George Rickey @ Kasmin Gallery, New York - "Wall Reliefs" Exhibition

George Rickey: Wall Reliefs

Kasmin Gallery, New York

January 11 – February 17, 2024

Kasmin presents a solo exhibition of work by pioneering American sculptor GEORGE RICKEY. Emphasizing wall-mounted stainless steel kinetic sculptures contextualized by the inclusion of significant free-standing examples from the early 1960s through the 1990s, the presentation draws from the collections of the George Rickey Foundation and the George Rickey Estate, represented by Kasmin since 2020, to demonstrate formal developments in the artist's singular practice over several decades.

George Rickey had begun mounting kinetic sculptures to the wall by the early 1960s, an ambition he held from the very beginning of his sculptural practice a decade prior. Working against the wall afforded Rickey the opportunity to fine tune the mechanics of his sculptural designs by hand before executing them at monumental scale, at a time when many sculptors had begun to collaborate with commercial fabricators to realize ambitious projects. His commitment to the hand-creation of his work is represented here by Atropos IV (1963, begun 1961), a unique work from one of the artist’s earliest series of line sculptures. George Rickey began his “Atropos” series in 1961, the year he learned the Heliarc welding technique that enabled him to realize his sculptural designs at an ambitious scale. Titled after the Greek goddess of fate and destiny, the movement of the two lines in Atropos IV is guided both by the artist’s intricate engineering and by chance, provided by a gentle breeze. The use of straight lines and geometric elements would soon hallmark Rickey’s ability to capture the essence of movement in his sculpture; as he once wrote, “Lines permit the most economical manifestation of movement I have found, a kinetic drawing in space.” In 1964, George Rickey exhibited monumental line sculptures at Documenta III, including a large-scale wall-mounted work from his related “Landscape” series, which anticipates Rickey’s Seascape III (1993) on view here, outside of the Orangerie in Kassel, Germany, where an early monumental vertical rendering, Two Lines – Temporal I (1964) was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. 

Once George Rickey discovered the line as a tool to illustrate motion, he began experimenting with other geometric shapes such as squares, rectangles and triangles. By the 1970s, living and working between East Chatham, NY and Berlin—a city then divided by a wall, on which artwork famously flourished through the 1980s—Rickey used these shapes to create works in which light and color reflect off of their expanded surface areas in new ways. Soon enough, George Rickey would open his forms, using open frames instead of solid planes as a sculptural element, to the effect that the works frame and reframe their surrounding environments through their openings. He would further create complex patterns out of simple shapes, creating a square out of triangles in Unstable Squares Diagonal Wall (1981) or truncating triangles into trapezoids in Cascade (1989).

A highlight of the exhibition is Annular Eclipse - Wall (c. 1995), a unique work related to one of Rickey’s last major sculptures, inspired by an annular eclipse in May 1994—a type of solar eclipse in which the moon is too far from the sun to cover it completely, resulting in a ring of fire around its edge. For the first time in decades, Rickey titled this work after nature, and, in a rare instance in Rickey’s oeuvre, this artwork’s title preceded its conceptual realization. A monumental iteration of  Annular Eclipse was installed along Park Avenue in 2000, inaugurating the boulevard’s public art tradition in New York, and then again at the corner of 48th Street and 6th Avenue in 2017.

George Rickey: Wall Reliefs underscores the relationship between Rickey’s wall-mounted kinetic sculptures and his documented interest in the optical effects of contemporary painting. Beginning his career as a painter, George Rickey early on honed his ability to produce artworks at a commanding scale by transforming small gridded sketches into large-scale public murals, an experience that prefigures the monumental sculptures. On a 1961 trip to Europe, around the time he began his “Atropos” series, Rickey met the artists Jesús Rafael Soto and Victor Vasarely in Paris, each known for creating optical effects of movement, and the latter of whose work Rickey would soon acquire for his personal collection. George Rickey’s research for his 1967 book Constructivism: Origins and Evolution—which dedicated a chapter to the role of optical phenomena in paintings by Bridget Riley, Vasarely, Soto, and others—would be instrumental in organizing MoMA curator William Seitz’s landmark traveling survey The Responsive Eye in 1965. As George Rickey would state about his kinetic sculptures in that year: “I've been interested in the essence of movement, not just in making objects [that] move, but in trying to use movement as an expressive means, as a painter might use color.”

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Jane Freilicher: Abstractions @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC

Jane Freilicher: Abstractions 

Kasmin Gallery, New York 

March 2 - April 22, 2023 

Jane Freilicher 

Montego Bay, 1961 

Oil on linen, 68 1/2 x 61 3/4 inches, 174 x 156.8 cm 

© The Estate of Jane Freilicher, courtesy of Kasmin 

The first exhibition in over fifteen years to focus on Jane Freilicher’s rarely-seen large-scale abstractions will go on view at Kasmin. Demonstrating the expansiveness of Freilicher’s visual language and underscoring her contribution to a generation of New York City painters, Abstractions offers an opportunity to discover a series of work by an artist known primarily for her distinctive style of painterly representation. This is the third solo exhibition of work by Jane Freilicher to be staged at Kasmin, and it will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue featuring an introduction by Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women, and an essay by writer and scholar Erin Kimmel.

The exhibition presents a group of paintings in degrees of abstraction, realized by Jane Freilicher between 1958 and 1962, a period of great inventiveness when the artist was spending stretches of time in Long Island but had yet to establish a studio there. The series marks a crucial moment of discovery and focus for Freilicher, who went on to integrate the freedom, fluidity, and confidence developed during this period into her more recognizable still lifes and landscapes of later decades.

Jane Freilicher’s abstractions have their roots in observation, informed by her studies with legendary abstract painter Hans Hofmann at his schools in New York and Provincetown. In this group of paintings, pastoral landscapes from Water Mill, Long Island, are translated through the lens of the artist’s memory into confident gestural compositions defined by their use of color and sensitive depiction of light. In a 2006 interview for The New York Sun, the artist tells writer Jennifer Samet of this evolutionary moment in her practice: “I remember being overwhelmed by aqueous light and the obliteration of the horizon by fog.” [1] Jane Freilicher’s palette returns repeatedly here to a combination of off-white and light blue, rendered in loose brushwork across an expansive pictorial space to give a palpable impression of the airy, open landscape of the country.

Breaking out of the domestic scale necessitated by previous studio spaces, this generative period saw Jane Freilicher regularly visiting Water Mill and then returning to her Manhattan studio where she would collapse the formal elements of the rural and coastal environments into energetic, improvisational paintings that were significantly larger than her earlier works. While approaching pure abstraction, the paintings from this period retain a compositional recognition of their ordering principles—the horizon line, a boat’s mast, the position of the sun in the sky, and, in the artist’s words, “long vistas of clouds and water.” [2]

The metamorphosis of landscapes that figure prominently in the artist’s life are representative of, as Roberta Smith identified in 2006, “a more personal, grounded version of Color Field painting.” [3] This observation bridges Jane Freilicher to a loose group of contemporaries whose considerations of their immediate environments brought great warmth and aliveness to varying shades of abstraction—Milton Avery, Etel Adnan, Joan Mitchell, Agnes Martin, and Willem de Kooning (whose own abstract landscapes inspired by his time on Long Island went on view at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1959).

Jane Freilicher’s (1924–2014) work is held in numerous private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; and the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE; among many others. Her paintings were selected for inclusion in the 1995 Whitney Biennial. Recent acquisitions have been made by institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Addison Gallery of American Art, MA; and Grand Rapids Art Museum, MI.

1. Jennifer Samet, “Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman,” The New York Sun (March 30, 2006): 25.

2. Jennifer Samet, “Portraits of the Artist,” 25.

3. Roberta Smith, “Art in Review: Jane Freilicher,” The New York Times (April 14, 2006): E32.

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Alexander Harrison @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC - Big World

Alexander Harrison: Big World

Kasmin Gallery, New York

January 12 - February 22, 2023

ALEXANDER HARRISON

Photo by Diego Flores

Alexander Harrison’s Big World brings together fourteen enigmatic and intimately-scaled new paintings by the artist whose dreamscapes and object-symbols blend illusion and fantasy with archetypes from cultural history. This is Alexander Harrison’s first solo exhibition at Kasmin.

Alexander Harrison sets up his paintings as portals into a vivid universe of elusive narratives brimming with searching, loneliness, escape, and entrapment. Scenes set at dusk or early morning capture the border between light and dark when the sky is at its most chromatic and stars punctuate a backdrop of deep blue. Paired with a conflation of seasons, Harrison renders an unreality that he compares to a fever dream, loaded with ambiguous symbolism, personified flowers and birds, trees in multiple forms, and figures that resist being seen in their totality. Working directly from an inner consciousness, Harrison brings myriad metaphysical references into his compositions, loading the work with an ineffable talismanic quality especially present in the artist’s intimately-scaled work.

Through the meticulous application of layers of acrylic on panel, Alexander Harrison conceptualizes the contrast between light and shadow, a tactic employed by the painters of the Italian Renaissance. Rarely depicting direct light, the artist favors the reflections occasioned by the surfaces of his images. Engaged with a history of surrealism and the supernatural, he turns repeatedly to symbols loaded with art historical and religious folklore, such as the apple, the pumpkin, and the moon, as well as those co-opted by racist caricature, such as the watermelon. Memento moris appear in the form of flowers, heavy-headed and drooping with melancholic candor in the moonlight. Appearing across his oeuvre, these motifs create an immersive universe, heightening the uncanny dissonance one feels when observing a whole rendered in fragments. The artist’s use of distinctive framing strategies, realized primarily through the use of trompe l’oeil, allow lifelike materials such as clapboard window frames and the bare stone walls of prison cells to determine the picture plane.

Mining his experiences growing up in Marietta, South Carolina, Alexander Harrison explores the psychic reverberations of America’s deeply entrenched racism as well as the role of the artist and the responsibilities inherent in painterly representation. These themes emerge in Harrison’s work through the recurrence of the Black male figure, reprised as a cowboy, an artist, and a man on the run. These characters recur as both a proxy for the artistic figure and for the manner in which Black masculinity has historically been stereotyped in popular culture, where representations have routinely lacked nuance. Harrison’s figures exist in riposte to these fallacies, offering instead portraits of self-determination and philosophical depth.

Alexander Harrison studied at The Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD. He has held solo exhibitions at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA; Fisher Parrish Gallery, Brooklyn, NY and NADA Miami, FL. Harrison has been in group exhibitions at Hesse Flatow, New York, NY; Richard Heller, Los Angeles, CA; 0.0 LA, Los Angeles, CA; Hotel Art Pavilion, Brooklyn, NY; Fisher Parrish Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Smoke the Moon, Los Angeles, CA; the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM; and the Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg, Germany. His work is held in private and public collections including the Hall Art Foundation, North Adams, MA.

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Roxy Paine @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC - Normal Fault

Roxy Paine: Normal Fault

Kasmin Gallery, New York

November 4 - December 23, 2021

Roxy Paine 

Topographic, 2021

60 1/2 x 84 x 8 inches / 153.7 x 213.4 x 20.3 cm

Courtesy of the artist 

Kasmin presents an exhibition of new work by ROXY PAINE (b. 1966, New York). Comprising an installation of thirteen relief paintings and one of the artist’s Dioramas, the works extend Roxy Paine’s epistemological investigations into the interconnected structures that constitute both the natural world and the systems humanity has imposed on it.

Obscuring the delineation between abstraction and the representation of landscape, soil, and flora, the works deliberately obscure the scale of their subjects to present simultaneously micro- and macroscopic perspectives of biological and geological phenomena, as well as the maps we use to notate the world around us. Roxy Paine’s constructions of these phenomena, including mycelium, molds, and rock material, entangle the dichotomy of beauty and destruction as they draw parallels between the patterns associated with the organic, the industrial, and the digital. Whether cells, bolts, or pixels, Roxy Paine repeatedly brings the accumulation of these formative units into absurdity, asking us to question how perception is framed, filtered, and codified.

Roxy Paine’s exploration into stratigraphy acts to interweave three distinct temporal frameworks: geological, fungal, and human. Time becomes the subject, as well as the perception of time and the way that the understanding of geology forces a different frame of reference. The artist has long been fascinated by fungi and its ability to productively transform dead matter into building blocks that other entities can harness to create new life. Their traditional medicinal uses, to induce perceptual shifts and philosophical epiphanies, is also of interest.

Three works in the exhibition use the internal geometric structure of the American flag as a compositional beginning. Layered with complex symbolism and rendered in lifelike layers of sediment, they consider our planet’s ongoing transformation in both political and biological terms. Drawing on the irony of a country at pains to assert its authority despite rapid ecological decline, they lay bare the pallid resemblance that political or social systems have to the effortless perfection and complexity of nature.

Reverent of the immensity of geological time, Gros Ventre (2021) is titled after a wilderness situated nearby to the artist’s studio and residence in Wyoming. The area’s historic vulnerability to landslides has contributed to a distinctive and contrasting terrain, forming a mountain range which is broken by faults that form an asymmetrical arch. Roxy Paine uses this as a starting point to look at nature and the lenses through which we variously understand, analyze, mythologize, romanticize, and disturb the natural world.

Works that emphasize the man-made entropy of the earth are intentionally fraught in tone. In Large Green Pools (2021), what appears as a volcanic landscape is interrupted not by the chlorophyllic burst of plant life but by toxic craters almost extraterrestrial in their vibrancy. Large Sun (2021) and Small Sun (2021) present the eventual absorption of earth in space while also conjuring associations of rapidly multiplying bacteria or fungi, signaling the presence of death or the dying. Roxy Paine revels in this theatre of nature as he condemns its destruction by pollutants and emissions.

Distinct from the arborescence of the artist’s Dendroids (the structure of which mimic the branch-like networks of leaf structures and microchips), these works consider multiplicity, proliferation, and the slow layering of sediment over time to create the environments we recognize on earth during the epoch of the anthropocene. Presenting devastated landscapes, charred by fire or nuclear disaster, these works also develop previous major installations such as Desolation Row (2017).

ROXY PAINE’s work is the subject of numerous museum exhibitions worldwide including Roxy Paine: Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor at Beeler Gallery, Columbus College of Art & Design, OH, 2016–17; Natura Naturans at Villa Panza, Varese, Italy, 2015–16; and Roxy Paine: Scumaks and Dendroids at Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO in 2011.

In 2009, Roxy Paine was selected to create Maelstrom, a site-specific installation for the rooftop garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His work has also been installed in prominent public venues In New York City such as Madison Square Park in 2009 and Central Park in 2002.

Roxy Paine has been the recipient of many prestigious awards, including John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Asher B. Durand Award by the Brooklyn Museum and the Trustees Award for an Emerging Artist by the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. His work is included in prominent public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art New York, Museum of Modern Art San Francisco, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, National Gallery Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., North Carolina Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

Major monographs of the artist’s work were recently published by Rizzoli in 2018, and by Skira in 2021.

ROXY PAINE

Text by Marc Mayer and Tan Lin

Published by Rizzoli Electa, November 2018

Hardcover, 288 p.

ROXY PAINE

Dioramas

Edited by Saul Anton

Texts by Mia Kang, Steven Matijicio and Michael Goodman

Published by Skira, 2021

Hardcover, 176 p., 145 ill.

KASMIN GALLERY

509 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001

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Contemporary Canadian Painting @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC - North by Northeast - Sara Anstis, Jane Corrigan, Holly Coulis, Wanda Koop, Manuel Mathieu, Stephanie Temma Hier, Corri-Lynn Tetz, Tristan Unrau, Janet Werner, Anna Weyant, Chloe Wise, Matthew Wong

North by Northeast:

Contemporary Canadian Painting 

Sara Anstis, Jane Corrigan, Holly Coulis, Wanda Koop, Manuel Mathieu, Stephanie Temma Hier, Corri-Lynn Tetz, Tristan Unrau, Janet Werner, Anna Weyant, Chloe Wise, Matthew Wong

Kasmin Gallery, New York

June 30 - August 13, 2021

Kasmin presents a group exhibition of contemporary painters, all of whom hail from Canada or have spent significant periods of their art education or artmaking career there. Presenting work by Sara Anstis, Jane Corrigan, Holly Coulis, Wanda Koop, Manuel Mathieu, Stephanie Temma Hier, Corri-Lynn Tetz, Tristan Unrau, Janet Werner, Anna Weyant, Chloe Wise, and Matthew Wong, North by Northeast draws a through-line charting the distinctive ways in which artists from the region complicate traditional genres of portraiture and landscape painting. 

The title of the exhibition riffs on the central premise of mistaken identity in the plot of Hitchcock’s 1959 film, North by Northwest, and the show queries what comparisons might be observable in these artists’ formal language. Depicting subjects in fantastical or dreamlike settings, many of the works displayed boast a keen sense of the tragicomic — bodies present as dislocated or incomplete yet assertive of their own desire. Similarly, the natural world is rendered as surreal, occasionally a prop, and at other times, a constructed mise-en-scene. Akin to the landscape painters of the “Group of Seven” before them, these artists share the formative experiences of Canada’s natural landscapes. The artists included have each carved rigorously conceptual practices, playing with the country’s canonical investment in representational traditions. Furthermore, the presentation speaks to a long history of cross-pollination between the US, where many of these artists now reside, and the major art centers of Canada.

SARA ANSTIS (b. 1991, Stockholm, Sweden) lives and works in London, United Kingdom. She holds a BFA in studio art and sociology from Concordia University in Montréal and received an MFA in 2016 from Valand Academy in Gothenburg, Sweden. She has exhibited in several group shows in the United Kingdom and Europe, including at Palazzo Monti, Bresica, Italy, and The Royal Drawing School, London. Anstis has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Fabian Lang Gallery, Zürich. This will be her fourth presentation in New York City.

JANE CORRIGAN (b. 1980, Quebec, Canada) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Corrigan received her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2003 and completed her MFA in 2009 at SUNY Purchase. Exhibitions include those at White Columns, New York, Rental Gallery, East Hampton, Carbon 12, Dubai, Sikkema Jenkins, New York, Wilkinson Gallery, London, Karma, New York, Retrospective, Hudson, New York, Feuer/Mesler, New York, and Oakville Galleries, Canada. She was a recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2013.

HOLLY COULIS (b.1968, Toronto, Canada) lives and works in Athens, Georgia. She received her BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design and her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. This summer, her exhibition Orbit will open at Philip Martin Gallery in Los Angeles. Other recent shows include Cooper Cole, Toronto, Simon Lee’s Viewing Room, London, and Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York City. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, Artforum, the Los Angeles Times, and the Brooklyn Rail. She is represented by Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles and by Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York City.

WANDA KOOP (b. 1951, Vancouver, Canada) lives and works in Winnipeg, Canada. She received an honorary Doctor of Law from University of Manitoba in Winnipeg in 2009. She has exhibited internationally for over four decades, with shows at the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Xi’an Art Museum in China. Koop has work in numerous public collections, including at Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montréal, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and Shanghai Museum of Art, China.

STEPHANIE TEMMA HIER (b. 1992, Toronto, Canada) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She holds a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, Toronto, and studied at the Academy of Art Canada in Toronto. Recent solo exhibitions include Bradley Ertaskiran, Montréal, Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai, Downs and Ross, New York, and Neochrome Gallery, Turin. Hier was a finalist for the Royal Bank of Canada’s Painting competition in 2016 and 2018. She is the recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, and has participated in residencies at Hospitalfield, Scotland, and Shandaken: Storm King, New York.

MANUEL MATHIEU (b. 1986, Port Au Prince, Haiti) lives and works in Montréal. A graduate of Goldsmith’s College in London, Mathieu has exhibited in Belgium, Canada, China, England, France, Martinique, Morocco, Spain, and the United States. His work is in the collections of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts. His recent work has been included in The Other Side of Now at Perez Art Museum in Miami. In 2020, Mathieu was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts and Power Plant, Toronto. Recent group exhibitions include Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, PHI Foundation, Montréal, Song Museum, Beijing, and Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart.

CORRI-LYNN TETZ (b. Calgary, Canada) lives and works in Montréal. She graduated from the MFA program at Concordia University in 2015. Tetz has received project support from Conseil des Art et des Lettres du Quebec, The Canada Council for the Arts, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, and was awarded the Brucebo Fellowship in 2016. She has exhibited across Canada, Sweden, and the United States, with acquisitions made by Senvest Collection and Equity Bank.

TRISTAN UNRAU (b. 1989, Canada) lives and works in Los Angeles. He holds an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. He was a resident at the Banff Centre in 2013 and a finalist for the Royal Bank of Canada Painting Competition in 2015, 2017, and 2018. In 2016, Unrau participated in the survey group exhibition Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures at the Vancouver Art Gallery. He has held recent solo shows Unit 17, Vancouver, and Towards, Toronto. Unrau's paintings are currently on view as part of a two-person exhibition at Stanley's, Los Angeles.

JANET WERNER (b. 1959, Canada) received her MFA from Yale University in 1987. Solo exhibitions include the Musée d'art contemporain, Montreal, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, Galerie Julia Garnatz, Cologne, and Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts, Montreal. Werner’s solo survey exhibition, Another Perfect Day, organized by the Kenderdine Art Gallery, toured to five locations in Canada from 2013–2015. Werner's work is in the public collections of the Musée du Québec, Musée d'art contemporain, Montreal, The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Toronto, and the Canadian Embassy in Berlin. An upcoming solo show at Arsenal Contemporary, New York, will take place Fall 2021.

ANNA WEYANT (b. 1995, Calgary, Canada) received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island. Weyant’s work was the subject of the solo exhibitions Loose Screw at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles in 2021 and Welcome to the Dollhouse at 56 Henry, New York in 2019. Her work has been featured in group shows at C L E A R I N G, New York, Anna Zorina Gallery, New York, Recharge Foundation, Singapore, Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami, and Local Projects, Long Island City.

CHLOE WISE (b. 1990, Montréal, Canada) lives and works in New York. She holds a BFA from Concordia University, Montréal. Recent exhibitions include solo presentations at Almine Rech in New York and London, as well as the HEART Herning Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark. Wise has exhibited work in numerous group shows internationally, and is currently on view in The Artist is Online, König Galerie, Berlin and in Fantasy America at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her work is included in the permanent collections of Julia Stoschek, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

MATTHEW WONG (b. 1984, Toronto; d. 2019, Edmonton, Canada). Matthew Wong’s work is in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Guggenheim Museum, New York, Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, Estés Lauder Collection, New York, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut. Matthew Wong will be the subject of a survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in August 2021.

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Stuart Davis @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC - Stuart Davis in Havana

Stuart Davis in Havana

Kasmin Gallery, New York

June 30 - August 13, 2021

Kasmin presents Stuart Davis in Havana, an exhibition of ten evocative early watercolors painted in 1920 following Stuart Davis’ brief yet formative trip to Havana, Cuba, where the artist convalesced after contracting Spanish flu. The exhibition is curated by Priscilla Vail Caldwell in collaboration with Earl Davis and the Estate of Stuart Davis. This is the second solo exhibition of work by the artist at Kasmin since the gallery began representing the Estate in 2018, and the first to focus on Davis’ time in Cuba. In addition to the suite of paintings, this exhibition presents a trove of archival material documenting the artist’s trip including postcards, lottery tickets, and the painter’s passport.

On December 31st, 1919, Stuart Davis joined his close friend and fellow painter Glenn O. Coleman in Havana. Due south of Florida and just 110 miles offshore, Havana attracted those seeking adventure, with the temptation of late, boozy nights, or as writer Gilbert Seldes described for The New Yorker in 1926, “The hours kept are Harlem Hours.” Over a century later, as we emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, our understanding of deprivation, desire for novel experiences, as well as the creative inspiration that unfamiliar environments can provide, is equally acute. Davis’ observations, those of an eager traveler, communicate to us directly despite the passage of time.

His new surroundings quickly engendered a sense of ambition in Stuart Davis at a pivotal moment in the young artist’s career when he was just 27 years old. Compelled by the burgeoning spirit of Modernism and crafting an original visual vocabulary, in his Havana watercolors we see Stuart Davis unleashed, boldly experimenting with flat planes of bright color. Works such as Dancer’s on Havana Street (1920) and Woman with Shawl (1920) are comprised of angular silhouettes rendered in bold hues, purple, ocher, black, bright yellow, and deep red, foreshadowing works from the late 1920s in which Davis would synthesize subject-matter into an increasingly rigorous geometry defined by color rather than dimensional space.

Melding reality and fiction, Stuart Davis layers depictions of Havana’s natural landscape with detailed architectural elements pulled from recognizable structures such as the Church Santo Angel Custodio, La Fortaleza of San Carlos de la Cabaña, or the fortifications of the old city. Parque Centrale—Cuba (1920) includes a broken outline of the park’s statue of political figure Carlos Manuel de Céspedes amongst pulsating swaths of color. These translucent washes of paint allow images to shift in and out of focus, generating an ephemerality associated with memory or dream.

In February 1920, Stuart Davis returned to the United States, a country in the midst of industrial and intellectual upheaval as well as robust growth. The “Roarin’ 20s” as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “was going to be the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it.” Or, in the case of Stuart Davis, plenty to paint.

ABOUT STUART DAVIS

Stuart Davis (1892–1964) is one of the preeminent figures of the American Modernist movement. Over the course of his prolific career, which spanned the early 20th century through the post-war era, Davis developed a distinct visual language that fused Cubism and high-art with his own pioneering motifs of consumerism and the syncopated rhythms of jazz. Davis’s work has been exhibited worldwide and is held in the permanent collection of prominent institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; San Francisco Museum of Art, CA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; among many others. Recent significant exhibitions include the 2016 critically acclaimed Stuart Davis: In Full Swing, which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY, and traveled to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR.

ABOUT PRISCILLA VAIL CALDWELL – VAIL CALDWELL PROJECTS

Priscilla Vail Caldwell is an independent curator and advisor based in New York City. Caldwell sits on the Advisory Committee at Northwestern University’s Block Art Museum, whose mission is to emphasize and support innovative interdisciplinary study and research. She earned her Master’s of Art History at Williams College, a BA from Northwestern University, and is a past recipient of the Kress Foundation Grant.

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297 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001

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Charlie Billingham, Alexander Harrison, Andrea Joyce Heimer, Esteban Jefferson, Tanya Merrill @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC - New Old Histories

New Old Histories 

Charlie Billingham, Alexander Harrison, Andrea Joyce Heimer, 

Esteban Jefferson, Tanya Merrill 

Kasmin Gallery, New York 

May 21 - June 26, 2021 

History is not an objective accounting of events. Rather, it is a series of stories told and retold in an effort to shape the world according to the whims and agendas of real people, as well as by the cultural conditions of a particular time and place. Histories are created, disseminated, and passed down, but they are also altered, forgotten, and re-shaped. New Old Histories presents five artists whose approaches to contemporary representational painting abound in narrative and allegory, developing our understanding of what is at stake in how—and by whom—these stories are told. The artists variously co-opt, critique, and upend conventions of historical painting, and in the process provide a lens through which to view the world today.

CHARLIE BILLINGHAM’S (b. 1984, London, UK) boisterous paintings, screens, and interior installations appropriate imagery from the satirical prints of Regency England. Men in undone formalwear and powdered wigs are disconnected from their original contexts so that the absurd, comic, and grotesque become snapshots of bestial inclinations. The artist’s technical approach focuses on pigment, texture, and surface, using both oil and acrylic paint on surfaces of polyester, linen, tapestry, canvas, or wood panel.

Charlie Billingham lives and works in London, UK. He completed his joint honors MA at the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art in 2008, and received a postgraduate degree from the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 2013. His work is in permanent collections at Saatchi Collection, London, UK; Ramin Salsali Private Museum, Dubai, UAE; Franks-Suss Collection, London, UK; and HSBC Collection, London, UK.

New York-based painter ALEXANDER HARRISON (b. 1992, Greenville, South Carolina) draws on his experiences growing up as a young Black man in the South to explore isolation, longing, and loneliness. Blending references from American cinema, literature, and illustration, with surrealist symbols such as flower heads, the moon, and dislocated limbs, Harrison’s Southern landscapes, often set at dusk, are populated by Black cowboys. Commonly erased by popular culture depicting the South, these figures propose ways in which we might re-emphasize acts of Black heroism in America, and their attire also hints at personal narratives—Harrison notes that his own grandfather often sported a cowboy hat. These inclusions from the artist’s past do not constitute an easy invitation to enter into over-familiarity, however. Utilizing trompe l’oeil framing devices that double as windowpanes or prison bars, Harrison creates portals that establish an immutable distance between subject and viewer, reasserting the melancholic tenor of the themes presented.

Alexander Harrison has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Fisher Parrish Gallery, New York, and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.

ANDREA JOYCE HEIMER’S (b. 1981, Great Falls, Montana) paintings evoke narrative friezes and tapestries, adopting a flattened perspective that speaks to a simultaneity of experience. Her work contains complex, imaginative and original use of symbolic figures and iconography, referencing the Garden of Eden and Greek mythology, while also creating and recording personal mythologies. At the center is a curiosity regarding the subject of loneliness, and her interest in origins—of the universe, of narrative art—respond to the obscurity surrounding her own young life.

Andrea Joyce Heimer lives and works in Ferndale, Washington. She received an MFA from the New Hampshire Institute of Art and has held teaching appointments at Oregon College of Art and Craft (Portland), Western Washington University (Bellingham), and Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Vancouver).

In his Petit Palais series, ESTEBAN JEFFERSON’S (b. 1989, New York) vaporous canvases depict the sepia-toned art museum in Paris. The artist’s ethereal pencil strokes on brown-stained linen sketch out the museum’s lobby, in which bronze 19th century busts of unidentified African men and women are presented with no details regarding subject, authorship, or provenance. Separated from the Greek sculptures and uncontextualized, the works pose a multitude of questions regarding the colonialist conventions of museum display. Jefferson’s paintings, in response, query whom in art history receives the privilege of being remembered.

Esteban Jefferson lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Petit Palais at Tanya Leighton, Berlin, in 2019, and an exhibition of the same name at White Columns, New York, in 2020. Also in 2020, as part of Art Production Funds’ citywide exhibition, 50 Artists: Art on the Grid, Jefferson presented an artwork across New York City’s transportation system. In 2021, the artist will present two major paintings at The Shed, New York, for the institution’s Open Call commission.

Three paintings by TANYA MERRILL (b. 1987, New York City) imaginatively examine humankind’s fraught relationship with nature and the paradoxical drives toward both consumption and conservation. Mining narratives from the development of the ecology of the United States, including the blight of the American chestnut tree, they are populated by sympathetic and symbolic non-human figures such as a feeding sow and the charcoal flames of a fireplace. Merrill renders the subtle movement of both with effervescence and immediacy, drawing on motifs from the art historical canon in order to use storytelling as a means to decode 21st-century concerns. Symbols and imagery make repeated appearances from one work to the next, building a mythology of personas and environments.

Tanya Merrill lives and works in New York. She received her MFA from Columbia in 2018 and has been the subject of a solo exhibition at Half Gallery as well as participating in group exhibitions at 303 Gallery, New York; Gagosian Gallery, New York; and Almine Rech, London. In 2021, Merrill will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Pond Society, Shanghai.

KASMIN GALLERY

509 West 27th Street, New York, NY

www.kasmingallery.com

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Lee Krasner @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC - Collage Paintings 1938–1981

Lee Krasner: Collage Paintings 1938–1981

Kasmin Gallery, New York

March 11 - April 24, 2021

Kasmin presents Lee Krasner: Collage Paintings 1938–1981. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and is accompanied by a fully-illustrated, hardcover catalogue. Featuring several masterpieces from the 1955 debut of Lee Krasner’s collage paintings at the Stable Gallery, as well as significant works from the artist’s 2019–2021 traveling European retrospective, this exhibition provides American audiences with the opportunity to further examine one of Lee Krasner’s most innovative practices.

Throughout her indelible career, Lee Krasner’s tireless and fierce self-examination compelled the artist to destroy previous works and reconstitute their elements into new compositions. This practice of reclaiming past works of her own, as well as of those of her husband, Jackson Pollock, resulted in many of Krasner’s most novel bodies of work in which elements of painting, drawing, and collage coexist in dramatic compositions. Increasingly regarded as one of the most philosophical and unwavering pioneers of the Abstract Expressionist movement in America, Lee Krasner’s collage paintings represent some of the artist’s most conceptual and emotionally charged works.

Included in the exhibition are pivotal works from Lee Krasner Collages at the Stable Gallery, New York, in 1955, which Clement Greenberg would later proclaim as a “major addition to the American art scene of the era.”[1] Reviewing the exhibition, painter Fairfield Porter remarked, “When nature is photographed in detail, its orderliness appears: Krasner’s art, which seems to be about nature, instead of making the spectator aware of a grand design, makes [them] aware of a subtle disorder greater than [they] might otherwise have thought possible.”[2] Stretched Yellow (1955) and Blue Level (1955), which were shown in the Stable Gallery exhibition, are two of a concise group of five works created in the same year in the same imposing vertical scale; the latter of which was also featured in the artist’s recent traveling retrospective.

Following the recent close of Lee Krasner: Living Colour, the tour de force European retrospective curated by Eleanor Nairne of the Barbican Centre, London, which traveled to the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Germany; the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland; and the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, a number of works from the exhibition are also included in Lee Krasner: Collage Paintings 1938–1981 at Kasmin. With Bald Eagle (1955) Lee Krasner masters the all-over composition and conjures the cut-outs of Henri Matisse, while remaining acutely self-referential in her bold amalgamation of unprimed canvas with parts of Jackson Pollock’s drawings from the 50s. Imperfect Indicative (1976) belongs to “Eleven Ways to Use the Words to See,” a striking series in which Lee Krasner integrated early charcoal drawings that were realized under the tutelage of Hans Hofmann between 1937 and 1940.

Executed during the same period of the charcoal drawings, Seated Figure (1938-39) is the earliest known collage painting by Lee Krasner. A formal feat inspired by Pablo Picasso’s cubist style, this work reveals Lee Krasner’s burgeoning interest in integrating collage techniques with oil painting on canvas and linen. Another noteworthy example is To The North (1980), made just four years before the artist’s death, which reveals a degree of assuredness in the starkness of its large pictorial components, making this piece one of the most mature and resolved of Lee Krasner’s collage paintings.

LEE KRASNER (1908–1984) is considered one of the most critical figures in the evolution of American art in the second half of the 20th century. Emerging from the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters, Lee Krasner committed to a six-decade persistent exploration of novel approaches to painting and collage. This is Kasmin’s third solo exhibition of the work of Lee Krasner, which the gallery has represented through the Pollock-Krasner Foundation since 2016. The Foundation, established in 1985, provides vital support to emerging and established artists nationally and internationally. For more information, visit www.pkf.org.

Lee Krasner’s work is held in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Jewish Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Tate, London; Cleveland Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, Long Beach; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Philadelphia Museum of Art; National Gallery of Australia, Sydney; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; and the Artizon Museum, Tokyo, Japan, among many others.

[1] C. Greenberg, quoted by B. Robertson, Lee Krasner, Paintings, Drawings, and Collages, exh. cat., London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1965, p. 4.

[2] F. Porter, "Reviews and previews," ARTnews, Vol. 54, No. 7, November 1955, pp. 66-67.

KASMIN

509 West 27th Street, New York

www.kasmingallery.com

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William N. Copley @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC - The New York Years

William N. Copley: The New York Years
Kasmin, New York
March 11 — April 22, 2020

Kasmin presents William N. Copley The New York Years, a comprehensive look at the evolution of the artist’s painting during three pivotal decades in New York City. The exhibition, on view at 509 West 27th Street, traces this central period through key paintings from multiple series and a corresponding presentation of photographic, publishing, and research materials drawn from the archives of the William N. Copley Estate. This is Kasmin’s sixth solo exhibition of the artist’s work since the gallery began representing the Estate in 2010.

“I’d been born in that town but didn’t remember it,” William N. Copley said of New York in his memoir Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dealer. Copley’s decision to move to the city—when the artist was 44—marked a return to the American scene after twelve years living in France. Copley’s early career had been one of a self-taught outsider working in Paris, where, under the influence of Surrealism, Copley developed a unique personal iconography. This “private mythology,” as he would call it, explored sexual politics and his culturally repressive upbringing. Copley’s eccentric style and his humorous, amatory themes led to commercial success and exhibitions throughout Europe in the 1950s. William N. Copley returned to the US in 1963, at a time when the Paris scene had grown quiet and New York was enjoying a period of explosive artistic activity.

Included in the exhibition are major works originally exhibited at William N. Copley’s first shows as an artist based in New York. These works, such as Tomb of the Unknown Whore (1965) and What’s Your Hurry (1965), reveal Copley’s shift to working at a larger scale and utilizing line drawing as a technique in his paintings. Copley’s switch from oil paints to acrylics, which allowed him to work faster and gave him new freedoms, coincided with a prolific series of colorful, narrative paintings adapted from the works Robert W. Service and other folk balladeers popular in the late 19th and early 20th century. These paintings are represented in The New York Years with Then In Meandered Deep-Hole Dan Once Comrade of the Cup (1967). Of special note in the exhibition is the large painting I Am Awarded My Handbag and Declared a Professional (1986), which was displayed in the artist’s immersive New Museum installation Tomb of the Unknown Whore in 1986. It is exhibited here for the first time in New York since the original exhibition.

Beginning in 1970, William N. Copley started rendering items from old Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogs in a loose, suggestive manner. Dubbed the Nouns, these everyday items were paired with geometric background patterns in a style similar to, or quietly critical of, Hard-edge and Op-style painting. William Copley at once further developed this painterly language and consummated his interest in erotic subject matter with the X-Rated series, which he began two years later in 1972. Indebted to the adult magazines sold along 42nd street and Times Square, the works feature figures in various stages of sexual congress and are marked by bold contour lines and lyrical color palettes. Speaking of the X-Rated exhibition held at the New York Cultural Center William Copley remarked, “I am attempting to break through the barrier of pornography into the area of joy.” Works from the Nouns and X-Rated series are presented in dialogue in William N. Copley The New York Years.

New York also provided William N. Copley an ideal setting for his non-painting activities. In 1967, Copley founded The Letter Edged In Black Press, Inc., which published the groundbreaking art periodical S.M.S. for six issues in 1968. S.M.S. featured facsimile multiples from an intergenerational group of artists, many of whom Copley met in New York and who would congregate at the artist’s publishing office on the Upper West Side. (Among the friends and contributors were Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Christo, Lee Lozano, John Cage, and Copley’s close friend and mentor Marcel Duchamp.) S.M.S. publications will be on view in the exhibition along with associated artworks and ephemera.

In the 1980s, William N. Copley began dividing time between New York and homes in Roxbury, Connecticut, and Key West, Florida. Though he began to withdraw from New York’s art world, he maintained a prolific focus on painting and his work grew in complexity and ambiguity. The late gallerist Phyllis Kind—known for her patronage of outsider art and directive support of the Chicago Imagists—became Copley’s primary New York dealer, staging five solo exhibitions at her Greene Street space in Soho between 1982 and 1991. Untitled (Apples & Oranges) (1986) dates from this period and is exemplary of Copley’s late style, employing multilayered compositions and collaged textiles such as lace fabric.

In addition to the key works on view, William N. Copley The New York Years presents a timeline of the artist’s numerous activities during his tenure in New York. Visitors will encounter an in-depth picture of his consequential return to the New York scene, where Copley forged his mature identity as an artist and painter.

William N. Copley, (1919–1996), known by his signature name CPLY, (pronounced 'see-ply'), was a painter, writer, gallerist, art patron, publisher, and art entrepreneur. In his lifetime, Copley was the subject of multiple European retrospectives, including Stedlijk Museum (1966), Kunsthalle Bern (1980), and Kestner-Gessellschaft (1995). Recent major institutional exhibitions have been held at The Menil Collection, Houston, and Fondazione Prada, Italy. His work is held in private and public collections worldwide, such as the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Stedelijk Museum and many more.

The New York Years completes a trio of coordinated international exhibitions that presents major series of works by William N. Copley in the first part of 2020. See The Ballad of William N. Copley at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, William N. Copley: The Temptation of St. Anthony (Revisited) at Nino Mier, Los Angeles, and The New York Years at Kasmin, New York.

KASMIN 
509 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001
kasmingallery.com

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Max Ernst: Collages @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC

Max Ernst: Collages

Kasmin Gallery, New York

January 23 - February 29, 2020

Kasmin prsents an exhibition of paper collages by German surrealist MAX ERNST (1891–1976). Staged in collaboration with the Destina Foundation, Collages features approximately forty collages on paper, ranging in both scale and subject matter, and spanning 1920 to 1975. Many of the works, with a focus on the 1960s and 70s, have never before been exhibited.

According to art historian Werner Spies, nearly everything in Max Ernst’s oeuvre can be traced back to collage. Bringing the fracture and disassociation of post-World War I existentialism into pictorial form, collage complements Ernst’s equally novel adoption of frottage and assemblage. The uniquely illusionistic quality and contextual depth of Ernst’s collages speak to his ability to seamlessly create new realities formed upon the Dada and Surrealist tenets of poetry, imagination, and dream.

Using source materials that include illustrations, periodicals, catalogs, newspapers, and scientific journals, these collages are often further altered using painting and drawing. They reveal fundamental aspects of Ernst’s art-making—the uncanny juxtaposition of unassociated forms and images. The exhibition consists of early works such as Loplop présente (1931), a superb example of Ernst’s use of indirect self-portraiture through his alter ego Loplop, who appears for the first time during the early 1930s and recurs throughout his oeuvre. Loplop is recognizable by his division into head, showcard, and feet, and calls to mind the structure of the cadavre exquis, the exquisite corpse.

A selection of collaged lettrines, or drop-caps, created by Ernst primarily for inclusion in artist books, are a focal point of the exhibition and demonstrate the artist’s range and fluidity of style within the medium of collage. Originating in European medieval illustrated manuscripts, lettrines acted to introduce a decorative flourish to the text and to indicate the beginning of a new chapter. In Lettrine D (1948) the forking branches of a tree intersect with an eel and a prehistoric winged creature to form the body of a Frankensteinian figure that frames the capital D. This particular lettrine was made for inclusion in a limited-edition catalogue designed by Ernst and published on the occasion of his 1949 retrospective at the Copley Galleries in Beverly Hills.

Eight of the works on display were originally presented at Alexander Iolas’ Paris gallery in 1971, the same year in which Max Ernst celebrated his eightieth birthday. Titled Lieux Communs, the exhibition featured twelve original collages and eleven poems by Ernst, highlighting his aptitude as an artist of both images and words. The collages and poems were also published as a limited edition print portfolio. Lieux communs translates directly to “truisms,” or more generally to “banalities,” or “trivialities,” reflecting the quotidian nature of the imagery selected by Ernst. Utilizing repeating patterns and dense cross-hatching, the artist folds the curvilinear shapes of the natural world—including animals such as Loplop—into scenes defined by the geometric structures of both classical and modern architecture. His composition of intimate domestic interiors, household objects, and indicators of bourgeoisie living are subtly unsettling. For example, Les Filles La Mort Le Diable (1970), translated as “Girls, Death, and the Devil,” can be demarcated into three vertical columns. Whilst at first glance the contents signal legibility, on closer inspection, it is clear that they misalign: the world has been rearranged by Ernst.

As articulated by Werner Spies, “Collage is the thread that runs through all of his works; it is the foundation on which his lifework is built. Once we have realized this, Max Ernst takes on the stature of an artist who opened the collage process—the combining of existing visual material—to possibilities that completely transformed its meaning, both technically and ideologically.”

Timothy Baum and Dr. Jürgen Pech contribute to the research and preparation of the exhibition.

MAX ERNST (1891–1976) was a German painter, sculptor, poet, and printmaker celebrated as one of the primary pioneers of Dada and Surrealism. Working in Europe during the heyday of Modernism, and in the US from 1941 to 1953, Ernst developed a style that melds metaphor, mythology, and memory, and draws upon the depths of the irrational and unconscious mind. His masterful illusionistic techniques and uncanny juxtapositions transform impossible compositions into unsettling realities. Whilst the menacing atmosphere of both world wars loom large in his work, Max Ernst's oeuvre is more accurately defined by an abundant life-force born out of a combination of the fanciful logic of dreams, the recurring and dynamic presence of animals, and Ernst’s enduring biting humor.

KASMIN

297 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001

www.kasmingallery.com

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Painters of the East End @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC - Mary Abbott, Nell Blaine, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, Jane Wilson

Painters of the East End
Mary Abbott, Nell Blaine, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, and Jane Wilson
Kasmin Gallery, New York
July 11 - August 16, 2019

JANE FREILICHER

Landscape in Water Mill, 1962

Oil on linen, 18 x 20 inches, 45.7 x 50.8 cm. 

Courtesy of the Estate of Jane Freilicher. 

Kasmin announces Painters of the East End, on view at 297 Tenth Avenue. The exhibition explores the commonalities and distinctions of the work produced amongst the coterie culture of Long Island’s South Fork during the mid-twentieth century, including Mary Abbott, Nell Blaine, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, and Jane Wilson.

Artists have historically converged on Long Island seeking inspiration from the landscape and an escape from their confined urban studios, while still retaining access to the energy of New York City. With the mass influx of the European avant-garde following the onset of World War II and the subsequent establishment of the New York School, a thriving and collaborative artist-based community was born in the East End.

The Hamptons of the New York School was untamed, inexpensive, and a bastion of bohemian living. The opportunities provided by the area’s open spaces were developmental for the painters who set up there not only because of their practical advantages—larger studios, relative quiet—but for novel subject-matter that allowed for contemplations of the horizon, rural landscapes, and bodies of water, nodding to the lineage of the Romantic sublime.

Perhaps most crucial for these artists was their shared inspirations which led to a new model of community, differing in both structure and character from the frenetic energy of lower Manhattan. Such a social scene was integral to both the personal and artistic lives of the artists represented in the exhibition. Helen A. Harrison, Director at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, says of the period: “The painters who gravitated to Long Island's South Fork in the mid-twentieth century were a far more varied group than the earlier art colonists, who came primarily for the picturesque scenery. They ran the gamut from landscape painters to Surrealists, Abstract Expressionists, and Pop artists, so it's clear that many were motivated by factors other than subject matter. Perhaps even more important than the beautiful surroundings and the ease of access from New York City was the magnetism of association, as artists attracted one another to form a vibrant creative community that continues to thrive today.”

The exhibition includes: Mary Abbott (b. 1921), Nell Blaine (1922 – 1996), Perle Fine (1905 – 1988), Helen Frankenthaler (1928 – 2011), Jane Freilicher (1924 – 2014), Elaine de Kooning (1918 – 1989), Lee Krasner (1908 – 1984), Joan Mitchell (1925 – 1992), Charlotte Park (1918 – 2010), Betty Parsons (1900 –1982), and Jane Wilson (1924 – 2015).

KASMIN GALLERY
297 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001
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Jasper Morrison @ Kasmin Gallery, New York

Jasper Morrison, Corks
Kasmin Gallery, New York
Through June 28, 2019

Portrait of Jasper Morrison, 2016

Photography by Elena Mahugo

Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery, New York

Kasmin announces the US representation of internationally acclaimed designer Jasper Morrison. Morrison’s first solo gallery exhibition in North America, Corks, is on view at Kasmin’s 297 Tenth Avenue space. 

The exhibition puts on view Jasper Morrison’s first complete series of furniture realized in cork. As limited editions, these pieces mark a departure from the designer’s usual methods of industrial production and initiate a new collaborative partnership that speaks to Kasmin’s continued engagement with presenting boundary-pushing work at the intersection of art and design. This presentation brings together examples of Jasper Morrison’s chaise longue, chairs, stools, bookshelves, and a fireplace, within a domestic exhibition design. 

JASPER MORRISON

Corks, 2019 

Photography: Diego Flores

Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery, New York

Jasper Morrison’s interest in cork stems from its remarkable functionality as well as its unique atmospheric qualities, which he recognizes as a key design component of an object’s long-term success. Developed by the cork oak tree as a protective covering, this particular iteration of the material is reconstituted from unselected wine bottle corks, some still visible in their original shape. 

His designs have long been the domestic choice of creative professionals, whilst simultaneously populating public art spaces and institutional settings. In 2014, he designed the furniture for the extension to Tate Modern, more than ten years after working on the opening of the museum with the architects Herzog & de Meuron, and in 2009, he was invited by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Bordeaux to create an interventional installation of his contemporary designs interwoven within the historical collections.

Work by Jasper Morrison is included in significant international collections such as Museum of Modern Art, New York; Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; V&A Museum, London; Design Museum, London, Musée des Arts Décoratif, Paris; Vitra Design Museum Collection, Weil am Rein; M+, Hong Kong; and many more.

KASMIN GALLERY
297 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001
www.kasmingallery.com

Constantin Brancusi @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC - The Photographer

Brancusi: The Photographer
Kasmin Gallery, New York
May 16 - June 29, 2019

“Photography is the form in which Brancusi speaks about his sculpture.”—Friedrich Teja Bach

Kasmin presents Brancusi: The Photographer, organized in collaboration with Bruce Silverstein Gallery. The exhibition will be on view at 293 Tenth Avenue, presented concurrently with Brancusi’s Flowers at Bruce Silverstein Gallery, on view at 529 West 20th Street.

Brancusi: The Photographer brings together 30 rare vintage gelatin silver prints spanning two decades that illuminate the significance of photography in the artist’s oeuvre. In 1921, Constantin Brancusi began to committedly pursue photography, influenced by his friendship with Man Ray, whose guidance on the technical elements of medium and mastery of the darkroom strengthened Brancusi’s command of the practice. This collaborative dialogue between the two artists led to numerous technical and artistic innovations within and beyond the photographic medium.

Aside from their inherent indexical nature, Brancusi’s photographs reinforce the artists’ intentions for his sculptures. Taken in the intimate, atmospheric environment of his carefully orchestrated studio design at the Impasse Ronsin in Paris, many of the works in the exhibition depict assemblages comprised of Brancusi’s most regarded sculptures, found objects and material fragments. They demonstrate the artist’s investment not only in the sculptures as individual entities but also in their relationship to one another in the context of a synthesized tableau. These ‘group mobiles’ create narrative juxtapositions amongst the rooms’ dramatic pitches of light and shadow, allowing Brancusi to emphasize salient elements of his work and recontextualize their forms.

An indelible, recurring subject in Brancusi’s photographs is his magnum opus, the Colonne sans fin (Endless Column). Different iterations of the sculpture are photographed while installed in Brancusi’s studio, at Târgu Jiu in Romania, and in Edward Steichen’s garden at Voulangis in France.  Often positioning the camera at the base of the sculpture looking up, Brancusi’s photographic works on Endless Column accentuate the sublime nature of the sculpture while also documenting the site-specificity of its myriad installations.

Brancusi: The Photographer marks the 30th anniversary of the exhibition Brancusi: Photographs, which was the inaugural show at Paul Kasmin Gallery upon its opening in 1989.

KASMIN GALLERY
293 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001
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James Nares @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC - Monuments

James Nares: Monuments
Kasmin Gallery, New York
May 23 - June 29, 2019

JAMES NARES

Prince II, 2018

22k gold leaf on Evolon

86 1/8 x 54 1/4 x 2 1/2 inches, 218.8 x 137.8 x 6.3 cm. 

Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery

Kasmin presents an exhibition of James Nares’ newest body of work, entitled Monuments, which will be on view at 509 West 27th Street.

New York City’s downtown sidewalks were laid almost 200 years ago by immigrant masons. These monolithic granite slabs were elaborately chiseled with improvised marks and designs to help prevent pedestrians from slipping. These carvings have withstood the erosion of time and human traffic, leaving a wonderful record of free thought and whimsical, personal markings from the hands and minds of uncelebrated workmen.

Single-stone wax rubbings were made on site, gilded in 22K gold, and hung vertically as shining “monuments” to those unknown souls whose touch still lingers on the city’s sidewalks.

KASMIN GALLERY
509 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001
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Jan-Ole Schiemann @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC

Jan-Ole Schiemann: A Different Pose
Kasmin Gallery, New York
March 7 - May 4, 2019

JAN-OLE SCHIEMANN 

Vielgestalt im Zwischenreich, 2019

Ink and acrylic on canvas, 200 x 180 cm. 

Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery

Kasmin presents A Different Pose, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of new paintings by Cologne-based artist Jan-Ole Schiemann. Schiemann’s paintings are grounded in both gestural abstraction and the history of 20th-century animation, aspects that combine to imbue his work with a rare sense of kinetic energy. Half-formed, simultaneously disappearing and reappearing shapes suggest that somewhere amidst the lines, there are figures tumbling, colliding, or fighting obscured by clouds of smoke. As a result of Jan-Ole Schiemann’s meticulous, layered application of charcoal, oilstick, ink and acrylic, the works have the illusion of both a sculptural and a digital depth. The artist’s first solo exhibition at Kasmin is comprised of new medium-scale and monumental paintings, as well as the debut of a new series of works on paper. The exhibition is on view at 297 Tenth Avenue, New York.

Jan-Ole Schiemann’s process begins with the collection of references—cut-outs from cartoon strips, elements from his own drawing process—which the artist then collages onto transparencies and projects against the canvas. Using primarily ink on the unprimed surface, Jan-Ole Schiemann uses sweeping gestures to build the dynamic base of the picture plane before moving on to more precise, illustrative detailing. The works are then built up to fruition carefully, introducing exuberant color and spontaneity as Jan-Ole Schiemann reimagines the projected configurations.

The series of works on paper demonstrates Jan-Ole Schiemann’s commitment to drawing, and its fundamental place in his oeuvre. Appearing as a consolidation of fragments of many sketches bought together into balanced coherence, the works give further insight into Jan-Ole Schiemann’s process and highlight the strength of his forms.

Jan-Ole Schiemann has mounted solo shows recently at CHOI&LAGER Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2018); Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (2017, 2015) and Half Gallery, New York, (2015). Schiemann was also included in curated exhibitions such as Cliché, Almine Rech Gallery, New York (2018); Abstract/Not Abstract, curated by Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian, Moore Building, Miami (2017); Prinz – the Ghosts are Outside, Kreuzberg Pavilion, Berlin (2015); and 17 Abstract Paintings, Warhus Rittershaus, Cologne (2014) amongst others. He is a graduate of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Albert Oehlen and Andreas Schulze (2007-2013) and currently lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

KASMIN GALLERY
www.kasmingallery.com

Theodora Allen @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC

Theodora Allen: weald
Kasmin Gallery, New York
Through March 9, 2019

THEODORA ALLEN 

Monument, No. 1, 2018

67x57 inches, oil and watercolor on linen.

Photo by Heather Rasmussen

Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery, New York

Kasmin presents weald, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles based artist THEODORA ALLEN. The exhibition is on view at 515 West 27th Street, New York.

For her first exhibition with the gallery and debut New York solo show, Theodora Allen presents two bodies of work: Shields (dwale) and Monuments (weald). Dwale from Old Norse, meaning deep sleep or trance; weald from the Old English for forest. The two words are anagrams, both archaic; one is landscape and the other mindscape.

The Shield paintings are a suite of intimately scaled still lifes, each variation set within the iconic shape of medieval armor. Executed in a muted palette of jewel-toned hues, the plants are both isolated and adorned, akin to scientific botanical illustrations used in early herbals and pharmacopeia. The storied herbage belong to a world of remedies, aphrodisiacs, sacraments, and poisons. They are killers or curers, sinners or saints. As emblems they are elusive, and carry the weight of existential inquiry.

In the adjoining room, the Monument series continues the theme of plants defined through time and ideology. Realized in a near-monochrome palette, this body of work takes on the symbols of a cup, a coin, a sword, and a branch—icons gleaned from allegorical card games of the middle ages through the 19th century. These subjects are bright white and cold, stone-like, set in a dense and overgrown forest of psychotropic plants. The luminous statuaries rest at the entrance of an arched passageway, seemingly between past and future.

Through a rigorous painting process, Theodora Allen’s evocative imagery becomes whisper thin. Translucent coats of oil paint are applied and removed, until the fabric itself shows the weather of its making. Pools of spilled watercolor are also visible among thin layers of oil paint. Allen plays with the tension between the organic lines of the watery edge against the linear and tight weave of linen. Evanescent subjects, polluted spectrums, and radiant blues animate the forces of surface and depth, darkness and light.

Drawing from music, literature, myth and nature, Theodora Allen’s still lifes highlight essentialism and contemplate the human condition. Time and place are slippery—each painting suggests a world within itself, where transformative plants and figural relics underscore our earthly existence. References to the past take the form of ruins; a shield for protection, a cup to replenish, a weapon to fight. Citing a rich fin de siècle era, these symbols mark a turning point, embodying the knowledge of the bygone while standing on the threshold of a new century. They offer the reminder that in the chaos and tumult of the present, this too shall pass.  Theodora Allen’s fascination with these enduring themes are rooted in Humanist thought; they reflect on the fundamental desire to search for meaning and purpose in life, to know that which is unknowable, and the cyclical and essential nature of these pursuits.

THEODORA ALLEN (b. 1985, Los Angeles, CA) holds an MFA in painting from the University of California, Los Angeles, a BFA in painting from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA, and has completed a residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME. Her work has been exhibited domestically and abroad, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Tucson, AZ), New Wight Gallery, UCLA (Los Angeles, CA), Blum & Poe (Los Angeles, CA), Sprüth Magers (Berlin, Germany), Almine Rech (New York, NY), and Berggruen Gallery (San Francisco, CA).

KASMIN GALLERY
www.kasmingallery.com