Wayne Ngan @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - "Spirit and Form" Ceramics Exhibition

Wayne Ngan: Spirit and Form

James Cohan Gallery, New York

September 5 — October 4, 2025 

Wayne Ngan 

Yellow Vase with Lugs, 2016, Rust Coloured Vase, 2017 

Yukon Black Jar with Geometric Lugs, c. 2000s, 

Thin Vase with Cast Iron Glaze, 2014, White Vase, 2016 

Photo courtesy of James Cohan Gallery

Wayne Ngan (b. 1937 Guangdong, China - d. 2020 Hornby Island, BC, Canada) is recognized as one of Canada’s premier ceramic artists. Ngan’s lengthy career spanned over six decades. At the age of thirteen, Wayne Ngan moved from Guangdong, China to a vastly different British Columbia, Canada. Wayne Ngan was determined to make a name for himself as an artist despite challenging circumstances. His practice drew influence from traditional Chinese, Korean, and Japanese pottery, as well as Modernist painting, pre-Columbian and ancient Egyptian art. Ngan’s extensive knowledge of these historic precedents and his connection to the natural beauty of Canada’s Hornby Island informed his abstract sculptural forms. This exhibition at James Cohan spotlights a selection of cornerstone works, created in the 1990s and the last decade of the artist’s life.

Inspired by the back-to-the-land movement, popularized in the 1960s and 70s, Wayne Ngan centered his life and artistic practice around a harmonious relationship with the environment anchored in self-sufficiency. Ngan sourced natural materials both to build his home and studio on Hornby Island, and also to fuel his artmaking, experimenting with creating various glazes from clay like Yukon black, a deep noir glaze with high shine. Ngan was committed to exploring process, using the wealth of knowledge he gained from his regular travels to China and Japan as well as independent research to refine techniques such as raku, hakeme (coarse brush decoration), and salt glazing. Waynes Ngan built his forms by throwing and altering pieces of clay, then sculpting them together. He would occasionally fashion elements that extend outwards and generate curvilinear, spouted openings in others. Here, elegantly elongated vessels in earth tones are in dialogue with compact lidded forms, which seem to contain the energy Ngan expended to render them. Their surfaces are varied – ranging from textural and patterned to slick and smooth. According to Wayne Ngan, “There are two ways of looking at pots: one is the actual clay pot, but the real pot to me is all around me—the spirit of the pot.”

Through his work in clay, Wayne Ngan fused East and West, the past and the present, collapsing disparate chronologies and geographies into intimate, evocative objects.

CERAMIC ARTIST WAYNE NGAN

Wayne Ngan studied at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, formerly the Vancouver School of Art. The influential teachings of British potter Bernard Leach and Soetsu Yanagi, founder of the Mingei, a Japanese folk art movement (prioritizing beauty in the everyday) resonated strongly with ceramic artists in British Columbia, including Wayne Ngan. In 1967, Wayne Ngan settled on Hornby Island, where he lived and worked until his passing in 2020.

Wayne Ngan’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions since the 1960s at venues including the Vancouver Art Gallery; the National Gallery of Canada; the Gardiner Museum, Toronto; Hanart Art Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan; Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York; the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; The Apartment in Vancouver; and the American Crafts Museum, Concord, Massachusetts, among others. Ngan’s ceramics are in notable public collections such as the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Montréal Museum of Fine Art, the Gardiner Museum, the National Palace Museum (Taipei, Taiwan), the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia.

JAMES COHAN

48 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.jamescohan.com

Jordan Nassar @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - "REVELATION" Exhibition

Jordan Nassar

REVELATION

James Cohan Gallery, New York

September 5 - October 4, 2025

Jordan Nassar

Photo by Takamasa Ota

James Cohan presents REVELATION, an exhibition of new work by JORDAN NASSAR at the gallery’s 48 Walker Street location. This is Nassar’s fourth solo exhibition with James Cohan. 

In REVELATION, Jordan Nassar reimagines traditional craft techniques across expansive multipanel embroideries and transportative mosaics to explore inherited nostalgia, history, and heritage. His recent embroideries are poignant meditations on color, as well as light and darkness; they reveal and conceal brilliantly-hued landscapes. In the front gallery, mosaics echoing Byzantine ruins wrap around the walls, eliciting the past in a contemporary site.

Jordan Nassar’s intricately hand-stitched works were made with the participation of Palestinian craftswomen living and working in Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Hebron. Notably, the geometric motifs extend across the entire plane of the canvases, creating dense walls of patterning that obscure imagined vistas. The shadowy palette of these works reflects a somber reverence, one that is punctuated by moments of brightness. A valley lit by a glowing crimson sun emerges from shades of gray in the aptly named Between Two Hedges of Silence, 2025. The artwork titles, as well as that of the exhibition, were inspired by Etel Adnan’s epic poem, The Arab Apocalypse. Jordan Nassar draws on the close linguistic connection between the Greek etymology of apocalypse with the act of unveiling [from apokaluptein, ’to uncover, to reveal’]. Viewers are granted a window of what lies beyond from multiple vantage points and perspectives. 

Alongside these embroideries, the artist has reconstructed two archaeological antiquities, employing the ancient method of hand-cutting glass. The originals are displayed in the arrivals corridor at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv as a welcome marker. The first is a fragment of a mosaic floor from a 5th-6th century Byzantine structure attributed to BethLehem of the Galilee; in this installation it is intentionally flipped on its side. Jordan Nassar has depicted its flora and fauna, mirroring its design and formal qualities, to vividly bring this ruin to life. He also asserts his own aesthetic choices, filling in eroded areas with exotic animals and curving grape vines that nod to the intricate Shellal mosaic excavated from the Wadi Ghuzze riverbed and now housed in the Australian War Memorial. 

Jordan Nassar describes “the act of remaking them as a tender gesture,” reframing the historical lineage of the craft as he interprets it. Bisan (Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out) (Deuteronomy 28:6), 2025, is the artist’s translation of a square mosaic from the historic city of the same name, decorated heavily with birds with ribbons tied around their napes. Here, Jordan Nassar has unbridled the birds of their ribbons. Ultimately, Jordan Nassar raises questions about the underlying symbolism of ruins, the implicit power that they project and the narratives they can be used to construct and uphold.

Artist Jordan Nassar

Jordan Nassar (b.1985, New York, NY) earned his BA at Middlebury College in 2007. Recent notable solo exhibitions include Jordan Nassar: Fantasy and Truth at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in 2023 and THERE in 2024-2025, which traveled from NCMA Winston-Salem (formerly SECCA) in North Carolina to the Susquehanna Art Museum in Pennsylvania. His work has been featured in exhibitions globally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Asia Society, New York, NY; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY, among others.

Jordan Nassar is represented in numerous permanent collections including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Rollins Museum of Art, Florida; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Florida; Dallas Art Museum, Dallas, TX; The Museum of Contemporary Art, California; and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, in Rhode Island. Nassar is the recipient of several awards including the 2022 Unbound United States Artists Fellowship and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation 2024 Biennial Grant.

JAMES COHAN

48 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.jamescohan.com

Spencer Finch @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - "One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige)" Exhibition

Spencer Finch

One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige)

James Cohan Gallery, New York

September 5 - October 4, 2025

SPENCER FINCH

One Hundred Famous Views of New York City 

(After Hiroshige), 2025 (detail)

42 watercolors on paper

9 1/4 x 14 1/4 in (each) / 23.5 x 36.2 cm (each)

© Spencer Finch, courtesy of James Cohan Gallery

James Cohan presents One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige), an exhibition of new work by SPENCER FINCH, on view at the gallery’s 52 Walker Street location. This is Finch’s sixth solo exhibition with James Cohan. 

For this exhibition, Spencer Finch presents four major installations, highlighting the artist’s fluency across media. Using watercolor, LED light tubes, stained glass, and concrete bricks, the artist explores different facets of Japanese aesthetics while furthering his ongoing investigations into color, perception, and close observation of nature. Finch’s engagement with Japan spans nearly fifty years, beginning with his first visit as a teenager. He began his artistic journey working with a potter outside Kyoto as an exchange student in college, and although the influence of Japanese visual culture has always been present in his work, this is the first exhibition fully dedicated to its impact on his practice. 

The title work in the exhibition is a conceptual and technical tour de force, a series of 42 watercolors in which Spencer Finch uses Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo as a palimpsest for exploring the strange beauty of New York City. Spencer Finch began by overlaying a map of Hiroshige’s 19th-century Edo (now Tokyo) locations over a map of New York City and its outskirts at the same scale. Focusing on the first 42 prints, which represent spring, he visited and photographed each of those locations between March and June of this year. The sites documented range from a junkyard in New Jersey to an iconic view of the Statue of Liberty and the Staten Island Ferry.

Spencer Finch next extracted forms from the original Ukiyoe prints—from the famous Sleeping Dragon Plum tree to the classic hanging bolts of fabric—and used these as templates to reveal elements of photographs from the corresponding New York locations. He then painted watercolors of these images in the same format as the original prints. One sees Hiroshige’s historic Edo and Finch’s New York City simultaneously, the images of Gotham peeking through the cut-out shapes of Edo. As a body of work, this installation represents both a love letter to New York and a cross-cultural dialogue spanning centuries, as Finch reimagines the contemporary urban landscape through the lens of Hiroshige’s iconic woodblock prints. 

The exacting verisimilitude of these watercolors is unusual in Finch’s oeuvre, but it recalls the artist’s formative art school venture of copying Monet paintings in extreme detail in the RISD Museum, an experience he later described as “my first brush with the Stockholm syndrome.” The New York City views are fragmented through the Japanese prints but together reveal the wonderful visual variety of the city and form an elliptical tribute to the artist’s adopted hometown. The scrutiny inherent to this laborious process revealed new details about a deeply familiar place. As the artist notes, “Before I worked on this project, I never knew that New York’s bridges were all painted different colors or how graffiti artists achieve a 3-D effect. And the shade of orange of the Staten Island Ferry: very peculiar!”

Alongside this installation of works on paper, Spencer Finch debuts a series of four light-based Haiku works. Like their verse analogs, these wall-hung LED sculptures capture a fleeting seasonal moment, distilling it into a poetic image. Presented vertically in the format of Japanese writing, each work consists of 15 distinct color filters arranged in the 5/7/5 pattern of traditional haiku syllabic structure. These four works, each representing a moment in nature from one of the seasons, are chromatically and spectrally precise, re-creating the specific color of light that the artist measured in situ, and using colored filters to achieve the spectral results. Thus, the first in the group, Haiku (First Snow, Woods, Winter), 2025, emanates cool winter light which is generated by filters of light blue and violet, gray, pale yellow, and dull green. The difference in the seasonal light is palpable as the spring light becomes warmer, the summer light is completely full spectrum, and the autumn light, representing falling oak leaves in the sky, moves again towards cooler blue.

A monumental stained glass installation is displayed in the six tall windows of the front gallery. Moonlight (Reflected in a Pond), 2025, shifts the exterior sunlight to the color of moonlight reflected in a pond in Finch’s native New England, which he measured using a colorimeter. The yellowish green light creates an other-worldly environment which references the Japanese tradition of moon-viewing to honor the autumn moon. By using the sun to create moonlight, Spencer Finch uses the traditional material of hand-blown stained glass to modern conceptual effect. The rectilinear arrangement of panels in the windows contrasts with the watery ripples and imperfections of the glass to create a light and space condition which feels both contemporary and ancient.

Installed in the same gallery is a new site-specific sculptural work, Fourteen Stones, 2025, inspired by Ryoan-ji, the 15th-century Zen garden in Kyoto. Spencer Finch drew upon his visits to the garden, when his quest for quiet contemplation of the fifteen stones was interrupted by hordes of visiting school children counting to fourteen, the number of stones that are visible from any location along the viewing platform. Using this perceptual idiosyncrasy as a jumping off point to explore the subjectivity of vision, Spencer Finch created 26 “stones” out of piles of common concrete bricks, each crudely mimicking one of the Ryoan-ji stones. Spencer Finch has arranged the stones so that from each of the four corners of the gallery only fourteen are visible. Using the vocabulary of minimalism to naturalistic effect, the artist creates an altered meditative environment in which he claims, “if you squint and stand on one leg, they really look like ancient stones bathed in moonlight.” 

One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige) continues Finch’s interest in the limits of perception, and the relativity of human experience. These new works embrace science and poetry in equal measure, communicating experiences of the world that are both universal and intimately subjective.

ARTIST SPENCER FINCH

Spencer Finch was born in 1962 in New Haven, CT, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, Hamilton College, and Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, and has exhibited extensively in the US and internationally since the early 1990s. Recent major projects include Bring me a sunset in a teacup, a two-wall commission for Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2023); Orion, permanently installed at the San Francisco Airport, CA (2020); Moon Dust (Apollo 17), Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2019); Fifteen Stones (Ryoanji), International Pavilion at the Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona, Spain (2018); Lost Man Creek, Public Art Fund, Brooklyn, NY (2016-2018); Trying To Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning, 9/11 Memorial Museum, New York, NY (2014), and A Certain Slant of Light, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY (2014). Significant recent solo exhibitions include the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT (2018-2019); MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2017); Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL (2017); Seattle Art Museum, WA (2017), and Turner Contemporary, Margate, United Kingdom (2014); Spencer Finch was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, the 2008 Turin Triennale and the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). His work can be found in many public collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Kemper Museum of Art, St Louis, MO; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Morgan Library, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

JAMES COHAN

52 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.jamescohan.com

James Cohan Gallery: 25th Anniversary Exhibition "All About 25"

All About 25

James Cohan, New York

May 16 - July 25, 2025

Yinka Shonibare

Red Shoes, 2025 

Mixed media 

70 7/8 x 70 7/8 x 11 3/4 in., 180 x 180 x 30 cm

© Yinka Shonibare, courtesy of James Cohan

James Cohan presents All About 25, an exhibition celebrating the gallery’s twenty-fifth anniversary, on view at James Cohan’s 52 Walker Street location. 

The James Cohan Gallery, established in 1999, is a vital player in the contemporary art world, known for its commitment to artistic innovation and cross-cultural dialogue. Founded by James and Jane Cohan,  the gallery has carved out a distinctive niche by fostering relationships with both emerging and established artists, as well as by championing underrepresented voices. David Norr, who served as James Cohan’s Senior Director from 2015 to 2018, was named partner in 2018 and co-owner in 2021. 

Located initially in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, James Cohan Gallery opened during a transformative period for contemporary art in the city. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw a migration of galleries to Chelsea, where spacious industrial buildings allowed for ambitious exhibitions. Cohan leveraged this momentum, bringing a thoughtful and international approach to gallery programming. His vision centered on building a program that was not only commercially viable but also intellectually and culturally resonant.

One of the key aspects that sets James Cohan Gallery apart is its emphasis on representing a diverse range of artists from around the globe. The gallery has been instrumental in presenting the work of artists such as Trenton Doyle Hancock, Elias Sime, Yinka Shonibare CBE, Firelei Báez, and Fred Tomaselli. These artists work in various media and often grapple with themes of identity, history, technology, and globalization.

By maintaining an international focus, the gallery has created a dynamic platform for intercultural exchange. Exhibitions often cross traditional boundaries of geography and genre, providing a broader lens through which to view contemporary artistic practices. Cohan’s support for African, Asian, Latin American, and diasporic artists demonstrates a forward-thinking commitment to global narratives.

In addition to its Chelsea origins, James Cohan Gallery expanded to locations in the Lower East Side and Tribeca, adapting to the evolving geography of the New York art scene. These moves were not merely logistical but reflected a strategic effort to remain close to emerging art communities and experimental practices.

The gallery is also recognized for its innovative curatorial approaches. It regularly features thematic exhibitions that explore pressing contemporary issues, bridging historical and contemporary art in novel ways. For example, shows that juxtapose canonical artists with contemporary voices help create dialogues that are both challenging and generative.

The originality of James Cohan Gallery lies in its ability to balance commercial success with critical engagement. It is not merely a venue for sales, but a space where contemporary issues are interrogated through the lens of art. Its programming often emphasizes storytelling, layered histories, and aesthetic experimentation.

Moreover, James Cohan Gallery is known for its long-term relationships with artists, which allows for deeper collaboration and the development of ambitious projects. This trust-based model contributes to the originality of the exhibitions, as artists are encouraged to take risks and push their creative boundaries.

James Cohan Gallery stands out as a thoughtful, globally-minded, and artist-centric institution in the contemporary art world. Its history reflects not only the trajectory of one gallery, but also broader shifts in the cultural landscape of the 21st century. Through its innovative programming, commitment to diverse voices, and intellectual rigor, the gallery continues to influence how contemporary art is produced, exhibited, and understood.

All About 25 features the work of artists who have shaped the gallery’s past, present, and future. Many of the paintings, sculptures and installations made specifically for the exhibition symbolically tie to the number 25. 

Participating artists include: Ranti Bam, Kathy Butterly, Alexandre da Cunha, Simon Evans and Sarah Lannan, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Spencer Finch, Gauri Gill, Michelle Grabner, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Federico Herrero, Yun-Fei Ji, Byron Kim, Mernet Larsen, Teresa Margolles, Kelly Sinnapah Mary, Josiah McElheny, Jesse Mockrin, Lee Mullican, Christopher Myers, Jordan Nassar, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Kaloki Nyamai, Scott Olson, Eamon Ore-Giron, Katie Paterson, Naudline Pierre, Matthew Ritchie, Hiraki Sawa, Shinichi Sawada, Yinka Shonibare, Elias Sime, Diane Simpson, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Fred Tomaselli, Bill Viola, and XU ZHEN®. 

A silver anniversary commemorates the 25th year of a significant event and represents the enduring nature and brilliance of a long-lasting relationship or achievement. Spencer Finch’s, Ag, 2008, is a series of 10 gelatin silver photographs, featuring modern pieces of silver (trays, pitchers and bowls) from a private collection in Philadelphia. The title references the symbol for the element in the periodic table. Collapsing the medium and subject–using silver to create images of silver–these photographs confound the distinctions between representation and the real.

New works by Byron Kim, Josiah McElheny and Jordan Nassar explore the mathematical and spatial potentials of the number 25 to diverse effect. Byron Kim’s Synecdoche (1991–present) is an ongoing project of portraiture that now comprises more than 500 10 x 8 in. panels in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art. Each panel is painted a single color recording the skin tone of the sitter. Synecdoche was a watershed for the artist when it debuted at the 1993 Whitney Biennial, and subsequent iterations have been seen in installations and exhibitions around the world. For this exhibition, Kim documented the skin tones of 25 members of the James Cohan team, continuing his explorations of the history of abstract painting, the problems of color and vision, and issues of human identity and existence while creating a collective portrait of a community.

Jordan Nassar’s newest embroidery, Mountain of Years, 2025, depicts cascading hills expanding across the field of the canvas. The artist renders the striated mountainscape in 25 distinct shades of rich greens and cool blue threads, offset by a peachy-pink sky.

Josiah McElheny’s Interior Geometry I, 2025, references a universe of unlimited possibility in a hand-cut and polished glass tetrakis hexahedron with 24 facets, its entirety constituting the 25th. The transparent and reflective surfaces of the suspended solid glass form act as both mirrors and windows, where we can peer inside and see ourselves. With morphing perspectives and reflections, the work celebrates a multiplicity and diversity of perspective.

“Reaching this milestone is both humbling and energizing,” says James Cohan, founder and principal. “Our journey has been defined by incredible partnerships with artists whose vision and dedication continue to inspire us. This anniversary celebrates their work.”

JAMES COHAN

52 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.jamescohan.com

Toshiko Takaezu: Bronzes @ James Cohan, NYC

Toshiko Takaezu: Bronzes

James Cohan, New York

May 16 - July 25, 2025

Toshiko Takaezu

Three Graces, ca. 2000s

Cast bronze, left: 78 x 22 in.,

middle: 74 x 21 in., right: 76 x 23 in.

Courtesy the Estate of Toshiko Takaezu

and James Cohan

James Cohan presents an exhibition of monumental sculptures by the late artist Toshiko Takaezu (b. 1922, Pepeekeo, Hawaii - d. 2011, Honolulu, Hawaii) on view at the gallery’s 48 Walker Street location. Toshiko Takaezu was celebrated for her experimental approach to abstraction and form over a lengthy career, which spanned the 1950s into the 2000s. While she is widely known for her painterly ceramics, Takaezu spent three decades mastering the possibilities of bronze. Toshiko Takaezu: Bronzes foregrounds her series of outdoor sculptures in the medium. 

Toshiko Takaezu’s initial foray into bronze was tied to her strong interest in the natural world. Starting in the 1980s, she worked closely with a team of artists and apprentices at the Johnson Atelier in New Jersey to render her creations using the lost-wax casting process. Takaezu’s soaring Stack Forms, ca. 1982-4, were directly inspired by her series of ceramic River Stones: convex circular forms glazed in tones akin to a riverbed of pebbles, such as earthy ochres and soft whites. In the main gallery, tall tree trunks in rich blue and green patinas are cradled by white pebbles and flanked by otherworldly globes. Tree-Man Forest, 1989, is a reverential meditation on both the precarity and resilience of natural life. Takaezu was deeply moved by a trip she took in 1973 to “Devastation Trail” on the Big Island of Hawaii, where she encountered a forest laid bare by the volcanic eruption of Kīlauea Iki in 1959. Toshiko Takaezu paid homage to this transformational event first in clay, and then in bronze, giving permanence to these majestic forms and embedding them into the land. 

The epic Three Graces, ca. 2000s, emits a powerful anthropomorphic presence; one that visitors can engage with as they circumnavigate each form. Takaezu’s first iteration of Three Graces was cast in 1994 and is installed at Grounds For Sculpture in New Jersey. These sculptures echo Takaezu’s classical tall ‘closed forms’ and showcase the artist’s mastery of gesture, visible in her application of dripping chemical patinas in deep blues, blacks and greens. In Greek mythology, the Three Graces were the daughters of Zeus–goddesses of beauty, charm and grace, often depicted together, interlaced in mid-dance The martyred saints Faith, Hope, and Charity, represent three similar theological virtues in Christian theology. These overlapping concepts are embodied in these monumental and undulating bronzes, forever linked as a trio. 

The singular resonant Untitled (Bell), 2004, perfectly concretizes Takaezu’s interest in sound and materiality. It is one of several forms that were inspired by the ceremonial bells of Japanese temples, and is similarly reliant on the strike of a mallet to produce a deep vibrational ring. This imposing bronze bell hangs from a custom interlocking wooden frame designed by the artist. Its dimensional surface resulted from Takaezu pouring hot wax in linear motions over the domed mold prior to its casting; an action that harkens back to her dynamic glazing process. 

Toshiko Takaezu’s achievements in bronze are a testament to her boundless exploration across mediums. Takaezu’s sculptures are monuments that reflect the natural world; fusing gesture and form through material permanence. Toshiko Takaezu: Bronzes unites carefully considered groupings which serve as sites for contemplation that engage the senses.

Born in Pepeekeo, Hawaii in 1922 to Japanese immigrant parents, Toshiko Takaezu first studied at the University of Hawaii, and later at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Toshiko Takaezu was a devoted maker and art educator, having taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art and Princeton University, until her retirement in 1992. She lived and worked in rural New Jersey through the 2000s. Toshiko Takaezu passed away in Honolulu on March 9, 2011. Throughout the artist’s lifetime, her work was exhibited widely in the United States and Japan, including a solo exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2004) and a retrospective at the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan (1995). Toshiko Takaezu was the recipient of the Tiffany Foundation Grant (1964) and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1980), among others. Her work is represented in many notable collections including the DeYoung/Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Honolulu Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Recent exhibitions include the 2022 edition of the Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams curated by Cecilia Alemani and presentations at the MFA Boston (2023) and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2024). In March 2024, The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum hosted Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within, the first touring retrospective in twenty years. It has traveled to the Cranbrook Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and will open at the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison (September 8–December 23, 2025) and the Honolulu Museum of Art (February 13–July 26, 2026)

JAMES COHAN

48 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.jamescohan.com

Elias Sime @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - TIGHTROPE: አረንጔዴ ነው (IT IS GREEN)

Elias Sime

TIGHTROPE: አረንጔዴ ነው (IT IS GREEN)

James Cohan Gallery, New York

April 1 — May 10, 2023

ELIAS SIME

Tightrope: It is Green 4, 2023

Reclaimed electrical wires on components

82 x 79 x 3 in. / 208.3 x 200.7 x 7.6 cm

© Elias Sime, courtesy James Cohan

James Cohan presents TIGHTROPE: አረንጔዴ ነው (IT IS GREEN), an exhibition of new work by Elias Sime. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at James Cohan. 

Elias Sime deftly weaves, layers, and assembles technological components into abstract compositions, often on a monumental scale. Sime moves fluidly between suggestions of topography, figuration, and sublime color fields. His works serve as records of the global exchange of commodities, and express the tenuousness of our interconnected world, alluding to the frictions between tradition and progress, human contact and social networks, nature and the man-made, and physical presence and the virtual.

The works in this exhibition represent a new chapter within Elias Sime’s ongoing Tightrope series, whose title reflects the precarious balance between the advancement technology has made possible and its detrimental impact on the environment. All the works in TIGHTROPE: አረንጔዴ ነው (IT IS GREEN) are, in fact, red. This dissonance reflects Elias Sime’s desire to push against didactic or prescriptive descriptions of his work. As he notes: “I make my art with freedom, and I want viewers to freely interpret them from their own points of view.” 

Working within a restricted palette allows the artist to explore subtle, undulating shifts in tonality across the braided wire panels of each composition. Hand-carved sculptural elements–shaped like leaves, flower petals, and branches–are also tightly encased within the same braided and coiled wire. This fluency between two and three dimensions is a hallmark of Elias Sime’s multi-faceted practice, informed by his ambitious civic architectural work in his home city of Addis Ababa.

“አረንጔዴ ነው (IT IS GREEN) is a paradox. It is an inquiry into the degree to which reality is shaped by the conditioning of the mind that perceives it. The grass may appear red, but it is grass, and grass is green. So what color is the grass? How far can words be separated from their understood meaning and still hold some kind of value in the minds of their users? Does the nature of that value change? Will language ever be truly powerful enough to fully reflect the internal experience of discovery? IT IS GREEN hopes to remind us of our immense power to dream and discover far outside the bounds of what we have been told. I say it is green. What do you see?

- Meskerem Assegued, Curator and co-founder of Zoma Museum

Working with his longtime collaborator, Meskerem Assegued, Sime co-founded, designed, and built the awardwinning Zoma Museum in Addis Ababa, an environmentally conscious international art center described by The New York Times in 2009 as “a voluptuous dream, a swirl of ancient technique and ecstatic imagination.” Zoma Museum celebrated its grand opening in its new location in March 2019, with expanded facilities that include a gallery space, library, children’s center, edible garden, elementary school, art and vernacular school, amphitheater, cafe, and museum shop.

Elias Sime has exhibited extensively around the world. His work has been shown internationally at the 59th Venice Biennale; Dak’Art Biennale of Contemporary African Art in Dakar, Senegal; the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna, Austria; and in the United States at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and a survey exhibition that traveled from the Santa Monica Museum of Art, California, to the North Dakota Museum of Art. The Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College presented Elias Sime: Tightrope in the fall of 2019, marking the artist’s first major museum survey. Curated by Tracy L. Adler, the Wellin Museum’s Johnson-Pote Director, the exhibition highlights Sime’s work from the last decade, much of which comprises the series entitled Tightrope, alongside a selection of early works critical to the artist’s development. The exhibition traveled to the Akron Art Museum in Akron, Ohio, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada in Spring 2021. Elias Sime: Tightrope was accompanied by the first monograph focusing on the work of Elias Sime, co-published by the Wellin Museum of Art and DelMonico Books • Prestel. Sime was also the subject of a solo exhibition entitled Currents 118: Elias Sime, on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum from July 2020 to January 2021.

In 2019, Sime received an African Art Award from the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and was shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize 2020.

Elias Sime’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock, AR; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Orlando, FL; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA; Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Newark Museum, Newark, NJ; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND; Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; Pizzuti Collection at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada; Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, Santa Fe, NM; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan

JAMES COHAN

48 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.jamescohan.com

Byron Kim @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - Drawn to Water

Byron Kim: Drawn to Water

James Cohan Gallery, New York

Through February 19, 2022

BYRON KIM

B.Q.O. 13 (Tobey Pond), 2021 

Acrylic on canvas mounted on panel

104 x 72 in. (264.2 x 182.9 cm)

© Byron Kim, courtesy of James Cohan, New York

Since the early 1990s, Byron Kim has painted in the space between abstraction and representation, creating expansive fields of color that express both personal and larger realities. Kim often explores perception by drawing upon the natural world or the human body as primary subjects.

The works in Drawn to Water, at James Cohan, belong to a new series titled B.Q.O., an abbreviation for Berton, Queequeg, and Odysseus, three key characters from famous oceanic tales: Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and Homer’s The Odyssey. Byron Kim first began this new series of paintings during a Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island, Florida in January 2020, while rereading these classic stories to spur his imagination. These three literary references suggest the enduring lifespan of the planet’s oceans relative to the temporality and mentality of human existence, destructive as it may be. Representing various bodies of water—at times placid or treacherous—Kim’s newest paintings reveal an experience of the sublime, by way of observing and submerging oneself in a fluid environment that can feel liberatory or, suddenly, prove overpowering.

Each painting in the series comprises three panels, each representing a distinct visual zone: the bottom panel captures the view from underwater, the middle panel the water’s surface and its reflections, and the upper panel the sky. For Byron Kim, these segmented depictions of sky and water find approximate analogy with the human body and mind. Collectively, they create a sense of the immersiveness of nature, toggling between the intimately observed experience of the artist and the greater human experience of beholding the world.

Within the three panels of each composition, Byron Kim moves between abstraction and a more representational approach, sometimes evincing a confusion between the two. Shifting back and forth between these modes is driven by Kim’s alternating desires to transcend the body or to be unified with the body. Does one achieve a state of transcendence through the body, or in spite of it? As Byron Kim, a newly dedicated open water swimmer, notes, “Swimming in the open ocean gave me a new relationship to my body. Normally, I privilege imagination and mind space over the body, which corresponds with my tendency toward abstraction. Depending on my body as a vehicle brought me away from abstraction—in a strange way, it was grounding, and brought me towards representation.”

In this new series, Byron Kim is looking at the ocean directly, but also imaginatively. For Kim, the content of these works is alternately palliative, sad and terrifying. He found healing power and connection in nature during the pandemic. Yet these works also embody threats of climate change and rising sea levels, contemporary anxieties that only intensify the spirit of the sea symbolized in the aforementioned iconic literary tales. Kim grounds his approach with concern and tenderness to create paintings that speak of catharsis and hope, rather than irreparable wound.

Throughout his career, Byron Kim has been interested in the relationship of parts to a whole, as a way to structure both our connection to one another, and to the world itself. Kim is perhaps best known for his ongoing painting project, Synecdoche, begun during the 1990s and included in the landmark 1993 Whitney Biennial. Now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Synecdoche consists of hundreds of monochrome panels that match the skin color of each individual human subject. In his Sunday Paintings, executed every week since 2001, he records the appearance of the sky every week along with a diary entry, juxtaposing the cosmological with the quotidian. With the B.Q.O. paintings seen in this exhibition, Kim embarks on a new body of work that grounds abstraction in the physical experience of the world around us, intertwining the personal perspective of the artist as observer with the elemental forces of nature.

BYRON KIM (b. La Jolla, CA, 1961) is a Senior Critic at Yale University. He received a BA from Yale University in 1983 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1986. Among Kim’s numerous awards are the Louise Nevelson Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters, NY (1993), the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1994), the National Endowment of the Arts Award (1995), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1997), the Alpert Award in the Arts (2008), and the Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize (2019). His works are in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; the M+ Museum, Hong Kong; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Norton Family Collection, Santa Monica, CA; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the Tate Modern, London, UK; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA. Byron Kim lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and San Diego, CA.

JAMES COHAN

48 Walker Street, New York NY 10013 

www.jamescohan.com

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - Mirror-works and Drawings (2004 - 2016)

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

Mirror-works and Drawings (2004 - 2016)

James Cohan Gallery, New York

48 Walker Street, January 29 -  March 6, 2021

291 Grand Street, January 29 - February 27, 2021

MONIR SHAHROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN

Untitled Maze, 2015

Mirror and reverse glass painting on plaster and wood

53 1/8 x 53 1/8 in., 135 x 135 cm

Courtesy James Cohan Gallery

James Cohan presents an exhibition of work by Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, on view from January 29 through March 6 at 48 Walker Street and January 29 through February 27 at 291 Grand Street. The exhibition spans both of the gallery’s locations, with a presentation of two major sculptural series in Tribeca and a selection of the artist’s geometric drawings and Convertible sculptures in the Lower East Side. This is the late artist’s first exhibition with James Cohan.

Over six decades, MONIR SHAHROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN (1922 - 2019) investigated the intricate geometries of her Iranian heritage, reconfiguring traditional craft techniques to explore the philosophical, poetic, and perceptual possibilities of interlocking primary forms. In her work, rigorous structure and repetition are the foundations of invention and limitless variation. Spanning mirrored mosaics, sculptural assemblage, drawings, textiles and monotypes, Monir’s multidimensional practice centered on incorporating elements from her inherited past into her own designs—which blended a range of compositional influences, from classical Persian interior decoration to Western modernism. 

Monir is best known for her geometric mirror-works, in which cut polygonal fragments of reverse-painted, reflective glass are arranged into kaleidoscopic compositions grounded on principles of Islamic geometry. Tied to a mystical understanding of primary shapes as sacred and connected to a divine natural order, her unit-based compositions of luminous glass reveal uniformity, repetition, and precedent as the basis for endless recombination. This two-part exhibition brings together major mirror-mosaic works and related geometric drawings from the prolific period following Monir's return to Iran in 2004.

On view at the Tribeca gallery are five major Maze works: Triangle Maze, Square Maze, Pentagon Maze, Hexagon Maze (all 2014), and Untitled Maze (2015). In these sculptures, the traditional surface of the mirror-mosaic is dissected and reassembled into a maze form, opening up spatial arrangements drawn from architectural convention to new possible interpretations. For Monir, the luminous reverse-painted glass pathways in these wall-based sculptures invoke the mazes of Persian gardens as well as the extravagant hedge labyrinths of English and French estate gardens. Her Maze works incorporate sacred geometries to give meditative, physical expression to the Farsi adage Hameesheh yek raah hast—“there is always a way”—inviting the viewer to discover their way in and their way out of the path laid out by the artist.

Monir often grouped her work in series she called “families,” suggesting a familial and conceptual affinity of form, dimensionality, or structure between works in each group. Each family comprises eight sculptures, which begin with the fundamental form of the triangle and progress through the remaining seven regular polygons in Euclidean geometry. In the central gallery, three exemplary works from Monir’s Fourth Family (2013) are each anchored by central, multi-sided linear shapes whose features define an outward-spanning tessellation of form. Like the sequence of Maze works in the previous gallery, Fourth Family Pentagon, Fourth Family Hexagon, and Fourth Family Octagon unfold in a progression of geometric complexity, each subsequent form composed of more facets and more angles.

The Convertible sculptures on view in Tribeca marry Monir’s enduring interest in repetition and seriality with explorations into modularity and permutability. Each wall-based mirror work is composed of segments that can be assembled in myriad patterns, folded and unfolded according to diagrams drawn by the artist—some based on extant decorative patterns, and others of her own invention. In Monir’s own words, they enable her to “play with ideas of infinity.” Khordad - Convertible Series (2011) is named for the third month of the Persian solar calendar, a timekeeping system that begins each year on the vernal equinox. The work is composed of four individual forms that each suggest the sinuous trefoil arches of early Islamic architecture. Reflection Five (2010) is a wall-based sculpture that consists of one central rhombus and four identical square-shaped forms which, in the Islamic tradition, symbolize North, South, West, and East. By organizing the forms according to her own design, and invoking concepts central to Minimalism such as modularity, the shape’s axes are complicated, demonstrating the fluidity and generative potential of geometric structure.

With Installation of 9 elements (2004), on view at the Lower East Side gallery, Monir employs diagrammatic organization to establish a spatial order between dissimilar, mirrored forms. Layering contemporary ideas with an Islamic integration of mathematics, bodily presence, and spirituality, this immersive installation work reconnects 20th century abstraction with its theological roots to invite sublime perceptual experience grounded in the body of the viewer. Monir explained in a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, “With the reflections, you’re also a part of the art piece. Your own appearance, your own face, your own clothing—if you move, it is a part of the art. You’re the connection: it is the mix of human being and reflection and

artwork.”

Exhibited alongside this nine-element installation are two mirror works whose shapes respond to Sufi mathematical principles, and a selection of historically significant drawings. Drawing was an integral throughline in Monir’s wideranging practice, providing a means for exercising dimensional thinking through experimentation with geometric structure. The drawings on view in this exhibition were created in the 1990s and 2000s, when Monir returned to Tehran after a 26-year period of exile in New York following the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Collectively, they demonstrate her decades-long, two-dimensional exploration of sculptural possibilities and sculptural production, as well as what curator Suzanne Cotter describes as the “intensely spatial nature of Monir’s artistic thinking.”

The work of MONIR SHAHROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN (b. Qazvin, Iran, 1924 - d. 2019) has been exhibited internationally beginning in the 1960’s. Her forthcoming solo exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA will open in 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include Sunset Sunrise, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2018), which travelled to Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates (2019); Mirror Variations: The Art of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Grand Rapids Art Museum, MI (2018); Lineages, Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2017); Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings, 1974-2014, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal (2014), which travelled to Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2015); and Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (2017); Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Convertibles and Polygons, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2013); and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Mirror Mosaics, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom (2007).

Her work is held in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, including the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; the Barry Art Museum, Norfolk, VA; Grand Rapids Museum of Art, Grand Rapids, MI; Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, France; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Monir Museum, Negarestan Museum Park Gardens, Tehran, Iran; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, Tehran, Iran; Niavaran Cultural Center, Tehran, Iran; Queensland Gallery of Contemporary Art, Queensland, Australia; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran, Iran; Toledo Art Museum, Toledo, OH; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom.

JAMES COHAN GALLERY

48 Walker St New York, NY 10013 

291 Grand St New York, NY 10002

www.jamescohan.com

Firelei Báez @ James Cohan Gallery, New York

Firelei Báez: Je bâtis a roches mon langage
James Cohan Gallery, New York
April 20 - June 16, 2019

FIRELEI BAEZ

Je bâtis a roches mon langage, 2019

Perforated tarp, printed mesh, artificial

and real plants; two paintings

© Firelei Báez, Courtesy James Cohan, New York

James Cohan presents Je bâtis a roches mon langage, an exhibition of new work by Firelei Báez, at the gallery’s Lower East Side location. This is the artist’s debut solo exhibition at James Cohan.

Dominican-born, New York-based artist Firelei Báez reconfigures visual references drawn from the past to explore new possibilities for the future. Incorporating subject matter from a breadth of diasporic narratives, the artist’s intricate works on paper and canvas, large-scale sculptures, and installations explore the ways in which personal and collective identities are shaped by inherited histories. Firelei Báez incorporates the visual languages of regionally-specific mythology and ritual alongside those of science fiction and fantasy, to envision identities as unfixed, and inherited stories as perpetually-evolving. By rendering spectacular bodies that exist on opposite sides of intersecting boundaries, Firelei Báez carries portraiture into an in-between space where subjectivity is rooted in historical narratives as much as it can likewise become untethered by them.

Acknowledging the reciprocal nature of migration as a non-linear course of movement, Firelei Báez creates sites of connectivity, where overlapping histories and modes of understanding coexist. For Je bâtis a roches mon langage, the artist has created an immersive installation in the main gallery that spreads into the reception area. The space is cocooned in hand-perforated blue tarp—often used for temporary shelter, and thus a symbol of both disaster and refuge—casting light onto material patterned with black diasporic symbols of nurturing and resistance. Overhead is a geo-specific map of the stars as they appeared in the night sky at the onset of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). A successful uprising led by self-liberated enslaved people against the French colonial government in Saint-Domingue, the Haitian Revolution was an early precursor to abolition movements internationally and had an indelible—if often unacknowledged—impact on the ideological and geopolitical landscape of the 19th century world. The installation’s oceanic quality suggests the broader history of black diaspora and the Middle Passage, in relationship to Glissant’s theory of the ocean as a connector and a repository of physical memory.

Facing each other within the tented installation are two imaginative portraits of empowered, black female protagonists. The viewer is positioned in the discursive space between their mutual gaze. The artist’s portrayals draw reference to the Haitian priestesses whose revolutionary contributions are absent from its heroic retellings, and tignons, head-coverings women of color were legally required to wear in 18th century New Orleans. Rendered in spectacular color, their bodies are in flux—always in the process of being made and unmade. For Firelei Báez, painting becomes a means of giving form to memory, evincing the idea that presence is not negated by passing.

With Je bâtis a roches mon langage, Firelei Báez has created a generative space in which the transmission of dominant historical narratives and ideologies can be reexamined, subaltern histories excavated, and new speculative possibilities explored. Throughout the run of the exhibition, the artist will organize readings and programs that break down and expand the white cube of the gallery, inviting others to enrich and activate the space with their own narratives and experiences.

FIRELEI BAEZ (b. 1981, Dominican Republic) received an M.F.A. from Hunter College, a B.F.A. from the Cooper Union’s School of Art, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work is the subject of 2019 solo exhibitions at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the Mennello Museum of Art, Orlando, FL. The artist’s monumental outdoor sculpture, 19.604692°N 72.218596°W, is included in En Plein Air, the 2019 High Line Art exhibition. Her current commission for the Modern Window at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is on view through November. Firelei Báez recently participated in the 2018 Berlin Biennale, and was also featured in biennials Prospect.3: Notes for Now (2014), Bronx Calling: The Second AIM Biennial (2013), and El Museo’s Bienal: The (S) Files (2011). Her major 2015 solo exhibition Bloodlines was organized by the Pérez Art Museum Miami and travelled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

Firelei Báez is the recipient of many awards: most recently, the United States Artists Fellowship (2019), the College Art Association Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work (2018), the Future Generation Art Prize (2017), the Chiaro Award (2016), and Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors (2011). Her work belongs to the permanent collections of institutions including of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; The Cleveland Clinic Fine Art Collection, Cleveland, OH; Phillip and Tracey Riese Foundation, New York, NY; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY; Sindika Dokolo Foundation Collection, Luanda, Angola; Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA; and the Salomon Foundation for Contemporary Art, Annecy, France.

JAMES COHAN GALLERY
291 Grand St., New York, NY 10002
www.jamescohan.com

Lee Mullican @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - Cosmic Theater

Lee Mullican: Cosmic Theater
James Cohan Gallery, New York
Through April 20, 2019

LEE MULLICAN

Kachina, 1959

Oil on canvas, 25 x 20 in.

Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York

James Cohan presents Lee Mullican: Cosmic Theater, curated by Michael Auping at the gallery’s Chelsea location.

The exhibition Lee Mullican: Cosmic Theater explores the late artist’s sustained interest in the universe as source material for his creative voice.  Lee Mullican was a seeker and tirelessly pursued a form of abstraction that connected nature and spirituality. Pulling from a wide range of influences he created works that found new meanings through formal explorations of composition, color, and mark making. In his conversation with Joanne Phillips from 1976, he recalled the push and pull between abstraction in the purest sense and what he explained as his “need for some kind of image.” Through a close examination of his paintings and drawings we begin to understand that these patterns, shapes, and figure-like forms reflect his deep and abiding interest in the cosmos. Lee Mullican’s enduring quest was to create through his art a new perspective. In his richly textured world, the bird’s eye and the mind’s eye are one, with outer space and inner space conflating and commingling on the striated surfaces of the picture plane.

The exhibition is curated by Michael Auping, who first met the artist in the early 1970s. They shared a fascination and knowledge of pre-Columbian and Native American art and mythology. Their long discussions often involved the melding of modern and ancient art. Carl Gustav Jung’s idea of a “collective unconscious” found its way into the conversations, a shared belief that connections can exist between vast distances in time and space.

The paintings and drawings chosen for the exhibition, some being shown for the first time, map a revealing path through much of Lee Mullican’s career, ending with paintings from his last series, The Guardians. Bringing together work spanning fifty years, the exhibition surveys key themes running through the artist’s career, framing his unusual hybridization of symbolic figuration, abstracted landscapes, and abstract space with his long-time fascination with the sky and the galaxy beyond.  

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color illustrated publication, featuring an essay by Michael Auping and published by Scheidegger & Spiess.

LEE MULLICAN was born in Chickasha, Oklahoma in 1919 and died in Los Angeles in 1998. He attended the Kansas City Art Institute after transferring from the University of Oklahoma in 1941. Upon his graduation from the Institute in 1942, Lee Mullican was drafted into the army, serving for four years as a topographical draughtsman. Lee Mullican traveled to Hawaii, Guam and Japan before ending his tenure in the army in 1946, when he moved to San Francisco. After winning a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959, he spent a year painting in Rome before returning to Los Angeles where he joined the teaching staff of the UCLA Art Department in 1961, keeping his position for nearly 30 years. He divided the later part of his life between his homes in Los Angeles and Taos, traveling internationally and co- organizing exhibitions at UCLA. Lee Mullican’s works are included in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hammer Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as in numerous other institutions.

MICHAEL AUPING is an independent curator and writer based in California and Texas and a specialist in the international developments of Post War art. Over his 40 year career, he has organized numerous exhibitions that have focused on Abstract Expressionism and related movements. As Chief Curator of the Albright Knox Art Gallery, his 1987 exhibition Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments was considered the most thorough survey of that movement in over three decades, and the book of the same title redefined the movement from both new European and American perspectives. He also curated major surveys of the work of Clyfford Still and Arshile Gorky. As Chief Curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Auping organized Philip Guston: Retrospective. He has also organized exhibitions of the work of John Chamberlain, Susan Rothenberg and Richard Serra.

JAMES COHAN
533 West 26 St, New York, NY 10001
www.jamescohan.com

Simon Evans™ @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - Passing through the gates of irresponsibility

Simon Evans™: Passing through the gates of irresponsibility
James Cohan Gallery, New York
Through April 14, 2019

Simon Evans™

The city of lists, 2019

Mixed media, 52 1/2 x 74 3/4 in.

© Simon Evans™, Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York

James Cohan presents Passing through the gates of irresponsibility, an exhibition of new work by Simon Evans™ at the gallery’s Lower East Side location. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at James Cohan.

Simon Evans™ is the artistic collaboration between Simon Evans and Sarah Lannan. Together the New York-based artists create dense text-based collages brimming with poetic handwritten phrases, drawings, and images often scavenged from the detritus of everyday life both inside and outside the studio. The works depict and describe a universe suspended between the poles of earnestness and irony. With deft wit and a wry brand of melancholy, ambiguously personal and fictional narratives are woven into diagrams, charts, maps, taxonomies, advertisements, diary entries, inventories, and cosmologies that plunge the viewer into alternate states of pathos and hope.

The works in Passing through the gates of irresponsibility demonstrate the continuous evolution and versatility of the artists’ distinctive visual language, reflecting their long-standing interests in concrete poetry, surface treatment, personal branding, and memory and historical narrative, both individual and collective. The stream-of-consciousness, elliptical prose layered throughout their work creates surprising—and occasionally startling—juxtapositions that produce moments of lyrical profundity and accidental poetry.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud and Sky are contemporary ruminations on the work on 18th century English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, 2018, takes its title from a line from Wordsworth's famous poem, “Daffodils,” yet the artists play against the romantic poet’s sentimental ode to bucolic pleasures. Their cumulus cloud is an expansive accumulation of the noise of the world today—the chaotic oversaturation of text and picture information enabled by the digital cloud—that hints at the anxieties and feelings of isolation often engendered by such omnipresent inundation. Sky, 2018, offers a distinctly serene counterpoint. As Evans notes, “I wanted to make a calm piece but I wanted it to be very much about the constant flux everything exists in. I wanted to construct a clear sky as a shield against the one we have, which to me seems loud and terrifying and constant, with noises and words and images...I saw it as a challenge as a word person to make something of satisfaction without them.”

All that potential energy, 2019, is a large-scale mixed media work on paper covered in layered gold leaf. The gilt surface of the work is a consideration of both the material’s elemental qualities—gold is a highly conductive metal and has been used in electrical wiring since the days of the telegraph—and its historical use in art and architecture, as suggested by the beautifully-sculpted hand that centers the composition. Into the grey night we go, 2019, is also an exploration of surface and material, in which delicate graph paper cut-outs represent fragile infrastructures and rich passages of orange poster board and pigment recall the gleam of construction signage under the headlights of passing vehicles at night. There is an ambiguous darkness to the composition that proposes both an end and a renewal. These works are preoccupied not just with the surface of the pictures but also, ultimately, the process of art making. They invite the viewer into a space suffused with possibilities for revelation and continued exploration.

In a tomb, 2017, Evans replicates his childhood bedroom in a shoe box. The impetus for the work was his parents’ sudden and dramatic split after forty years of marriage the previous year. As he recalls, “Now I was getting to know my mum, and I remembered this one time she helped me make an Egyptian tomb in a shoe box for school. I was big into ancient Egypt like many children were, and through it I began to look back before I was born down the long road of history.” The work is a nod to the rare special moment Evans and his mother shared in his childhood, as well as a way of mourning the demise of his parents’ marriage. It touches upon both intensely personal pasts and the broader strokes of world history. The microcosm of the personal and the macrocosm of the universal are also syncretized in The World Again, 2017, a map of the world filled up with other worlds—and other planets—all hand-drawn and labeled. Its title recalls a 2002 piece in which the artist imagined the world as a giant, man made island. With The World Again, Simon Evans and Sarah Lannan represent the world as it is today using the archaic language of cartography. The seeming condensation of the universe into the palm of the hand—achieved by smartphones and tablets—is reflected in the densely layered worlds that fill the composition.

Several other works in the exhibition continue the play between past and present. The city of lists, 2019, is an abstracted landscape of a city of cities, both ancient and modern, in which a length of classical meandros is juxtaposed with a contemporary wall clock. Relic, 2019, is—like a tomb—a work inspired by ancient Egypt. Hieroglyphic illustrations are interspersed with layered lists and phrases at turns profound (dear god i miss the old dark ages when your face was the sky/ in this new one all we have is money and whatever we want to think) and profoundly silly (Photographing your salad turns it in into a ghost). It is a picture that attempts to capture the flux of time through naming and listing, with small everyday acts and thoughts reflecting the movement of human civilization through history.

Simon Evans™ (Simon Evans, b. 1972, London and Sarah Lannan, b. 1984, Phoenix) has exhibited extensively, both in the US and internationally. Significant solo museum exhibitions include  Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, OH (2013); Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (MUDAM), Luxembourg (2012); Aspen Art Museum, CO (2005); and White Columns, New York (2005). Simon Evans™ was featured in the 12th International Istanbul Biennial in Turkey and the 27th São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. Work by Simon Evans™ is included in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, including the Berkeley Art Museum, CA; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami; Honolulu Museum of Art, HI; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (MUDAM), Luxembourg; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA. Simon Evans and Sarah Lannan currently live and work in Brooklyn, NY.

JAMES COHAN GALLERY
291 Grand St, New York, NY 10002
www.jamescohan.com

Spencer Finch exhibition, James Cohan Gallery New York - Fathom

SPENCER FINCH

Spencer Finch, Fathom

James Cohan Gallery, New York

May 2 - June 15, 2013

To “fathom” is to comprehend the essence of something colossal or ineffable by translating it into terms we can grasp. For more than twenty years, SPENCER FINCH’s practice addresses such a need to capture and frame experience. In site-specific installation as well as drawing and sculpture, Spencer Finch has combined scientific calibration and calculation with a romantic’s engagement with nature and faith in the limitless rewards of observation.

A fathom is also a unit of measurement approximately six feet in length that is used to measure the depth of water, and a key reference point for the exhibition. After learning about Henry David Thoreau’s 1846 survey of Walden Pond, in which the famed polymath performed soundings to determine the lake’s depth at 102 feet and debunk a popular myth that it was bottomless, Spencer Finch received permission from the Walden Pond State Reservation to take a boat on the lake and perform that seminal survey for the second time. Dropping rope into the pond, as Thoreau had, while also employing an electronic depth meter — combining old and new technology — Spencer Finch further measured longitude and latitude as well as color-matching the water at each sounding point.

The resulting work is a 120-foot long rope – the rope Spencer Finch used in the soundings, and the artist's description of the depth of Walden Pond. It serves as the physical record of the findings as well as an armature: paper tags for each of the approximately 700 soundings appear along the rope at their equivalent measure of depth along with their exact coordinates and a swatch of matched color, applied in watercolor. Neither entirely documentation nor sculpture, the long line may best be considered a drawing of Walden Pond.

The main gallery will include several other works delving into the idea of delineation, from continuous-line drawings of encircling vultures observed by the artist in Spain to abstract renderings of meteorological models used to predict weather patterns. Other new and recent works on view for the first time in New York address themes as varied as the color of the light on Mars, the breeze through Emily Dickinson’s bedroom window and the attempt to render wind through chalk pastel drawings of the movement of the curtains at Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s famous pavilion in Barcelona.

SPENCER FINCH (b. 1962, New Haven, Connecticut) exhibitions and commissions on Wanafoto Blogzine: Spencer Finch installation Following Nature, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN (through August 25, 2013); Spencer Finch, I'll tell you how the Sun rose, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, Sweden (2012); Spencer Finch, Lori Hersberger, Martin Oppel: Weather Report, Ecole Régionale des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, France (2010); Spencer Finch, Amabilis Insania, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin (2010);  Spencer Finch, In Praise of Shadows, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin (2007-2008)... 

Next exhibition at James Cohan Gallery, New York: Shi Zhiying, June - July, 2013

James Cohan Gallery New York
www.jamescohan.com

New York Lower East Side Art in China - Exhibition at James Cohan Gallery Shanghai - Joshua Abelow, David Adamo, Michael Bauer, David Brooks, Erica Baum, Hilary Harnischfeger, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Anicka Yi

Downtown: A View of New York's Lower East Side
James Cohan Gallery, Shanghai 
March 8 - May 5, 2013

Downtown: A View of New York's Lower East Side (LES) is a group exhibition presented by James Cohan Gallery in Shanghai with artworks by Joshua Abelow, David Adamo, Michael Bauer, David Brooks, Erica Baum, Hilary Harnischfeger, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Anicka Yi, whose work exemplifies the alternative scene in New York City’s burgeoning Lower East Side art district. For the artists included, this exhibition marks the first time their work will be shown in China. The exhibition was developed in collaboration with the LES galleries who represent the artists presented in the exhibition. It was curated by Jessica Lin Cox and William Pym of James Cohan Gallery, New York. A bi-lingual catalog of the exhibition accompanies the exhibition. 

Anicka Yi

ANICKA YI 

阿尼卡•伊  

Debt to Pleasure, 2011

欢乐之债, 2011 

Digital c-print 数码打印 - 30 x 45 inches; 76 x 114 cm 

Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York

ANICKA YI was born in 1971 in Seoul, South Korea. The artist lives and works in New York, USA

David Brooks

DAVID BROOKS 

大卫•布鲁克斯 

Imbroglios (a phylogenetic tree, from Homo Sapiens to Megalops Atlanticus), 2012

《纠葛（系谱 树，从智人到大西洋大眼蟹）》, 2012 

Fiberglass, gelcoat, MDF, pencil, hardware 

玻璃钢、凝胶图层、中密度纤维板、铅笔、硬件 

21 x 12 x 5 ft; 6.4 x 3.65 x 1.5 m

Courtesy the artist and American Contemporary, New York

DAVID BROOKS was born in 1975 in Brazil, Indiana, USA. The artist lives and works in New York, USA.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins

JESSICA JACKSON HUTCHINS 

杰西卡•杰克逊•哈钦斯 

Dinner Theater, 2012

晚宴剧场, 2012 

Collage on canvas, glazed ceramic, chair 

布面拼贴、上釉陶瓷、椅子 

85 1/2 x 72 1/2 x 21 inches; 217 x 184 x 53 cm 

Courtesy the artist and Laurel Gitlen, New York

JESSICA JACKSON HUTCHINS was born in 1971 in Chicago, IL USA. The artist lives and works in Berlin, Portland, OR USA.

In assembling this exhibition, DOWNTOWN provides a snapshot of what is on view in eight prominent LES galleries. As the oldest neighborhood in New York City, the LES has been home to waves of immigrants from Eastern European Jews, Poles and Ukrainians to what is today the heart of New York’s Chinatown. Throughout the neighborhood, galleries can be found tucked into small storefronts, up narrow staircases, and more recently in newly-built white box spaces. Progressive gallery models are thriving; they are incubators of the most exciting emerging artwork being made today. The close-knit community of artists and art dealers attracts well-heeled crowds to this former working class neighborhood, shifting the associations of the old world to the new. In the spirit of cultural exchange, this exhibition brings the best of the LES scene to audiences in Shanghai. 

Michael Bauer

MICHAEL BAUER 

迈克尔•鲍尔 

Thon - H.S.O.P. – 42, 2012

鲔鱼 - H.S.O.P–42, 2012 

Oil on canvas 布面油画 - 72 x 60 inches; 182.9 x 152.4 cm

Courtesy the artist and Lisa Cooley, New York

MICHAEL BAUER was born in 1973 in Erkelenz, Germany. The artist lives and works in New York, USA

Joshua Abelow

JOSHUA ABELOW 

乔舒亚•阿贝娄 

Dumb & Easy, 2007-2008

愚蠢与简单, 2007–2008 

Oil on linen 亚麻布面油画 

56 panels, each 18 x 18 inches; 45.7 x 45.7 cm  

共 56块，每块 18 x 18英寸（45.7 x 45.7 厘米） 

Courtesy the artist and James Fuentes LLC, New York

JOSHUA ABELOW was born in 1976 in Frederick, Maryland, USA. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, USA

The accompanying publication traces the evolution of the idea of 'downtown' as an attitude as much as a place. An essay by the curators charts the history of the downtown art scene in New York and the parallel social and cultural contexts from the late 1960s to the present. Interspersed throughout are first-person narratives from the artists and gallerists in the show who talk about what the LES means to them. The effect for the reader is as if overhearing snippets of life lived by artists and art professionals on the scene. In keeping with the show’s theme, the publication has been designed by Project Projects, an internationally celebrated design firm as well as a grassroots member of the LES community.

James Cohan Gallery Shanghai
1F, Building 1, Lane 170 Yue Yang Road, by Yong Jia Road, Shanghai
www.jamescohan.com