator and community leader in the Bay Area. Surveying the artist’s impressive range and expansive approach, Ruth Asawa Through Line offers an unparalleled window into Ruth Asawa’s exploratory and resourceful approach to materials, line, surface, and space.

This exhibition is co-organized by Kim Conaty, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Edouard Kopp, John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Chief Curator of the Menil Drawing Institute, with Scout Hutchinson, Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum, and Kirsten Marples, Curatorial Associate at the Menil Drawing Institute. 

After the exhibition closes at the Whitney, it will travel to the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston.

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY 10014

whitney.org

Christina Quarles @ Hauser & Wirth Menorca – Come In From An Endless Place

Christina Quarles 

Come In From An Endless Place

Hauser & Wirth Menorca

17 June – 29 October 2023

CHRISTINA QUARLES

(And Tell Me Today’s Not Today), 2023

Acrylic on canvas

127 x 132.1 x 5.1 cm / 50 x 52 x 2 in

© Christina Quarles

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Pilar Corrias, London

Photo: Fredrik Nilsen

CHRISTINA QUARLES

It’s Been 7 Hours, 2023

Acrylic on paper

85.7 x 66.7 x 3.8 cm 33 3/4 x 26 1/4 x 1 1/2 in (framed)

© Christina Quarles

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Pilar Corrias, London

Photo: Fredrik Nilsen

CHRISTINA QUARLES

Wish We’d Grown Up on tha Same, Advice, 2023

Ink on paper

39.4 x 54.6 x 3.8 cm / 15 1/2 x 21 1/2 x 1 1/2 in (framed)

© Christina Quarles

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Pilar Corrias, London

Photo: Fredrik Nilsen

Los Angeles-based artist Christina Quarles unveils new paintings and works on paper at Hauser & Wirth Menorca. ‘Come In From An Endless Place,’ her first exhibition in Spain, coincides with a major presentation at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and follows her participation in last year’s celebrated exhibition ‘The Milk Of Dreams’ at the Venice Biennale.

Christina Quarles’ critically acclaimed canvases and drawings display fragmented, polymorphous bodies embedded in rich, textural patterns—a singular approach to figuration, unique to the artist’s visual rhetoric and her fascination with the subject of bodily experience. Tangled arms and legs transform across her paintings, while perspectival planes bisect bodies, simultaneously grounding and dislocating them in space. In her initial approach to the canvas, Quarles begins by making marks that evolve into line drawings of human forms and body parts. She then photographs the work and uses Adobe Illustrator to draw the backgrounds and structures that ultimately surround the figures. In a reversal of the conventional layering of a composition, Quarles’ figures precede and even dictate the environment that they come to inhabit.

As a queer, cis-gendered woman born to a Black father and a white mother, Christina Quarles has described her position of engagement with the world as ‘multiply situated,’ an experience of embodiment reflected in her sui generis art. The intersection of Quarles’ figures and planes analogize the imagined and prescribed boundaries of identity. Vibrant magentas, blues, greens, and yellows serve not as a means of describing reality but as a way of actively resisting the viewer’s instinct to assign binary classifications to the figures such as male or female, white or Black, abstract or representational.

Christina Quarles’ contemplation of identity is illustrated by the large paintings on view in ‘Come In From An Endless Place,’ where multiple patterns, figures, and planes shift and collapse. Fixed only by the limits of Quarles’ arm span, the architectural features of her tableaux approach three-dimensionality. ‘Lift Yew Up, I Wanna Lift Yew Up, I Wanna’ portrays a suite of appendages –entwined arms and protruding legs on an aerial plane– that appear to alternately defy and submit to gravity. There is an endless looping in Quarles’ composition, reflected in other works, such as, ‘(And Tell Me Today’s Not Today).’ Here ghostly figures appear spread across gradient planes. These knotted extremities seem tied to a centrifugal force, pulling arms, ears, and legs inwards, as figures attempt to reach the boundaries of the canvas. Foregrounded are two touching fingers that evoke Michelangelo’s canonical fresco in the Sistine Chapel. Freed from the collapse of body parts, they reach toward one another as God’s hand reached for Adam’s.

Pursuant themes of combat, support, and restraint can be seen in a new suite of mesmerizing acrylic paintings on paper, a technique Christina Quarles exhibits publicly for the first time. Rendered by the span of Quarles’ wrist movement, bodies merge, overlap, squirm, and lean into one another through movements that give way to multiple readings. In ‘Wrestlin’’ Quarles portrays bodies in what could be a playful or more contentious encounter, whereas in ‘Restin’’ a form emerging from a brilliant brushstroke appears to either grow or collapse between two tall flowers. Again, figures appear twisted and curled—perhaps they provide support and order to one another, or perhaps they are bound in a more chaotic situation. As Christina Quarles’ exhibition title, ‘Come In From An Endless Place,’ suggests, this body of work continues to explore the cyclical nature of escape, return, and ongoingness. Beauty and monotony, struggle and ease – the limitations and possibilities of confinement continue to be paramount in this body of work.

In addition to the paintings on canvas and paper, ‘Come In From An Endless Place’ features Christina Quarles’ fine-line drawings, where figures are often accompanied by phrases written into the composition, evoking the artists’ interest in language’s potential to create and disrupt meaning. The sentences, written in a mixture of slang and phonetic spelling, draw from a wide range of references; overheard phrases, poetry, or pop songs, such as ‘Hallelujah’ by Leonard Cohen, or ‘Self Control’ by Frank Ocean. In ‘Wish We’d Grown Up on tha Same Advice’ Quarles writes Ocean’s lyrics into a serene scene with figures that recline and embrace. In ‘Just Got Caught Up in Myself’ the title is written next to a contorting body, attempting to break free from the confines of two dimensions.

Drawing is a key principle in Christina Quarles’ work as she began the practice at the age of 12, attending life drawing classes after school. As an adult, Quarles has continued to hone this practice. ‘Figure drawing is this weird thing where you can’t just acquire the skill and be done with it. It’s like working out at the gym, you have to keep maintaining it. When I go to the painting, I’m not referring to sketches. I’m referring to this ongoing practice of drawing.’

For her exhibition in Menorca ‘Come In From An Endless Place,’ Christina Quarles continues to synthesise the study of drawing, experimental painting techniques, and digital technology, resulting in a unique and compelling approach to figuration which situates the artist as a vanguard of contemporary painting. 

About the artist

CHRISTINA QUARLES (b. 1985) is a Los Angeles-based artist, whose practice works to dismantle assumptions and ingrained beliefs surrounding identity and the human figure. Born in Chicago and raised by her mother in Los Angeles, Christina Quarles took art classes from an early age. She developed a solid foundation for a lifelong drawing practice through after-school programs and figure drawing classes at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts.

In 2007, Christina Quarles graduated from Hampshire College with dual BA degrees in Philosophy and Studio Art, then trained and worked in the field of graphic design. As her immersion in the visual arts progressed, she became well versed in and influenced by Marlene Dumas, Leonora Carrington, Jack Whitten, David Hockney, and Philip Guston. Seeking a vehicle for expressing the feelings and experiences language alone cannot articulate, Christina Quarles went on to attend Yale University, where she received her MFA in 2016. She participated in an intensive artist residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture that same year.

Christina Quarles has been the recipient of several awards and grants. She was the inaugural recipient of the 2019 Pérez Art Museum Miami Prize, in 2017 she received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, and in 2015 she received the Robert Schoelkopf Fellowship at Yale University and participated in the Fountainhead Residency in 2017. In 2022, Christina Quarles’s work was featured in ‘The Milk of Dreams,’ the 59th International Art Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Cecilia Alemani and in ‘manifesto of fragility,’ the main exhibition of the 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath.

HAUSER & WIRTH MENORCA

Isla del Rey (Illa del Rei)

Mahon, Menorca

Balearic Islands, Spain

www.hauserwirth.com

Saul Steinberg @ Pace Gallery, Seoul

Saul Steinberg 

Pace Gallery, Seoul 

March 31 – April 29, 2023 

Pace presents an exhibition of work by Saul Steinberg at its arts complex in Seoul. The show brings together works on paper and wood sculptures conveying the defiant humor, curiosity, and modernist attitude of an artist trying to make sense of the chaotic postwar period. This exhibition, which marks the artist’s first presentation in Seoul, will focus on his unique, worldly perspective, which was shaped by his experiences as an immigrant in America, a New Yorker, and an observant traveler both within and outside of the US.

The Romanian-born artist emigrated to the United States from Europe in 1942 during World War II. In New York, he became an integral part of American Modernism. He married the artist Hedda Sterne, who was already connected to the city’s pioneering artists. Establishing himself in New York’s avant-garde community, he earned critical acclaim for his inventive drawings, prints, paintings, collages, and sculptures, which defied easy categorization by reflecting a multiplicity of artistic styles, rendered with characteristic intellect.

Saul Steinberg became best known to the public for his drawings in The New Yorker. Among his most famous images for the magazine was the March 1976 cover known as View of the World from 9th Avenue, which wryly comments on the solipsism of New Yorkers by depicting the majority of the United States as a thin strip of land sandwiched between the Hudson River and the Pacific Ocean.

Influenced by and engaged with the aesthetics of Cubism, Futurism, and Surrealism, Saul Steinberg’s art often explores visual and philosophical paradoxes, while offering oblique commentary on the state of culture and society. Among the works included in the upcoming exhibition in Seoul are the works on paper Abidjan (1973), Cairo (1974), and Nebraska (1966), which meditate on the absurdities and contradictions underpinning daily life and societal norms.

Saul Steinberg’s identity as an émigré is reflected in many of his works. The American Corrida (c. 1981), which will be on view in the upcoming show in Seoul, depicts a duel between Uncle Sam and a figure wearing traditional Native American dress. Onlookers to the spectacle include Abraham Lincoln, a bald eagle, and the Statue of Liberty.

In addition to the works on paper, Pace’s exhibition in Seoul showcases a rarely exhibited Table sculpture by Steinberg. With Summer Table (1981), a mixed media collage on wood, the artist engaged with the history of trompe l’oeil and foregrounded his interest in the poetic possibilities of everyday objects, including carved replicas of paint brushes, notebooks, and a range of banal items that accumulated on this worktable and in his domestic surroundings. This playful yet intricate sculpture can be understood as a portrait that captures the inextricability of Steinberg’s expensive practice and daily life.

Also included in the show is the sculpture U. S. Post Office (1984), for which Saul Steinberg situated a mixed media, three-dimensional rendering of a post office atop an elevated wooden base. In Saul Steinberg’s hands, a seemingly mundane, bureaucratic structure is imbued with an ineffable, surrealistic sense of whimsy.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Soul

www.pacegallery.com

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