Sliced Tropics & Cosmic Dancers @ Luhring Augustine Gallery, NYC - Lygia Clark, Sarah Crowner, Mark Handforth, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Rezac, Philip Taaffe

Sliced Tropics & Cosmic Dancers

Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York

September 12 – October 25, 2025

Luhring Augustine presents a group exhibition that highlights the work of Lygia Clark, Sarah Crowner, Mark Handforth, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Rezac, and Philip Taaffe. These six artists share a kindred interest in disrupting of familiar forms, employing unique strategies such as manipulations of lines and planes – folding, pinching, slicing, splicing – and radical shifts in scale to reshape and reimagine recognizable and quotidian motifs. 

ARTISTS BIOS

Lygia Clark (b. 1920, Belo Horizonte, Brazil – d.1988, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is one of the preeminent artists of the twentieth century, whose pioneering body of work reimagined the relationship between audience and the art object. A founding member of the 1950s Brazilian Neoconcretist movement, Clark proposed a radical approach to thinking about painting by treating its pictorial surface as if it were a three-dimensional architectural space. Her iconic Bichos, or sculptures constructed out of hinged metal planes, allowed for the audience to exercise authorship through participation. Clark’s reliance on the viewer to steer her sculptures through many possible configurations not only jeopardized the autonomy of the art object itself, but also reconfigured her art as a performative, time-based event.

Sarah Crowner (b. 1974, Philadelphia, PA) explores the spaces where geometry abuts gesture, materiality merges with composition, and the graphic confronts the handmade. Her sewn canvases initially appear pristine in their composition, however closer inspection reveals the various slippages, imprints, and nuances of hand-painted surfaces constructed from separate yet related elements. Architecture plays a significant role in many of her works; her site-specific wall pieces transform spaces into three-dimensional experiences in which the viewer processes the environment as one autonomous artwork. The patterns in her work, drawn equally from the natural world and historic sources, create an entryway between the art object and the context, enabling the viewer to be enveloped and literally step inside her work.

Mark Handforth’s (b. 1969, Hong Kong) works are interventions in space: offering novel engagements within existing environments and asserting new perspectives on familiar fixtures. His sculptures displace quotidian objects and recontextualize their forms in unexpected articulations. In some of his iconic works, the bodies of stars, streetlamps, and traffic signs whimsically buckle, twist, and droop. The seemingly defunct and defeated contortions in these forms are countered by a gracefulness imparted by Handforth’s meticulous craftmanship; this incongruity imbues the works with a wry humor and an endearing pathos. His works reference a post-punk aesthetic and utilitarian minimalism, while the capricious scale and juxtapositions draw on the legacies of Surrealism and Dadaist absurdism.

Elizabeth Murray (b. 1940, Chicago, IL – d. 2007, Granville, NY) was an artist at the forefront of American painting for five decades and is considered one of the most important postmodern abstract artists of her time. Her drive and determination produced a singularly innovative body of work characterized by a Cubist-informed Minimalism and streetwise Surrealism. Throughout her career, she reveled in the physicality of paint and approached her work through the constructive vocabulary of sculpture, warping, twisting, splintering, and knotting her canvases. In the 1980s Murray introduced three-dimensionality to her canvases, bringing about a complete break from traditional, flat, rectilinear compositions. Muddied, moody, and gestural, these paintings blazed a course of international recognition and notoriety.

Richard Rezac’s (b. 1952, Lincoln, NE) abstract sculptures, rooted in a studious consideration of the history of art, architecture, and design, quietly connote everyday sources, leaving the viewer with a sense of familiarity and closeness. Exceptionally precise in their execution, with each decision carefully considered by the artist, the pieces are made to be looked at and thought of with absorption. Their human scale and careful placement (the height on the wall, the distance they hang from the ceiling, etc.) initiates a dialogue that demands time, the works revealing themselves slowly. This combination of exquisite craft and spatial intentionality imparts a knowing presence to the sculptures, lending an ostensible sense that they are full of concealed information. Taciturn, earnest, and magnetic, they toggle between congruence and dissonance, space and form, lightness and solidity.

Philip Taaffe’s (b. 1955, Elizabeth, NJ) practice is distinguished by its elaborate sampling of techniques and symbols that merge iconography, design, and art historical and cultural motifs to generate something authentically new. Celebrated for his ability to build intricate and contemplative compositions culled from this wide-ranging lexicon of imagery, Taaffe produces transfixing works rife with geometric forms and interwoven complex patterns that call into question traditionally accepted definitions of realism and abstraction. The visual vibrancy and dynamism that underlie his work reveals the convergence of the optical and the conceptual, the decorative and the narrative, the natural and the man-made, as well as the ancient and the modern. 

LUHRING AUGUSTINE CHELSEA

531 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.luhringaugustine.com

Constanza Schaffner @ Luhring Augustine Tribeca, New York - "Leones, Flores, Constanzas" Exhibition

Constanza Schaffner

Leones, Flores, Constanzas

Luhring Augustine Tribeca, New York

January 13 – March 2, 2024

Luhring Augustine presents Leones, Flores, Constanzas, an exhibition of new paintings by the Argentine, New York-based artist Constanza Schaffner. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Constanza Schaffner is interested in the often-contradictory forces that reside within the individual psyche, and the tensions that can arise between poetic and rational approaches to understanding and experiencing the world. In her doctoral dissertation on comparative literature, she focuses on strategies to “re-enchant” the contemporary world, which she sees as largely disconnected from the mythical, the magical, and the sacred – an investigation that permeates her artistic practice as well.

In Constanza Schaffner’s self-portraits, enlarged, exaggerated facial expressions are prevalent; flesh is realized with luminescence and translucence, punctuated by flickering highlights; pores, wrinkles, creases – signifiers of time and age – are lingered over and explored with her dynamic brushwork as sites for experimentation in abstraction. In the work De Terror y de Gloria, a bat-flower becomes a portrait of its own. Petals and stems consume and lift off the canvas in densely rendered contrast, with vessels and veins suggesting traces of vibrant life on the cusp of decay. In La Entrada del Tiempo, a symphony of flowers sprouts out of the heads of two male lions and Constanza. While one lion is captured in a moment of reflection, or dozing off, another looks at Constanza, staring back at the artist with her own eyes. Throughout her work, Constanza Schaffner examines tensions that reside within beauty, gender, and power.

Constanza Schaffner was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1989. Her work has been exhibited at CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach, FL; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Plymouth Rock, Zürich, Switzerland; Bortolami, New York, NY; Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, England; Park View/Paul Soto, Los Angeles, CA; and Galerie Houssenot, Paris, France. The artist’s work is included in the permanent collections of Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; and the Hall Art Foundation, Reading, VT. She is a PhD candidate at the Department of Comparative Literature in New York University’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

LUHRING AUGUSTINE TRIBECA

17 White Street, New York, NY 10013

www.luhringaugustine.com

Frank Auerbach @ Luhring Augustine, NYC - "Frank & Julia" Exhibition

Frank Auerbach: Frank & Julia

Luhring Augustine, New York

October 27 – December 22, 2023

Luhring Augustine presents Frank & Julia, the gallery’s second exhibition with the esteemed British painter, Frank Auerbach. This presentation focuses on Frank Auerbach’s portraits of his wife, Julia, alongside self-portraits, and follows his widely lauded 2020 survey show, Frank Auerbach: Selected Works, 1978–2016, in the Gallery's Chelsea location. Frank & Julia is on view in the galley's Tribeca location and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Celebrated for his distinctive painterly lexicon, which is characterized by passionate brushwork and tactile impasto, in this exhibition Auerbach delivers evocative compositions imbued with soul and presence. The paintings and works on paper on view in Frank & Julia offer a singular vantage point from which to explore Frank Auerbach’s creative spirit, inviting contemplation into his motivations and artistic methodologies. From the time of their university days when they met at the Royal College of Art in London in the 1950s, Julia was one of the artist’s first sitters. Conversely, only sporadic self-portraits exist from Frank Auerbach’s early career, and it is within the last few years that he has consistently engaged with his own visage as a recurring motif. Notably, all the works featured in this exhibition come from the past decade, with the earliest portrait of Julia made in 2012, and all of the self-portraits finished within the last year.

This harmonious and incisive body of work intricately weaves the personal and the artistic, the self and the familial, the artist and his subject. Viewed through this unique prism, each composition’s formal choices radiate with fresh resonance. For Frank Auerbach, painting remains a lens through which he observes and interprets the world, a means to assimilate and encapsulate his surroundings before distilling them into a composition. The works in Frank & Julia go beyond documenting the artist’s personal relationship with his wife, transcending sentimentality, and instead, offer an extraordinary perspective into the genesis of image-making and aesthetic prowess that has been the hallmark of Frank Auerbach’s distinguished career spanning seven decades.

Born in 1931 in Berlin, Germany, FRANK AUERBACH has been living in England since 1939. Frank Auerbach studied painting at Borough Polytechnic, and received degrees from St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art. In 1986 the artist represented Great Britain at the XLII Venice Biennale, for which he, along with Sigmar Polke, was awarded the Golden Lion Prize. He has been the subject of solo shows at The Hayward Gallery, London; Kunstverein, Hamburg; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; The National Gallery, London; Royal Academy of Arts, London; and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. In 2015 a major retrospective exhibition of Auerbach’s work was presented at Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany and Tate Britain, London. His works are included in prestigious collections worldwide including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; British Museum, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; and Tate, London. A forthcoming exhibition of large-scale drawings by Frank Auerbach will be presented together for the first time at The Courtauld Gallery, London in Spring 2024.

LUHRING AUGUSTINE TRIBECA

17 White Street, New York, NY 10013

www.luhringaugustine.com

Pipilotti Rist @ Hauser & Wirth + Luhring Augustine, New York - "Prickling Goosebumps & A Humming Horizon" Exhibition

Pipilotti Rist 

Prickling Goosebumps & A Humming Horizon

Hauser & Wirth, New York

9 November 2023 – 13 January 2024

Luhring Augustine Chelsea, New York

18 November 2023 – 3 February 2024

Self-described ‘wild and friendly’ Swiss artist PIPILOTTI RIST presents a selection of new and recent sculptural works and projections in ‘Prickling Goosebumps & a Humming Horizon,’ a major two part exhibition opening in Chelsea. The exhibition, which takes place simultaneously at Hauser & Wirth’s 22nd Street location and Luhring Augustine’s 24th Street location, has been conceived by the artist as a multisensory experience for visitors. In these complementary presentations, Pipilotti Rist explores interior and exterior—internal and external physical and psychological spaces—with Luhring Augustine reimagined as an expansive, shared ‘backyard’ and Hauser & Wirth transformed into a whimsical ‘collective living room.’

At each location visitors are greeted with an artistic gesture on the façade: the work ‘Textile Simultaneity’ at Luhring Augustine and ‘Innocent Collection’ at Hauser & Wirth. 

At Luhring Augustine Chelsea on West 24th Street, visitors are taken on a journey through an expansive ‘backyard’ environment animated by sounds, colors and textures. In the entrance gallery they encounter new small-scale works—a landscape painting, ‘Visual Cortex Dolomites,’ and a rock sculpture, ‘Respect Scholarly Rock’—each of which is activated by hypnotic video projections. The main gallery is dominated by Pipilotti Rist’s spellbinding ‘Neighbors Without Fences’ (2020), a full-scale façade of a clapboard house, which is surrounded by a ‘courtyard’ filled with outdoor patio furniture and anchored by ‘The Patience’ (2016), a massive 1.5-ton boulder awash in the colors of a dynamic projection. A version of ‘Neighbors Without Fences’ debuted as a highlight in ‘Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor,’ Pipilotti Rist’s 2021-22 survey exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Each window of the clapboard façade contains a glowing screen displaying new videos made specifically for this exhibition; the works are from Pipilotti Rist’s ‘Peeping Freedom Shutters’ series (2020-2023), a group of unique video sculptures that pay homage to women’s rights activists whose fearless advocacy has opened windows onto the possibility of a more equitable world. 

The back gallery presents ‘Big Skin’ (2022), a version of which was first included in Pipilotti Rist’s solo exhibition ‘Behind Your Eyelid’ at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong. The installation’s undulating, semi-translucent resin panels, or ‘skins,’ float cloud-like from the ceiling with video projections of real and animated galaxies and natural landscapes dancing across their surfaces. The resin material of these skins simultaneously absorbs and emits light, creating ghostly shadows across the walls and floor, transporting viewers into another dimension. 

At Hauser & Wirth’s West 22nd Street building, Pipilotti Rist transforms the entire street level space into a ‘living room’ painted in lush reds and vegetal greens. Here guests discover single-channel sculptural video works, including many presented publicly for the first time. For each of these works, Pipilotti Rist has embedded a video into a found domestic object or piece of furniture—from ‘Ich brenne für dich (I burn for you)’ (2018), fashioned from an antique marble fireplace mantle to ‘Über Stock und Stein (Over Hill and Dale)’ (2023), which animates the interior of a vintage toy horse stable with different oscillating forms and colors. A new group of sculptures, together titled ‘Metal Flake Milk Tooth’ (2023), punctuates the space in an arrangement laying low across the gallery floor. With their furniture-like qualities—each form evokes yet subverts the familiar geometries of a chair or coffee table—these objects hew to Pipilotti Rist’s longstanding fascination with the reflective and emotive potentials of light: constructed from fiberglass composite, the sculptures have been coated with metal flakes, airbrushed candy colors and clear lacquer that yield glittery, optically dynamic surfaces which defy capture by photography. ‘Metal Flake Milk Tooth’ thus happily demands that we experience it in three dimensions and be present in its space in order to engage its pleasures. Two new major video projections—‘Welling Color Island East’ (2023) and ‘Welling Color Island West’ (2023)—and the new moving light installation ‘Petting Colors’ (2023) complete Pipilotti Rist’s interior adventure at Hauser & Wirth. Her richly colored projections swirl down from the ceiling onto carpet ‘islands’ occupied by cushioned seating areas for communal occupancy and immersion. The gently moving lights of ‘Petting Colors’ dance across the room to land upon visitors and connect them to one another as well as Pipilotti Rist’s other works in situ, making members of the public active participants in her enchantments.

PIPILOTTI RIST, a pioneer of spatial video art, was born in 1962 in Grabs in the Swiss Rhine Valley on the Austrian border and has been a central figure within the international art scene since the mid-1980s. Astounding the art world with the energetic exorcistic statement of her now-famous single channel videos, such as ‘I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much’ (1986) and ‘Pickelporno’ (1992), her artistic work has co-developed with technical advancements and in playful exploration of its new possibilities to propose footage resembling a collective brain. Through large video projections and digital manipulation, she has developed immersive installations that draw life from slow caressing showers of vivid color tones, like her works ‘Sip My Ocean’ (1996) and ‘Worry Will Vanish’ (2014).

For Pipilotti Rist, showing vulnerability is a sign of strength on which she draws for inspiration. With her curious and lavish recordings of nature (to which humans belong as an animal), and her investigative editing, Pipilotti Rist seeks to justify the privileged position we are born with, simply by being human. Her installations and exhibition concepts are expansive, finding within the mind, senses and body the possibility for endless discovery and poetical invention. ‘Pixel Forest’ (2016), made from 3,000 LEDs hung on strings, resembles a movie screen that has exploded into the room, allowing viewers an immersive walk through 3-dimensional video. As she herself puts it, ‘beside the energy-intensive exploration of the geographical world, pictures, films and sounds have been and are the spaces into which we can escape... The projector is the flamethrower, the space is the vortex and you are the pearl within.’

Since 1984, Pipilotti Rist has had countless solo and group exhibitions, and video screenings worldwide. Her recent solo exhibitions include the site-specific installation Hand Me Your Trust on the M+ Facade, Hong Kong (2023); Behind Your Eyelid at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2022); Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (The Museum of Contemporary Art), Los Angeles (2021–2022); Your Eye Is My Island at MoMAK (The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto) and Art Tower Mito (2021); Åbn min Lysning (Open my Glade) at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk (2019); Sip My Ocean at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2017–2018); Pixel Forest at New Museum, New York (2016 – 2017); and Your Saliva is My Diving Suit of the Ocean of Pain at Kunsthaus Zürich (2016), all resulted in record-breaking attendance numbers for each institution. 

HAUSER & WIRTH

www.hauserwirth.com

LUHRING AUGUSTINE

www.luhringaugustine.com

Frank Auerbach @ Luhring Augustine, New York - Selected Works, 1978–2016

Frank Auerbach 

Selected Works, 1978–2016

Luhring Augustine, New York

October 31, 2020 – February 20, 2021

Luhring Augustine Chelsea presents a solo exhibition of FRANK AUERBACH’s paintings and drawings that celebrates the mature career of a singular artist. Spanning from the late 1970s to recent works, the selection of his portraits and landscapes on view underscore Frank Auerbach’s great achievements in painting in the post-war era. The first show of his work in New York of this scale since 2006, the exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Frank Auerbach’s work exists outside of any specific period or style. Employing an energetic impasto technique to render his subjects, he creates figurative paintings through an intensive daily regimen. The exhibition highlights portraits of a group of his devoted sitters, some of whom he has been painting since the 1970s and still pose for him regularly today. The paintings are often the result of months of labor: at the end of a day of work, he will frequently scrape down the entire surface of the piece in order to start anew in his next attempt; each rejected endeavor a pursuit toward the final expression. The landscape paintings are derived from sketches Frank Auerbach makes in locations close to Mornington Crescent in Camden Town, London, the area near the studio where he has worked since 1954. With his distinct idiom Frank Auerbach imagines the quotidian scenes of parks, streets, and buildings around his familiar neighborhood.  

LUHRING AUGUSTINE CHELSEA

531 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.luhringaugustine.com

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