Serge Alain Nitegeka @ Marianne Boesky Gallery, NYC - "Configurations in Black" Exhibition

Serge Alain Nitegeka 

Configurations in Black

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

January 30 - March 8, 2025

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents Configurations in Black, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by South Africa-based artist Serge Alain Nitegeka (b. 1983; Rwanda). For his fifth solo exhibition in more than ten years with the gallery, Nitegeka imbues his newest body of work with symbolically and politically charged colors and forms.

Deploying the visual language of minimalism and geometric abstraction, Serge Alain Nitegeka reappropriates modernism’s formal preoccupations with color, line, and space to examine the lingering effects—both personal and political—of forced migration. Drawing on his own history as a refugee, Nitegeka erects—at times quite literally—barriers, obstacles, and borders both visual and physical for the viewer to traverse. Conjuring unsettling abstracted, obstruction-laden landscapes—in both two dimensions and three—Nitegeka evokes the psychological experience of political displacement and statelessness.

For Configurations in Black, Serge Alain Nitegeka debuts a new suite of paintings and sculptures—which he began working on more than two years ago, in a season of experimentation following a global pandemic. In the resulting paintings on plywood, Nitegeka conjures abstract landscapes defined by loose, organic planes of color—dark gray, bright orange, sunny yellow, vibrant teal. Heavy black lines run across the compositions at various angles while silhouetted figures—borrowed from the artist’s 2012 film Black Subjects—tumble through space, many of them balancing bundles on their backs or shoulders. On canvas, a material Nitegeka returns to for the first time since university, the heavy black lines that appear on plywood—and throughout the artist’s oeuvre—vanish, leaving the figures to float through the landscape with no sense of a horizon line, no sense of which way is up or down, no sense of where they’re coming from or where they’re going. With the painted wood sculptures, Serge Alain Nitegeka evokes the unnamed parcels that the figures in the paintings carry on their backs and shoulders, representing, perhaps the personal effects—and psychological burdens—that migrants carry along their journeys.

Serge Alain Nitegeka’s work has long been characterized by a stark, limited color palette. In early work, the artist exclusively used black, white, red, on the golden grain of exposed plywood. In the mid-2010s—on the heels of working on a pair of outdoor sculptures—sky blues and sunny yellows began to appear in his work, as if the open sky under which he was working found its way onto the surface itself. With Configurations in Black, Serge Alain Nitegeka incorporates new hues into his work: greens, blues, grays—and a startling neon orange laden with symbolic and metaphorical potential. Nitegeka borrows his new orange shade from the life vests commonly worn by migrants and refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea en route to Europe. Piled high on the shores of the Greek island of Lesbos, the life vests represent mass migration as a crisis of human rights and global politics; they also represent each individual who has made the treacherous journey in search of safety. Throughout these works, Serge Alain Nitegeka once again incorporates a series of motifs associated with movement—the raw plywood of shipping crates, bright red “fragile” stamps, and handling mark arrows—appear once again in these newest works. 

Serge Alain Nitegeka’s paintings embody a liminal space—one both physical and psychological. With his work, Nitegeka creates space—and a sense of a landscape that must be traversed. Then—having created a space to enter, be it visually or physically—Nitegeka blocks the entrance with heavy black lines or renders the landscapes too dense to navigate. Silhouetted figures and viewers alike are left to move through space without any indication of where they are going—there is no up or down, no gravity or horizon line, no clear path. Instead, there is only searching, an endless journey with no origin and no destination, weighed down by the ever-growing bundles they carry. 

With Configurations in Black, Serge Alain Nitegeka pushes his practice forward—both formally and conceptually. Nitegeka’s work speaks to his personal history and to the political, to crises of ceaseless war and famine, and to those who have no choice but to leave their homes in pursuit of another. “His art,” Allie Biswas wrote in 2015 “urges us to make connections with this global sphere of personal and collective disjuncture and trauma, where life is ruled by uncertainty and enforced readjustment. In doing so, his work becomes representative of a fundamental part of the present-day human condition. What Serge Alain Nitegeka ultimately reminds us is that the significance of a journey, whatever form it may take, lies in the process of allowing ourselves to enter into that which we cannot always control.” A decade later, as Nitegeka deepens his formal exploration of abstraction, expands his color palette, and further complicates his landscapes, Configurations in Black offers a stark reminder that migration is a journey begun but perhaps never ended, that the foreigner lives, perhaps, within, and that the burdens—physical and psychological—remain with us as the journey continues.

A sense of suspended movement permeates the journey alluded to throughout Configurations in Black—perhaps related to the artist’s own status: for nearly 10 years, Nitegeka has been stuck in South Africa, unable to travel outside the country as his citizenship proceedings continue. The artist exists, at present, in a state of limbo, suspended within his own liminal landscape, with no real sense of when it will be resolved. Unable to attend the opening of the exhibition, the artist’s absence is a presence all its own, felt deeply within the work on view.

ABOUT SERGE ALAIN NITEGEKA

Serge Alain Nitegeka’s work was the subject of a 2015 solo exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland’ Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; the Perez Art Museum Miami, FL; and the Jewish Museum, New York, NY. Nitegeka’s work was included in the South African Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and at the Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Gothenburg, Sweden the same year. In 2019, Nitegeka received the Grant-Award from the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation, New York, NY and the Villa Extraordinary Award for Sculpture from the Claire & Edoardo Villa Will Trust, Johannesburg, South Africa in 2018. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; the Newark Museum, NJ; the Jewish Museum, New York, NY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL, among others. The artist lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. 

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY

507 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

marianneboeskygallery.com

Dashiell Manley @ Marianne Boesky Gallery, NYC - Model _______

Dashiell Manley: Model _______

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

November 16, 2022 - January 7, 2023

DASHIELL MANLEY

letters I. E.W.A.T.I.F.A.B.E.T.W.S.T.U.W.W.W.K.I.B.A.I.W.L.O.M.B.W.W.L.T.T.H.I., 2022

Gouache, acrylic, graphite, chalk, pastel, newspaper, and oil stick on linen

3 panels, each: 39 x 32 inches 99.1 x 81.3 cm; 

overall: 39 x 96 inches 99.1 x 243.8 cm

Photo: Jeff McLane

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents Model _______, Los Angeles-based artist Dashiell Manley’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Comprising three extensive new triptychs alongside two individual paintings, the exhibition continues Dashiell Manley’s exploration of language, repetition, meditation, and play. 

Dashiell Manley’s practice is characterized by focused, repetitive, oftentimes labor-intensive techniques with an emphasis on systems of production as means of exploring and understanding cultural and political events. In 2016, Dashiell Manley started developing his Elegy series, which marked a shift from analytical manifestations of the daily news formerly found in his New York Times paintings to more emotional and psychological expressions on the canvas, allowing himself to open up his gestures and movements as a means of processing collective and personal emotions. 

The three triptychs in Model _______ follow a similar narrative arc that maps the artist’s ideation of his Elegy series, acting as a sort of prequel to his earlier works. The first panels are illusionistic paintings of Dashiell Manley’s handwritten notes which have served as the foundation for many of his Elegy works. Using an imaginative linguistic game that experiments with the accumulation of meaning, Manley begins by writing out the alphabet, then stops at the first word that comes to mind, and picks up the alphabet with the last letter of that word until his mind stumbles upon the next word. In one instance, the automatic exercise unravels into a political rant that Manley calls a “letter to boomers” in which he confronts the generational gap between millennials and boomers:  

ABCD EVERY ZABCDEFGHIJKLM NOW XYZ AND EFGH IJKLMNOPQRS THEN OPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGH I JKL MNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDE FEEL MNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ANGRY ZA BECAUSE FGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCD EVERYTHING HIJKLMNOPQRS THAT UV WAS TUVWXYZ… 

The form of the first panels speak to their content—Dashiell Manley inverts the employment of halftone by turning a traditionally industrial process into a handmade one so that a coherent image is visible only when seen as a whole while individual dots are—much like the singular alphabetical letters composing the notes—negligible bits of information. Perspective is thereby crucial in Manley’s work in that distance creates the illusion of a screen print and proximity reveals the artist’s hand, making the paintings essential to see in person. The process of accumulation echoes the Elegy paintings which are made up of independently insignificant marks that become significant when perspective comes into play. 

Consisting of five to eight different colors that together create a seasonal palette, the second panels are colored grids that suggest the passage of time and space. The compositions loosely reference Shoji screens used to divide and separate space, and woodblock printed calendars whose color palettes are used to distinguish seasons, motifs the artist has been experimenting with for the past fifteen years. Manley uses the middle of the triptych as both a bridge and a dividing line between coexisting opposing elements in the first and third panels.

The final panels are chalk paintings, automatic and spontaneous like Dashiell Manley’s alphabet game, that relieve the viewer from the meticulous calculatedness of the first two panels. Despite representing the present moment, the final panels harken viewers back to the past with the association between chalk and childhood, both of which are notoriously ephemeral. Together, the triptychs develop a circadian rhythm that breathes life into the work, three panels that usher the viewer from one moment to the next, leading viewers back to the beginning. 

Model _______ is an exploration of four understandings of the word: of thought, as ideals, architecture and spatial models, and as citizens in society. Each panel represents movement through time, and together the triptychs weld into mirrors of the artist’s mind at different stages of his unique artmaking process. While each panel is formally different, ranging from gouache, acrylic, chalk, pastel and oil, to newspaper and linen, they read as a single, cohesive work that illustrates material and political complexities.

“Taken together what do we have?” writes Dashiell Manley. “We have models of thought, models of time and models for a certain kind of historical experience. The past is projected and possibly altered. We play through it, struggling to get to the other side. Once we are there (here) we realize that it looks nothing like we thought it would and that our work isn’t finished.”

DASHIELL MANLEY (b.1983, Fontana, California) is of Japanese-American descent working in Los Angeles. He received his BFA from CalArts and holds an MFA from UCLA. Manley has recently presented solo exhibitions with Nino Mier Gallery, Brussels, Belgium (2021); Silverlens Gallery, Manila, Philippines (2020); Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2020); Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2018 and 2016); and Stanford University, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, CA (2016). Important group exhibitions include The Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014); Variations: Conversations In and Around Abstract Painting, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2014); and Made in L.A. 2012, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2012). Public collections include The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA; and Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA.

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY

507 W 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

marianneboeskygallery.com

Chidinma Nnoli @ Marianne Boesky Gallery, NYC - When will my feet catch fire?

Chidinma Nnoli

When will my feet catch fire?

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

September 8 – October 8, 2022

CHINDINMA NNOLI

The pains of growing, 2022

Oil and acrylic on canvas, 62 x 54 inches

© Chidinma Nnoli, courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents When will my feet catch fire?, a solo presentation of five new paintings and a sculptural work by Lagos, Nigeria-based artist CHINDINMA NNOLI. The works on view explore various modes of processing trauma and healing, and delve into the ways in which stigma, dissociation, and dominant societal narratives limit  discourses around traumatic events. For Chidinma Nnoli, the works pose the question: “When will the things I am going through be ‘big’ enough for me to speak about?”

 

Chidinma Nnoli situates seemingly silent feminine  figures within  otherworldly, sparsely populated terrains. Deploying a thick, pastel-hued impasto, Chidinma Nnoli creates landscapes that are as fleshy and tangible as they are ethereal and mysterious. The balance between the earthly and the celestial continues in Chidinma Nnoli’s debut sculptural work Is there a God beyond the sky? in which a pair of hands reach upwards from a brick-like, earthy base.

 

The exhibition’s title is derived from Lavender, lavender, when will my feet catch fire? a poem Chidinma Nnoli wrote in 2017. Since 2020, Chidinma Nnoli’s work has referenced her poetry, much of it written in late adolescence, with each series in her oeuvre referencing a separate poem.

 

This latest body of work marks a transition in Chidinma Nnoli’s compositions, away from interior spaces, familial subjects, and Romanesque architecture, and towards obliquely evocative landscapes centered on iterations of a feminine figure. In this way, the new paintings insist on the importance––the human value––of a single subject’s embodied experience and spiritual existence. Philosophically and spiritually, When will my feet catch fire? explores the emotions––liberating as well as daunting––born of claiming one’s independence.

CHINDINMA NNOLI (b. 1998, Nigeria) is a visual artist with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Benin. In 2020, she was selected for the Rele Arts Foundation Young Contemporaries exhibition. Select group exhibitions include: The Invincible Hands (2021), Shyllon Museum, Lagos, Orita Meta (2021), Rele Gallery, Los Angeles, and In Situ (2021), Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. Nnoli held her debut solo exhibition To Wander Untamed in 2020 at Rele Gallery, Lagos and had a solo presentation at the Armory Show in 2021. Her works have been featured in Vogue, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and Colossal. Chidinma Nnoli currently lives and works in Lagos.

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY

509 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.marianneboeskygallery.com

Jammie Holmes @ Marianne Boesky Gallery, NYC - What We Talking About

Jammie Holmes: What We Talking About

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

September 8 — October 8, 2022

JAMMIE HOLMES

Gold Geneva, 2022

Acrylic, oil pastels and glitter on canvas

84 x 60 inches / 213.4 x 152.4 cm

© Jammie Holmes, courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents What We Talking About, Jammie Holmes’s debut solo exhibition in New York. Holmes, a self-taught artist, creates complex allegorical works that draw on personal memory, self-portraiture, recurrent motifs, and intersocial relationships to investigate and illuminate themes of Black life across America. 

Jammie Holmes examines and repositions perceptions, experiences, and themes of Black life as they relate to both African American history and contemporary realities. Various signifiers of status and power, luxury and appropriation, acceptance and exclusion are significant themes in the artist’s work. Ornate gold frames simultaneously reference the exclusivity of art museums (Holmes did not visit one until he was an adult), and the colonial looting of gold from Africa, foregrounding the historical complexities of power and the difficult history behind much cultural presentation in institutional contexts.

When Jammie Holmes was first teaching himself to paint, he studied Gordon Parks’s photographs, Rashid Johnson’s complex abstractions, and Kevin Williams’s iconic paintings of African American culture. As Holmes says, he studied faces, and the ways artists rendered them, until the organization and structure of the features clarified in his mind. This emphasis on faces is a leitmotif of Jammies Holmes’s work: Many of the paintings include a self-portrait, where the figure of the artist himself stands in, metonymically, for the presence of Black men in U.S. society.

Parallel to Jammie Holmes’s incorporation of portraiture into his painterly vocabulary, the paintings and video on view in What We Talking About reflect his ongoing engagement with contemporary and historical artistic practices: Jammies Holmes has recently been studying works from the Dutch Golden Age and the Italian Baroque. Visually, the influence of Caravaggio is evident in the deepening black of his palettes, while Holbein’s famous memento mori is recontextualized in a representation of Black southern life. The social themes of luxury as well as bourgeois life that pervade the works that he is studying parallel the artist’s formal and narrative explorations. Underlying this exploration is an intrinsically troubling or unsettling question: How to engage with the traditions of Old Master painting when the word Master is so violently charged in the history of American racism? 

This capacity to simultaneously draw in and unsettle is exemplary of Jammie Holmes’s work. Scenes of warm, quotidian social interactions –– a game of dice, a gathering at a kitchen table –– also include figures of violent surveillance, from the allusive presence of unnamed white men, to outright confrontations with police. The theme throughout is resilience and vibrancy, a particular vision into a culture that evolves and endures.

JAMMIE HOLMES (b. 1984, Thibodaux, Louisiana; lives and works in Dallas, Texas) is a self-taught painter. Following his graduation from high school, Holmes spent more than a decade working in an oil field. He relocated to Dallas in 2016. His work has most recently been presented in exhibitions at Library Street Collective, Detroit; Deitch Projects, Los Angeles; Marianne Boesky, New York; Nassima-Landau Projects, Tel Aviv; Dallas Museum of Art; and Dallas Contemporary, among others. His work is also included in the permanent collections of the Aïshti Foundation, Brooklyn Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, ICA Miami, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, New Orleans Museum of Art, Perez Museum of Art, X Museum, and The Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art.

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY

507 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.marianneboeskygallery.com

Suzanne McClelland @ Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen - MUTE Paintings

Suzanne McClelland: MUTE

Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen

Through April 18, 2021

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents a selection of paintings from SUZANNE MCCLELLAND’s MUTE series.

Systems of communication and exchange are at the center of Suzanne McClelland’s practice. The artist explores the inherent interdependence between abstraction and representation as it appears in painting and the printed, written and spoken word. In large-scale canvases as well as collaborative books and prints, Suzanne McClelland has opened new avenues for painting, investigating its linguistic and acoustic dimensions and reflecting our broader cultural and political concerns. Built from visual as well as auditory observations of this world, her works underscore the ways in which language itself is gendered and politicized by its context and therefore naturally infused with social commentary.

Suzanne McClelland’s MUTE paintings disassemble language. The series comprises 26 paintings, one for each letter of the Latin alphabet. Rather than representing the letters as we see them, each painting in its own way mutes the elemental components of language, so much so that these letters dissolve or melt into the unutterable. McClelland liberates language from an existential bind: severing symbols from their function, she prevents their vocalization and articulation. They exist now as solitary devices, allowing them to return to their potentiality. The MUTE series deconstructs symbols and structures into abstractions that manifest an alternate alphabet, which in turn demands a new context to acquire legible meaning. The result is an expression of language that cannot be spoken or read, yet demands to be seen, felt, and understood as present.

In the process of painting this work, Suzanne McClelland engages with notions of control and doubt. The artist seizes on intuition as well as chance as powerful means of responding to systems of describing and naming, quantifying and predicting, categorizing and identifying. While their verticality is suggestive of portraiture, the abstracted compositions are formed by viscous spills: records of the pouring, staining, and hardening of pigments. The surfaces of these paintings – simultaneously sparkly, dusty, and inky – are encrusted with frozen sprays of glitter, charcoal, and dry pigments.

SUZANNE MCCLELLAND (b. Jacksonville, FL) has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad since the early 1990s. The artist has had solo presentations at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art (Philip Morris), the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, and the Orlando Museum of Art, among others. Suzanne McClelland participated in the 1993 and 2014 Whitney Biennials and her work has been presented in group exhibitions, such as those at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. The artist has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, and a Nancy Graves Foundation Grant; and she has participated in international residencies, including most recently the Troedsson Villa Residency in Nikko, Japan and the Skowhegan School. Her work is held in numerous public collections including that of the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. The artist will have her first solo exhibition with Marianne Boesky Gallery in 2021. Suzanne McClelland lives and works between New York and the tip of Long Island, NY.

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY

100 South Spring Street, Aspen, CO 81611

marianneboeskygallery.com

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Jay Heikes @ Marianne Boesky Gallery, NYC - Echo In Color

Jay Heikes: Echo In Color 

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York 

February 13 – March 13, 2021 

JAY HEIKES

Second Wave, 2020

Oil on stained canvas

75 x 112 in

Courtesy of the artist and 

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents Echo in Color, JAY HEIKES’ fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. With his show, Jay Heikes continues his exploration of alchemical processes and the fleeting sense of connection that can be found when turning to nature and the universe. The exhibition features a selection of new and recent paintings from the artist’s Mother Sky series and Minor Planets sculptures. 

Jay Heikes is regarded for his varied practice, wherein he combines and transforms an array of media and materials, including recent works that center around a preoccupation with the philosophical tradition of alchemy. The title of the exhibition, Echo in Color, references the perceptual phenomena of synesthesia, a blending of the senses in which the stimulation of one modality produces sensation in another. The assembled works in the exhibition evoke a similar awareness, crossing the senses in ways that are not understood through everyday language. Jay Heikes’ preoccupation with these concepts speaks to his deep considerations of the role that art serves in culture. During a time of economic, social, and environmental turbulence, the artist creates a meditative response to this uncertainty.

“The sheer vastness of a wide-open space is imbued with feelings of emptiness – only in a cave or canyon can the gesture of a scream be returned,” said Jay Heikes. “Through the last four years of alienation and the recent time collectively spent in isolation, I began to see the idea that in retreating to an imagined vastness, such as through a painting of the sky, the works become representations that keep us grounded and avoid the total void of the sublime.”

In particular, Jay Heikes is interested in the juxtaposition of the painting and sculpture presented within Echo in Color. In his Mother Sky works, the artist stains the canvas using a combination of vinegar, salt, and powdered pigment. As they react, these substances generate unpredictable hues, ranging from rust, indigo, copper, and fluorescent greens. Screen printed and dabbed on the canvases are voluminous shapes of clouds and smoke, composed from distortions of found and photographed images. The euphoria in the otherworldly and meditative vistas simultaneously cause an underlying unease through the eerie and acidic tones of the tempestuous, burning skies that layer the canvas. The imagined atmospheres, at first an escapist opportunity for the viewer, reflect an inability to create complete control.

Presented alongside the paintings, Jay Heikes features Minor Planets sculptures. This series of sculptures has been crafted from a range of materials, including concrete, pyrite, salt, slag, asphaltum, quartz, rope, and dust collected from the artist’s studio in the forms of modeled orbs and disks – timeless and ancient in appearance. The latest iteration of the Minor Planets on view in Echo in Color has transitioned to center on the material of concrete, giving the sculptures weight and autonomy in both their scale and composition. In this way, the juxtaposition of turning to the sky as a means of transcendence alongside the grounding materiality of the sculptures offers refuge in turbulent times. Yet even the Minor Planets serve as a testimony to the unpredictability of the artist’s chosen mediums and form, as the metals and complementary materials in the sculptures oxidize and mutate over time. In his 2019 text on this body of works, “I Wavereth,” Jay Heikes notes, “At times it feels like I am playing God with these landscapes, imagining an atmosphere from above that has finally freed itself of all human trivialities. I was supposed to pick up the mantle of activism and help answer the people’s cries but instead I became more distant, even hidden, while creating these representational moods of the soul.”

On the occasion of this exhibition, the artist’s first comprehensive monograph was published in cooperation with Gregory Miller & Co. and distributed by Distributed Art Publishers and features text by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Jenelle Porter, Philippe Vergne, and an interview between Jay Heikes and Hamza Walker.

Yale graduate and Minneapolis-based artist JAY HEIKES (b. 1975) is known for his heterogeneous practice, which mixes and reinterprets a kaleidoscopic array of media—activating stories, puns, and irony in a cyclical meditation. His most recent body of work employs his preoccupation with the philosophical tradition of alchemy. Themes of evolution and regeneration, stasis and corrosion take form in his artistic actions, recharging Heikes' previous narrative pursuits and reaffirming the notion that mutation and change are essential to the creative process.

Following his first solo presentation at Artists Space, New York in 2003, Jay Heikes participated in a number of group exhibitions at venues such as the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2003) and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2002 and 2005). In 2006, Jay Heikes was included in the Whitney Biennial: Day for Night,curated by Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne. Since then, Heikes has been the subject of numerous domestic and international exhibitions, including shows at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2007); the Aspen Art Museum (2012); Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam (2015); Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago (2015); Federica Schiavo Gallery, Rome (2019); and Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE (2019).

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY

507 West 24 Street, New York, NY

marianneboeskygallery.com

Anthony Pearson @ Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen

Anthony Pearson
Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen
June 28 - July 20, 2019

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents Los Angeles-based artist ANTHONY PEARSON’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, at its location in Aspen, Colorado. The exhibition features works from Anthony Pearson’s Embedments, Etched Plasters, and Tablets series, each of which capture his sensitivity to the experience of light, texture, and color. Pearson’s work is powerful in its quietude, revealing layers of complexity as one explores the surface, patterning, and material closely and from a range of perspectives and environments. Pearson’s work feels particularly at home in Aspen, where set against the rugged landscape and open expanses, his evocations of light and materiality are further amplified and affecting. 

The exhibition coincides with the release of the Anthony Pearson’s new monograph, featuring a substantive essay on the artist’s vision and approach, written by Alex Klein, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia’s Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber Curator, as well as a wide selection of images highlighting the range of his practice.

Anthony Pearson’s practice is fueled by a longstanding engagement with the dichotomies of lightness and darkness—first sparked by his early work as a photographer. His explorations manifest through a spectrum of processes with materials such as clay, bronze, and gypsum cement, which he develops methodically and contemplatively through time to yield a wide range of visual effects. His innate ability to capture the sensation of light emanating from deep within his materials positions him within the trajectory of California’s Light and Space Movement, which has concerned itself with the effects of form and light on viewer perception and experience.

Further underlying Anthony Pearson’s practice is an experimentation with physicality, which results in works that behave in instances as both sculpture and painting as well as both object and image. This interplay between formal vocabularies is particularly felt as one experiences and considers the progression of his distinct series, starting with the Tablets, which Anthony Pearson produced between 2010 and 2014. Abstract sculptural works that are affixed to the wall, the Tablets appear as soft organic forms folding onto themselves or as small bundles of volumetric cylinders. Handcrafted in clay, cast in bronze, and coated with cobalt and silver nitrate patina, the Tablets actively respond to their environment, absorbing and reflecting the light within the space. While their physicality positions them clearly within the trajectory of sculpture, their placement on the wall retains some suggestion of the experience of painting.

Anthony Pearson’s development of the Tablets series gave way to an extensive exploration of the formal possibilities of hydrocal, a gypsum cement, which continues to today. To create the Etched Plasters—the second of his hydrocal series—Anthony Pearson pours the material, mixed with colored pigment, into a frame and then uses a carbide knife and custom-made wood guides to make incisions into the surface. The finished pieces are distinguished by the intricate interplay of line and density, as the subtle and precise cuts stand in dynamic contrast to the solidity of the hyrocal. Here, Anthony Pearson’s work on the surface replicates the expression of paint on canvas or pencil on paper, while the material itself provides the dimensionality of sculpture—fusing the two media into a new kind of object. The incisions, which actively read as line drawings, are executed in rich, arabesque-ing patterns that evoke vibrant energy and fluid movement. As the mica-based pigments in the hydrocal catch the light, this sensation is heightened, and the lines take on the quality of rays of light or wisps of sand flowing through one’s fingers.                                                   

With his Embedments series, Anthony Pearson more fully embraces the language of free-form gesture, most often associated with painting. In this most recent series, Pearson pours the differently colored hydrocal in layers, into a mold backed by a stretched canvas. In instances, Pearson shifts the mold, while in others he allows the cement to settle organically. This action results in the creation of rich color fields that weave together to suggest abstract landscapes. In this way, the painterly gesture is inextricably tied to the physicality of the work itself, which is also emphasized by the textural impressions and traces of fiber filament left on the surface from the stretched canvas that is removed upon the material’s hardening. These actions shift Anthony Pearson’s work more directly into the space between object and image, with the formal qualities of painting and sculpture coalescing into a new whole. At the same time, these newest works retain their sense of light, as they allude to the setting sun and the desert and ocean views of California.

Anthony Pearson (b. 1969, Los Angeles) is well-known for his highly formalized and sensitive use of both process and materials. By experimenting with the formal limits of photography, where his practice originated, he found a visual vocabulary rooted in abstraction that explores the balances between positive and negative, lightness and darkness. He continues to investigate these dichotomies across a range of media. Anthony Pearson has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY (2018), David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2017), the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2012), and Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, MN (2008), among numerous others. Group exhibitions include Tantric drawings: sites of transformation, Drawing Room, London, UK, and Peninsula Arts, Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK (2016-17); L.A. Exuberance: New Gifts by Artists, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2016-17); The Sun Placed in the Abyss, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH (2016); Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Paintings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2014); second nature: abstract photography then and now, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA (2012); and The Anxiety of Photography, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO, and Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin, TX (2011). Anthony Pearson lives and works in Los Angeles.

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY - ASPEN
100 South Spring Street, Aspen, CO 81611
www.marianneboeskygallery.com

Frank Stella @ Marianne Boesky Gallery, NYC

Frank Stella: Recent Work
Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
April 25 - June 22, 2019

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents an exhibition of recent sculptures by renowned artist FRANK STELLA. Ranging from the monumental to the intimately-scaled, the featured sculptures capture Frank Stella’s ongoing exploration of the spatial relationships between abstract and geometric forms and the ways in which they behave in and engage with physical space. In these newest works, Stella combines interlocking grids with more fluid and organic lines, creating a dynamic interplay between minimalist and gestural visual vocabularies. Frank Stella: Recent Work will be on view across both of the gallery’s Chelsea locations at 509 and 507 W. 24th Street.

Frank Stella’s decades-long career is synonymous with artistic innovation. From his early Black Paintings, which dramatically shifted the dialogues on abstract art, to his use of both the formal qualities of painting and sculpture to produce his Polish Village series in the 1970s, and through to his use of computer modeling and 3D printing, from the 1990s and into the present, Stella has continued to push compositional boundaries. His experimentation with and use of line, color, and form have resulted in strikingly different effects—on the canvas and in three dimensions. Stella’s boundless vision has resulted in a new body of work that freshly engages the grid as well as the star and ribbon motifs that have appeared throughout his oeuvre.

In some works, like Atalanta and Hippomenes (2017), the rigid structure of the grid is broken by the application of large, billowing white forms that seem to weave and expand across the vertical and horizontal planes. Inspired by the ethereal quality of smoke rings—which have long captivated Stella— the abstract form appears weightless despite its grand scale. This sensation is further accentuated by the way the grid is affixed to the wall, giving it a contrasting feel of solidity. In others, such as Leeuwarden II (2017), the fiberglass grid is suspended within a metal frame, with brightly-colored, almost neon, ribbons dramatically swooping in and out of it, imbuing the work with a vivid sense of motion. The juxtaposition of materials, from colored fiberglass to bare steel to PU-foam, adds further texture and depth to the sculptures and contributes to the shifting experience of the work as one changes position and perspective.

The star, which first entered Frank Stella’s visual lexicon in the early 1960s with his Dartmouth Paintings and became increasingly prominent in his work in the 2000s, continues to serve as an important source of inspiration and point of departure. In Jasper's Split Star (2017), Stella produces the form in monumental scale—the sculpture measuring approximately 18 by 20 by 18 feet. The star’s sides, which are in parts gridded, push in and outward, creating an unexpectedly sinuous form and disrupting our expectations of the rectilinear lines of the grid. In sculptures like Nessus and Dejanira (2017), the star becomes part of a larger constellation of grids and organic forms. Named for figures in Greek mythology, the work is a kind of microcosm of the conceptual inquiries and formal themes that have driven Frank Stella’s practice since the late 1950s.

Born in Malden, Massachusetts and based in New York City, FRANK STELLA (b. 1936) has produced an extraordinary body of work over the past six decades. Since his first solo gallery exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1960, Frank Stella has exhibited widely throughout the U.S. and abroad. Early in his career, his work was included in a number of significant exhibitions that defined the art in the postwar era, including Sixteen Americans (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959), Geometric Abstraction (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1962) The Shaped Canvas (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1964-65), Systemic Painting (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1966), Documenta 4 (1968), and Structure of Color (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1971). In 2017, NSU Art Museum, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, organized Frank Stella: Experiment and Change, an exhibition that featured 300 works from across Stella’s 60-year career. His work is held in more than 50 public collections, including in the holdings of some of the most preeminent museums in the U.S. Stella’s most recent work uses digital modeling to explore how subtle changes in scale, texture, color, and material can affect our perception and experience of an object.

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY
509 and 507 W. 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
www.marianneboeskygallery.com

Maria Lai @ Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen, Colorado - Invito a Tavola

Maria Lai: Invito a Tavola 
Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen, Colorado
February 23 - April 8, 2018

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents Invito a Tavola, an exhibition dedicated to the work of artist MARIA LAI (1919–2013). The exhibition highlights Lai’s career-long commitment to community, from her early drawings depicting the women of her hometown in Sardinia to a major late-career installation that invokes ideas of communion and for which the exhibition is titled. Invito a Tavola marks Maria Lai’s first solo exhibition in the U.S. since 1956, and provides an intimate portrait of the late artist through one of the most enduring themes from her illustrious sixty-year practice. The exhibition is the first organized by the gallery since it commenced representation of the artist’s archive in November 2017.

The exhibition is anchored by the installation Invito a Tavola (The Invitation Table), which is comprised of a large-scale table, measuring approximately nine feet in length and three feet in width, set with terracotta-cast breads and books. The work, created in 2004, expresses Lai’s deeply felt belief that art provides essential nourishment for the soul, and at the same time suggests the importance of breaking bread as a means of binding communities together and healing discord. The installation also underscores Lai’s experimentation, play, and mastery of materials, which can also be seen in her extensive work with textiles. Invito a Tavola has not previously been displayed in the U.S., and is one of only two such installations produced by the artist. The second is on display in Lai’s birthplace, Ulassai, at the Stazione Dell’Arte, a museum dedicated to Maria Lai’s work.

The exhibition also features a selection of Maria Lai’s early drawings, which depict the women of Ulassai in their daily routines. Inspired by the poetry and teachings of her close friend and mentor Salvatore Cambosu, and concerned in particular with the female voice, Lai developed a rhythmic visual language that interpreted the domestic and social lives of these women. Her drawings and watercolors, produced between 1958 and 1965, gave way to a deep and long-lasting engagement with the loom and textiles—one that would shift her focus from realistic representation to an interrogation of gesture and the collective experience. Indeed, the large-scale tapestry included in Invito a Tavola includes the line, “Every work of art must become bread to be shared at a common table.”

Perhaps even more than her object-based practice, performance and community-activated engagement were at the core of Maria Lai’s career. Her most famous of these works is Legarsi alla Montagne (To Bind to the Mountain), which she created in 1981 as a “monument to the living” in response to a request to make a war memorial in Ulassai. In this social action, inspired by a local legend, neighbors tied blue fabric together, creating a single ribbon that wove around homes and other structures until it encircled a peak that overlooked the town. The performative work served to physically and metaphorically bind the town, mountain, and people, establishing a sense of community and bringing the individual into a bigger whole. This work led to the development of other social actions initiated by Maria Lai in cities across Italy and Europe.

MARIA LAI was born in Ulassai, Sardinia in 1919. Though her early artistic endeavors took her to Rome and Venice, she was often drawn back to the customs and histories of the island, and in particular to the lives and voices of the women who lived there. Over the course of her illustrious sixty-year career, her work was shown extensively in solo exhibitions throughout Italy and Europe, and she was invited to participate in group shows across the globe, including at the Venice Biennale of 1978. In addition to her visual and social arts practice, which encompassed works on paper, sculpture, textiles, performances, and community actions, Maria Lai collaborated with several theater companies, including Fueddu and Gestu. She received a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in 1943, and in 2004, she was awarded an honorary degree in Literature from the University of Cagliari. Following her death in 2013 in Cardedu, institutions in the towns of Cagilari, Nuoro, and Ulassai came together to present a major, joint retrospective of Maria Lai’s work. Most recently, her work was included in documenta14 in Athens and the Venice Biennale, both in 2017, and in March of 2018, the Uffizi Gallery Museum in Florence, Italy will open a retrospective of her practice.

BOESKY WEST
100 South Spring Street, Aspen, CO 81611
www.marianneboeskygallery.com

Serge Alain Nitegeka @ Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

Serge Alain Nitegeka: Personal Effects in BLACK
Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
January 11 – February 24, 2018

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents Personal Effects in BLACK, Johannesburg-based artist SERGE ALAIN NITEGEKA’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition features a new body of work, created in 2017, that continues Serge Alain Nitegeka’s examination of color, form, and space. Personal Effects in BLACK is presented across both the gallery’s Chelsea locations, connecting them with a site-specific installation in one of the interior corridors.

The paintings featured in Serge Alain Nitegeka’s exhibition highlight the artist’s ongoing engagement with the ways in which manipulations of line, color and volume affect our experience and understanding of space. This new body of work can be traced to Serge Alain Nitegeka’s earlier large-scale, site-specific installations, which he began in 2008 and were composed of variously scaled painted and unpainted wood panels. These sculptural works reconfigured the spaces in which they appeared, and choreographed the viewer’s path and movement through them, creating a directed, and at times forced, encounter with the environment.

These immersive installations gave way to a series of paintings that mimicked the physical experiences in two-dimensional space. The use of unprimed plywood surfaces, bisected by bold swaths of color creates a dynamic interplay between depth and flatness, inviting the viewer to step into the frame only to then block the seeming point of entry. With his new paintings, Nitegeka moves further into abstraction, focusing in particular on the effect that the color black has on both the visual and emotional perceptions of his work.

The geometric compositions arise spontaneously, with Serge Alain Nitegeka shaping the lines, colors, and geometric volumes organically on the wood panels. Matte and glossy blacks appear in wide strokes and in fine, delicate lines across crisp whites, warm yellows, and cool blues, creating a complex web of layers that seem to reach further and further beyond the surface field. Perceptions of depth are further complicated by the incorporation of additional wood panels and forms, producing a physical depth in some works that is only perceived in others. The flow between the real and imagined is further heightened by the installation in the gallery’s corridor, which references the site-specific works that first yielded these investigations.

At the same time, Serge Alain Nitegeka’s incisive use of black evokes a psychological depth. Where his earlier installations suggested the conditions of forced migration, which the artist himself experienced, his current engagement with black relates to emotions of solitude, emptiness, and the sensation of being weighed down. Of his work with black, Serge Alain Nitegeka said: “Black is brute darkness. An intangible destructive mass that is dense and viscous, weighing me down deep into silence. It puts me into a state of overwhelming appreciation and meditation—a space of unknown emptiness and depth. There is an uninterrupted silence, and nothing is familiar. It is there as I drift in and out of sleep, where I wander blindly, arms stretched outwards trying to clutch onto something. I move about in a majestic solitude of colors and forms. My mind blank and hands busy. The once straight lines bend evenly into curves as I learn to surrender.”

In considering the work outside of himself, he also noted, “I know that no one is exempt from the heaviness of the unknown. At the end of the day, while we close our eyes asleep in the black, the heaviness catches up. No one is spared. Black is ever constant.”  

SERGE ALAIN NITEGEKA’s practice comprises abstract painting, sculpture, large-scale installation, and figurative drawing, repurposing modernist preoccupations with line and the picture plane to address larger cultural and political issues. Nitegeka’s work has been shown throughout South Africa, Senegal, Europe, and the United States. His first solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, Morphings in BLACK, opened in November 2014 at the gallery’s Lower East Side location. In 2015, Nitegeka’s work appeared in the South African Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, as well as at the Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Gothenburg, Sweden. In spring 2015, he presented his largest site- specific installation to date, Structural Response II, at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA. In 2016, Nitegeka presented his second solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, titled Colour & Form in BLACK. In 2017, his work was included in numerous group exhibitions, including Solidary and Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection which will travel to institutions such as the Baltimore Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive at University of California, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Nitegeka (b. 1983, Burundi) currently lives and works in Johannesburg.

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY
509 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
www.marianneboeskygallery.com

Dwelling, Marianne Boesky Gallery, NYC

dwelling 

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York 

Through March 26, 2011 

DWELLING, the fourth exhibition in the Marianne Boesky gallery’s uptown location, uses the former private residence as both backdrop and point of departure. Featuring works that incorporate elements of everyday items into their various forms, both explicit and intimated, the ideas of home and domestic spaces are (re)interpreted within this object-like focus. The works, like the emptied rooms they inhabit and the corners they haunt, often become vehicles for remembrance and association distinctive to inner, personal arenas.

The concept of domestic space suggests an underlying dichotomy between the private sphere and the performative element of selecting objects with which to surround oneself. Where the private is made public, the home invites a certain level of voyeurism as each room is filled. A dual sense of recognition and discomfort can be felt in viewing the spaces of others. Thus within the word ‘dwelling’ itself, the distinct nostalgia implicit to that of ‘home,’ is not so plainly felt. One dwells at someone else’s home. One dwells over all the things and the monuments to those things that make it theirs and not one’s own. 

While the domestic at times may be synonymous with the familiar and quotidian, here no such reliably knowable presence exists. The works included in the exhibition subvert the everyday and remain ultimately enigmatic despite their borrowing from the commonplace of our modern lives. They range from the vaguely utilitarian (furniture), to the more in-operational and artificial; some pieces are assembled with an unraveling material rawness while others with an uneasy slickness in the meticulous fidelity to re-production. The seemingly oblique nature of what should be readily identifiable veers in a multitude of directions – the absurd and the grave, the sentimental, the unsettling and disorienting, the sexual and psychological, the political and biographical. The result is an alienation and disquiet of walking through a reality that is not quite one’s own. A sense of distance becomes tangible where even the most banal forms can suddenly take on a foreign otherness. Inevitably one attempts to find oneself within the seemingly ordinary aspects of these works, and yet they are imbued with an inescapable awkwardness.

It is the anxiety of realizing that the objects, resemblance to the familiar aside, are not ‘real’ objects for utilization in the domestic realm.

In playing upon objects that fail to function, or exist as simulacra in place of the real, the works on view become shells, much as the private interior spaces become the shells, the very vessels and voids of memory. A sense of passing becomes evident—of time, of the transition from room to room, of the associations that trail behind. Traces of former selves, of childhood, of lingering vestiges of the past intertwine all that has gone before, meanwhile coloring the present.

ARTISTS

David Baskin 

Cosima von Bonin 

Daniel Buren 

Tom Burr 

Pier Paolo Calzolari 

Maurizio Cattelan 

Peter Coffin 

Andy Coolquitt 

Urs Fischer 

Peter Fischli David Weiss 

Katharina Fritsch 

Robert Gober 

Guyton \ Walker 

Mona Hatoum 

Paula Hayes 

Jay Heikes 

Martin Honert 

Jessica Jackson Hutchins 

Rashid Johnson 

Mike Kelley 

Friedrich Kunath 

Shio Kusaka 

Jim Lambie 

Sarah Lucas 

Donald Moffett 

Jorge Pardo 

Claudio Parmiggiani 

Salvatore Scarpitta 

Gerda Scheepers 

Gregor Schneider 

Andreas Schulze 

Lucy Skaer 

Franz West 

Rachel Whiteread 

Claudia Wieser 

Jonas Wood 

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY 

118 East 64th Street 

between Lexington and Park Avenues 

NEW YORK, NY

www.marianneboeskygallery.com

02-03 | 03-26-2011

Yuichi Higashionna, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

Exhibition : Yuichi Higashionna

Fluorescent

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

Through February 12, 2011

An exhibition of new work by YUICHI HIGASHIONNA is on view at the Marianne Boesky Gallery. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York, following a project room show in 2008.

YUICHI HIGASHIONNA’s installations are comprised of fluorescent light sculptures, paintings, and reverberating stripes inspired by interior design of 1970s Japan, and fanshii culture – that which is odd, cute, diminutive, and frequently tacky. The artist is particularly interested in exploring the excess, ostentation and domestic kitsch that developed out of Japan’s admiration and desire for Western cultural appropriation following the war. As a result, his works are a tribute to these themes, and may be seen in part as a satirical commentary on Japanese aesthetics, or as a symbol for the re-building and revitalization of post-Hiroshima Japan. Higashionna pursues installations that are familiar in their materials and individual components, yet presents them in a base, halting manner.

In the main gallery, YUICHI HIGASHIONNA combines his fluorescent sculptures along with paintings inspired by street graffiti, Op art, and fanshii. These paintings are installed atop textured wallpaper that looks as though the wall itself is peeling away. Each work is illuminated from below by a tubular fluorescent bulb that provides a pervasive light. These disparate elements, while familiar, are here stylized and haunting in their amalgamations.

Juxtaposed with the paintings are the artist’s sculptural constructions composed of everyday Japanese fluorescent lights. Simple in structure and utilitarian in nature, YUICHI HIGASHIONNA uses circular bulbs, common to private residences, as the foundation for a large-scale chandelier and a vertical chain of lights mounted on the wall. The resulting sculptures are a paradox of elegant light forms and dangling exposed electrical wires. This “un-finished” presentation with its alien glow further highlights the strange that exists within the quotidian.

Other elements in the show – the black striped walls, the elastic lattice wall piece, the crude mobiles of Venetian black glass, and the sculptures constructed of colorful acrylic-framed mirrors – explore the borders and boundaries created between interior and exterior, contributing to a sense of the simultaneously familiar and the uncanny that pervades Higashionna’s practice.

YUICHI HIGASHIONNA lives and works in Tokyo. In 2010, he was included in the exhibition The New Décor at the Hayward Gallery in London and had solo shows at the Berengo Akatsu Collection, Japan, Nadiff Gallery 2F, Japan, and Gallery EXIT in Hong Kong. His work was featured at The Sculpture Garden Museum VANGEI MUSEO in 2009, a solo exhibition at Yumiko Chiba Associates in 2008, and at Comme des Garçons’ flagship store in 2006.

2011 EXHIBITIONS at the Marianne Boesky Gallery

DWELLING, group show, February 3 - March 26, 2011 in the gallery’s uptown location: 118 East 64th Street - New York

SUE DE BEER, Depiction of a Star Obscured by Another Figure, February 18 - March 19, 2011 (509 W 24 S)

HANNAH VAN BART, March 31 - April 30, 2011 (509 W 24 S)

PROJECT SPACE: JESSE CHAPMAN AND DAVID SCANAVINO, March 31 - April 23, 2011 (509 W 24 S)

SALVATORE SCARPITTA, May 6 - June 11, 2011 (509 W 24 S)

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY

509 West 24th Street

between 10th and 11th Avenues

NEW YORK, NY 10011 - USA

www.marianneboeskygallery.com

Takashi Murakami, Marianne Boesky Gallery, NYC

Takashi Murakami

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

April 11 - May 10, 2003

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents a new exhibition of works by Takashi Murakami.

Over the last five years, Takashi Murakami has emerged as the leading force in the encouragement, articulation and development of an only recently acknowledged contemporary Japanese art culture. As an artist, theorist, and curator, he has put forward an elaborately conceived view combining a thorough understanding of western modernism, traditional Japanese art history, and contemporary consumer culture.

This spring, Takashi Murakami unveils a new collaboration with Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs. He was invited to collaborate with the designer on a new line of handbags and merchandise, even going so far as to redesign and update their logo. The product launch in Louis Vuitton stores has already begun.

At the same time, for his third solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, Takashi Murakami collaborates using his own designs and characters created for Louis Vuitton in another context. The paintings and sculptures will display the elaborate and colorful motifs emblazoned on these commercial products. The surfaces and attention to detail are signature to Murakami’s style of art making. Other than the content, these paintings still contain the elements of Murakami’s true painting—superflat, minimalism, abstraction, and representation. By boldly agreeing to do this project, Murakami moves beyond the art of merely appropriating pop culture imagery, to an all too questionable realm of art as commerce. As Murakami continually emphasizes, the boundaries between commercial works and fine art is malleable, and the patterns and decorations of both can be illuminating.

Takashi Murakami’s aesthetic agenda encompasses myriad activities. Along with the many exhibitions of his artwork (including solo exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, Serpentine Gallery in London, Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Boston Museum of Fine Art), he has curated several important exhibitions, such as “SUPERFLAT” and “Coloriage”, which champion a specifically Japan-centric view of modern and contemporary visual culture. Murakami also has organized his own art festivals in Japan (called “Geisai”), and he continues to design and market consumer goods—t-shirts, watches, mousepads, postcards, etc.—disseminating his signature images to an increasingly wider cultural spectrum.

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY

509 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.marianneboeskygallery.com