Hugo McCloud @ Sean Kelly Gallery, New York - Burdened

Hugo McCloud: Burdened

Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

January 22 – February 27, 2021

HUGO McCLOUD 

Pineapple Express, 2020

Single use plastic mounted on panel 

71 x 61 inches (180.3 x 154.9 cm) 

© Hugo McCloud, Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York

Sean Kelly Gallery presents Burdened, HUGO McCLOUD’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The works in the exhibition—created over the last nine months whilst Hugo McCloud quarantined at his studio in Mexico—are composed entirely of the ubiquitous, but overlooked material, single use plastic bags. Another distinguishing element of this new body of work is that it marks Hugo McCloud’s first foray into figuration. Occupying all three galleries, this exhibition addresses the human and economic cost of labor worldwide, geopolitics, the environmental impact of single use plastic and Hugo McCloud’s preoccupation with finding beauty in the everyday.

Hugo McCloud is well known for his abstract paintings which utilize materials often omitted from fine art practices – tar paper, scrap metal, solder, and industrial materials – things the artist refers to as “discarded, disregarded and devalued.” Continuing his interest in working with overlooked materials, this new series is meticulously composed using hundreds, even thousands, of small cut-out pieces of single use plastic, collaged to create the compositions. Using plastic bags as the “paint” that comprises his palette, Hugo McCloud carefully constructs the images building layers from varied hues of plastic to achieve the desired result.

Hugo McCloud uses plastic as a metaphor to understand our similarities and differences as human beings; to connect to our environment; and to highlight the negative impact on our shared planet of our carbon footprint. He addresses the economics of labor through the medium of plastic and how it passes through the hands of individuals at every level of society. Through his process of recycling materials in these works, Hugo McCloud questions the politics of down-cycling and its impact upon inequality, migration and the resources available to each of us. Originally drawing inspiration from photographs of people he encountered during his travels, when Covid-19 travel restrictions were put in place Hugo McCloud was forced to pivot and source images from the internet.

Hugo McCloud’s paintings in the main gallery focus on workers performing their daily tasks. His subjects, their gaze concealed or averted, are engaged in labor critical to their survival, whether it be collecting refuse, transporting fruit and other goods, or recycling oil. He states that this new body of work is “about the idea of the person that is burdened in life, trying to survive, or make ends meet. I think in some regards, everybody is burdened in their own way in life.” In the front gallery, Hugo McCloud depicts images referencing the Mediterranean refugee crisis, migrants adrift at sea, attempting to make the perilous journey to another country to escape the unbearable conditions in their homeland—risking their lives in the hope of a better future for them and their families. In the lower gallery, Hugo McCloud exhibits a series of intimate, elegiac images of plants and flowers that he refers to as his “quarantine drawings.” He notes that as the lockdown continued, we were all bombarded with negative news and as our movements were increasingly restricted, it was important for him to “find a moment in each day for something that was in a sense still beautiful and still light.”

In June 2021 Hugo McCloud’s work will be the subject of a major exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Within the past year, his work has been acquired by the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, North Carolina. His work is in the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.; the North Carolina Museum of Art; the Detroit Institute of the Arts; and The Margulies Collection, Miami. Hugo McCloud has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Arts Club, London and Fondazione 107, in Turin, Italy. He has also been featured in group exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York and The Drawing Center, New York, amongst others.

SEAN KELLY GALLERY

475 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10018

www.skny.com

Shahzia Sikander @ Sean Kelly Gallery, New York - Weeping Willows, Liquid Tongues

Shahzia Sikander

Weeping Willows, Liquid Tongues

Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

November 5 – December 19, 2020

SHAHZIA SIKANDER

Arose, 2020, 

Glass mosaic with patinated brass frame

84 x 62 inches (213.4 x 157.5 cm), edition of 5 with 2 APs

© Shahzia Sikander

Photography: © Photo by Mayer of Munich

Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York

Sean Kelly presents SHAHZIA SIKANDER’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery and her first exhibition in New York City in nine years. Weeping Willows, Liquid Tongues is an expansive, in-depth look into Sikander’s recent work, featuring the artist’s dynamic large-and-intimately-scaled drawings, a captivating new single channel video-animation, luminous, intricate mosaics and her first ever free-standing sculpture.

Shahzia Sikander takes classical Indo-Persian miniature painting as the point of departure for her work. From premodern beginnings to contemporary influences, it is precisely this historical continuum and its continuous capacity for reinvention that has sparked Sikander’s visually rich engagement in multiple media. The works in the exhibition explore tensions between power and powerlessness to present transformative ideas. Sikander's interest in sociology, psychoanalysis, and the examination of how culture and society shape the imagination is all fodder for her work. The ways in which violence, systemic racism, class and cultural fears are deeply entrenched in media and political representations, be it the fear of the unknown, the migrant, the immigrant, the Muslim, the LGBTQ community, the ‘other’ and the various fault lines of race, class and gender also intersect within her work. In this tangled web, the extractive nature of capitalism appears to promise liberty and happiness, but too often bestows debt and despair. These ideas are all explored in her new series of paintings The Shroud, 2020 and Oil and Poppies, 2020, which emerged whilst the artist was researching symbols of extraction.

Shahzia Sikander’s first major sculptural work, Promiscuous Intimacies, borrows its title from Gayatri Gopinath’s forthcoming essay on Sikander’s practice. This bronze sculpture, with its sinuous entanglement of a Greco-Roman Venus and an Indian Devata, explores in Gopinath’s words, “the promiscuous intimacies of multiple times, spaces, art historical traditions, bodies, desires, and subjectivities.” In their suggestive embrace, the intertwined female bodies bear the symbolic weight of communal identities from multiple geographic terrains. They evoke non-heteronormative desires that are often cast as foreign and inauthentic, and instead challenge the viewer to imagine a different present and future. The backward glance of the lower figure “demands that we understand ‘tradition,’ ‘culture,’ and ‘identity’ as impure, heterogenous, unstable, and always in process,” disrupting “taken-for-granted national, temporal, and art historical boundaries.”  

Presenting a comprehensive overview of Shahzia Sikander’s films, the exhibition features three animations: Parallax, 2013, Disruption as Rapture, 2016, and her most recent film, Reckoning, 2020. The new film, made from multiple drawings, reveals the cyclical theme of struggle through kinetic forms. In it, Sikander considers the relationships between migrant-citizen, conflict-erosion, memory-myth, warfare-fatality, father-son, and human - nature. The musical score accompanying Reckoning is written by the inimitable composer Du Yun, awarded the Pulitzer in Music in 2017, and features the Pakistani singer Zeb Bangash. Du Yun and Sikander’s decade-long collaborations (including Parallax and Disruption as Rapture) span Shanghai, New York, Sharjah, Istanbul, Hong Kong and Pakistan and speak to their ‘creative intimacy,’ female agency and shared passion for finding common ground through multiple languages.

While questioning the very concept of national culture, Shahzia Sikander provides deep aesthetic reflections on the history of colonialism, capitalism and the formation of racialized identities in the present. Our ecological condition is a mirror of social conditions: erosion of climate, borders, rising waters, rising heat, and displacement of bodies amongst others. All resources are gathered in the rubric of monetization: language, labor, human intelligence and human attention. Sikander reimagines the United States’ foundational claims of freedom and liberty, that were never applicable to all, by presenting overlapping diasporas and using art to imagine the possibilities of a more just and livable future. Sikander’s work is not about hybridity. It is not fusing cultures or aesthetics. The multiple juxtapositions reflecting gender, race, class, and language differences are arranged and rearranged to imagine visual forms that challenge fixed narratives and break binary thinking in all its forms. Sikander's work is the antithesis of the fictions of purity and authentic national culture.

SHAHZIA SIKANDER lives and works in New York City. Her innovative artistic practice led to her meteoric rise internationally in the mid-nineties with survey exhibitions at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1998, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art 1998, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden 1999, and the Whitney Museum of American Art 2000. Sikander has had major solo exhibitions throughout the world, including most recently at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, 2017; the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, 2017; MAXXI | Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome 2016; the Asia Society Hong Kong Center, Hong Kong, 2016; the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 2015; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. 2012; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2010; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2007; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2007; the Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2005; and at the San Diego Museum of Art, California, 2004 amongst others. Sikander has been invited to participate in significant international biennials such as the Lahore Biennale 01, Pakistan; the Karachi Biennale 17, Pakistan; the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Manege, Russia; the 8th and 13th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey;  the 5th Auckland Triennial, New Zealand; the Sharjah Biennale 11, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE; the 54th and 51st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Italy; and The Whitney Biennial, New York amongst others. In addition, she has been included in notable group exhibitions at institutions such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Amongst the numerous awards, grants, and fellowships Sikander has received are the KB17 Karachi Biennale Shahneela and Farhan Faruqui Popular Choice Art Prize, 2017; the Religion and the Arts Award, 2016; the Asia Society Award for Significant Contribution to Contemporary Art, 2015; the National Medal of Arts Award presented by U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2012; the John D. and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation Achievement ‘Genius’ award, 2006; and Tamgha-e-Imtiaz, the National Pride of Honor Award presented by the Pakistani Government.

Shahzia Sikander will be the subject of a traveling exhibition titled Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities. The exhibition will open at The Morgan Library, New York in June 2021 followed by the RISD Museum, Rhode Island in November 2021, and MFA Houston, Texas in Spring 2022. On the occasion of these exhibitions, there will be a major new monograph printed. Extraordinary Realities, is an exhaustive examination of Sikander’s work from 1987 to 2003, charting her early development as an artist in Lahore and the United States, and foregrounding her critical role in bringing miniature painting into dialogue with contemporary art. Edited by Jan Howard and Sadia Abbas, with contributions by Gayatri Gopinath, Faisal Devji, Kishwar Rizvi, Sadia Abbas, Jan Howard, Vasif Kortun, Dennis Congdon, Bashir Ahmed, Rick Lowe and Julie Mehretu.

SEAN KELLY GALLERY

475 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10018

www.skny.com

Julian Charrière: Towards No Earthly Pole @ Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Julian Charrière: Towards No Earthly Pole
Sean Kelly Gallery, New York
January 31 - March 21, 2020

Sean Kelly presents Towards No Earthly Pole, JULIAN CHARRIÈRE’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Recognized as one of the most innovative and prominent artists of his generation, Julian Charrière is renowned for a complex discipline that links artistic and scientific inquiry, coalescing ecology, geology, archaeology, physics, historical inquiry, and nomadic exploration. Centered around the US premiere of Julian Charrière’s video work of the same name, the exhibition continues Julian Charrière’s exploration into how human civilization and the natural landscape are inextricably linked.

Julian Charrière conceived the film, Towards No Earthly Pole, while aboard a Russian research ship for the first Antarctic Biennale. The powerful impression made on him by the Antarctic landscape and his readings of accounts of early 20th-century exploration led him to focus on Iceland, Greenland, the Rhône and Aletsch glaciers and Mont Blanc in France. This meditative 102-minute film, the result of a series of expeditions made between 2017-2019, combines footage taken from each of the locations. Filmed at night, the dazzling landscapes Julian Charrière captured are dramatically lit by a spotlight carried on a drone; as light tracks across the dark terrain, incredible shapes and tonalities of an almost otherworldly nature are revealed. Towards No Earthly Pole offers a unique vision of polar landscapes, inviting a unique consideration of their mythos, delicate ecology, and fraught geopolitical condition.

Exhibited in conjunction with the film are four sculptures titled Not All Who Wander Are Lost, 2019. A series of perforated boulders, which rest atop beds of core samples that were drilled and removed from each mass, reflect on the movement of matter. They were inspired by a geological paradox Julian Charrière encountered on several occasions during his travels. Referred to as “erratics,” these large boulders, found in the middle of otherwise empty fields, differ in size and type from the rocks native to the surrounding area. An enigma to previous civilizations, scientific study has revealed that these peculiar objects are deposits left behind by glacial ice as it glided across vast distances. In addition to these sculptures and a suite of related photographs in the front gallery, Julian Charrière’s film And Beneath It All Flows Liquid Fire, 2019 will be on view in the lower gallery. Filmed in Lugano, Switzerland, the video shows the Antonio Bossi Fountain in the Piazza Riziero Rezzonico at night, spewing fire to create a sense of ambiguity. Society has regarded fossil fuels as limitless, however, the exhaustion of these resources and the consequences of their destructive forces becomes inevitable. Julian Charrière’s fountain combines these themes to stress the coexistence of both elements and forces. Throughout the exhibition, in direct and complex ways, Julian Charrière juxtaposes fire and ice, harnessing their oppositional nature to symbolize change and transformation. 

Born in Morges, Switzerland in 1987, JULIAN CHARRIÈRE currently lives and works in Berlin. A participant of the Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments), Julian Charrière has exhibited his work – both individually and as a part of the Berlin-based art collective Das Numen – at museums and institutions worldwide, including MAMbo- Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Italy; MASI Lugano, Switzerland; the Parasol Unit Foundation for Art, London; the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, Switzerland; the Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Thyssen-Bornemizsa Art Contemporary, Vienna; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland; the K11 Foundation, Shanghai; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo amongst others. His work has been featured in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India; the 12th Biennale de Lyon, France; the 13th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice; the 57th Venice Biennale, Venice; the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art, Canada; and the 14 Bienal de Artes Mediales de Santiago, Chile. In 2013 and 2015, Julian Charrière was awarded the Kiefer Hablitzel Award / Swiss Art Award and in 2018, was the recipient of the GASAG Art Prize.

SEAN KELLY GALLERY
475 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
skny.com

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Robert Mapplethorpe, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Robert Mapplethorpe

Saints and Sinners 
Sean Kelly Gallery, New York 
Through January 25, 2014

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, Christopher Holly, 1980 

© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.

This December marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the landmark exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment. On the occasion of the anniversary of that defining juncture, not just in Mapplethorpe’s career, but also in the larger dialogue regarding freedom of expression in the arts, Sean Kelly brings together twenty-seven pairings of Mapplethorpe images exploring the theme of Saints and Sinners.

While some pairings in the exhibition may have more obvious connections, others are more ambiguous in their associations. The fifty-four images that comprise Saints and Sinners, some of which have rarely been exhibited, afford the viewer an opportunity to find personally meaningful connections in the work. Mapplethorpe himself deftly subverted any moral implications by presenting his subject matter in an objective, even classical manner, putting the onus on the viewer to draw their own conclusions. 

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, Bruce Mailman, 1981

© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.

Mapplethorpe’s Self-Portrait (1980) in drag is paired with a portrait of the french singer and actress, Amanda Lear (1976) – two unique depictions of female sexuality. The profile of a marble sculpture of Ermes (1988) is shown next to a vanitas-like composition of a human skull (1988); the former perhaps represents an ideal of physical perfection whilst the latter reminds one of the realities of mortal existence. Bruce Mailman (1981) and Christopher Holly (1980) are, in different guises, potentially perceived as either playful or nefarious – in each case the viewer is called upon to decide the implications for themselves.

Together, the photographic pairings in Saints and Sinners offer the possibility of seemingly endless personal interpretations of the work and a fresh perspective on Mapplethorpe’s practice and his fearless contribution to contemporary photography. 

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE was born in 1946 in New York. He earned a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he produced artwork in a variety of media, mainly collage. The shift to photography as Mapplethorpe’s sole means of expression happened gradually during the mid-1970s. He took his first photographs using a Polaroid camera, and later became known for his portraits of artists, architects, socialites, stars of pornographic films, members of the S&M community and an array of other characters many of whom were personal friends. During the early 1980s, his photographs shifted to emphasize classical formal beauty, concentrating on statuesque male and female nudes, flowers, still lifes and formal portraits. Mapplethorpe died from AIDS on March 9, 1989, in Boston, at age 42. Since that time, his work has been the subject of innumerable exhibitions throughout the world, including major museum traveling retrospectives.

Sean Kelly represents the Robert Mapplethorpe Estate in the Americas.

SEAN KELLY GALLERY
475 Tenth Avenue - New York, NY 10018
www.skny.com