Markus Lüpertz @ Michael Werner Gallery, NYC - Et in Arcadia ego

Markus Lüpertz: Et in Arcadia ego

Michael Werner Gallery, New York

Through 29 April 2023

Michael Werner Gallery, New York presents Markus Lüpertz: Et in Arcadia ego, an exhibition of recent paintings by the eminent German artist Markus Lüpertz. The exhibition shows the artist at his best, forging a future for his work by invoking the past and reimagining it in the present.

Et in Arcadia ego is a Latin phrase that has intrigued classicists, artists, and poets since it was introduced in the 17th century, first in a painting by Giovanni Francesco Guercino and subsequently in two paintings by Nicolas Poussin. The widely accepted translation is “Even in Arcadia, there I (Death) am.”

Bringing the ethos of Guercino and Poussin into the present-day, Markus Lüpertz paints the idyllic, mythical utopia of Arcadia in the bucolic landscape of Brandenburg, Germany, where the artist keeps his studio. In tranquil and lush settings, death is present through the inclusion of skulls, the Greek underworld rivers of Acheron and Styx, and sleeping figures culled from the paintings of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Art historian Eric Darragon has written that “the art world is fragmented and the confrontation between various practices no longer has any meaning,” and because of this Lüpertz “is having a dialogue with a vanished world: that of old painting.” In these recent works, Markus Lüpertz’s own history collides with art history. The artist’s famous looping dithyrambs, apparent in painter’s palettes and Nazi helmets from his provocative German motif series, take shape in memento mori paintings and traditional German landscapes.

Markus Lüpertz has said, “Painting confronts the future, which we don’t know, and is aware of the past, which we do know, and this defines the present—not something new, but something individual.” Markus Lüpertz: Et in Arcadia ego presents Markus Lüpertz’s singular vision and remarkable contemporary interpretation of the cycle of beauty, loss, and death in Arcadia.

Markus Lüpertz (b. 1941, Liberec, Bohemia) is one of the most important and influential artists to emerge from post-war Germany. In recent years, major surveys have been presented at the Hirshhorn Museum and the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Kunst- und Austellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; The Hermitage State Museum, St. Petersburg, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art; and Palazzo Loredan, Venice.

MICHAEL WERNER GALLERY

4 East 77th Street, New York, NY 10075

www.michaelwerner.com

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16-02 / 29-04-2023

Peter and Sally Saul @ Michael Werner Gallery, East Hampton, NY

Peter and Sally Saul

Michael Werner Gallery, East Hampton

Through 13 November 2022

Michael Werner Gallery, East Hampton presents Peter and Sally Saul, an exhibition of works on paper by Peter Saul and ceramic works by Sally Saul. Both artists specifically created and selected the mostly new works for this joint exhibition, where their work is shown together for the first time in many years.

Since his first solo exhibition in 1961, PETER SAUL (b. 1934) has exhibited throughout the world. His paintings 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. Recent important exhibitions include Peter Saul at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Pop, Funk, Bad Painting and More at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse and Le Delta in Namur, and his first retrospective in New York, Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment at the New Museum. Paul Saul’s first extensive monograph was published by Rizzoli in Fall 2021.

SALLY SAUL (b. 1946) has shown her work extensively for over three decades in solo exhibitions and group shows throughout the United States and internationally. Her first survey Blue Hills, Yellow Tree, bringing together three decades of work, was held at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York in 2019. Sally Saul is represented by Venus over Manhattan. Solo exhibitions include Sally Saul at Almine Rech, Paris in 2020, and at Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York in 2020/21.  Her work has been shown at other venues including Jeffrey Deitch, New York; the Art Museum of West Virginia, Morgantown, WV; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; White Columns, New York; and Lumber Room, Portland, OR.

Both artists live and work in Germantown, New York.

MICHAEL WERNER EAST HAMPTON

50 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937

www.michaelwerner.com

Peter and Sally Saul

Michael Werner East Hampton

24 August - 13 November 2022

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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

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Francis Picabia @ Michael Werner Gallery, NYC - Women: Works on Paper 1902-1950

Francis Picabia

Women: Works on Paper, 1902-1950

Michael Werner Gallery, New York

27 April - 18 June 2022

We should mistrust

picturesque people

we should mistrust

old master painting

we should even mistrust painting

painted without mistrust

- Francis Picabia (1879-1953)

Michael Werner Gallery, New York, presents Francis Picabia – Women: Works on Paper 1902-1950, an exhibition of over 40 works on paper spanning 50 years of the iconoclastic French artist’s career.

Gaining notoriety as a leader in the Dada movement only to later reject the movement, Francis Picabia’s contemporary Marcel Duchamp described the artist’s work as a “kaleidoscopic series of art experiences.” Always a step ahead of his peers, Francis Picabia produced an extraordinarily diverse body of work that deeply impacted countless generations of artists.

Art critic Dave Hickey writes, “more engaged with making works of art than with constructing an oeuvre or articulating an ideology, Picabia wore out styles like a baby wears out shoes.” Regularly shifting styles, the artist’s interest in rendering the figure remained steadfast. Culling imagery from sources as diverse as ancient Roman sculpture and paintings by Ingres to contemporary magazine photographs and Hollywood studio portraits, this exhibition explores Francis Picabia’s images of women, a classical subject the artist continually reinterpreted over his career.

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

MICHAEL WERNER GALLERY

4 East 77th Street, New York, NY 10075

www.michaelwerner.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