Guimi You @ Lehmann Maupin, NYC - "Breath, Island" Exhibition

Guimi You

Breath, Island

Lehmann Maupin, New York

September 4 – October 18, 2025

Lehmann Maupin presents Breath, Island, a solo exhibition of new paintings by South Korean artist GUIMI YOU. Inspired by her recent solitary two-week journey to Korea’s Jeju Island, the works in this exhibition trace both the contours of the island’s volcanic terrain and the artist’s own inner landscapes. Through delicate, atmospheric brushwork and a sensibility rooted in East Asian painting traditions, Guimi You transforms Jeju’s flower-filled hillsides, lush botanic gardens, and quiet guest houses into intimate spaces of reflection and self-discovery. Breath, Island follows You’s inclusion in a number of recent institutional exhibitions, including those at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, Florida.

Jeju Island, often described as Korea’s island of wind, stone, and women, holds a unique place in Korean cultural collective memory as both a natural sanctuary and nostalgic retreat. For Guimi You, its landscapes are both subject and mirror. Wandering its oreum (volcanic hills), resting beside ponds framed by blooming magnolia, or watching waterfalls carve their paths through black basalt, You allowed the rhythms of the island to shape her own: breath following landscape, painting following breath. Over time, her awareness surpassed the environment, reaching into the very experience of being alive.

Originally trained in East Asian painting, You’s understanding of East Asian pictorial traditions—where painting is not an act of depiction, but of evocation—anchors her approach. Her mark-making recalls the layered transparency of ink washes and the restrained harmony of traditional Korean landscapes, reminiscent of works like Jeong Seon’s Inwangjesaekdo, which capture not only form but atmosphere. Brushstrokes hover like mist, yet settle like memory.

At the same time, You’s years spent in the United Kingdom and United States imbued her practice with the materiality of oil painting and the structural dynamics of Western contemporary art. Her works exist between Eastern and Western legacies, and she approaches them through a lens of synthesis rather than negotiation. In her paintings, oil behaves like ink, and forms emerge with the lightness of thought. In balancing these disparate traditions, You’s paintings enter personal terrain—a space where East and West, past and present, landscape and self gently coalesce.

In Breath, Island, the act of painting is both record and refuge. Works such as Noble Silence (2025) depict the interior of the artist’s wooden guest house: a silent space that holds the sacred stillness of artistic solitude. Elsewhere, Rest (2025) captures figures lingering in a garden at the foot of Mt. Halla; here, human presence dissolves into landscape. In Pause (2025), a simple view of bonsai framed by a greenhouse window becomes a meditation on growth and restraint. Across the exhibition, traces of the artist herself—suggested silhouettes, personal objects, a figure mid-sketch—weave quietly throughout the scenes.

Breath, Island is less a chronicle of Jeju than a portrait of a painter in search of equilibrium. For GuimiYou, painting is not a destination, but a passage: a way of translating identity into image and holding two worlds, East and West, within the same frame. In this sense, her paintings function as islands themselves—floating spaces where the memories of one place and the lessons of another can meet, pause, and breathe.

LEHMANN MAUPIN NEW YORK

501 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Calida Rawles @ Lehmann Maupin, London - "This Time Before Tomorrow"

Calida Rawles

This Time Before Tomorrow

Lehmann Maupin, London

September 11 – 29, 2025

In her first solo exhibition in London, This Time Before Tomorrow, internationally recognized painter CALIDA RAWLES presents a new body of work that explores cycles of time and human experience. In her signature, hyperrealist paintings, serenely-composed figures wade and float in water. The liquid element, for Calida Rawles, is a charged substance that reflects and refracts issues of race, power, and access. Often dressed in solid-colored garments that fold and billow in response to water’s force and movement, her figures flourish in imperceptible moments of submersion and release. Alternately, the face acts as a window into the subject’s soul. In this new suite of six paintings, water is a container for the ebbs and flows that define contemporary global life. The detailed faces typical of Calida Rawles are absent, and the moments of suspension that have become hallmarks of the artist’s work take on deeper meaning. This Time Before Tomorrow comes on the heels of Calida Rawles’ first solo museum exhibition, Cadida Rawles: Away with the Tides, which debuted at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in late 2024 before traveling to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in 2025, as well as her inclusion in the 12th Berlin Biennale in 2022.

In This Time Before Tomorrow, there are no identifiable figures and time does not travel in one direction. Broken, disjointed, murky, upside-down bodies represent the feeling of being knocked off one’s axis, and hyperrealist representation dissolves into fabulism. The paintings picture the liquid and solid contours of the “in-between,” muddying the boundaries between the mundane and the extraordinary by enfolding fantastical, supernatural elements into everyday life. Where and how do we locate ourselves and each other in times of unease and upheaval? What are the consequences of totalizing neglect and frenzy? How much is too much? Calida Rawles answers these questions with play and speculation. Her new works dive more deeply into color theory, asserting her expertise as a colorist; her experiments with both color and chiaroscuro define the buoyancy and stagnation that imbibe the bodies that float, sink, and fold into one another. Strong contrasts of dark and light color, largely within a tertiary palette, create atmospheric volume, depth, and drama. Gestural brushstrokes and depictions of movement mirror states of matter as well as liquid and solid states of being. Blurring the line between hyperrealist figuration and surrealist abstraction, the darkness of the palette personifies the weight of the present while the veil of the water becomes a prism and conduit for other worlds and galaxies.

Reference images of fire, lungs, a Bodhi tree, a living snake plant, and other natural elements inform the artist’s conceptual and formal thinking. In All is One, twin subjects turn inward to face each other at the center of the canvas. Rather than a mirror image, the two sides fuse into one another. The artist’s daughter served as the model for the painting, and resemblance—twin subjects, likeness, similitude, generational transfer, and the past facing the present—forms its core. All four elements are present—fire, earth, water, air—gesturing toward balance. And yet, this is not a picture of symmetry. The subject on the right is slightly higher than its twin, while two otherworldly bubbles draw the eye into another space and time punctuated by flames, lung tissue, tree branches, and shadows.

Abstraction and figuration blend and blur, just as the flesh of Calida Rawles’ subjects diffuse into each other and into aquatic expanses of primordial liquid. Aspects from philosophy texts, speculative fiction novels, ancient and indigenous mythologies, and Black feminist poetry collections and memoirs she read while preparing for the show—including the texts The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Survival Is a Promise, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Alchemist—are also present. What is the artist’s role in moments of crisis? In When Time Carries, the certainty of time, location, and direction dissolve. Clarity and resolution give way to intermission and surrender as her subject appears to submit to water’s ability to hold, carry, and resist. Is the body floating or drowning? Ripples and bubbles obscure the figure’s face, camouflaging and hiding its identity and actions as it interacts with and is changed by its environment.

Bubbles, shadows, and stars recur in This Time Before Tomorrow as symbols of energy’s transformative potential. Both bubbles and stars are composed of gas. The result of nuclear fusion, air bubbles in this new suite of paintings double as stars and planets on the brink of transformation—an alternate state of matter and being. Once fully formed, a star releases excess fuel to create new stars. Here, stored energy and exhaustion become life forces that catalyze new entities constituted by movement, energy renewal, and subject-object relations that meet disequilibrium and disorientation with lightness and effervescence. Asymmetrical bodies of flesh, water, and gas become ciphers for power, weariness, and hope, while natural elements and processes accumulate energy waiting to be released and recycled.

Beyond water’s function as a vital force and historically charged site of memory, Rawles’ choices in color and pose, as well as how she renders space and the environment, are connected to broader questions of race, representation, and ethics within art history and everyday life. Each artwork is based on a photograph or series of photographs that the artist takes herself, and the tertiary colors of her palate signify the liminal space of transformation and existential angst that her figures tread. This alchemical focus on change, disillusionment, and the potential for renewal in This Time Before Tomorrow is a blueprint for the future. Reflection thus emerges not only as a surface element but also as a character in its own right and a method of making. At a time when chaos of all types—political, economic, environmental—proliferates, Calida Rawles’ new paintings prompt viewers to embrace the threshold between past and present as well as the feeling of being in transition. What results is a vibrant wellspring for inner and outer worldmaking.

LEHMANN MAUPIN LONDON

Mayfair, London

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Teresita Fernández @ Lehmann Maupin, Seoul - "Liquid Horizon" Exhibition

Teresita Fernández: Liquid Horizon

Lehmann Maupin, Seoul

August 27 – October 25, 2025

Lehmann Maupin presents Liquid Horizon, an exhibition of new work by New York–based artist Teresita Fernández, on view at Lehmann Maupin Seou. Featuring a glazed ceramic wall installation and luminous sculptural panels that evoke watery realms, the exhibition extends Fernández’s ongoing interest in subterranean landscapes—soil horizons formed by geological and human-formed layers. Here, her inquiry moves into the stratified depths of the ocean, revealing layers of shifting density and transparency that expand the visual and conceptual language beyond the terrestrial.

Liquid Horizon marks Fernández’s debut at the gallery’s Seoul location and her first exhibition in the city in over a decade. The exhibition proliferates the dialogue with her most recent exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin: Soil Horizon in New York and Astral Sea in London. It is preceded by two recent museum exhibitions at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas and at SITE Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which both investigate the vibratory, interdependent nature of terrestrial and cosmic matter—treating landscape not simply as physical terrain but as a charged space of psychological, political, and cultural resonance. Concurrently, Fernández’s work is on view in the exhibition Shifting Landscapes at the Whitney Museum in New York.

For over three decades, Teresita Fernández has examined the complexities and paradoxes within landscape—the visible and hidden, celestial and earthly, fierce and alluring, material and ephemeral, ancient and contemporary. Her material intellect is firmly embedded within the sculptural investigations that question how place, land, and landscape are defined. Her work reveals landscapes as embodied sites—at once vast and intimate, private and collective—where poetics and politics intertwine, exposing the layered histories, identities, and cosmologies contained within their strata.

Rather than depicting literal geographies, Fernández’s “Stacked Landscapes”—such as Liquid Horizon 3 (2025)—function as sculptural abstractions and metaphors for perception and the human condition. In keeping with the tenets of color field abstraction, albeit sculpturally, Fernández is deeply engaged with material resonance and its capacity to evoke emotional and psychological depth. Composed of relief horizontal striations in charcoal, sand, and blue pigments on aluminum, these works suggest geological formations that merge with aqueous realms and introspective states. This affective quality recalls Mark Rothko’s compositions—his softly divided, luminous fields of color that emerge from profound emotional inquiry. At the base of each “Stacked Landscape” are crackled slabs of velvety charcoal, anchoring layers of black and blue sand that accumulate like shifting, tactile terrains. These strata transition into vivid, translucent veils of blue, ranging from saturated nocturnal depths to spectral, radiant luminosity. The color moves between immersion and emergence, suggesting a space suspended between the terrestrial and the celestial.

The merging of land and water in the “Stacked Landscapes” serves as a critical point of observation, suggesting both origin and passage—a threshold where interior and exterior conditions converge. Rhythmic transitions between light and dark and between reflection and absorption evoke a meditative awareness of history, migration, and otherworldliness. These works also extend Fernández’s ongoing engagement with maps, which consider land, islands, and continents inseparable from the surrounding waters and spaces. A thin, quivering line of electric blue marks the magnified, abstracted boundary between land and water, darkness and light, underscoring the quiet intimacy Teresita Fernández renders with subtle precision. In this fragile seam, she draws our attention to the unseen—what lies beyond immediate perception.

Water—like soil—is treated as a kind of horizon. It contains its own layered depths and reflective surfaces, embodying an “as above, so below” duality that reframes spatial orientation. In Fernández’s recent Astral Sea series, on view in the gallery, water is a central element. Water absorbs and mirrors, dissolving the boundary between surface and depth, earth and sky, rooting the viewer in a fluid, shifting field rather than a fixed location. This expanded notion of the horizon recurs throughout the exhibition in varied forms. For Teresita Fernández, any single element contains multitudes. Metaphor and memory operate as equal counterparts in her evolving conception of landscape.

The glazed ceramic installation White Phosphorus/Cobalt (2025) echoes the chromatic depth and surface sensitivity of the “Stacked Landscapes” yet diverges in both structure and scale. Composed of thousands of small ceramic cubes, the work forms a shifting matrix of light and color saturation, moving from pale tones at the center to deeper hues at the edges. This tonal gradient generates a field that simultaneously expands and contracts, suggesting a vortex or an astral body. Swirling with blue and white mineral glazes, the title of the work White Phosphorus/Cobalt evokes a range of paradoxical references, from chemical reactions and mining to natural phenomena and the cosmos. These micro-forms repeat and resemble fractals, echoing geological strata, meteorological patterns, or cosmic fields. Through this intimate–infinite dynamic, the work becomes a site of alchemical, political, and environmental significance, implicating the contentious associations with both white phosphorus and cobalt in relation to extraction and destruction.

The exhibition also features nine solid graphite relief panels titled Nocturnal(Milk Sky). Rendered in soft blue tones, these works depict the rhythmic rise and fall of the tide. Polished graphite elements are juxtaposed with ethereal blue and white skies, creating a visual interplay between reflection and atmosphere. Situated in the liminal space between land and sea, the real and the imagined, these panels highlight Fernández’s continued engagement with materials sourced directly from the earth. Graphite, a recurring element in her practice, underscores her conceptual focus on materiality and place. The parenthetical in the title—Milk Sky—evokes both the celestial expanse of the Milky Way and a maternal link between women and the cosmos.

Liquid Horizon offers a resonant meditation on land and water. Through material intricacy and conceptual depth, Teresita Fernández invites viewers into layered environments where boundaries between past and present, self and world, and memory and perception dissolve.

LEHMANN MAUPIN SEOUL

213, Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 04349

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Arcmanoro Niles @ Lehmann Maupin, NYC - "When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart" Exhibition

Arcmanoro Niles

When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart

Lehmann Maupin, New York

Through  August 15, 2025

I’ve realized how important it is to take time to connect with the people and things you love, especially when you feel hopeless. These connections and the memory of these moments can remind us of who we are and what's important—and can provide answers on how to move forward. 

— Arcmanoro Niles

Lehmann Maupin presents When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart, an exhibition of new paintings on canvas by New York-based artist ARCMANORO NILES. Known for his colorful paintings that capture the daily, yet intimate moments of contemporary life, Niles turns to portraiture and still life painting in his latest series, exploring the poignancy and vulnerability of deep emotional connections to ordinary places, objects, and people. Across the exhibition, Niles employs his signature vibrant color palette and swaths of glitter to render tight compositions and focused, singular subject matter, delving into personal relationships and memories—or as critic Seph Rodney writes, to make “oil and acrylic paintings that do something unconventional under the cloak of conventionality.” This presentation comes on the heels of Niles' recent inclusion in exhibitions at the Barberini Palace in Rome, the Museum Kampa in Prague, and the Parrish Museum in Water Mill, NY; the show also precedes a summer 2026 solo museum exhibition of Niles’ work at the Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY. 

Arcmanoro Niles is known for his brightly-hued paintings that expand our understanding of traditional genre painting and portraiture. His work offers a window into colloquial moments of daily life―a woman seated at a restaurant table, a child eating an apple, an elderly man playing checkers―with subjects drawn from photographs of friends and relatives and from memories of his past. In depicting not only people close to him but the places and times they inhabit, Niles creates his own record of contemporary life. The paintings, though intensely personal and autobiographical, engage in universal subjects of domestic and family life while referring to numerous art historical predecessors, including Italian and Dutch baroque, history painting, and Color Field painting. Influenced by poetry, Niles’ titles often suggest an underlying narrative behind the seemingly mundane scenes; at the same time, by pairing his own words and images, he seeks to convey a universal sense of emotional experience. 

In When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart, Arcmanoro Niles’ compositions follow the logic of linear perspective, building environments and constructing scenes that feel lived and real. In contrast to this naturalistic structure, Niles’ treatment of his medium—both in color scheme and in the visible materiality of the paint—add an otherworldly or surreal quality to the works. Throughout his oeuvre and in this series, he makes unconventional choices when it comes to color, developing singular hues directly on the canvas by layering strokes of paint over a neon ground; his subjects’ dark skin tones are rendered with shades of blue or orange, clouds or flames are bright pink, and moments of glitter leap off the picture plane, as though hovering over its surface. The works in When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart are painted in a technicolor palette that constructs a signature kind of chiaroscuro, which serves to heighten both the drama and intimacy of his compositions. 

Across the exhibition, Arcmanoro Niles immerses himself in his intimate relationships to specific people and settings, capturing and elevating their essence through artmaking; his paintings crystallize memory, freezing moments in time. In In Between the Glory Days and Golden Years (200 Miles from Where I’ve Been) (2025), for example, Niles situates the viewer across the dining table from his subject—in this case, a middle-aged woman with glittering pink hair and a plaid shirt—with a piece of carrot cake in between, ready to be shared. To the subject’s left, the arm of a younger companion is just visible, suggesting the woman is part of a larger, celebratory gathering, perhaps intended to connect loved ones and mark a milestone. Arcmanoro Niles’ composition implicates the viewer, along with their own familial ties and memories of the passage of time, in the narrative. In this way, Niles invites viewers to commune with their own inner lives and memories through interaction with his own.  

In his deeply personal Where Do I Turn to When I Can’t Take It Anymore (All the Hope I Had I Hope I Wasn’t Wrong) (2025), the lone self-portrait in the series, Niles turns fully inward. Painted in melancholic shades of teal and periwinkle, the artist depicts himself lying in bed on his side next to an open box of tissues, his eyes open and looking vaguely ahead. The composition suggests a certain sadness—Niles’ forlorn expression is one of longing, or perhaps even heartbreak, probing loneliness and solitude in the wake of loss. Here and across the exhibition, Arcmanoro Niles finds solace in connecting with others through the universal language of art marking, seeking to harness its capacity for catharsis and transformation. He finds solace in the mundane and everyday, “painting what he knows” to seek meaning and preserve memory. 

LEHMANN MAUPIN NEW YORK

501 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Arcmanoro Niles: When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart

Lehmann Maupin, New York, June 12 – August 15, 2025

Kim Yun Shin, Kim Chang Euk, Hong Soun, Scott Kahn @ Lehmann Maupin, Seoul - "Sublime Simulacra" Exhibition curated by Andy St. Louis

Sublime Simulacra

Kim Yun Shin, Kim Chang Euk, Hong Soun,  Scott Kahn

Lehmann Maupin, Seoul

Through March 15, 2025

Lehmann Maupin presents Sublime Simulacra, a group exhibition curated by Andy St. Louis. Featuring works by Kim Yun Shin, Kim Chang Euk, Hong Soun, and Scott Kahn, the exhibition speculates on the potential for landscape paintings to generate shifts in the ways that images mediate our experience of the natural environment. 

In Sublime Simulacra, the landscape serves as an inflection point for new modes of perception. The ultimate reality of images was first contested by Plato, who theorized that all representations can be categorized as one of two types: exact (“truthful”) reproductions or deliberately distorted (“false”) likenesses. Jean Baudrillard’s seminal 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation expanded upon Plato’s theory by introducing the notion of the simulacrum, defined as an imitation that fails to make reference to its original. In postmodern artistic discourse, simulacra are typically conceptualized as representations of representations—copies based on other copies—that do not derive from empirical experience, thus blurring the line between the actual and the imaginary. This fundamental inability to distinguish objective reality from subjective representation informs much of postmodernist thought, which polemicizes the mediation of the real through simulacra. According to Jean Baudrillard, the apotheosis of this phenomenon occurs when a representation is so lifelike that it creates its own reality, or hyperreality, effectively destroying the hegemony of the real and rewiring the cognitive connection between perception and belief.

Sublime Simulacra repudiates negative connotations associated with simulacra and embraces broader interpretations of the term as it relates to artistic engagement with the landscape. Through the visual languages of organic abstraction, geometric figuration, realism and surrealism, the paintings on view propose variable relationships between images and the realities they represent, in direct correlation to each artist’s conceptual stance and creative process. By reexamining the dialectics of simulacra through the lens of the landscape, this exhibition spotlights depictions of the ineffable as consummate expressions of authenticity.

For Kim Yun Shin, whose practice spans more than six decades, sculpture and painting have always served as distinct mediums that accomplish the same ends—namely, abstracting her impressions of nature. Whether using chainsaws and hand tools to shape solid masses of wood or brushes and paint to render two-dimensional shapes on canvas, Kim’s works convey a visual world filled with vital energy. She achieves this by attuning her own artistic consciousness with the rhythms and resonances of the natural environment, forging an almost spiritual connection that erases divisions between art and life, subject and object, representation and reality.

Kim’s paintings resist dualistic ontologies and in doing so embrace their intrinsic function as simulacra, despite a conspicuous absence of realism. As expressions of the very essence of the landscape, they operate as unequivocally evocative renderings that reproduce the sensibility of reality vis-à-vis the artist’s embodied experience, lending form to the natural order of the universe through layered compositions filled with saturated colors, organic textures and botanical structures. Contrary to Plato’s condemnation of the simulacrum as a “corrupt” copy of reality, Kim’s works effectively neutralize preconceived notions of image hierarchy by facilitating pluralistic interpretations of the cosmic energies they thematize.

Kim Chang Euk, like so many artists of his generation, progressed through several creative phases throughout his career in tandem with the evolution of modern Korean art in the postwar era. The landscape was an enduring source of inspiration throughout Kim’s lifelong artistic journey, from the geometric and symbolic abstraction that defined the first three decades of his career to the straightforward figuration of his later years. However, it was during the transitional period between these modalities, from the late 1970s to the 1980s, that Kim produced some of his most stirring renderings of the natural environment. These works evince a restrained subjectivity that suffuses their picturesque mountains, forests and streams with arresting immediacy and timeless appeal.

In shifting his purview from imagery that had little bearing on objective reality toward more clearly identifiable landscapes, Kim drew nearer to the realm of simulacra in his paintings while also retaining a certain degree of phenomenological affect. Reality and representation constituted disparate yet parallel perceptual paradigms that he deftly synthesized into a shared, simultaneous perspective rather than insisting on a single, authoritative viewpoint. As such, Kim’s abstracted landscapes do not attempt to copy the “actual” landscape, but nonetheless provoke a comparable sensory response in viewers.

In his prolific painting practice, Hong Soun appropriates press photos and strips them of their primary function by focusing on the landscapes at their periphery. These partial depictions belonging to the artist’s Sidescape series reveal images that are always visible yet remain perpetually overlooked—a strategy that subverts our habituated cognitive framework for construing an image’s meaning by cross-referencing its primary subject matter with its surrounding context. The disorienting effect of expunging a scene’s focal point is reinforced by the naturalistic aesthetic with which Hong paints the landscape and the specificity of each work’s title, which includes the date and location of its source photo. In his most recent body of work, Hong takes photos himself, inevitably imbuing his landscapes with personal memories connected to actual places he has visited, resulting in a series of painterly landscapes titled Unfamiliar Familiar Landscape. 

Throughout his oeuvre, Hong asserts the independence of images as inherently fallible configurations of signifiers that have been divested of their communicative capacity. Instead of striving to render subjective approximations of sensible phenomena or imply viable alternatives to physical reality, his paintings operate as meta-images that preclude the possibility of conflating their simulacra with the landscapes they reconstruct. This dissociation of reality and representation is particularly urgent in light of today’s highly mediated visual culture, which Hong counters by positing that the ultimate truth of an image is derived from its intrinsic unreality as a copy, regardless of how legitimate its outward appearance may seem.

Since the late 1970s, Scott Kahn has continuously developed an uncanny mode of figuration, visualizing ambiguous landscapes through precise applications of paint and subtle manipulations of perspective. This approach generates an infinite depth of focus that contradicts the natural distortions inherent in human optical perception, thereby undermining the realism of his depictions. Kahn’s signature aesthetic sensibility and idiosyncratic compositional logic—including motifs of voluminous foliage casting dappled shadows, prominent pathways and gates leading to indeterminate destinations, peculiar atmospheric conditions and abnormal variations in scale—is redolent of the liminal semi-conscious state between being asleep and being awake that elicits fantastic imaginaries permeated with surreal affect.

Just as dreams are deceptions, so too are simulacra of the highest degree, and Kahn’s paintings are no different. Jean Baudrillard categorized such illusory simulacra as simulations that conflate the real and the illusory such that they become indistinguishable and the original ceases to be relevant. Although this definition implies a negation of meaning, Kahn’s works foster new interpretations due to their ontological incongruity with the physical attributes of specific locations. Hyperreal yet untethered to the real world, they envision the domain of the subconscious, which may be influenced by objective reality but cannot act as its substitute. However, since the visual signifiers that pervade Kahn’s works directly correspond to his own personal lexicon, they remain largely inscrutable for viewers who perceive his otherworldly landscapes as divergent from their own dreamlike reveries.

Whenever the sensory response evoked by the totality of the landscape overwhelms normal perception and approaches the inconceivable, Jean Baudrillard’s dialectics of simulacra collapse under the weight of the transcendent sublime. Given the practical impossibility of reproducing the moment-to-moment impressions that lend the landscape its essential ineffability, it is no wonder that artists abandon the notion of objective authenticity in their representations of the natural environment—they are compelled to break certain rules that differentiate reason and imagination, forging simulacra that recreate reality on their own terms and invite the viewer to share in this “unreal” experience.

“The simulacrum implies huge dimensions, depths and distances that the observer cannot dominate,” reflected Gilles Deleuze in his 1990 essay Plato and the Simulacrum, which formalized the phenomenology of the sublime in relation to Baudrillard’s theory. “The simulacrum includes within itself the differential point of view, and the spectator is made part of the simulacrum, which is transformed and deformed according to his point of view. In short, folded within the simulacrum there is a process of going mad, a process of limitlessness…” Nowhere is this description more salient than in depictions of the landscape, which cannot serve as copies of reality because they manifest a mode of subjective experience that lacks a rational corollary—an ineluctable sublime. 

LEHMANN MAUPIN

213 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Korea 04349

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Sublime Simulacra - Kim Yun Shin, Kim Chang Euk, Hong Soun,  Scott Kahn

Lehmann Maupin, Seoul, January 22 – March 15, 2025

Kim Yun Shin @ Lehmann Maupin, London - "Add Two Add One" Exhibition

Kim Yun Shin

Add Two Add One

Lehmann Maupin, London

February 27 – March 15, 2025

Lehmann Maupin presents a two-part solo exhibition of work by pioneering Korean artist Kim Yun Shin, which will span the gallery’s London and New York locations. Surveying the artist’s oeuvre and including both paintings and sculptures from the 1990s to the present, the London component—which marks the artist's debut exhibition in the United Kingdom—will be on view at Lehmann Maupin’s temporary space at No.9 Cork Street.

Growing up amidst the backdrop of Korea’s tumultuous history in the 20th century, Kim Yun Shin has established herself as a formative figure in the post-war South Korean art scene, overcoming societal norms to carve out a space for herself as a first-generation woman sculptor. Despite facing challenges in a male-dominated field, she ventured to Paris to pursue her artistic aspirations, taught at various universities, and co-founded the Korean Sculptress Association in 1974 to support emerging artists. Partly influenced by her nomadic early life, her work reflects a fearless exploration of diasporic cultures—from France, Mexico, and Brazil, to her adoptive home of Argentina, where she established Museo Kim Yun Shin, the first Korean immigrant art museum. Now, at 90 years of age, the artist resides in Seoul, South Korea, where she continues to produce work in her studio. 

Her artistic practice, which encompasses sculpture and painting, is also deeply rooted in encounters with the natural world. Kim’s sculptural work engages with the fundamental qualities of materials and nature, navigating themes of confrontation, introspection, and coexistence. Using solid wood as her primary medium, she visualizes the intersection between nature, time, and history, reconsidering the very essence of human existence. Her early sculptures from the 1970s are deeply rooted in traditional Korean hanok architecture, which uses a distinctive technique that joins wooden blocks without nails. Her colorful paintings, meanwhile, are marked by distinctive surface fragmentation; across her compositions, large sections gradually divide into smaller shapes. The resulting artworks evoke a primordial energy, at once expansive and concise, concentrated and diffused. For Kim, painting offers the opportunity to explore sculptural concepts in a two-dimensional format. 

LEHMANN MAUPIN

No.9 Cork Street, London

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Todd Gray @ Lehmann Maupin, NYC - "While Angels Gaze" Exhibition

Todd Gray: While Angels Gaze

Lehmann Maupin, New York

January 23 – March 22, 2025

Lehmann Maupin presents While Angels Gaze, an exhibition of new work by TODD GRAY. While Angels Gaze marks the gallery’s first New York exhibition with the artist and his first since joining Lehmann Maupin’s roster in 2023. Best known for his photo assemblages that feature subject matter ranging from imperial European gardens, to West African landscapes, to depictions of pop icons, to portraits of the artist himself, Todd Gray builds critical juxtapositions in his work that examine accepted cultural beliefs—particularly around ideas of the African diaspora, colonialism, and societal power dynamics. In While Angels Gaze, Todd Gray presents a suite of new pieces that combine images from his music photography archive, work made in the early 2000s, and photographs taken during his fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 2023.

In addition to his recent fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, which he completed as one of the winners of the prestigious 2022–23 Rome Prize and Italian Fellowships, Todd Gray has been featured in many notable museum exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial in 2019 and the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA exhibition in 2016. His work is represented in numerous museum collections, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada, among others.

In his newest body of work, Todd Gray integrates Roman Catholic imagery and architecture with photographs sourced from his own archive, including self portraits, images of the Ghanaian landscape, and figures from pop music. The mining of his multi-decade music photography archive is an important component of Gray’s practice and one that offers a view into the history of music, featuring recognizable figures from Al Green to Iggy Pop. In While Angels Gaze, Todd Gray combines these titans of the music industry with images of Roman Catholic cathedrals and ancient Roman statuary, drawing parallels between religious or mythical personages and the idols of today. In these compositions, modern pop stars are cast as the contemporary equivalents of historical figures—where societies might once have inlaid images of saints in golden basilica ceilings or erected statues of religious leaders on building facades, modern idols play on elevated stages to crowds of tens of thousands, becoming enshrined as mass media icons.

Throughout the exhibition, Gray’s lens extends beyond imaging pop icons, with some works devoid of figures all together. In Blues Ship (makes me wanna holla) (2024), for example, Todd Gray depicts an image of a ship in the foremost panel, which appears to sail out of an image of the cosmos captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Both photographs are set in circular frames against a rectangular foundation image that shows an ornately decorated ceiling. The ship is a model of a French slave ship from the Maison des Esclaves (House of Slaves) museum on Gorée Island, a UNESCO world heritage site and former center of slave trading on the African coast, while the ceiling is located in Villa Torlonia, the former residence of Benito Mussolini in Rome. Here, Gray’s use of cosmic imagery functions as a conceptual bridge, condensing the time between the painting of the ceiling and the photographing of the ship. In works like these, Todd Gray moves beyond celebrity adoration to examine the veneration of other false gods—commerce, wealth, power—exploring the enduring nature and consequences of such idolatry across centuries.

While Angels Gaze also showcases Todd Gray’s use of formal compositional techniques. The curving ovals and circles the artist employs in this body of work disrupt his consistently rectangular format, creating portals through time that bridge the far past and the present. Throughout the series, Gray creates a sense of visual reverb—body gestures are mirrored from one figure to the next in works like Other tellings (Hollywood, Florence, Cosmos) (2024), architectural shapes blend across images in Gorée Island, Villa Torlonia (2024), and color palettes echo across compositions, from the gold-ground mosaics of St. Marc’s Basilica in Venice to the glittering sequins of Michael Jackson’s shirt in Glitter ’n Gold, 2(St. Marks) (2024).

Although Todd Gray’s scenes are overlaid and juxtaposed, his work is never meant to be dissected—rather, each image can be thought of as a discrete stanza that composes a poem of completed work, reflecting his deeply intuitive process. In The Song Remains (assumptions about the nature of time) (2024)—one of the exhibition’s smallest works, composed of just two panels—Gray depicts Iggy Pop in black and white, his image overlaid against a statue from Villa Torlonia of a figure holding a pan flute. The gesture of the statue’s outstretched arm on the left is mirrored in Iggy’s raised hand on the right, connecting the two figures across time as if by an invisible thread. The image suggests an enduring human archetype, different and yet unchanged over the course of many centuries, and invites wider questions about the essence of human nature. Throughout While Angels Gaze, Todd Gray invites us to ask not only who we are, but who we have been—and how much, if at all, this has changed over the course of millennia.

LEHMANN MAUPIN NEW YORK

501 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Dominic Chambers @ Lehmann Maupin, London - "Meraki" Exhibition

Dominic Chambers: Meraki

Lehmann Maupin, London

October 8 – November 9, 2024

When the sprites of ideas enter the studio and marry themselves to resolve of the artist committed to fully realizing them, one enters the summoning world—a state of creative immersion, that inner greenfield home to those things that shimmer: ideas, memory, dreams, and bodies without form or language, and perhaps angels live there too.

—Dominic Chambers

Lehmann Maupin presents Meraki, an exhibition of new work by American artist Dominic Chambers, in the gallery’s permanent space at Cromwell Place in London’s South Kensington neighborhood. Marking the artist’s first solo presentation in the United Kingdom, Meraki spans two floors and includes expansive paintings, brightly colored studies, and several works on paper. Dominic Chambers, born in St. Louis, MO and currently based in New Haven, CT, is best known for his vivid, colorful paintings that frequently depict scenes of leisure and contemplation as a mode for exploring ideas of personal interiority. In this exhibition, the artist expands his lens to the realm of devotion, engaging themes of inspired connection to work, art, and the natural world.

In creating his latest body of work, Dominic Chambers took the idea of meraki, a Greek word meaning “to pour one's soul into one's work,” as an origin point. As the title of the exhibition, Dominic Chambers uses this concept as a frame of inquiry, contemplating what it might mean to pour oneself into a creative endeavor and how the concept of the soul, or one’s own interiority, can intersect with ideas of devotion. These themes are poetically illustrated in The Summoning World (Studio Angel) (2024), a large-scale painting that blends the artist’s studio with a serene landscape, populated by a single, reclining angel. Chambers identifies this angel as Gabriel, of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, referencing the long tradition of angels functioning as messengers. Often acting as divine intermediaries bearing important news or a spark of inspiration, the figure of the angel has appeared for centuries across religious texts, literature, and art history—from the work of Leonardo Da Vinci to that of Kerry James Marshall. While Dominic Chambers’ warm, yellow-orange tones in The Summoning World (Studio Angel) suggest the golden settings of Fra Angelico, the scene, which is hung with artworks in various states of completion, also recalls Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio (1911). Astute viewers note that some of the paintings depicted can be found hanging in the gallery exhibition. Here, Chambers places the painter in the role of the summoner, bringing images and objects into the material world from another realm. 

Dominic Chambers also looks to the natural world as a space of devotion and replenishment. In his new Thunderscape (2024) series, the artist depicts minute figures amidst landscapes of rolling hills and colossal trees, with each canvas drenched in rich, vibrant color. These works in particular reveal the influence of Magical Realism in Chambers’ practice—in naming the series, he envisioned a surreal vista, where the shadows from tree branches became lightning bolts. In this world, the electrified landscape comes alive with sound, creating the titular thunderscape. 

Dominic Chambers’ Thunderscapes also feature flying kites, some tethered, others autonomous, racing through the skies. These kites recall those in the paintings in his exhibition Leave Room for the Wind, which opened at Lehmann Maupin New York in early 2024. Their presence in the Thunderscapes series suggests they have escaped those picture planes to enter new canvases; they function as avatars, for either the artist or the creative spirit, time traveling across exhibitions and bodies of work. 

Throughout Meraki, Dominic Chambers expands his explorations of leisure and interiority begun in earlier exhibitions—from the mental and physical leisure seen in Soft Shadows (2022) to the kinetic leisure in Leave Room for the Wind. In Meraki, he finds a new site for the replenishment of personal interiority in devotion, considering the spiritual as well as the bodily and intellectual, painting beyond the figurative and capturing the psyche. 

LEHMANN MAUPIN LONDON

1 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, SW7 2JE London

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Oren Pinhass @ Lehmann Maupin, New York - "Losing Face" Exhibition

Oren Pinhass: Losing Face

Lehmann Maupin, New York 

September 10 - October 12, 2024 

Lehmann Maupin presents Losing Face, a solo exhibition of new works by New York-based artist Oren Pinhass. Losing Face marks Pinhassi’s first presentation with Lehmann Maupin since joining the gallery in May 2024. The exhibition features new large-scale sculptures made from sand-based material, constructed using the artist’s signature technique.

Oren Pinhassi creates sensuous sculptures and large-scale installations that explore the politics of architectural spaces as they relate to the human body. His anthropomorphic sculptures, often standing up to eight feet in height, examine individual vulnerability within the built environment, probing new possibilities for coexistence. Oren Pinhassi’s haptic and immersive spaces redefine the relationship between viewer and environment, provoking a visceral interaction with the art object that yields a heightened awareness of humankind’s place within an ecosystem of co-creation, where we in turn are shaped by the objects and architecture around us. 

In Losing Face, Oren Pinhassi harnesses the logic of the eponymous idiom and turns it on its head, making it a positive proposition: what happens when we strip away our ego and individuality? The works on view gesture towards a willingness to relinquish one’s familiar perception of the world—to “lose face” would be to lose access to the sensory organs—and in this way, Oren Pinhassi allows for transformation and vulnerability in the construction of the works. Against the rapid-fire spread of information and the speed at which new events unfold in contemporary society, Oren Pinhassi’s new work asks the viewer to slow down and consider the interdependence necessary to imagine possible collective futures. 

Oren Pinhassi is drawn to organic materials for their shape-shifting potential and works primarily with sand and plaster. He repeatedly applies these materials in layers over burlap and welded steel skeletons; the mark of the artist’s hand is a key component throughout the work. In Losing Face, a group of 5 new sculptures stand erect, themselves in states of fluidity and transition. Oren Pinhassi also returns to the ongoing motif of feet in his work. Referencing medieval horizontal tomb effigies and augmenting the work’s anthropomorphic nature, each claw-footed sculpture stands atop a rock. With the feet of the sculpture clinging to the heavy rock bases, Oren Pinhassi’s totemic sculptures suggest at once a vulnerable figure on the cusp of succumbing to gravity and a monument standing vertically erect.

Across Oren Pinhassi’s body of work, queerness is an essential logic of construction in that the artist’s objects themselves generate queer space. For Oren Pinhassi, queer spaces are areas of potential—areas where objects generate a slight friction between one another, allowing the individuals in that space to become porous and open in ways not always possible in mainstream society. In Losing Face, this logic is apparent in the holes that traverse the surface of each work, drawing parallels to the vital cavities in the human body that function as loci of passing, puncture, or penetration. These negative spaces directly suggest eyes, mouths, genitals, and pores—a formal gesture that imbues each artwork with a distinct eroticism, allowing ideas and objects to enter into and move through the sculptures. 

Architectural motifs such as awnings and windows are recurring motifs in Oren Pinhassi’s work, and in Losing Face, these aspects conduct a formal investigation into the perforations present in the exhibition. Widows and doors are vital components of architecture, as they allow the body to pass through space. In this sense, such openings allow bodies to merge with architecture in ways that invite a new understanding of our relationship to others and to the built environment. Similarly, awnings and vents protect the human body from the elements. Oren Pinhassi folds these architectural reference points into the works in Losing Face, inviting viewers to reflect on systems of dependency and protection between ourselves and the environment around us. 

LEHMANN MAUPIN NEW YORK

501 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Teresita Fernández @ Lehmann Maupin, London - "Astral Sea" Exhibition

Teresita Fernández: Astral Sea

Lehmann Maupin, London

September 5 – 21, 2024

Lehmann Maupin presents Astral Sea, an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Teresita Fernández. Featuring a series of glazed ceramic pieces and new sculptural paper panels, Astral Sea extends the artist’s interests in the confluence points of the cosmos, land, and water, as seen through the lens of an embodied sculptural landscape.

Astral Sea inaugurates Lehmann Maupin’s temporary location at No.9 Cork Street, located in the heart of Mayfair, while the gallery’s permanent space at Cromwell Place undergoes renovation this fall. Concurrent to the exhibition, Teresita Fernández’s work is on view at SITE Santa Fe in the two-artist exhibition Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson. Co-curated by Teresita Fernández and Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, the exhibition features over 30 of her works and marks the first time Robert Smithson’s oeuvre has been placed in conversation with an artist working today.

Throughout her practice, Teresita Fernández has concerned herself with the ambulatory viewer, situating her work so that it is brought to life by the individual’s movement around the gallery. With these shifting vantage points, people’s reflections move across the surfaces of the work; depending on one’s location, the artist’s materials either reveal or conceal themselves from view. This physical engagement is akin to how we wayfind in or navigate the world around us, making evident our connectivity to the universe—the stars, tides, and slow time of geology. In this way, Teresita Fernández’s works embody the phrase: “Nothing rests; Everything moves; Everything vibrates.”1

This continuous, flowing movement is the starting point for Astral Sea—a phrase that Teresita Fernández feels speaks to the ephemerality of both the sky and water. Visible from the gallery’s windows are two new glazed ceramic works: Astral Sea 1 and Astral Sea 2, made from thousands of tiny glazed ceramic tesserae, with imagery that is at once deeply familiar yet ambiguous. The saturated blues suggest a flowing river connecting the two panels, earthen copper/brown hints at land masses, and deep greens become blooming organic matter. At the same time, these works could depict a galaxy, creating an “as above, so below” vertiginous topography that refuses to ground the viewer in a single recognizable location. The ceramic pieces are placed in the path of the sun, causing shifting light to add dynamism to the glossy surface of the tiles. As the viewer approaches the works, their silhouettes move across the variegated surface, activating the shimmering minerality of the glazes. These works are never still; they vibrate. As a result, Astral Sea 1 and 2 exist on both macro and micro registers. The individual tiles coalesce to form a whole, transforming the intimately microscopic into the immensely vast.

Another reference point for the exhibition is the phrase Stella Maris, which translates to “star of the sea” and speaks to the feminine qualities universally associated with water. This “star of the sea” is evident in a series of new sculptural paper panels titled Stella Maris(Net). While the glazed ceramic panels open onto vast worlds, these sculptural paper panels conceal something, creating liminal spaces between what can and cannot be known. Created through an accumulation of paper pulp and pigments, each work becomes a palimpsest where multiple layers are hidden from view, like invisible geologies. Networks of airy white lines and points (possible stars, galaxies, or wave breaks) unfold atop blue-gray grounds, and upon close inspection, the ink seeps into the crevices of the paper, turning the works into physical, sculptural objects. Atop the paper are handwoven nets made from Kozo fibers, which are tethered to fixed points, draping over the surface to create veils obscuring sections of the imagery below. The patterns in the paper and the weave of the nets intersect, prompting the viewers’ eyes to remain in motion. This active looking reinforces the fact that nothing is simultaneously accessible. The viewer’s eye is kept in perpetual motion as the works slowly unravel rather than immediately reveal themselves.

The net motif reappears in the freestanding sculpture Tether(Flotsam and Jetsam), which anchors the exhibition, grounding the ephemerality of the accompanying works. A concrete geometric form sits on the floor, recalling a monumental and faceted dark gray gemstone. The surface exposes fragments of white sand that have been cast into the dark concrete, suggesting infinite constellations. The base of the sculpture is tilted to reveal that it is not entirely resting on the floor, but rather being pulled upward towards the ceiling by a directional rope. On the opposite end of the rope are suspended nets that seemingly hover, yet remain tethered. The base functions like a mooring anchor, while the nets’ buoyancy allows them to float up to the surface of an imagined water line. Additionally, the nets are laden with rock-like crystalline minerals, including azurite and malachite. Glistening like suspended points of light, these elements unify the bodies of work across the exhibition, merging the color and minerality of Astral Sea 1 and 2 and the nets of Stella Maris(Nets). Tether(Flotsam and Jetsam) somatically places viewers in the space between land, sea, and sky.

As in much of Teresita Fernández’s practice, the sociopolitical underpinnings of Astral Sea are important yet subtle. Here, the artist’s choice of the terms flotsam (lightweight buoyant material) and jetsam (castoff heavy material) is deliberate, referencing colonial extraction and greed. These trajectories of pillage are associated with the displacement of materials both across bodies of water and at the bottom of the ocean. By presenting and then pausing this ensnarement, Teresita Fernández suspends us for a moment, making space to consider what is historically valued/hoarded and what is devalued/discarded.

Astral Sea invites viewers to reflect on their own sense of scale, place, and ambulation, prompting recognition of the buoyancy and weight of both history and the elements. As novelist Carlos Fuentes states, “The sky is neither high nor low. It’s over us and under us at the same time.”2 Teresita Fernández’s works tumble; they simultaneously float above and tether us to the ground, reminding us of the constant state of flow and flux at the place where sky, land, and sea converge on the same astral plane.

¹ From The Kaybalion, 1907

² From the novel Aura, 1962

LEHMANN MAUPIN LONDON

No.9 Cork Street, Mayfair, London

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Liza Lou: Painting @ Lehmann Maupin, NYC

Liza Lou: Painting

Lehmann Maupin, New York

September 5 – October 12, 2024

Lehmann Maupin presents Liza Lou: Painting, an exhibition of new work by the Los Angeles-based artist. Spanning the gallery’s New York location, the exhibition features a series of abstract works on canvas in which Liza Lou explores the most singular feature of a painting—the brushstroke. Activating the intense chroma and refractive qualities of glass beads, Liza Lou uses her signature material to flow and coagulate into a new form of paint, applying beads in free-form gestures through an intuitive approach. As they collide and overlap on the canvas, Lou’s beads reconstruct strokes of paint, an often-fetishized aspect of mid-century American Abstraction. Concurrent to this exhibition, Liza Lou’s landmark Trailer (1998–2000), will be installed (opens September 13, 2024) in the Brooklyn Museum lobby gallery; it is a recent addition to the permanent collection and will debut at the museum in September, offering an opportunity to experience the artist’s most recent work alongside this rarely-seen immersive sculpture.  

In a career spanning three decades, Liza Lou has become widely known for introducing beads as a contemporary fine art medium. Her persistent experimentation has challenged hierarchies and injected humor and glamour into a Feminist vision. Lou’s project is an open-ended investigation into the metaphoric possibilities of a humble material to draw attention to the poetic and painful dimensions of labor, the artistic process, and the complexities of American life. 

In this new series of paintings, Liza Lou renders what appear as quick, painterly gestures in grain-by-grain minutiae. Beads naturally resist blending or mixing; thus, Lou renews Frank Stella’s admonition to “paint as good as in the tube,” applying pure color directly to canvas. The placement and color of each paint stroke is predicated in the moment, purely in reaction to the stroke preceding it. In an aesthetic call and response, colors are superimposed or juxtaposed, reveling in joyful adjacencies. Bright chroma radiates across the canvas in vivid jabs while lattice work builds up and propels itself outward. At close range, the tiny, individual 3-dimensional pieces of factory-made color jostle each other, resulting in micro explosions that register as surprise, offering a new take on American Abstract painting. 

Known for her community-based approach, Liza Lou’s current work emerges from a period of solitude spent living and working alone in the Mojave desert in Southern California. From this undiluted experience in nature, Lou reveals a close look at the act of painting itself, magnifying granular gestures and, as she has described, “listening to the material.” Together, Lou’s exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin and the Brooklyn Museum provide portals into the evolution of Lou’s decades-long practice—one centered in materiality, invention, and possibility.

LEHMANN MAUPIN NEW YORK

501 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Artist Loriel Beltrán @ Lehmann Maupin, London — "To Name the Light" Exhibition

Loriel Beltrán: To Name the Light

Lehmann Maupin, London

May 14 – June 22, 2024

Sculpture is durational in a way that painting is not. Painting can be observed in a glance, whereas sculpture has to be explored in time and space. I try to bring this sculptural animation to my wallworks while keeping that “glance” effect of painting. Painting is like a container where everything compresses into this one thing, whereas sculpture expands into more ambiguity.

—Loriel Beltrán

Lehmann Maupin presents To Name the Light, the London debut of Miami-based, Venezuelan-born artist LORIEL BELTRÁN (b. 1985). Featuring five new paintings, including the monumental work Total Collapse (Miami / Seoul), 2024, the exhibition foregrounds the artist’s engagement with time––geological, biological, historical, linguistic––as a conceptual framework to explore the phenomenological effects of light, color, and materiality. This exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s fully illustrated catalogue, including an essay by curator Katherine Rochester. 

Loriel Beltrán has become known for his sculptural accumulations that poetically combine aspects of painting and sculpture. Employing custom-made molds and layers of paint, each work is produced through a meticulous process of pouring, embedding, compressing, drying, slicing, and finally assembling each vibrantly pigmented cross section into an abstract composition. Loriel Beltrán’s paintings materialize color in its full complexity in such a way that recalls the work of abstract painter and theorist Joseph Albers (1888-1976), whose exacting investigation of chromatic interaction expanded the possibilities for modern color theory. Albers asserted that “as basic rules of language must be practiced continually, and therefore are never fixed, so exercises toward distinct color effects never are done or over.” Loriel Beltrán has developed his own chromatic language that also incorporates an element of chance in the interplay between material viscosity, gravity, and time. The resulting images are prismatic, as though color and light are emanating from every visual cut / break in the composition.

Total Collapse (Miami / Seoul), 2024, the centerpiece of the exhibition, is the literal and metaphorical collapse and compression of the body of work the artist produced for his recent exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, Seoul. Beltrán has incorporated residual elements and pieces of works from that show into the compressed layers, making the palette a register of prior paintings. Seemingly frozen in a transitional state of becoming and disintegrating, between representation and abstraction, the painting is composed of striated sections of typically discordant pigments––vibrant blues, reds, greens, and yellows are placed next to areas of deep maroons and browns, next to pastel pinks, purples, and blues––to surprising and sometimes technicolor effect. In a recent interview with the artist, curator Katherine Rochester states, “Beltrán's work applies increasing pressure to the distinctions between categories that organize our anthropocentric view of the world. Nature and culture, science and philosophy, language and image, sculpture and painting are all subjected to a series of artistic operations that create new forms from a hybrid use of references and materials. ‘What remains on the other side of total collapse?’” For Loriel Beltrán, it seems that what remains is an endless set of possibilities in the undefined space of perception.

While Total Collapse draws from the artist’s own personal painting history, other works in the exhibition, like Sulfur Aerosol, 2024 and Dark Path / Dark Past, 2024, skillfully traverse art history by exploring the genre of landscape painting, drawing inspiration from the legacy of early 19th-century Romantic painters such as J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich. The sense of awe, mystery, and grandeur that Turner and Friedrich sought to invoke in their atmospheric impressions of the natural sublime serve as a touchstone for Loriel Beltrán. While he employs quite different techniques, Beltrán is interested in encouraging a similarly direct viewing experience that connects us with our surroundings on an emotional and spiritual level, inviting the possibility of infinity and wonder into the gallery. In Sulfur Aerosol, Loriel Beltrán depicts an acidic skyscape composed of layers of cotton candy pink, baby blue, and mustard yellow pigment. The surface of the painting vibrates with an alluring and ominous intensity, invoking in the viewer a similar  sense of overwhelm to that induced by contemplation of the rapidly advancing effects of climate change. For Loriel Beltrán, the work is open to a variety of interpretations. He explains, “It has a toxic but seductive quality, the kind we usually get from technology and the idea of ‘progress’ and our curiosity for the next thing.” 

In Dark Path / Dark Past Loriel Beltrán depicts a night scape that is created through an ombre effect––deep maroon transitioning into deep verdant green. Throughout, there are hints of bright yellow, blue, purple, and pink that suggest a scattering of objects, debris, or perhaps even people. The title alludes to the dark path / past of humanity, one marked with a violence that has had an irreparable impact on the landscape. Here as with the other works in the exhibition, Loriel Beltrán employs the language of abstraction to grapple with the complexity of human history, the vastness (and incomprehension) of the natural world, and indescribable physical experience of light and color. What captivates him, especially, is the profound connection between color––a manifestation of light––and its ties to substances originating from the sun, extracted from minerals, and developed into pigments. 

Together the works in To Name the Light offer an excavation, a dissection, a dispersion and deciphering of time and history––personal, shared, and that of painting. Previously, Loriel Beltrán described the interplay between chosen combinations of colors as “panels of code;” rather than representing an image, they comprise a distinct visual language, replete with numerous possibilities for imagery. Loriel Beltrán transforms the code into a rich repository of accumulated knowledge, experience, memory, and signification. 

LEHMANN MAUPIN

1 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, SW7 2JE London

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Marilyn Minter Exhibition @ Lehmann Maupin, Seoul

Marilyn Minter 

Lehmann Maupin, Seoul 

March 7 – April 27, 2024

Lehmann Maupin presents Marilyn Minter, an exhibition of new paintings by renowned multidisciplinary artist Marilyn Minter, marking her first solo exhibition in Seoul. The works on view depict vignettes of women’s lips and mouths, at once alluring and enigmatic.

Known for her decades-long career that encompasses photography, painting, video, and installation, Marilyn Minter creates imagery that engages both hyperrealist and abstract technique. Her work has often centered around corporeal qualities and practices typically omitted from the mass-media depictions of women that dominate contemporary consumer culture, such as body hair, stretch marks, dirty feet, or acts of grooming. Rather than conceal such realities, the artist seeks to reframe these aspects of womanhood. Minter is also engaged with the art historical cannon, often using her signature lexicon to appropriate traditional tropes like the Odalisque or the Bather.

In Marilyn Minter, the artist’s compositions depict closely-cropped images of women’s faces, their mouths, lips, teeth, and décolletages adorned or open to varied degrees. In White Lotus (2023), a figure wears thick strands of pearls and beads, her open lips and jewelry obscured by steam and water droplets. Similarly, in Gilded Age (2023), dark red lips part to reveal a jewel-encrusted grill. The imagery is intimate yet strange, luring the viewer in with the suggestion of something more. Across the exhibition, Marilyn Minter’s compositions continue her bold exploration of glamor, beauty, and representation through a feminist lens.

LEHMANN MAUPIN

213 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Tammy Nguyen Exhibition @ Lehmann Maupin, London — "A Comedy for Mortals: Purgatorio"

Tammy Nguyen

A Comedy for Mortals: Purgatorio

Lehmann Maupin, London

March 13 – April 20, 2024 

“This mountain is so formed that it is 

always wearisome when one begins the ascent, 

but becomes easier the higher one climbs.” 

— Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio

Lehmann Maupin presents A Comedy for Mortals: Purgatorio, Tammy Nguyen’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, which spans two floors of the gallery’s location in Cromwell Place. Featuring new paintings, works on paper, and a sculptural artist book, Purgatorio is the second exhibition in a three-part series based on the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri’s canonical masterpiece of Christian literature. A Comedy for Mortals: Inferno opened in Seoul in March 2023, and the series will culminate in 2025 with A Comedy for Mortals: Paradisio, Tammy Nguyen’s first exhibition in New York. Additionally, Purgatorio follows Tammy Nguyen’s recent debut solo museum exhibition at the ICA/Boston. 

Tammy Nguyen’s multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections between geopolitics, ecology, and history, using narrative to intertwine disparate subjects through artmaking. Across her mediums, Tammy Nguyen’s work aims to unsettle, and the tension between her elegant forms and harmonious aesthetics often belies the nature of her storytelling. She probes this contrast between form and content by confusing the visual plane, which she achieves by creating intricate visual metaphors nestled within many layers of diverse material.Tammy Nguyen works with watercolor and vinyl paint, repeatedly obscuring and revealing her subjects to build friction.

In Tammy Nguyen’s version of The Divine Comedy, Dante’s three epics act as a metaphor for the geopolitics of Southeast Asia during the Cold War. Nguyen constructs narratives that explore the moral gray areas that permeate global history, probing the power language has to shape these ambiguities. Her world building is often ripe with inversion—in Inferno, Nguyen tracked Dante and Virgil’s descent into hell against the Space Race—up is down, day is night, and large is small. In Purgatorio, as Dante seeks to purify his soul by ascending Mount Purgatory with Virgil as his guide, Nguyen plots a simultaneous descent into her version of the Grasberg Mine (a project conducted in West Irian, Indonesia from the 1930s–80s). 

The paintings in Purgatorio are united in formal qualities but marked by distinct characters—from statuesque angels appropriated from Gianlorenzo Bernini sculptures, to prehistoric dinosaurs, to a host of international leaders from the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. Tammy Nguyen immerses these characters in a lexicon of imagery that sets the scene for her version of purgatory, which takes the form of an island that exists in liminal time and space, each occupant a kind of refugee in an eternal state of waiting. In Angels Carrying Crosses on Mount Purgatory (2023), angels ascend the canvas, nocturnal luna moths trace the path of the moon, seashells dot the sky like stars, and ancient fern fronds rhythmically punctuate the picture plane. In Natural Love is Always Inerrant (2024), Jesus Christ himself arrives by boat to the shores of purgatory, bearing a crucifix; the composition is divided in two, the figure at center framed by sunset on the left and sunrise on the right. 

During the Cold War, Southeast Asian countries were contending with the anxiety of both looming conflict (augmented by the destruction wreaked by the atomic bomb in Japan) and their new sovereignty. Here, ancient monsters reference this kind of existential and ever-present menace. In several paintings, including Love Can Never Turn its Sight (2024) and What Sin is Purged Here in the Circle Where We are Standing? (2024), prehistoric dinosaurs emerge from and retreat into the surrounding fauna. Tammy Nguyen’s dinosaurs allude to one monster in particular—Godzilla, whose depiction first developed in 1950s Japan. In this way, the dinosaurs in Purgatorio reference the continued threat of atomic warfare and serve as a vehicle for the address of traumas past. Other works, such as I Pray to God That This Asian-African Conference Succeeds (2024) and World Peace is Not Merely the Absence of War (2024), depict individuals who were present at the Bandung Conference, where African and Asian leaders gathered to imagine a future independent from Western influence and control. These figures permeate the environment of purgatory, gesturing towards the endurance of ideas and resistance.     

A Comedy for Mortals: Purgatorio culminates in a large-scale artist book entitled Mine, Purgatory (2024), which itself takes the form of a mountain and opens inwards like a mine. With each turn of the page, the reader descends into the mountain, growing closer to the center. The pages themselves contain excerpts from both the Bandung Conference and Dante’s cantos in Purgatorio; Tammy Nguyen manipulates the stanzas to create her own idiosyncratic translation, which becomes increasingly complete as one reaches the end of the book. As the cantos conclude with Dante’s discovery of his true love, Tammy Nguyen’s reader approaches the center of the mine, and treasure is unveiled: at the base of the book is the golden imprint of a dinosaur foot. Through an investigation of the materiality of language, Tammy Nguyen’s artist book in A Comedy for Mortals: Purgatorio offers a paradigm for the formation of both identity and history, and in their intersection, probes the good, the bad, and the morally ambiguous. 

LEHMANN MAUPIN

1 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, SW7 2JE London 

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Nari Ward Exhibition @ Lehmann Maupin, London - "Balance Fountain"

Nari Ward: Balance Fountain 

Lehmann Maupin, London

November 15, 2023 – January 6, 2024

Lehmann Maupin presents Balance Fountain, New York-based multidisciplinary artist NARI WARD’s first solo exhibition in London. The exhibition precedes a major European museum exhibition to be announced in the coming months. Adopting a distinctly spiritual approach, Balance Fountain probes the unseen forces that shape both unique cultures and global society, exposing ritual as a structural artistic device. The presentation features a series of new copper panel works, a selection of sculptures, and a large-scale floor installation, each composed of objects adjacent to ceremonial practice or devotional behavior.

Nari Ward is best known for his wall- and installation-based sculptural works created from materials frequently found and collected throughout Harlem, his longtime neighborhood. The artist combines these materials to re-contextualize their original meanings, creating assemblage works that confront complex social and political realities (often surrounding race, migration, democracy, and community) through literal and metaphorical juxtaposition. Materially specific but intentionally ambiguous in their signification, Nari Ward’s works encourage the viewer to explore many possible interpretations. 

Installed in the center of the gallery are two sculptures, whose individual construction and mutual interaction explore the restorative possibilities of communal gathering. Balance Fountain (2013—2014) recalls a wheelbarrow overflowing with mysterious cargo. Strands of silver shade cloth, enormous golden mango seeds, and long metal window balances exceed the confines of an antique barrel. Freed from performing their crucial mechanical function, Nari Ward’s window balances suggest an array of metaphorical resonances. If a window is used to see, then a window balance is a purveyor of vision. Essential to this operation is a typically hidden cross-shaped spring that allows windows to be raised or lowered with ease. In Balance Fountain, these crosses proliferate to create a spray of delicate crucifixes extending from a base of luminous seeds. In both title and material, Balance Fountain is a meditation on equilibrium, potentiality, and the promise of insight if only you can strike the right balance.

Balance Fountain sits atop a new floor installation titled Groundin’ Visible (2023), which is composed of bricks overlaid with a sheet of copper. Ward has long been drawn to copper as an artistic medium for both its energetic properties and its many cultural associations with medicine and healing. In Groundin’ Visible, the copper surface is imprinted with the indexical traces of sundry objects. The delicate outlines of prayer beads and rosaries appear alongside the visually resonant yet significantly opposing symbols of the Union Jack and the Congolese Cosmogram. Nari Ward also includes the imprints of eight fan blades, which hold dual resonance in Groundin’ Visible as a practical appliance and as a metaphor for the invisible movement of the Spirit. Recalling this animation, Groundin’ Visible is conceived as a pedestal for hosting other activity. Several performances take place during the run of the exhibition, where participants engage Balance Fountain and Groundin’ Visible in a ceremonial manner that explores communal introspection.

In Prayers Series; Circuit (2023), Nari Ward considers the significance and omnipresence of prayer across global religions. Praying is an act of devotion that communes the individual with the divine, often through the use of sacred objects that materially structure a spiritual connection. The tactility of these exercises that connect the physical to the spiritual is of great interest to Ward, whose new series deploys prayer beads and hands as a central motif. Each panel in Prayers Series features the ghostly traces of prayer beads, their impression left on the copper surface through the application of a darkening patina. The unbroken loop of the beads is crisply visible. Describing this loop and also the conductive properties of copper metal, the titular word Circuit gestures towards both visible and invisible manifestations of connective energy and repetitive labor.

Echoing the interplay between Balance Fountain and Groundin’ Visible, Ward’s Empire (2023) is also composed of new and found art objects. The sculptural installation comprises a decorative glass cabinet painted black with indelible ink and filled with an assortment of unusual black globes. These globes are tufted in balls of cotton dipped in sugar and singed with fire. Their scorched topographies reference the most notorious crops that powered the economies of the American South. A dark twist on the western museological phenomenon of the cabinet of curiosities, Empire gestures towards slavery and colonialism as invisible forces used to violently re-structure societies, often in concert with religious proselytization. Here and elsewhere in the exhibition, Nari Ward employs assemblage to deconstruct the often invisible yet intertwined religious, political, and cultural structures that charge humble objects with extraordinary significance. 

LEHMANN MAUPIN

1 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, SW7 2JE London

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Gilbert & George Exhibition @ Lehmann Maupin, NYC - THE CORPSING PICTURES

Gilbert & George

THE CORPSING PICTURES

Lehmann Maupin, New York

June 22 – August 18, 2023

Lehmann Maupin presents THE CORPSING PICTURES, a new group of pictures by Gilbert & George. The exhibition marks their tenth solo presentation at the gallery. The exhibition comprises a suite of richly colored pictures starring the artists themselves in various poses of alarm and resignation as bones encroach in intricate patterns over their faces and bodies. Masterfully employing their signature use of bold color and symmetrical composition, Gilbert & George confront the subject of mortality and life itself with winking gallows humor, leaving each picture open to multiple interpretations.

Gilbert & George met as art students in 1967 at Saint Martin’s School of Art, where they developed the concept of “living sculptures.” Meticulously groomed and dressed in suits, the artists’ legendary promenades through the streets of London, heads and hands coated in metallic powders, formed the blueprint for future art that centered on the performative and sculptural potential of the body. Since then, they have lived and worked together in London’s East End, their individual identities subsumed into a vision of animate sculpture. Gilbert & George have long been beloved fixtures and keen observers of their changing world. As attentive to the detritus in the gutters of London as they are to the shifting social mores of the citizens who walk its streets, the artists have provoked strong reactions and critical thinking on subjects ranging from sex, violence, identity, and death.

From its title, THE CORPSING PICTURES promises to elaborate these long running thematic concerns through a destabilizing play on words. “Corpsing” is a term that comes from theater. It refers to the instant an actor breaks character by doing something unprofessional such as accidentally laughing or moving when they are supposed to be playing dead. In such moments, the character is revealed as an actor, the illusion broken, and the scene killed. In many of THE CORPSING PICTURES, Gilbert & George stare out at the viewer, breaking the fourth wall through direct address and deliberately embracing the cardinal mistake of rookie actors by “corpsing” death.

Each picture is richly colored in a red and gold palette that features Gilbert & George alternately ensconced, entombed, and enclosed behind a lively formation of bones. Skeletons of various origins make a sepulchral appearance. Many are human (BONE BOX and HA HA have a distinctly archeological character); some are vegetal (RIB TIES and TIES include the delicate fringes of desiccated flora); other bones are implied, as in CHAINS, which features no visible bones at all but simply Gilbert & George–still enfleshed–whose skeletons provide the armature for their signature suits. 

The heft and character of the bones play out a drama of memento mori told in visually striking vignettes. EQUALS centers two large bones across the bodies of Gilbert & George, playfully recalling the adage that death is the great equalizer. KISS BONE anoints the pair with the kiss of death or life–a hulking X formed by two massive femurs. BONE WHEEL, on the other hand, features delicate patterns of bones arranged in pleasing ornaments across the picture plane. Indeed, THE CORPSING PICTURES are insistently horizontal, signaling the position of final repose by references to pavement, litter, vegetation, prone bodies, and upturned shoe soles. Many of these bones are no longer held in vertical alignment by ligaments and muscles, but clattered to the floor–perhaps the result of a divining incantation or a diverting game such as pick up sticks. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet put it to the gravedigger: 

“Did these bones cost no more the

breeding but to play at loggets with them?”

THE CORPSING PICTURES debut as the Gilbert & George Centre opens its doors in London’s East End. An important addition to the London museum landscape, the Centre will provide dedicated exhibition space for Gilbert & George, ensuring that the arc of their singular career remains publicly accessible. Museums have long been analogized to mausoleums. Ever alive to the power of language and the language of power, the artists’ CORPSING PICTURES might be understood as a characteristically sideways gloss on the enshrinement of their legacy. Like Shakespeare’s wise fool, Gilbert & George embrace the comedic role of the gravedigger, entombing themselves while asserting that they have never been more alive. 

LEHMANN MAUPIN

501 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Hernan Bas Exhibition @ Lehmann Maupin, NYC – The Conceptualists: Vol. II

Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists: Vol. II

Lehmann Maupin, New York

May 17 – June 17, 2023

Lehmann Maupin presents The Conceptualists: Vol. II, an exhibition of new work by HERNAN BAS (b. 1978 in Miami). Marking the artist’s sixth solo presentation with the gallery, the exhibition is a continuation of Hernan Bas’s Conceptualists series started in 2021.

Hernan Bas is best known for his narratively rich scenes that feature a wide-range of references spanning art and literature, popular culture, kitsch, the occult, religion, and mythology. Across his works, Hernan Bas seeks to defamiliarize everyday experience through humor, revealing the surreal and absurd lurking beneath the mundane. In the Conceptualists series, Hernan Bas marries his personal appreciation of conceptual artists with his ongoing exploration of eccentricity. Whereas a number of prior works by the artist depict figures known as “enthusiasts” engaged in esoteric habits, this body of work reimagines absurdity and obsession as foundations of artistic practice. 

Each work in Hernan Bas’s Conceptualists series depicts a fictive conceptual artist enraptured by his eccentric creative pursuits. In Conceptual artist #22 (The sole source for his prized homemade pulp paper is vintage Pulp Fiction), Bas envisions an artist who makes paper from Harlequin romance novels (turning one form of pulp into another), while in Conceptual artist #18 (Spirited by a passion for urban legends, he fabricates roadside memorials from which to hitchhike from), Bas imagines a performance-based artist who erects fake road-side memorials and hitch-hikes from one to another. 

At the heart of the series lies a productive tension between conceptual and representational forms of artmaking. Whereas Hernan Bas’s fictive artists create thoroughly idea-based, propositional works that perhaps can be expressed by their titles alone, Bas’s own paintings remain invested in the art object and reward close looking. And while he depicts artists engaged in fervently conceptual practices, Bas’s compositions summon a wide range of art historical references that lurk in collective consciousness and popular imagination. Conceptual artist #17 (With the aid of scissors, paper doilies and origami he elevates lily ponds to attract potential princes) might call to mind Claude Monet’s waterlilies, while Conceptual artist #16 (Performance based; the founder and reigning champion of a weekly pillow fight tournament) evokes American Realist painter George Bellows’s canonical boxing scenes. In the latter, Hernan Bas undermines this traditional theater of masculinity, and in the place of a boxing match he depicts two male figures engaged in a pillow fight. A space of intimacy becomes a sporting arena; in lieu of a boxing ring, Hernan Bas depicts a mattress and bedframe lined with red ribbon bows. Indeed, Hernan Bas’s practice is characterized by the frequent convergence of the private and public realms, and he often reformulates masculine tropes repeated throughout art history to give way to queer interpretations.

Throughout The Conceptualists, art haunts everyday existence. Conceptual artist #19 (A child of the 80’s, he places his Polaroid self portraits in a familiar spot whenever he’s feeling lost), contains a number of subtle references to Andy Warhol. The many milk cartons—which Hernan Bas has silkscreened onto the canvas—recall Andy Warhol’s silkscreens of mass-produced goods (such as soup cans and soda bottles), while the Polaroid camera in the subject’s hands evokes his iconic Polaroid images. Perhaps the work’s most emphatic homage can be seen in the figure’s socks, where a pattern of skulls references Andy Warhol’s early Death and Disaster series. Here and across this larger body of work, Hernan Bas’s sensitivity to art history results not in an insular investigation of artmaking, but rather in an expansive consideration of art’s capacity to permeate the collective cultural imagination. 

LEHMANN MAUPIN

501 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lehmannmaupin.com

_____________