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, 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

Artist N. Dash @ Lévy Gorvy Dayan, London

N. Dash

Lévy Gorvy Dayan, London

April 25 – June 15, 2024

N. Dash 

GP_24, 2024 

Earth, acrylic, cardboard corners, graphite, 

hardware, string, and jute, 

84 × 64½ inches (213.4 × 163.8 cm)

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist N. Dash, inaugurating the gallery’s new location in London’s Mayfair district. The artist’s debut exhibition with the gallery features multi-panel paintings that explore ecologies of resonance among disparate materials. N. Dash’s practice is grounded in and distinguished by bringing together organic substances, manufactured readymade objects, and images resulting from embodied processes. The tactile surfaces of these restrained, luminous works emphasize haptic experience, drawing attention to the subtle yet seismic effects of touch.

N. Dash 

H_24, 2024 

Earth, oil, silkscreen ink, and jute 

66½ × 48 inches (168.9 × 121.9 cm)

N. Dash’s paintings draw on the building blocks of our natural and constructed worlds, including earth and water, jute and cotton, graphite and oil, along with oft-overlooked fabricated items such as architectural insulation and factory-produced cardboard. Across the works in the exhibition, these elements are recombined to elevate the structural, textural, and energetic synergies and tensions among them. A work whose hue resembles patinated copper might comprise Styrofoam insulation, or an image might be silkscreened onto a panel on which earth has been troweled and dried into a cracked, furrowed plane. There are slippages among the many materials, processes, and signifiers that are evoked in these paintings—each held together by careful, spare decisions.

At the core of N. Dash’s work is a daily ritual wherein the artist rubs a small piece of white cotton between finger and thumb until the machine-loomed fibers fray and lose their gridded structure, decomposing into an abject tangle. For the artist, the fabric serves as a recording device on which actions are imprinted, energy is captured, and immaterial forces are stored. The resulting sculptures are colored by a patina of dirt and oils, transformed by the spontaneous movement of the artist’s body. The grid, one of modernism’s paradigmatic forms, is undone again and again in the artist’s hand—by the body, the weather, and the environment. The artist photographs iterations of these sculptures and silkscreens the images onto panels prepared with earth, such that the images undulate according to the earth’s topography. In addition, planes of color are silkscreened, leaving fields of rosette patterns that result from the halftone printing process.

The works’ beveled edges reveal their earthen substrates, allowing them to breathe. In these carved-out margins, the layers of earth, gesso, and jute are rendered visible, exposing the quasi-geologic structure of each panel. This strategy appears differently in a series of works in which strings are embedded in, or excavated from, the earthen grounds, the latter creating fine trenches of negative space, where the materiality of the work is exposed and raw. Ecological concerns course through these paintings with references to human and nonhuman interconnection and intervention. They examine, on an intimate scale, the impact of touch on natural resources, and reckon with the ways in which synthetic materials contain, shape, and merge with the environment. Here, Photoshop can imitate a field of flowers with an algorithmic printing pattern, but a rosette is still a field of ones and zeros. These questions of mimesis, artificiality, and exploitation are at play in these paintings, but subtly so. Through the works on view, nature and byproducts of manufacture are counterposed on vertical stages of earth, uplifting this most fundamental material and source.

LÉVY GORVY DAYAN 

35 Dover Street, London 

www.levygorvydayan.com

Andy Robert @ Michael Werner Gallery, London - Ti Zwazo Clarendon: You Can Go Home Again; You Just Can’t Stay

Andy Robert

Ti Zwazo Clarendon: You Can Go Home Again; You Just Can’t Stay

Michael Werner Gallery, London

16 September - 4 November 2022

Michael Werner Gallery, London presents Ti Zwazo Clarendon: You Can Go Home Again; You Just Can’t Stay, the first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom of works by Haitian-American artist ANDY ROBERT.

Through accumulation, stacking, shifts in perspective and scale, rhythm and repetition, Andy Robert experiments with color, line, and grids, arriving at a mosaic-like approach that negotiates abstraction with figuration, the lyrical alongside the concrete. As with folklore, science fiction, autobiography, and concepts related to time, time travel, and cinema, Robert interrogates and mines the oral, challenging a static understanding of history. The artist describes his method, “in questioning how an image comes into the world, and into being, I want to own up, to admit at any point, a painting, an image can change direction and isn’t fixed.” Robert finds “at times, the act of picking apart the production distracts and is not necessarily the whole conversation for me, since there is a desire to have the viewer take in the full picture.”

Collective and private experiences roam, and the stuff of culture, our horizon folds and acts as a starting point for thinking and questioning. In speaking to and addressing the present, history and memory is likened to the push and pull of sampling and song, as it forms into something new. In the words of Andy Robert, “as photography is to surveillance, as policing is to the archive, as music is to both listen and dance, as dance is to night, a ritual dubbed of sunrise and sunset, the martial arts, as one thing flows into the next,” the artist “both breaks down, builds on, builds up, interprets, and reinterprets” painting.

Andy Robert elaborates further: “although a painting may raise questions, it isn’t always necessary to rush and quickly snuff it out but may instead call the viewer to pause and ponder. In such an intense and fast paced world, the call to wonder and myth today, and to spend time and roam, it may not be necessarily wise to reveal your cards so quickly. Ti Zwazo the Marvelous today is on the fly; diasporic and on the move, a hustle just past 3rd, it is a chase, Ti Ca you have to catch it.”

ANDY ROBERT (b. 1984, Les Cayes, Haiti) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles. Robert has been included in significant group exhibitions at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; and The Studio Museum in Harlem. His work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway; The University of Chicago Booth School of Business; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and The Studio Museum in Harlem. This year, the artist participates in the Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA.

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-colour catalogue. 

MICHAEL WERNER GALLERY

22 Upper Brook Street, London W1K 7PZ

www.michaelwerner.com

_____________

Rose English @ Richard Saltoun Gallery, London

Rose ENGLISH: Form, Feminisms, Femininities
Richard Saltoun Gallery, London
Through 13 April 2019

'Form, Feminisms, Femininities' is Rose ENGLISH's first solo exhibition with Richard Saltoun Gallery. The exhibition shines light on two moments from the early stages of the artist's career, beginning with her experimentation with emergent processes and materials as a young artist in the early 1970s and culminating with a focus on her 1983 performance Plato's Chair, a work that marked an important turning point in Rose English's extensive interdisciplinary practice. The exhibition presents for the first time several early works in photography, ceramics, collage and performance to camera, providing a unique opportunity to more fully engage with different aspects of the artist’s work.

The 1970s was an era of political and social upheaval, and it was within this cultural milieu that Rose English first emerged as an artist. She has developed a unique artistic vocabulary that has consistently analysed and commentated on aesthetics, politics, philosophy and form, including aspects of Rose British pop culture, from show girls and show horses to magic acts and pantomime. Rose English's work challenges conventional understandings of both feminism and femininity through the combination of forms with which she engages, including theatre, circus, poetry and fine art, producing acclaimed performances but also works in other media such as film and installation.

Artistically reflexive and self-reflexive, the artist's work has paid close attention to the conventions and histories of these forms. This is evident in early work such as Untitled (Miss O'Murphy) (1969), a collage that incorporates a cut-out of the floating body of Boucher's eponymous painting (1752). For the young Rose English, the sensual exuberance of the baroque is an important site of feminist investigation, as she tenderly sends up its extravagant constraints. The two collage series, Baroque Harriet and Baroque Ruby, reflect the recumbency and horizontality of Boucher's Miss O'Murphy, humorously incorporating Rose English’s own photographs of 20th Century women into rococo settings.

A set of vintage performance to camera photographs entitled Bed in Field (1971), document an early conceptual and performance piece with the artist and her then partner tucked up and sleeping under the wide undulating duvet of a ploughed field. Photographs and ceramics made for and deriving from another early performance, A Divertissement (1973), are also elements of this exhibition and offer insights into the origins of making things that lies at the root of the artist's oeuvre.

The final room of the gallery is given over to one of Rose English's most important early monologue performances, Plato's Chair (1983) and features a video of the performance staged at the Western Front in Vancouver, Canada in 1983. Rose English interrogates a range of words and questions relating to the stage and the conventions of its forms – theatre, opera, dance and spectacle – and their relation to existential thought. The list of keywords and other ephemera, including original collages the artist created as 'audience programmes', feature in the exhibition alongside a sound installation of multiple variant audio recordings of Plato's Chair performed in other venues. The installation extends the artist's interrogation of the idea of 'the repertoire' – evident in Plato's Chair – to a current meditation on the histories of her own work.

___________

References:

Abstract Vaudeville: The Work of Rose English, Guy Brett, Rose English & Anne-Louise Rentell. London: Ridinghouse, 2014

A Chaos of Possibilities, Jennifer Kabat. The Believer, Issue 116: December/January 2018

RICHARD SALTOUN
41 Dover Street, London W1S 4NS
www.richardsaltoun.com

Peter Saul: Some Terrible Problems @ Michael Werner Gallery, London

Peter Saul: Some Terrible Problems
Michael Werner Gallery, London
23 September - 5 November 2016

Michael Werner Gallery, London, presents Some Terrible Problems, an exhibition of new paintings by American artist Peter Saul. This is the first London exhibition by Peter Saul, who remains a vital presence in American painting through more than fifty years.

Peter Saul was born in San Francisco in 1934. Following his studies at the California School of Fine Arts and Washington University, St. Louis, he settled for six years in Paris, an unusual choice for a young artist at a time when New York City was the place to be. Saul has remained something of an outsider ever since. Neither a believer in the promise of abstraction, nor a disciple of the Existentialist philosophies underlying the artspeak of the day, Peter Saul remained true to his personal influences and obsessions: French academic painting, MAD magazine, artists such as Paul Cadmus and Rosa Bonheur. Peter Saul embraced narrative and figuration in painting when painting was supposed to be non-objective (if one didn’t already believe painting to be dead). His ironic and caustic humour, love of the grotesque and dogged insistence on the necessity of a picture to tell a story, have left him at odds with every dominant style and “-ism” of the past five decades. Peter Saul has developed into a profound history painter whose ambivalent politics and lurid imagery further complicate the reception of his painting. Consequently, he has long existed outside the canon of acceptable contemporary artists, a radical fringe figure who nonetheless exerts profound influence on younger artists.  

In 1967, Peter Saul said, “Not to be shocking means to agree to be furniture”. This statement outlines the exceptional attitude with which Saul gleefully skewers the conventions of world politics and culture. “Pictures with problems” are Peter Saul’s abiding interest. Some Terrible Problems features seven new large-scale canvases, each dissecting to humorous, gruesome and often offensive effect a range of subjects and attitudes. These remarkable new works revisit genres of history painting and portraiture while remaining thoroughly contemporary and visually unlike anything else in recent painting.

Since his first solo exhibition, in Chicago in 1961, Peter Saul has exhibited his work throughout the United States and internationally. His works are found in numerous museum collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Peter Saul lives and works in New York.

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-colour catalogue featuring an interview between Peter Saul and artist Joe Bradley. 

MICHAEL WERNER GALLERY
22 Upper Brook Street, London W1K 7PZ
michaelwerner.com

Tom Wesselmann: Collages 1959-1964 - David Zwirner, London

Tom Wesselmann: Collages 1959-1964
David Zwirner, London
Through March 24, 2016

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of collages by American artist TOM WESSELMANN at the gallery's London location. Organized in collaboration with The Estate of Tom Wesselmann, the exhibition presents over 30 works produced between 1959 and 1964–a significant period spanning the artist's early career and his emergence as a leading figure of Pop Art.

Since the mid-1960s, Tom Wesselmann's oeuvre has been synonymous with the bold, graphic, and large-scale imagery of Pop Art. On view at the gallery, his intimate, handwrought collages of the late 1950s and early 1960s reveal the germination of his iconic style, and attest to his lifelong interest in depicting still lifes, interiors, landscapes, and female nudes.

Tom Wesselmann first explored the medium of collage in 1959, during his final year as an art student at The Cooper Union School of Art, New York, and it remained central to his practice throughout the early 1960s. Part of a generation of artists that reacted against the dominant action-oriented, gestural style of Abstract Expressionism, Tom Wesselmann took interest in quotidian, figurative, and popular subject matter, as well as the representational and graphic qualities afforded by collage. Employing found materials culled from urban detritus and popular media such as postcards, wallpaper, stickers, and fabric, Wesselmann executed several discrete but related series of collages that variously depict figures (both anonymous and known), interiors, and still lifes. Formally, the works relate to early modernist collage and assemblage techniques and practices and, in their subject matter, make numerous art historical references to the works of Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, Wassily Kandinsky, and Hans Memling, among other artists. In his later collages, representations of contemporary life and consumer goods become more prominent, evolving into the large-scale Pop Art paintings for which Wesselmann became recognized.

Among the works on view are several significant examples of his "Portrait Collages," 1959-1960, the first group of collages executed by the artist. Characterized by depictions of one or two female figures seated in interior spaces and rendered in diverse materials including leaves, wallpaper, paint, and wood, the series makes frequent allusions to works by Old Masters, as well as contemporary artists, such as Willem de Kooning and other Abstract Expressionists. These first iterations of collage, in particular, are marked by dynamic patterning, idiosyncratic material juxtapositions, flattened forms, and rich, vibrant color that would remain consistent features of his work throughout his career.

Also included in the exhibition are a number of works from Tom Wesselmann's "Little Great American Nudes" series, a pivotal body of work begun in 1961 that led directly to the development of his larger-scale "Great American Nudes," 1961-1973, for which he gained art-world acclaim, and of which the first example, Great American Nude #1, will be on view.

Begun in 1962, Tom Wesselmann's "Little Still Life" series demonstrates the artist's increasing interest in depicting contemporary, popular subject matter such as food, articles of clothing, and flowers, which he typically represented in tabletop displays. Like his nudes, this series increased greatly in scale, as evidenced in his 1963 Still Life #29–one of the artist’s first large-scale still lifes, of which only a small number exist (one example is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). As Marco Livingstone has remarked regarding the artist's collages, "Wesselmann was able not only to make art that reflected his identity and the circumstances of his life, but also to expand on the advances made by the previous generation towards the establishment of an art that could be defined as specifically American."¹

¹Marco Livingstone, "Small Early Collages," in Tom Wesselmann: A Retrospective Survey 1969-1992. Exhibition catalogue (Tokyo: Art Life Ltd., 1993), p. 39.

Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004) is well known for his collages, paintings, and sculptures depicting still lifes, landscapes, and nudes. He attended The Cooper Union School of Art, New York, from 1956-1959, and was co-founder, with artists Marcus Ratliff and Jim Dine, of the influential Judson Gallery, New York (which operated from 1957 to the late 1960s). In the 1960s, he emerged as a leading figure of Pop Art.

Tom Wesselmann's works are included in numerous museum collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Kaiser-Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld, Germany; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

DAVID ZWIRNER
24 Grafton Street - London W1S 4EZ
www.davidzwirner.com

Christopher Wool, Simon Lee Gallery, London

Christopher Wool
Simon Lee Gallery, London
October 11 - December 22, 2006

Simon Lee presents new painting and works on paper by Christopher Wool.

Christopher Wool has punctuated the art world with works that have reinvigorated recent contemporary debate on the changing status of painting. He belongs to a generation of artists (Robert Gober, Jeff Koons and Richard Prince) who in the early 1980s were looking for new possibilities in painting and sculpture. Within his particular oeuvre, Christopher Wool has transposed elements from mass culture such as print media, advertising, music and film as a means to create a collision between painting and printing.

The processes of painting, the physical properties of paint and techniques of reproduction underpin Christopher Wool’s practice. Crucial to Wool is his impulse to exploit the limits of painting. In previous works he has used a plethora of media comprising aluminium, silkscreen, varnish, photography, paint rollers and stencils with industrial procedures and techniques made available by mass production. Wool used these procedures in combination with painting to play with the ideas and techniques of reproduction.

For Christopher Wool’s current body of work he employs silkscreen and spray paint that is meticulously built up and then partly removed. Wool has returned to painting in a reductive format to emphasis elements of painting and erasure, gesture and removal, depth and flatness. Chiefly using black spray enamel Wool draws out the tensions that are at play with form, line and colour. The action and erasure that become apparent highlight Wool’s unique form of mark making on the picture plane. By spraying the canvas, retracing the line with solvent, blending and then erasing the line of spray paint Wool maps out and retraces his line across the canvas. Wool’s medium of choice makes reference to the urban environment and graffiti, however the works sidestep hasty interpretation and the surface qualities allow the viewer focus on the retinal impact of the paintings.

Christopher Wool's work has been featured in numerous exhibitions including, most recently; Christopher Wool, Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain (2006), Christopher Wool, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France (2006), William Gedney-Christopher Wool: Into the Night, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island (2004), Christopher Wool, Camden Arts Centre, London (2004), Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, Lyon (2003), Crosstown Crosstown, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee / Le Consortium, Dijon (2003 / 2002) and Secession, Vienna (2001).

SIMON LEE GALLERY
12 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DT
www.simonleegallery.com