Wild Strawberries - Inaugural Exhibition @ 125 Newbury Gallery, New York - Featuring 17 artists

Wild Strawberries 

Inaugural Exhibition

125 Newbury, New York

September 30 – November 19, 2022

Paul Thek

Untitled (Hand with Ring), 1967 

Photo: Richard Gary 

© The Estate of George Paul Thek 

Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York 

Deana Lawson 

Portal, 2017 

Courtesy of the artist, 

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles and New York, 

and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York 

Lucas Samaras 

Untitled, 1964 

© Lucas Samaras, courtesy Pace Gallery  

Kiki Smith 

Virgin Mary, 1992 

© Kiki Smith, courtesy Pace Gallery

125 Newbury, the new project space spearheaded by Arne Glimcher, opens to the public with Wild Strawberries, an intergenerational show featuring 17 artists whose work traffics in the dreamlike exchange between threat and seduction. Inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 cinematic masterpiece, Wild Strawberries, the exhibition brings together sculpture, painting, photography, and film by a wide range of artists, including Lynda Benglis, Lee Bontecou, Julie Curtiss, Alex Da Corte, Doreen Lynette Garner, Robert Gober, David Hammons, Deana Lawson, Shahryar Nashat, Brandon Ndife, Kathleen Ryan, Lucas Samaras, Max Hooper Schneider, Kiki Smith, Paul Thek, Hannah Wilke, and Zhang Huan. The exhibition also includes excerpts from narrative and experimental films that reflect a similar sensibility, which have been selected in collaboration with filmmaker and scholar Vito Adriaensens.

Wild Strawberries cultivates a garden of widely divergent practices, which germinate and transform the body. Probing the power of sensation, the works investigate art’s capacity to stimulate pleasure and incite horror in the same gesture. The exhibition is grounded in the work of key figures of the post- 1960s generation who mobilized the aesthetics of bodily abjection toward fascinating, disturbing, and political ends. The nightmarish forms of Bontecou are juxtaposed with the exquisite formlessness of Benglis, and the corporeal poetry of Wilke contrasts with the cruel delights of Samaras and Thek. Engaging the viewer on a visceral level, these works are brought into dialogue with sculpture and photography from the 1980s and ’90s by Hammons, Smith, Gober, and Zhang in which the language of abjection has become infused with struggles of power, politics, race, and gender.

Oscillating between feelings of repulsion and attraction, Wild Strawberries traces this dialogue further in the work of an emerging cohort of contemporary artists, including Da Corte, Curtiss, Garner, Nashat, Ndife, Ryan, and Schneider. Their practices draw on earlier precedents while forging new cross-pollination between painting, sculpture, film, photography, and installation. 

Wild Strawberries Artist List:

Lynda Benglis (b. 1941)

Lee Bontecou (b. 1931)

Julie Curtiss (b. 1982)

Alex Da Corte (b. 1980)

Doreen Lynette Garner (b. 1986)

Robert Gober (b. 1954)

David Hammons (b. 1943)

Deana Lawson (b. 1979)

Shahryar Nashat (b. 1975)

Brandon Ndife (b. 1991)

Kathleen Ryan (b. 1984)

Lucas Samaras (b. 1936)

Max Hooper Schneider (b. 1982)

Kiki Smith (b. 1954)

Paul Thek (1933 – 1988)

Hannah Wilke (1940 – 1993)

Zhang Huan (b. 1966)

About 125 Newburry

Gallery 125 Newbury, New York. A Project Space Helmed by Arne Glimcher

125 NEWBURY

395 Broadway at Walker Street, New York City (Tribeca)

www.125newbury.com

Gallery 125 Newbury, New York - A Project Space Helmed by Arne Glimcher

Gallery 125 Newbury, New York

A Project Space Helmed by Arne Glimcher

Talia Rosen, Arne Glimcher, Kathleen McDonnell, Oliver Shultz 

Photo: 2022 © Luca Pioltelli, courtesy Pace Gallery

Gallery 125 Newbury

Courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace Gallery announces the establishment of Gallery 125 Newbury, a new project space in New York helmed by Pace’s Founder and Chairman Arne Glimcher. Located at the corner of Broadway and Walker Street in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood, the enterprise is named for the address of Pace’s first-ever gallery space, which opened in Boston in 1960. Gallery 125 Newbury will operate in association with Pace, which is led by President and CEO Marc Glimcher. The new gallery is set to open in fall 2022.

Guided by Arne Glimcher’s six decades of pioneering exhibition-making, the enterprise, situated in a space formerly occupied by the Pearl River Market, will present up to five exhibitions per year with a focus on thematic group shows and emerging artists, including artists both within and beyond Pace’s program; Gallery 125 Newbury will eschew the traditional gallery model in favor of a more nimble and flexible structure focused on developing cutting-edge exhibitions with a global perspective.

Gallery 125 Newbury will serve as an expanded platform for Arne Glimcher’s curatorial vision, which he will develop in tandem with his ongoing work at Pace. Maintaining his current role with Pace and his office space at the gallery’s 540 West 25th Street location, Arne Glimcher will continue to organize selected exhibitions at Pace’s global locations, including forthcoming solo exhibitions of Robert Irwin, Richard Tuttle, and Sam Gilliam, and he and his team will also continue working closely with Pace’s other artists. The inauguration of Gallery 125 Newbury represents Arne Glimcher’s return to his roots in hands-on curatorial experimentation, where his interest has always been directed.

Arne Glimcher says: “When I started the Pace Gallery 60 years ago, it was a tiny little place on Newbury Street in Boston. I’m dazzled every day by what the gallery has become and our incredible artists, and I’m thrilled to continue to play a role in Marc’s vision. Gallery 125 Newbury is about expanding my own story at the same time, about going full circle, back to the little gallery I once had, back to being hands-on in every facet of making shows and working with artists and connecting with the public, which is the part of it that I really love.”

Marc Glimcher says: “I’m thrilled that Gallery 125 Newbury will extend the possibilities of Pace’s programming. My father has a strong history of making iconic exhibitions. Decades ago, he created the blueprints that commercial galleries still follow in presenting their artists’ work. Gallery 125 Newbury offers Arne a space to further explore his inimitable personal vision.”

Gallery 125 Newbury will be housed in a 3,900 square-foot space with 17-foot ceilings. Prior to the enterprise’s opening, the interior space will be fully renovated by architects Enrico Bonetti and Dominic Kozerski, of the firm Bonetti/Kozerski, which designed Pace’s eight-story gallery in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. Keeping with the character of Tribeca, the space will retain some elements of the structure, including its original ceilings. 

The Gallery 125 Newbury team will include Kathleen McDonnell, Talia Rosen, and Oliver Shultz, who will continue to serve as members of Arne Glimcher’s existing team at Pace as well as directors of the new space.

ARNE GLINCHER is the founder and chairman of Pace Gallery, which he established in Boston in 1960. In the early years of the gallery, which opened its first New York space in 1963, Glimcher championed artists including Louise Nevelson, Agnes Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Dubuffet, Lucas Samaras, Chuck Close, and Claes Oldenburg, as well as pioneers of the Light and Space movement James Turrell and Robert Irwin. His decades-long relationships with these and other artists cemented the gallery’s position as a leading and boundary-pushing institution. Over the course of his career, Arne Glimcher has become one of the most prominent and prolific figures in the international art world, and Pace now occupies nine locations worldwide. Among the films Glimcher has directed are The Mambo Kings (1992), which received an Academy Award nomination, Just Cause (1995), and Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies (2008). He also produced Gorillas in the Mist (1988), which received five Academy Award nominations, and the documentary White Gold (2013). Arne Glimcher is chairman of the board of directors of the African Environmental Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the production and distribution of films about environmental issues in Africa for the people of Africa.

PACE

pacegallery.com

RongRong @ The Walther Collection, NYC - Day After Day. RongRong and the Beijing East Village - Exhibition + Book

Day After Day. RongRong and the Beijing East Village
The Walther Collection, New York
Through October 12, 2019

RONGRONG

1994 No. 20 (Zhang Huan, "12 Square Meters"), 1994. 

© RongRong. Courtesy the artist and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing.

But here in the East Village, we do almost everything. Curse plays rock music and writes poetry. Kongbu curates and writes criticism. Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and Zhu Ming do performances … But I am the only photographer. Everyone left their hometown and seeks dreams here from afar. We are all children who left home, which makes us constantly hungry …–RongRong

The Walther Collection, with Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing, presents Day After Day: RongRong and the Beijing East Village. The exhibition features 40 of RongRong’s seminal photographs from 1993-1998 portraying the Beijing East Village—an artistic community poignantly described as “a meteor in the history of contemporary Chinese art.” (Silvia Fok, “Photography, Performance Art, and the Beijing East Village,” in RongRong’s Diary: Beijing East Village (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2019). Day After Day coincides with the publication of RongRong’s Diary: Beijing East Village by The Walther Collection and Steidl.

Nearly four years after the Tiananmen student protests in 1989, RongRong, then a 25-year-old from the southern province of Fujian, joined a group of young and struggling bohemian artists who settled in a desolate village on the outskirts of Beijing. RongRong captured the quotidian yet eruptive life of this community, as many of his fellow artists pushed their bodies to the brink to create radical and subversive performances. Considered highly disruptive by political authorities, these artists lived under constant fear of harassment, raids, and arrests. Both as a  principal photographer and essential collaborator, RongRong faithfully documented what remain some of the most powerful and important performance works of Chinese contemporary art, by artists such as Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and Ai Weiwei.

The exhibition Day After Day emphasizes these explosive performance art activities in the village, before and after it was forcefully evacuated in the summer of 1994. RongRong’s emotive photographs will be paired with excerpts from a diary that RongRong kept during his stay in the village, as well as his present-day recollections. Such writings provide essential insight into the performances as they were being conceptualized and carried out, such as the extreme heat and squalid conditions of the public latrine that was the setting for Zhang Huan’s 12 Square Meters; the ominous arrest of artists and viewers that followed Ma Liuming’s groundbreaking nude performance Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch; and the chilly evening when the collaborative Primordial Sounds took place beneath a Beijing overpass.

RongRong’s Diary: Beijing East Village

150 pages, 124 images

26 x 21 cm, Cloth-bound hardcover

Published by Steidl / The Walther Collection; June 2019

The Walther Collection has worked closely with RongRong to produce the monograph RongRong’s Diary, which features a near-comprehensive compilation of the artist’s writings from this period. In short journal entries and personal correspondence with his sister, RongRong recounts his blossoming friendships with fellow artists, memorable outings and incidents, and their guerrilla approaches to staging new works. In doing so, he offers reflections both mundane and profound: adjusting to his new life in Beijing, deep anxiety about police backlash, and wavering faith in what photography can achieve in turbulent times. With over 120 images, RongRong’s Diary includes never-before-seen photographs selected by RongRong to highlight everyday life in the Beijing East Village and to call attention to a number of lesser-known performances. The book’s interplay between RongRong’s images and texts creates an absorbing personal narrative of an artist coming into his own.

RongRong was born in Fujian Province, China, in 1968. He was a key member of the Beijing East Village group, experimenting with photography and documenting the performances of his fellow artists in the early 1990s. These works have attained an almost mythic status in the history of contemporary Chinese experimental art. In 2007 RongRong and his wife and photographic partner inri founded Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing, emphasizing international collaborations and the creation of a sustainable infrastructure for young Chinese artists. RongRong’s best-known works include the 1990s East Village and Ruins series, as well as his collaborations with inri since 2000 such as In Fujisan, Liulitun, and Tsumari Story. Their joint work explores the beauty of the human body in nature and the urban environment, as well as the development of their family. His work has been exhibited worldwide during the past three decades, and is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Myriam and Guy Ullens Foundation, Beijing; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, and several distinguished private foundations.

The Walther Collection Project Space
526 West 26th Street, Suite 718, New York, NY 10001
www.walthercollection.com