Josh Faught: Sanctuary @ Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle

Josh Faught: Sanctuary

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle 

Through August 3, 2025

JOSH FAUGHT (U.S., b. 1979)

Sanctuary [detail], 2017

Hand-woven, hand-dyed cotton, hemp,

and gold lamé, scrapbooking stikers;

the entire 1999 season of the soap opera

Passions (DVD); the sheet music for 

Peter Hallock's "A Song of Deliverance";

advertisements for The Monastory 

(The Sanctuary); issue six of Pot Pourri,

a sexual questionnaire for the "new age";

an adverstisement for The Date-Record;

giant clothespins, nail polish, and pins.

Henry Art Gallery, Gift of William and 

Ruth True, originally commissioned in 2016 

for Saint Mark's Cathedral, Seattle, WA, 2020.5 

Image courtesy of the artist

JOSH FAUGHT (U.S., b. 1979)

Sanctuary, 2017

Installation view: 

Saint Mark's Cathedral, Seattle, WA, 2017

Image courtesy of the artist

The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington presents an exhibition featuring the work of JOSH FAUGHT (born 1979, Missouri, based in San Francisco, CA). Know for his evocative multimedia creations that blend weaving found objects, and ephemera, Josh Faught examines craft traditions, queer culture, and personal history in ways that challenge systems of classification and highlight structures of support, visibility, and identity.

This exhibition highlights Sanctuary (2017), a monumental tapestry commissioned by Western Bridge for Seattle’s Saint Mark’s Cathedral and now part of the Henry’s collection. Drawing from Faught’s personal collections and local Seattle archives, Sanctuary reflects on how queer communities have created spaces of safety and connection, and how these practices intersect with themes of faith, devotion, and desire. The tapestry features a rich array of found and archival materials, weaving together spirituality, history, and pop culture. These references evoke stories of connection and isolation in queer history as a means to address ongoing questions about safety, belonging, and well-being.

Accompanying Sanctuary is a selection of Faught's recent basket works. These intimately scaled pieces complement the sprawling height of Sanctuary and highlight the artist's exploration of everyday objects as vessels for human emotions and memories.

This exhibition celebrates Josh Faught's ability to intertwine personal and collective narratives, offering visitors an opportunity to reflect on themes of identity, community and memories.

JOSH FAUGHT explores the conjunction between various histories: the history of textiles, sociopolitical histories, and the artist’s personal history. Recent solo exhibitions include Look Across the Water into the Darkness, Look for the Fog, Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2022); Both Things are True, Koppe Astner, Glasgow (2019); Casa Loewe, London (2019); Sanctuary, commissioned by Western Bridge, St Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle (2017); Siyinqaba, US Embassy in Swaziland, Mbabane (2015); BE BOLD for what you stand for, BE CAREFUL what you fall for, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at the Neptune Society Columbarium, San Francisco (2013); Snacks, Supports, and Something to Rally Around, Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis (2013). Josh Faught has exhibited in group exhibitions at NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Yerba Buena Center for Art, San Francisco; The New Museum, New York; ICA Boston; The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; Pakville Galleries, Ontario; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit. He is a professor of textiles and fine arts at the California College of the Arts.

Josh Faught: Sanctuary is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Senior Curator, with Em Chan, Curatorial Assistant. 

HENRY ART GALLERY

University of Washington

15th Ave NE & NE 41st St, Seattle, WA 98195

henryart.org

Josh Faught: Sanctuary

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle

March 8 - August 3, 2025

Julia Bland @ The Aldrich, Ridgefield - "Woven in the Reeds" Exhibition

Julia Bland: Woven in the Reeds 

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

May 15 - September 14, 2025.

JULIA BLAND

Helper (detail), 2024 

Courtesy of the artist and Derek Eller Gallery, New York 

Photo: Adam Reich

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum announced JULIA BAND’s first solo museum presentation, Woven in the Reeds. Bland’s installation is part of Aldrich Projects, a quarterly series featuring one work or a focused body of work by a single artist on the Museum’s campus. Julia Bland debuts a monumental tapestry composed of canvas, ropes, linen nets, and fabrics that are dyed, woven, braided, tied, and sewn by hand. 

Bland grew up in Palo Alto, California, in the shadow of the counterculture movement of the 1960s–70s, and in the nascent stages of technological utopianism. Raised by parents with different religious backgrounds—her mother is Jewish, and her father is a Presbyterian minister—Bland’s upbringing was marked by a blend of spiritual influences. In 2008, she was awarded a fellowship to work in Morocco, where she lived on and off for several years. During this time, she studied Sufism and immersed herself in the country’s rich customs, materials, and craftsmanship.

Informed by these personal experiences, Bland’s textiles reflect a synthesis of visual cultures across time and place. Her work blends the tie-dyed, kaleidoscopic imagery of psychedelia with sacred Islamic geometry and Judeo-Christian symbols. Bland’s meticulous layering, diverse materials, and intricate fiber techniques result in compositions that exude rhythmic intensity and devotional energy, evoking the mystical abstractions of transcendentalist painters like Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz.

The confluence of openwork netting and solid patches of material coalesce at certain points to form distinct shapes while dissolving into others, depending on the viewer’s perception. In this way, Julia Bland references the Shifting Gestalt Effect, an optical phenomenon that emphasizes the whole of patterns and objects over their individual elements. One image that may emerge is the “priestly hands,” a powerful religious symbol from ancient Judeo-Christian traditions representing divine protection. The work’s title, Woven in the Reeds, refers both to Judaism, where reeds are valued for their flexibility and strength and used for writing the Torah, and to Sufism, where—as the artist explains—“The song of the reed flute laments its separation from the reed bed, and is a frequent metaphor for the longing for God.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a ‘zine.

JULIA BLAND (b. 1986, Palo Alto, CA) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MDA from The Yale School of Art. She has been an artist in residence at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Lighthouse Works, The Sharpe-Walentas Space Program, and The Shandaken Project: Storm King. She has received awards including The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, The Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship from Yaddo, The Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize, NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Craft/Sculpture, The Florence Leif Award for Excellence in Painting, and the Natasha and Jacques Gelman Travel Fellowship. Recent solo exhibitions include Rivers on the Inside, Derek Eller Gallery, New York, NY; Embers, Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole, WY; Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL; The Lighthouse Works, Fisher’s Island, NY; Helena Anrather, New York, NY; and On Stellar Rays, New York, NY. Recent group exhibitions include The Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY; Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY; The Swedish Institute in Paris, France; The Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY; John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI; Chambers Fine Art, Beijing, China; and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, NY. Julia Bland lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Aldrich Projects | Julia Bland: Woven in the Reeds is curated by Curatorial and Publications Manager Caitlin Monachino.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

258 Main Street Ridgefield, CT 06877

www.thealdrich.org

Christina Kimeze @ South London Gallery

Christina Kimeze

South London Gallery

31 January – 11 May 2025

CHRISTINA KIMESE

Screen (I), 2024

Oil, pastel and oil stick on suede matboard

110 x 90 cm

© Christina Kimeze, image courtesy of the artist.

Photo: Matthew Hollow

CHRISTINA KIMESE

Soaring (I), 2024

Oil, pastel and oil stick on suede matboard

210 x 165 cm

© Christina Kimeze, image courtesy of the artist.

Photo: Matthew Hollow

CHRISTINA KIMESE

Soaring (III), 2024

Oil, pastel and oil stick on suede matboard

210 x 165 cm

© Christina Kimeze, image courtesy of the artist.

Photo: Matthew Hollow

CHRISTINA KIMESE

Arches, 2024

Oil, pastel and oil stick on suede matboard

110 x 90 cm

© Christina Kimeze, image courtesy of the artist.

Photo: Matthew Hollow

The South London Gallery (SLG) presents London-based artist CHRISTINA KIMESE’s first institutional solo exhibition.

Christina Kimeze’s paintings depict often lone female figures, immersed in natural landscapes or set within abstracted interiors distilled to focus on patterns or isolated architectural features, such as arched doorways and spiral staircases. The protagonists are based on the artist's friends, family, and sometimes herself, in works which she says, 'belong to a new exploration of the idea of existing between two emotional spaces and the feelings of "otherness" that can arise from this space'.

The work explores themes of interiority, belonging and ideas of home. Evoking the feeling of nostalgia and remembering in her work, at times Christina Kimeze has drawn on memories of visiting her father's home country of Uganda. The scenes she creates are often set against richly coloured foliage, capturing the heat of the country. She is also inspired by a broad range of literary references including a number of Black, feminist 20th-century writers. Unusual surface materials form an important part of Kimeze’s practice, lending the paintings a distinctive luminosity and texture created using dry chalks, oil pastel and wet paints applied to suede matboard, paper and canvas.

For her SLG exhibition, Christina Kimeze has created a new body of work to be shown in the Main Gallery. Originally inspired by the resurgent popularity of roller skating in Black communities in London and beyond, they explore broader ideas around movement, flight and freedom. These expressive works evoke sensations of the body moving through space, and how those feelings might be conjured in the mind's eye. In the Fire Station galleries other new paintings and works on paper will be shown alongside a newly commissioned tapestry made by Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh (*).

The exhibition is accompanied by a new, hard-backed catalogue, designed by ‘A practice for everyday life’. This beautifully illustrated book will bring together images of paintings made in recent years alongside a selection of smaller works on paper. It offers a space to reflect on Christina Kimeze's practice to date and discover her new body of work, shown for the first time at the South London Gallery. The catalogue features essays by curator and writer Ekow Eshun; Eleanor Nairne, The Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art and Head of Department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and a conversation between the artist and Alayo Akinkugbe, writer, art historian and founder of Instagram platform, @ABlackHistoryOfArt.

ARTIST CHRISTINA KIMESE

Christina Kimeze lives and works in London. Kimeze studied at The Royal Drawing School postgraduate programme 2021-2022 where she was awarded the Sir Denis Mahon award; and received her undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford in Biological Sciences.

Recent exhibitions include: Women & Freud: patients, pioneers, artists, Freud Museum, London (2024); Drawing Biennial 2024, Drawing Room (2024); Soulscapes, Dulwich Picture Gallery (2024); Present Tense, Hauser and Wirth, Bruton (2024); Something other than the world might know, White Cube, Paris (2023); Interior, Michael Werner Gallery, London (2023); and The Great Women Artists IV, Residency at Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy (2022).

(*) About Dovecot Studios

Dovecot is a world-renowned tapestry studio in the heart of Edinburgh and a landmark centre for contemporary art, craft, and design. Established in 1912, Dovecot continues a century-long heritage of collaboration with international artists to make exceptional and engaging works of art. Dovecot Studios undertakes public and private textile commissions, with major tapestry projects including collaborations with Chris Ofili, Alison Watt, and Garry Fabian Miller. Also specialising in handcrafted rugs, Dovecot has worked with various artists such as Linder, Jim Lambie, and Nicolas Party. Occupying an extraordinary building, formerly Victorian baths, Dovecot also has an engaging programme of exhibitions and events, which expand the conversation around art, craft, and design.

SOUTH LONDON GALLERY - SLG

Main Gallery & Fire Station galleries

SLG, Main Building: 65–67 Peckham Road, London, SE5 8UH

SLG, Fire Station: 82 Peckham Road, London, SE15 5LQ 

www.southlondongallery.org

Artist Diedrick Brackens @ Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC - "blood compass" Exhibition

Diedrick Brackens: blood compass

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

April 25 – June 1, 2024

Jack Shainman Gallery presents blood compass, a solo exhibition of new work by Diedrick Brackens spanning both New York City locations, opening April 25 in Chelsea, and April 26 in Tribeca. In these weavings, the artist maps an imagined place — visualizing the internal mechanisms and symbols that animate his work while removing the anchor of direct narrative. The scenes depicted in each weaving exist out of time, suspended between a distant past and a world to come. The works in this series are set at dusk, twilight, and deep night — hours that become vehicles for ritual and interiority. The silhouetted inhabitants of this in-between realm are archetypes that Diedrick Brackens once described as ciphers, or “needles through which I slip the threads of biography and myth, and pass through a mesh of history and context.”

His figures are accompanied by an ecosystem of symbols and shapes that have recurred over the course of his practice. The animals, natural elements, and man-made objects, accrue significance every time they are cast in this ever-evolving mythology. The characters in this series are placed in dialogue with lightning bolts, waning suns, and sourceless orbs of light — open-ended devices of orientation. In these distilled arrangements, footholds for straightforward interpretation dissolve — inviting viewers to parse the compositions and uncover meaning.  

Diedrick Brackens’ semiotic language emerges from lived experience, but also through revisiting books, poems, and legends. In blood compass, some of these references — alluded to in his titles — include the novel Mind of My Mind by Octavia Butler, the poem “How you might approach a foal” by Wendy Videlock, and the Bible’s parable of the prodigal son. These stories, though dramatically diverse in genre and subject, speak to Brackens’ inclination to loop, lose, and locate oneself in that which is known, but also to shape-shift, forming new meaning from that which is “familiar.” He approaches these symbols — weighted with memory, context, and history — with fresh eyes or, as Videlock’s poem concludes, ”like you / are new to the world.”  

Diedrick Brackens (b. 1989, Mexia, TX; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is best known for his woven tapestries that explore allegory and narrative through the atapestriesrtist’s autobiography, broader themes of African American and queer identity, as well as American history. Diedrick Brackens employs techniques from West African weaving, quilting from the American South and European tapestry-making to create both abstract and figurative works. Often depicting moments of male tenderness, Diedrick Brackens culls from African and African American literature, poetry and folklore as source. Beginning his process through the hand-dyeing of cotton, a material he deliberately uses in acknowledgement of its brutal history, Diedrick Brackens’ oeuvre presents rich, nuanced visions of African American life and identity, while also alluding to the complicated histories of labor and migration. Brackens utilizes both commercial dyes and atypical pigments such as wine, tea and bleach to create his vibrant, intricately-woven tapestries that investigate historical gaps, interlacing the present with his singular magical realist worldview. Diedrick Brackens’ scenes intentionally lack any sort of moralizing tone, allowing his subjects the freedom of living life on their terms. Jack Shainman Gallery is proud to represent Diedrick Brackens in collaboration with Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA / Dallas, TX / Seoul, KR.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

513 W 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

46 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10013

jackshainman.com 

The Circus in Contemporary Art @ Kunstmuseum Thun - Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys. The motif of the circus in contemporary art

Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys. 

The motif of the circus in contemporary art

Kunstmuseum Thun 

September 16 – December 3, 2023

Francisco Sierra

Clown II (from: Facebook), 2008

Oil on cardboard, 21 x 15.5 cm

Kunstmuseum Bern, Collection Foundation GegenwART

Michael Dannenmann

Fulgenci Mesters Bertran – Weissclown Gensi, 2016

C-Print, 39.5 x 29.3 cm

Courtesy of the artist

Istvan Balogh

Monkey with Lemon, 2009

Lambda-Print, 1–4, 60 x 40 cm

Courtesy of the artist

Miriam Bäckström

The Opposite of Me Is I, 2011 

Jacquard tapestry 

Silk, wool, cotton, acrylic and Lurex on Trevira CS warp 

290 x 970 cm

Courtesy of the artist

Miriam Bäckström

The Opposite of Me Is I, 2011 

Jacquard tapestry 

Silk, wool, cotton, acrylic and Lurex on Trevira CS warp 

290 x 970 cm

Courtesy of the artist

Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger

Kunstmuseum Thun presents works by international artists who use the motif of the circus. Against this backdrop, the group exhibition explores current social issues and questions political structures. With works by: Kathryn Andrews, Miriam Bäckström, Istvan Balogh, Beni Bischof, Barbara Breitenfellner, Mona Boschàr, Michael Dannenmann, Latifa Echakhch, Nicola Hicks, Taus Makhacheva, Dieter Meier, Yves Netzhammer, Tal R, Augustin Rebetez, Boris Rebetez, Ugo Rondinone, Niklaus Rüegg, Francisco Sierra, Norbert Tadeusz, William Wegmann.

The origin of the circus can be dated back to the end of the 18th century, although at that time it was still found in fixed buildings and mainly in London. In the 19th century, circuses were anchored as a mass phenomenon in European metropolitan life. They attracted numerous representatives of the fields of literature, fine arts, music and film. Thus, circus motifs influenced naturalistic painting, New Objectivity, the avant-garde, and Expressionism.

Boris Rebetez

Regarde et je regarde aussi, 2001

Mixed media, 37 x 29 x 27 cm

Courtesy of the artist

Zilla Leutenegger

Ring of fire, 2012

Video installation consisting of 1 wall drawing

(acrylic on wall), 1 object (metal) and 1 projection

(color, no sound, 11.42 min., Loop)

ca. 237 x 100 x 50 cm

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich/Paris

Photo: Bernhard Strahm

Zilla Leutenegger

Polar bear, 2007

Video installation consisting of 1 wall drawing 

(acrylic on wall) and 1 projection (colour, no sound, loop),

ca. 250 x 230 cm

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich/Paris

Norbert Tadeusz

Das grosse Ei (Casino II), 1987

Oil on canvas, 300 x 550 cm

Norbert Tadeusz Estate

Photo: Hanna Neander

Barbara Breitenfellner

WVZ 231, 2012

Collage

Courtesy of the artist

Today, the place of sensual experiences and extremes may seem like a relic from a bygone era. And yet contemporary artists still make use of the repertoire of circus forms. For the circus offers an opportunity on both a micro and macro level to demonstrate current social conflicts, to expose stigmatization, to question power structures, or to illuminate the human-animal relationship. For example, the Zurich artist Istvan Balogh addresses the issue of overstimulation in today's society by showing the clown as a victim. A melancholy mood is evoked by clowns by New York-based artist Ugo Rondinone, whose shoes are literally hung on the nail. U.S. artist Kathryn Andrews leaves the clown costume behind as a melancholy veil, while in the video work by Russian artist Taus Makhacheva, a tightrope walker balances at a dizzying height.

A publication accompanying the exhibition will be published by HIRMER Verlag, Munich. With contributions by: Helen Hirsch, Alisa Klay, Sarah Elena Müller, Manfred Niekisch, Astrid Sedlmeier, Mandy Abou Shoak, Brigit Stammberger, Katrin Sperry.

Co-curated by Helen Hirsch and Katrin Sperry.

KUNSTMUSEUM THUN | THUN, SWITZERLAND

Thunerhof, Hofstettenstrasse 14, 3602 Thun

www.kunstmuseumthun.ch

1 Mira Madrid @ Art Brussels 2023 - Teresa Lanceta, Esther Ferrer, Hamish Fulton, Dan Perjovschi, Sanja Ivekovic

Teresa Lanceta, Esther Ferrer, Hamish Fulton, Dan Perjovschi, Sanja Ivekovic 

1 Mira Madrid 

Art Brussels 2023 

20 – 23 April 2023 

TERESA LANCETA 

(Barcelona, Spain, 1951) 

Tapices Tapestry JUNIO, 2003 

Lana y algodón, 275 x 178 cm, Pieza única

Courtesy 1 Mira Madrid

At Art Brussels 2023, 1 Mira Madrid presents a markedly personal and dynamic project on the image and its multiple plastic representations. Establishing a link between her own artistic practice and the artists with whom she works –which are the ones that interest her as an artist–,Mira Bernabeu has articulated a gallery program in which she explores the use of the image as a formal and expressive resource in the contemporary creation. The proposals put forward by 1 Mira Madrid address controversial issues and seek to provide a meeting point in which to debate the context in which we live. The identity of the gallery is configured based on the selection of artists with whom it works. The works exhibited are not only loaded with a strong critical content, but also question pre-established and commonly accepted concepts.

1 Mira Madrid

Argumosa 16, bajo dcha, 28012 Madrid

1miramadrid.com

www.artbrussels.com

Henry Moore @ Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong - Tapestries

Henry Moore. Tapestries

Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong

Through 27 November 2021

Hauser & Wirth presents rarely seen tapestries by Henry Moore. A series of five large-scale tapestries is on view, courtesy of the Henry Moore Family Collection, for the first time in Asia.

Renowned for his sculptures and drawings, Henry Moore was one of the few modern artists to extend his work into the realm of tapestry. The brilliance of the drawings is confirmed in their transition into large tapestries, seven or eight times the size of the original. These lost nothing of their power in the process, retaining all the textural qualities of the drawing, from a smudgy chalk line to a decisive pen stroke.

The presentation has been made possible due to the artist’s daughter, Mary Moore, who introduced her father to West Dean Tapestry Studio in 1976, and later helped to choose and oversee intimate watercolour drawings interpreted into life-size tapestries. The detailed textile works are the result of a true creative collaboration with highly skilled weavers led by Eva-Louise Svensson, dying wool to achieve precise colours and blending threads of a great variety of tones to adapt the artist’s original drawing media.

The works were created for the artist’s family and have not been exhibited publicly in over a decade. They were initially unveiled at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, in 1980, followed by a tour of New Zealand, America and Canada over the next five years. The theme of mother-and-child predominates many of the tapestries, following the birth of Moore’s first grandchild and continuing a larger line of enquiry into interior and exterior form which inspired the artist’s most celebrated sculptures. The sustained flow of commissions by Moore and his daughter of West Dean Tapestry Studio was a spectacular act of patronage, resulting in 23 tapestries made between 1976-86, supporting the immense craftmanship involved in the traditional weaving process.

HENRY MOORE

Henry Moore is celebrated as the most important British sculptor of the twentieth century for his particular addressing of the human form and uncompromising vision, which make him an abiding influence for contemporary artists. The human figure, enigmatically isolated or in relationship with others, is both the stimulus and the crux of all Henry Moore’s works. For him, creating his sculptures was not so much an abstract exercise in looking at the human figure, but a personal investigation and violation of the artist’s own body. Overlooked sometimes, are his fascinating drawings, often inspired by poetry and mythology. Hovering between abstraction and figuration, Henry Moore developed his own unique language of form.

Born in 1898 and originally from West Yorkshire, Henry Moore studied at both the Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art in the 1920s. Before World War II Henry Moore’s works were widely exhibited in his home country, in the 1940s he also started to gain international success. In 1946, Henry Moore’s radical vision on sculpture was celebrated in his first international retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1948 Moore represented Great Britain at the 24th Venice Biennale and won the International Prize for Sculpture for his participation the same year. In 1963 the artist was awarded the British Order of Merit.

Together with his daughter Mary Moore, he established the Henry Moore Foundation in 1977, which administers his works. Since his death in 1986, the interest in his work has only continued to grow: in 2015 Moore’s works were presented at National Roman Museum in Rome and in 2017 he was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Germany. At Tate Modern, London, two rooms are dedicated to display over 30 of his works.

WEST DEAN TAPESTRY STUDIO

West Dean is one of the only professional tapestry studios in the UK, originating from a vision of Edward James to support traditional arts and craft skills, and carry on the 5,000 year old tradition of woven tapestries. The studio opened as a commercial workshop in 1976 with a commission from Mary Moore to produce a tapestry from a drawing by her father, Henry Moore. The Tapestry Studio has been working with contemporary artists and designers to translate their images into woven tapestry since 1976. Since weaving 23 tapestries for The Henry Moore Foundation, 1976 – 1987, the Studio has worked with artists John Piper, Howard Hodgkin, Eileen Agar, Matty Grunberg, Philip Sutton, Bill Jacklin and Adrian Berg.

Exhibited throughout the world, tapestries by the Studio are also on permanent view at the Henry Moore Foundation, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Surrey History Centre, Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead and many other locations.

HAUSER & WIRTH HONG KONG

15-16/F, H Queen's, 80 Queen's Road Central, Hong Kong

www.hauserwirth.com

______________

Cindy Sherman @ Sprüth Magers Gallery, Los Angeles - Tapestries

Cindy Sherman: Tapestries

Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles

Through May 1, 2021

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers present the first solo exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery by internationally renowned artist CINDY SHERMAN, who has been associated with Sprüth Magers since the 1980s. In the latest series on view, Cindy Sherman explores her first non-photographic medium in a career spanning over 40 years: Tapestry. Featuring a dozen examples of her new and recent tapestries, the exhibition marks the début of these works as a coherent body of work.

In line with Cindy Sherman’s long-term photographic investigation into the construction of identity and the nature of representation, the images are based on pictures posted on the artist’s personal Instagram account, which she creates using widely available filters and face-altering apps. Impossible to print in large scale due to the low-resolution nature of the original Instagram images, they are transposed into woven textiles, which in turn resonate with the pixelation of the source material: Pixels, here, translate to the warp and weft of thread.

Produced in Belgium—with its long history of weaving and tapestry—and made of cotton, wool, acrylic and polyester, each tapestry invents and introduces an entirely unique character. In keeping with many of her previous works, the artist becomes nearly unrecognizable through changes in hair color, hairdo, eye color, skin tone, facial features and even gender. For example, one work depicts a figure with a blonde beard in front of mountains, water and pink skies, gazing upward with an inquisitive, hopeful look, as if to the heavens; another shows an almost extraterrestrial-looking being with pink hair, purple skin and two sets of flashy eyelashes taking a selfie in front of a prismatic sunset.

In Cindy Sherman’s tapestries, the interplay between character and background is as dynamic as ever. While earlier bodies of work feature distorted, yet still realistic, human figures, here they are increasingly digitally manipulated, resulting in exaggerated traits or the partial dissolution of the body as it begins to merge with its environment. The artist also continuously experiments with the images’ backgrounds, which range from plain white or grey to elaborate digital landscapes, often using Instagram effects. By combining contemporary, digital tools such as Photoshop and Instagram with such a traditional medium as tapestry—often associated with domestic settings and coded as female—Cindy Sherman also gives a nod to art history, gender and societal roles.

Since the late 1970s, Cindy Sherman has been photographing herself in guises inspired by stereotypes and characters from mass media, everyday life and art-historical imagery. Her unique approach reveals the degree to which these stereotypes are entrenched in the cultural and social imagination. Sherman’s influential, complex oeuvre draws upon cinema, realism and the grotesque, and is embedded in a number of postmodern and feminist theories.

CINDY SHERMAN (*1954, Glen Ridge, NJ) lives and works in New York. Her work was recently the subject of a large-scale exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, which followed a major retrospective exhibition in 2019–20 at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and Vancouver Art Gallery. Other recent solo exhibitions include: Fosun Foundation, Shanghai (2018), The Broad, Los Angeles (2016), Dallas Museum of Art (2013), and Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (all 2012). Selected group exhibitions include Hayward Gallery, London (2018), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2016), Tate Modern, London (2015), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012) and MUMOK, Vienna (2011). Cindy Sherman also participated in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011) and co-curated a section of the 55th Venice Biennale (2013).

SPRÜTH MAGERS

5900 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036

www.spruethmagers.com

_______________________

Brassaï @ Higher Pictures, NYC - Language of the Wall: The Tapestries, 1968

Brassaï, Language of the Wall: The Tapestries, 1968

Higher Pictures, NYC

Through March 5, 2016

Higher Pictures presents Language of the Wall: The Tapestries, 1968 presenting together for the first time Graffiti I and Nocturne, two of the earliest of seven known tapestries created by BRASSAI. The tapestries, both made in 1968 by the renowned Atelier Yvette Cauquil-Prince, were woven from Brassaï’s collages of his own Graffiti photographs and are exhibited here alongside a selection of gelatin silver prints from the well-known series.

Brassaï began taking photographs of graffiti he saw on walls throughout Paris in the early 1930s and first published a suite of them in a 1933 issue of the surrealist magazine Minotaure (no. 3 – 4), writing there that graffiti had “toppled all the painstakingly devised canons of our aesthetic.” Brassaï wrote about the spontaneous, untrained scrawls and carvings of the graffitists as eternal and formative gestures, imagining children discovering and recreating the human face by gouging two eyeholes into stone or sharing naïve expressions of love through carved hearts and roughly inscribed initials. Though this language would later inspire Jean Dubuffet to make a direct connection between Brassaï’s project and Art Brut, a term Dubuffet coined in the late 1940s to describe what we now call outsider art, Brassaï never aligned himself with the movement.

In 1956, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted the exhibition Language of the Wall: Parisian Graffiti Photographed by Brassaï, featuring over 100 prints from the series selected by Edward Steichen and organized by the artist into visual categories, including: faces; love; war; birds and beasts; wizards and phantoms; and the sign of death. In the exhibition’s press release, Steichen establishes graffiti as “chiefly valuable for the light they throw on the everyday life of the ‘man in the street’ of the period, and for the intimate details of customs and institutions of people in a particular time and place.” It was following MoMA’s exhibition and the subsequent publication of Graffiti de Brassaï in 1961 that Brassaï and Yvette Cauquil-Prince—a master weaver who had already worked with Pablo Picasso and would collaborate with Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Alexander Calder—first discussed translating his photographs into textiles. The process of making Graffiti I and Nocturne would have begun with Brassaï making a collage of prints (each tapestry here comprises more than twenty photographs) that was then used to create a full-scale template, called a cartoon. Placed under or behind the loom, the cartoon provided the weaver with a blueprint for the final piece.

Graffiti I (1968) was Brassaï and Cauquil-Prince’s first tapestry. Measuring nearly 5 feet tall and 10 feet wide, it features what Brassaï called the “bird-woman” (the gelatin silver print is also on view here) in the center of the composition and twinned in miniature in the upper left corner. She is surrounded primarily by images of lovers’ hearts, though a skull and other glyphs appear, all rendered in the grays, browns, and blacks of Paris’ walls. Nocturne, 4 1⁄2 feet tall and 9 feet wide, was completed the same year. The eponymous evening light is captured in vibrant blues and violets; once again, though now facing in the opposite direction, the bird-woman anchors the composition in the center and reappears in the upper left corner. A number of the same hearts from Graffiti I appear around her, joined by a curvilinear female silhouette and a crossbones motif topped with a broadly smiling face in the place of a skull. The Graffiti project charts Brassaï’s transposition of drawing into photograph, and then both into tapestry, ultimately, in the artist’s own words, returning to the wall what he took from it.

Brassaï was born Gyula Halász in Brassó, Transylvania in 1899. In 1924, after studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest and the Academy of Fine Arts at Charlottenburg in Berlin, he moved to Paris where he began working as a journalist and, eventually, a photographer. He took the pseudonym of his hometown in 1932 and the next year published his first photobook, the landmark Paris de Nuit. Widely considered one of the most important artists of the interwar period, Brassaï worked actively through the late 1960s; he died in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France in 1984. His work has since been the subject of several major retrospectives, including Brassaï at the Centre Pompidou, Paris and Hayward Gallery, London in 2000 and Brassaï: The Eye of Paris at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC in 1998.

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