Ana Cláudia Almeida @ Stephen Friedman Gallery, NYC - "Over Again" Exhibition

Ana Cláudia Almeida: Over Again

Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York

5 September - 18 October 2025

Ana Cláudia Almeida

Licking, 2025

© Ana Cláudia Almeida, courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery

Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York, presents Over Again, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Brooklyn-based, Brazilian artist ANA CLAUDIA ALMEIDA. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York.

Ana Cláudia Almeida is an artist whose work explores materiality through movement and mark-making, incorporating a range of media including paper, plastic, oil pastels, paint, video, and sculpture. Her practice seeks to disrupt the functional role of objects by examining the dynamic tension between interior and exterior, individual and environment. The fluttering nature of her works on fabric, the shifting quality of her sculptures, and the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of her large-scale paintings transform intangible memories into physical form.

In Over Again, drawing, oil painting, sculpture, and plastic collide in what Ana Cláudia Almeida describes as an “ecosystem of pieces,” where each medium leaks into the next—a monotype that wants to be a drawing, a drawing that yearns to be a painting, and plastic remnants that refuse to be cast aside. Processes coexist and collide across surfaces, embodying the changeability that sustains both life and artistic practice. Her work reflects the cyclical nature and plasticity of life, tracing the ways in which every action leaves an imprint that shapes what comes next.

Ana Cláudia Almeida’s new body of work—and the exhibition’s title—draws inspiration from Brazilian musician Tim Maia’s song Over Again, which she embraces as a mantra urging liberation from rigid patterns in mind, body, and daily life. Literature, music like Maia’s, and the people she’s met have opened her to alternative ways of living, offering a vision of a less harsh existence. “Precisely in the moments when everything felt more urgent than fabulation, allowing myself that exercise was one of the greatest experiences of freedom I could have had… and now my new pleasure is to lean into the place that hope occupies in the lives of us, Black people.”

In works like Cascata II (2025), Ana Cláudia Almeida revisits the notion of freedom—inseparable, for her, from hope. The largest work in the exhibition is composed of vividly painted fabric that cascades from the gallery ceiling. Its free-flowing brushstrokes unfurl in winding swaths of color, a stunning display of the artist’s intuitive process. This sense of unrestrained movement extends throughout the exhibition: in Dew (gripe) and Belly full of liquids (both 2025), Almeida uses expanses of white space to frame and amplify her vibrant, expressive line drawings. 

For Over Again, Ana Cláudia Almeida assembles a constellation of works that speak to difference, resilience, and the radical act of imagining otherwise. Together, they form what she calls “an essay for a world of differences and complexities”—a defiant refusal of the “machine of existence-flattening” and an invitation to inhabit a space where freedom and hope are lived, shared possibilities.

Artist Ana Cláudia Almeida

Ana Cláudia Almeida (b. 1993, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; lives in Brooklyn, New York) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and video. Her work has been exhibited widely in Brazil and internationally. Notable presentations include a two-person exhibition with Tadáskía at the Nevada Museum of Art as part of the Joyner/Giuffrida Visiting Artists Programme; Guandu Paraguaçu Piraquara at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Rio de Janeiro; Buracos, Crateras e Abraços at Quadra, Rio de Janeiro; and Wasapindorama at Fundação de Arte de Niterói, Niterói. Group exhibitions include Ensaios sobre a Paisagem at Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho; Olhe bem as montanhas at Quadra, São Paulo; Essas Pessoas na Sala de Jantar at Casa Museu Eva Klabin, Rio de Janeiro; Crônicas Cariocas at Museu de Arte do Rio; and Casa Carioca at Museu de Arte do Rio.

Ana Cláudia Almeida holds a BFA from Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. 

Her work is held in the public collections of Museu de Arte do Rio, Instituto Inhotim, Sesc Rio de Janeiro, and the Nevada Museum of Art.

STEPHEN FRIEDMAN GALLERY NEW YORK

54 Franklin Street, New York 10013

www.stephenfriedman.com

Hank Willis Thomas: I Am Many @ Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Hank Willis Thomas

I Am Many

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

September 5 – November 1, 2025

Jack Shainman Gallery announces I AM MANY, an exhibition featuring new and recent work by Hank Willis Thomas, the artist’s eighth exhibition with the gallery and first in their newly opened Tribeca flagship location. Bringing together large-scale sculptures, retroreflective, lenticular and textile works along with a group of mixed-media assemblages, I AM MANY continues Hank Willis Thomas’ investigation into the myriad of ways that the past and present remain interwoven and interconnected. These works explore the legacies of exploitation and oppression in conjunction with new forms of community and solidarity.

Over the past two decades Hank Willis Thomas’ conceptual practice has employed a wide range of media, from photography and sculpture, to screen printing, installation and video. Drawing from both archival and contemporary imagery that references historical examples of political resistance through iconic photographs or contemporary acts of protest, Thomas regularly recontextualizes popular imagery as source material for his works. What unites Thomas’ work across media is his emphasis on the multivalent nature of historical meaning—as something that can always be reshaped and seen from different perspectives.

The exhibition takes its title from an eponymous work that references photographs from the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike which saw Black men assembled with posters all bearing the same message of ‘I AM A MAN’ and in nearly identical typeface. Hank Willis Thomas has transformed that historic message by creating new iterations that expand out from the original phrase, with retroreflective vinyl that, once activated by direct light, reveals latent, previously hidden images of historic protests. Removed and repositioned from their original context, the crowds underscore the enduring power conveyed by the written word. 

Hank Willis Thomas also uses retroreflective vinyl to staggering effect in Black Survival Guide, or How to Live Through a Police Riot (2018), a work originally commissioned by the Delaware Art Museum to mark 50 years since the occupation by the National Guard following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Thomas combined text from the historic document—originally created as a practical manual to help African Americans survive an occupation—with images taken from News Journal photographs of the time. By encouraging viewers to activate these works via flash, Thomas invites them to resurrect, recover and even save images from being lost to history, ensuring they remain visible and gain prominence in our collective memory.

Sculpture continues to be a vital mode of public engagement for Hank Willis Thomas, providing him with opportunities for building community through shared experience. His punctum sculptures take inspiration from Roland Barthes’ photographic theory which describes a detail or passage within an image—the ‘punctum’—that emotionally resonates, sticks with or ‘pierces’ a viewer. Originally sourced from archival photographs, Hank Willis Thomas has begun to use more universal gestures in his newer compositions, as in Community (2024), where isolated hands linking with arms create a circle of power that conveys love, support and connection. In E Pluribus Unum (2020), an eight-foot stainless steel arm points towards the sky with strength while incorporating viewers into its brilliant reflective surface. The nature and scale of these sculptures mirrors their varying iterations in public spaces nationwide while also speaking to Thomas’ longstanding commitment to reconciling the effects of the past on our present moment in history. 

Jack Shainman stated, "Few artists are able to interpret history in ways that provide new strategies for understanding the present. Hank Willis Thomas has done this consistently throughout his career with successive bodies of work that blend technical sophistication with metaphoric depth. Exhibiting Hank's work in our Tribeca gallery—itself embodying a beautiful but complicated period in American history—promises to be a fitting example of what we envisioned for the space, one where the past can be reanimated by contemporary visions and new material sensibilities.”

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

46 Lafayette Street, New York, NY

jackshainman.com

Lucas Samaras: Chalk and Bronze @ 125 Newbury Gallery, New York

Lucas Samaras: Chalk and Bronze

125 Newbury Gallery, New York

January 24 - April 12, 2025

Lucas Samaras 

Untitled, July 17, 1962 

© Lucas Samaras, courtesy Pace Gallery

125 Newbury presents Lucas Samaras: Chalk and Bronze, an exhibition of two distinct yet related bodies of work by the Greek-born American artist, a pivotal figure in the New York avant-garde. This presentation brings a selection of more than two dozen vibrant, never-before-seen pastels from the 1960s into dialogue with a suite of figurative bronze sculptures that Samaras created in the early 1980s. 

Lucas Samaras began employing pastels at a young age, partly as a means of communication. After his family emigrated from Greece to the United States during the 1940s to escape the country’s brutal civil war, Samaras, who spoke no English upon his arrival in America, saw pastels as an outlet for his inner world. “Art was the only thing I could do without speaking,” the artist explained in an interview, “They just gave me paper and pastels, and I drew.” He carried this interest through high school and college, studying under the influential artists Allan Kaprow and George and Helen Segal at Rutgers University.

Known for his critical role in the Happenings movement of the late 1950s, his enigmatic sculptural boxes and chairs, and his expansive and protean photographic practice, Samaras’s comparatively lesser known work in pastel was nevertheless integral to his practice. “One might say that the pastels are the foundation of Samaras’s work,” explains Arne Glimcher, curator of the exhibition and the artist’s friend and dealer for over 50 years, “It was in pastel that he invented not only his palette but himself.” Samaras first exhibited his pastels at New York’s Green Gallery in the early 1960s. More recently, these works were the subject of a major 2016 exhibition at The Morgan Library.

The selection of pastels included in this exhibition reflects Samaras’s deep interest in the lurid, almost vulgarly chromatic possibilities—and the powdery materiality—of the medium. Many of the works consist of self-portraits, where faces or body parts appear fragmented or contorted, rendered in stark contrast against monochromatic backgrounds. Elsewhere, the face merges with its prismatic surroundings, threatening the solidity of the body’s border with the world.

Relentless and constantly shapeshifting in his pursuit of formal evolution, Lucas Samaras turned towards the medium of bronze on only a few occasions throughout his long career. In this suite of works created during the early 1980s, he explored concerns of flesh and figure through an almost alchemical treatment of metal. Like his early pastels, the bronzes evoke the softness of the body, improbably transmuting the hardness of metal into the tenderness of flesh. The resulting sculptures are among the only figurative images that Lucas Samaras created which are not self-portraits. Instead, they seem to speak to a more generalized notion of the human condition––what it might look or feel like to inhabit a body from the inside out, externalizing an otherwise inaccessible interiority. If the pastels embody meditations on a vibrant mode of life-turned-art, the bronzes represent their contorted doubles.

Small in scale but capacious in their emotional depth, Samaras’s bronze figures offer visions of twisting or perhaps melting bodies. Often plated with silver or gold, they fold over and into themselves as flesh might. Figures recline alone or appear intertwined with one another. Moments of embrace reveal themselves in the murky shimmer of the metal. The boundaries between agony and ecstasy, between self and other, begin to dissolve.

Presented together for the first time since a 1982 exhibition at Pace Gallery, these two bodies of work feed into and inform one another. Together, they reflect the artist’s unflinching exploration of what it felt like to inhabit his own body, both in the physical and psychic registers. As a pastel face dissolves into polychrome rays of light, a bronze body takes shape from its primordial ground, producing a sense of struggle that distills Samaras’s lifelong investigation of the nature of selfhood and embodiment.

Eluding historical categorization, Lucas Samaras’s (b. 1936, Kastoria, Macedonia, Greece; d. 2024, New York) oeuvre is united through its consistent focus on the body and psyche, often emphasizing autobiography. The themes of self-depiction, self-investigation, and identity were a driving force behind his practice, which, at its onset in the early 1960s, advanced the Surrealist idiom while proposing a radical departure from the presiding themes of Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. Samaras emigrated with his family from Greece to the United States in 1948 and attended Rutgers University, New Jersey, studying under Allan Kaprow and George Segal, and then at Columbia University, New York, where he studied art history under Meyer Schapiro. During this time, he initiated painting self-portraits and gravitated toward the use of pastels, which enabled him to work quickly, exploring figurative and geometrical forms in rich colors and with luxuriant texture, characteristics that would reoccur throughout his practice. He soon shifted toward objects, producing assemblage reliefs and boxes comprised of elements culled from his immediate surroundings and five-and-dime stores—cutlery, nails, mirrors, brightly colored yarn, and feathers—affixed with liquid aluminum or plaster. Gesturing toward a larger investigation of (self) reflection in his work found in his early mirror rooms, self-portraiture, and more recent use of digital mirror-imaging, Samaras’s oeuvre acts as an extension of his body while underscoring the transformative possibilities of the everyday—a true blurring of art and life.

In 1969, Lucas Samaras began to expand upon his use of photography, experimenting with a Polaroid 360 camera, which appealed to his sense of immediacy. His innovation further materialized with his use of the Polaroid SX-70 in 1973 in a melding of self-portraiture and abstraction, created by manipulating the wet-dye emulsions with a stylus or fingertip before the chemicals set. This process progressed with digital art in 1996 when he obtained his first computer and began to experiment with printed texts on typewriter paper. By 2002, he had acquired a digital camera, and the use of Photoshop became an integral component of his practice. These technologies gave way to Photofictions (2003), a series characterized by distorted self-portraits and psychedelic compositions.

125 NEWBURY

395 Broadway, New York, NY 10013

www.125newbury.com

Artist Thu-Van Tran @ Almine Rech New York — "In spring, ghosts return" Exhibition

Thu-Van Tran 

In spring, ghosts return 

Almine Rech New York 

May 7 — Jun 15, 2024 

Almine Rech New York, Tribeca presents In spring, ghosts return, Thu-Van Tran's third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Forming the focal point of her exhibition In spring, ghosts return, Thu-Van Tran’s Colors of Grey evokes a world of intense paradox. Vivid hues enact their own negation, their multiplicity eclipsed through their mixing by the emergence of a gray singularity. Differentiation morphs into that which is almost indistinguishable. Begun in 2012 as a poetic reckoning with the so-called Rainbow Herbicides that the United States weaponized against Vietnam during Operation Ranch Hand, the series has taken many forms, from wall-sized frescos to monumental paintings. In her most recent expression, the artist explores expanded vistas on a more intimate scale. These works engage the legacies of Renaissance perspective, 19th-century panoramas, and Christian devotional painting only to subvert them through a meditation on landscape that unfurls across metaphoric and geographical registers.

Arranged at the height of windows with a shared horizon line, the paintings in the exhibition offer a 360-degree view onto a compositionally and conceptually complex miasma of colorful abstraction. Their astounding beauty is rooted in horror. Indeed, the gestural washes that veil the canvas belie the steely logic of Tran’s politically encoded color theory. Between 1962 and 1971, the United States sprayed 19 million gallons of chemical weapons onto the jungles of Vietnam. Agent Orange was the most notorious, but Agents White, Blue, Pink, Green, and Purple were also unleashed in an act of chemical warfare that caused decades of ecological and human devastation. Limiting her palette to the colors used to identify these lethal herbicides, Tran paints each color alongside its opposite, gradually producing a shroud of gray pigment that floats above its originally colorful substrate. Her systematic approach results in a painterly negation that poetically figures the trauma of neocolonial occupation. This is a landscape twice abstracted. First, through the familiar gestural marks of nonobjective painting and, second, through the coda waiting to be deciphered in the very colors that Tran initially employs. 

The resulting panoramic installation that encircles the viewer formally echoes a system of visual representation popularized at the height of colonial expansion. Offering the public an immersive, even cinematic viewing experience, the panorama technique was patented in 1787 to instant acclaim. Visitors flocked to spectacles such as the “panorama du commerce” at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, where seamlessly fused canvases hung in the round detailed scenes of colonial trade across the French empire. Commissioned to coincide with the Exposition Universelle of 1889, the panorama was a magnum opus of Orientalist painting. Allegories representing each country left no room for doubt as to the hierarchy of civilizations according to the French: Europe was represented as the arts and architecture, while Asia was reduced to elephants and a hookah. 

Conversely, Tran’s installation works against the panorama’s historical roots in imperialist expansion. Traditional panoramas borrowed a compositional style adopted from military protocols used to survey enemy land. They delivered scenes of heightened realism, typically from a bird’s-eye view. Tran immerses the viewer in a shifting landscape of suggestion and abstraction. Rather than indoctrinating viewers through an illusionistic palimpsest deployed to conceal violent conquest, the artist confronts the perpetual unfolding of imperialist aggression through the enigmatic commingling of color, form, and perception.

In In spring, ghosts return, Tran introduces an additional structural element that mitigates the surveilling mode of observation courted in 19th-century panoramas. Interrupting the revolving pan of paintings are two triptychs, whose triple-paneled format borrows from Christian devotional painting. An altar is a threshold to divine mystery. In the Christian tradition, it illustrates the apotheosis toward which all other elements in the church, such as the stations of the cross, narratively progress. Its appearance here is a reminder of forces greater than the visible world and its conquest. This formal intercession in the rhythm of the panorama suggests space for contemplation. The panoramic effect, in turn, exerts reciprocal pressure on the altarpieces, confounding the notion of chronological time fundamental to the Christian worldview. Rather than an explicit narrative mapped onto an advancing timeline, the horizon line that laces across Tran’s panorama suggests a continual cycle akin to the Buddhist belief in reincarnation. In spring, ghosts return reminds us that everything circles back to a point of origin only to begin again.

Tran’s incorporation of altars in the form of dual triptychs invites a spiritual dimension into what might otherwise stand as an exercise in history painting. As the exhibition title suggests, there are ghosts in this landscape. Apparitions coalesce and evanesce in the swirling veils of paint, pointing to mourning, mystery, and the possibility of communion. Tran has previously described her preoccupation with “the melancholy of a shifting landscape into which we must project and construct ourselves.”1  For centuries, Western painting prized various perspectival systems developed in the Renaissance, whose power lay in the promise of projection. These systems relied on the metaphor of the window, placing the viewer in a fixed position relative to the scene before them. A window might provide a view, but Tran’s panorama invites us to choose our own perspective. In this haunted terrain, the act of seeing is also a radical act of reconstruction that forges a future through the vivid condensation of history in the present. 

— Katherine Rochester, PhD, art historian and curator 

1  Hélène Guenin,“Interview: Thu-Van Tran and Hélène Guenin,” in Thu-Van Tran: Nous vivons dans l’éclat, ed. Hélène Guenin (Nice: MAMAC; Paris: Editions Dilecta, 2023),141.

ALMINE RECH NEW YORK

361 Broadway, New York, NY 10013 

www.alminerech.com

Constanza Schaffner @ Luhring Augustine Tribeca, New York - "Leones, Flores, Constanzas" Exhibition

Constanza Schaffner

Leones, Flores, Constanzas

Luhring Augustine Tribeca, New York

January 13 – March 2, 2024

Luhring Augustine presents Leones, Flores, Constanzas, an exhibition of new paintings by the Argentine, New York-based artist Constanza Schaffner. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Constanza Schaffner is interested in the often-contradictory forces that reside within the individual psyche, and the tensions that can arise between poetic and rational approaches to understanding and experiencing the world. In her doctoral dissertation on comparative literature, she focuses on strategies to “re-enchant” the contemporary world, which she sees as largely disconnected from the mythical, the magical, and the sacred – an investigation that permeates her artistic practice as well.

In Constanza Schaffner’s self-portraits, enlarged, exaggerated facial expressions are prevalent; flesh is realized with luminescence and translucence, punctuated by flickering highlights; pores, wrinkles, creases – signifiers of time and age – are lingered over and explored with her dynamic brushwork as sites for experimentation in abstraction. In the work De Terror y de Gloria, a bat-flower becomes a portrait of its own. Petals and stems consume and lift off the canvas in densely rendered contrast, with vessels and veins suggesting traces of vibrant life on the cusp of decay. In La Entrada del Tiempo, a symphony of flowers sprouts out of the heads of two male lions and Constanza. While one lion is captured in a moment of reflection, or dozing off, another looks at Constanza, staring back at the artist with her own eyes. Throughout her work, Constanza Schaffner examines tensions that reside within beauty, gender, and power.

Constanza Schaffner was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1989. Her work has been exhibited at CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach, FL; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Plymouth Rock, Zürich, Switzerland; Bortolami, New York, NY; Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, England; Park View/Paul Soto, Los Angeles, CA; and Galerie Houssenot, Paris, France. The artist’s work is included in the permanent collections of Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; and the Hall Art Foundation, Reading, VT. She is a PhD candidate at the Department of Comparative Literature in New York University’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

LUHRING AUGUSTINE TRIBECA

17 White Street, New York, NY 10013

www.luhringaugustine.com

Frank Auerbach @ Luhring Augustine, NYC - "Frank & Julia" Exhibition

Frank Auerbach: Frank & Julia

Luhring Augustine, New York

October 27 – December 22, 2023

Luhring Augustine presents Frank & Julia, the gallery’s second exhibition with the esteemed British painter, Frank Auerbach. This presentation focuses on Frank Auerbach’s portraits of his wife, Julia, alongside self-portraits, and follows his widely lauded 2020 survey show, Frank Auerbach: Selected Works, 1978–2016, in the Gallery's Chelsea location. Frank & Julia is on view in the galley's Tribeca location and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Celebrated for his distinctive painterly lexicon, which is characterized by passionate brushwork and tactile impasto, in this exhibition Auerbach delivers evocative compositions imbued with soul and presence. The paintings and works on paper on view in Frank & Julia offer a singular vantage point from which to explore Frank Auerbach’s creative spirit, inviting contemplation into his motivations and artistic methodologies. From the time of their university days when they met at the Royal College of Art in London in the 1950s, Julia was one of the artist’s first sitters. Conversely, only sporadic self-portraits exist from Frank Auerbach’s early career, and it is within the last few years that he has consistently engaged with his own visage as a recurring motif. Notably, all the works featured in this exhibition come from the past decade, with the earliest portrait of Julia made in 2012, and all of the self-portraits finished within the last year.

This harmonious and incisive body of work intricately weaves the personal and the artistic, the self and the familial, the artist and his subject. Viewed through this unique prism, each composition’s formal choices radiate with fresh resonance. For Frank Auerbach, painting remains a lens through which he observes and interprets the world, a means to assimilate and encapsulate his surroundings before distilling them into a composition. The works in Frank & Julia go beyond documenting the artist’s personal relationship with his wife, transcending sentimentality, and instead, offer an extraordinary perspective into the genesis of image-making and aesthetic prowess that has been the hallmark of Frank Auerbach’s distinguished career spanning seven decades.

Born in 1931 in Berlin, Germany, FRANK AUERBACH has been living in England since 1939. Frank Auerbach studied painting at Borough Polytechnic, and received degrees from St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art. In 1986 the artist represented Great Britain at the XLII Venice Biennale, for which he, along with Sigmar Polke, was awarded the Golden Lion Prize. He has been the subject of solo shows at The Hayward Gallery, London; Kunstverein, Hamburg; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; The National Gallery, London; Royal Academy of Arts, London; and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. In 2015 a major retrospective exhibition of Auerbach’s work was presented at Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany and Tate Britain, London. His works are included in prestigious collections worldwide including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; British Museum, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; and Tate, London. A forthcoming exhibition of large-scale drawings by Frank Auerbach will be presented together for the first time at The Courtauld Gallery, London in Spring 2024.

LUHRING AUGUSTINE TRIBECA

17 White Street, New York, NY 10013

www.luhringaugustine.com

Arthur Dove @ Schoelkopf Gallery, New York – Yes, I Could Paint a Cyclone – Inaugural Exhibition of the New Location of the Gallery in Tribeca

Arthur Dove: Yes, I Could Paint a Cyclone 

Schoelkopf Gallery, New York 

September 29 – December 1, 2023 

Arthur Dove, 1880–1946

Tanks and Snowbank, 1933

Oil and metallic paint on canvas in the artist’s frame, 18 x 24 inches

Photo Credit: Roz Akin | Private Collection, courtesy of Schoelkopf Gallery

Schoelkopf Gallery debuts its new Tribeca location at 390 Broadway, with an exhibition dedicated to pioneering American painter ARTHUR DOVE (1880–1946). The exhibition presents a dynamic selection of increasingly nonrepresentational works that trace Arthur Dove’s evolution as a painter and reveal his unyielding interrogation of established artistic convention. 

The exhibition Arthur Dove: Yes, I Could Paint a Cyclone brings together over 70 significant works in various media, including oil, pastel, watercolor and charcoal. These pieces are drawn from distinguished foundations and private collections across North America, revealing Arthur Dove's profound influence and innovation in 20th century art. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by leading Dove scholar Rachael DeLue, Professor in American art at Princeton and author of the monograph Arthur Dove: Always Connect (2016).

Arthur Dove's career began in 1903 as an illustrator in New York before his transformative experiences in France in 1908–09, when he participated in the Salon d'Automne in Paris. Inspired by French modernist master Henri Matisse, Arthur Dove began to experiment with a painterly approach that would redefine American art.

Arthur Dove's breakthrough came in 1912 when legendary gallerist Alfred Stieglitz exhibited his groundbreaking series of daringly abstract pastels known today as the Ten Commandments (1911–12). These works marked the earliest expressions of his unique nonrepresentational style, provoking both controversy and excitement. His art captured the essence of nature, light, sound, and sensation in a liminal zone between abstraction and representation.

Throughout his career, Arthur Dove challenged traditional modes of expression, cementing his status as a pioneering painter and thinker within the emergence of abstraction in twentieth-century modernism. In the late 1930s, Arthur Dove and his wife, fellow artist Helen Torr, settled in Centerport, Long Island, where Dove continued to redefine his style. Despite declining health, he created works featuring geometric and biomorphic forms, foreshadowing movements like Abstract Expressionism and Color Field Painting.

Helmed by Andrew Schoelkopf, the gallery presents innovative and important works of American art encompassing both abstract and realist movements, while also shedding light on American artists deserving of greater attention. The gallery’s robust program celebrates the entire sweep of the American modernist movement from 1875 through present day. Schoelkopf Gallery’s move to Tribeca marks a significant milestone in its storied history, bringing a rich array of American art to the vibrant neighborhood. The new 4,800-square-foot gallery space allows the gallery to share its commitment to American art with a larger audience, as well as to support collectors, scholars, museums and the public with a program that expands the canon and creates community.

"Schoelkopf Gallery's new location in Tribeca is the physical embodiment of many changes in our business and in the field of American art. The location offers distinct physical spaces to enhance the gallery's programming and it gives our team more opportunities to tailor personal experiences for the most active collectors of American art.  Over the last five years, more than 30% of the buyers from our gallery are those new to the field or who have not worked with us previously. This figure is the highest I have observed in my career and indicates there is a growing community for American art that is eager to learn more about the American Modernist movement." 

SCHOELKOPF GALLERY

390 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10013

schoelkopfgallery.com

Tjebbe Beekman @ GRIMM Gallery, NYC - Tetris

Tjebbe Beekman: Tetris

GRIMM Gallery, New York

Through 12 November 2022

TJEBBE BEEKMAN

Massacre of the Innocents, 2022

© Tjebbe Beekman, courtesy GRIMM

TJEBBE BEEKMAN

Massacre of the Innocents, 2022 - Detail

© Tjebbe Beekman, courtesy GRIMM

GRIMM presents Tetris a new solo exhibition by TJEBBE BEEKMAN. This is the artist’s second solo presentation in New York and the first in the gallery’s new Tribeca location.

Increasingly fragmented, polarized, and ever chaotic, Tjebbe Beekman’s new body of work is a personal reflection of contemporary society and a method of coping with the existential events of today through his contemporaries of the past. Titled after the 1980’s arcade game, his new paintings mimic the navigating tasks of the 'Tetris' exercise and are structured with imagery referencing art history as their anchoring subject matter. Each work consists of various levels of material - thick impasto with collaged elements, rope, and sand, combined with the use of acrylic paint -resulting in this new series referencing past artists' contributions to the painterly medium. Far from cynical, Tjebbe Beekman pays homage to the continuum of artistic and technical development which the medium of painting provides: balancing composition, color, depth, and perspective through the lenses of those who have preceded him.

Just as the various elements in the game of 'Tetris' connect, so do Tjebbe Beekman’s textured references, interlocking visual, historic, and structural information in an abundance of composition. In the game, as the speed increases in the stacking of blocks, gaps form where holes between concrete information are left at a loss, similarly to the ways in which we glean information from various media sources at a rapid and disjointed rate today. The viewer may need time to digest each work, as it evokes the un-ending stream of media and information we sift through on a daily basis.

Tjebbe Beekman’s previous work has aimed to focus on the dismantling of contemporary society through a psychoanalytic lens into his own fascination with the genres of history, architecture, and dystopia, as well as his own mediation with the world’s current existential events. With this new body of work referencing both old and modern masters, Beekman develops environments through the embodiment of those who have served as pillars of the artistic field before him. Nodding to historic iconographic painting, like in Massacre of the Innocents, 2022, Beekman continues to break the mold of what is expected of the medium to create new innovation and celebrate the act of creating in its entirety.

TJEBBE BEEKMAN

Tjebbe Beekman (b. 1972 in Leiden, NL) attended the KABK: Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (NL) from 1993 to 1997, followed by the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (NL) from 2003 to 2004. Awards and nominations include the Theo Wolvecamp Prize (NL), Buning Brongers Prize (NL), and the Royal Painting Prize (NL). Tjebbe Beekman’s recent exhibitions include: Mondrian Moves, Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL); The Roaring Twenties, Museum Kranenburgh, Bergen (NL); Symbiosis: Virtues, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL); Reflections beyond the Surface, Akzo Nobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (NL); Symbiosis, GRIMM, New York, NY (US); Listen to your eyes, Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (NL); Collected, Capital C, Amsterdam (NL); Where is the Madness You Promised Me, Hudson Valley Museum of Modern Art, Peekskill, NY (US); Discover the Modern, Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL); Top Floor, Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL); Van Cobra tot Boorolie, Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam (NL); Out of office, Singer Museum, Laren (NL); Freedom – The Fifty Key Dutch Artworks Since 1968, curated by Hans den Hartog Jager, Museum De Fundatie, Zwolle (NL); and De meest eigentijdse schilderijen tentoonstelling, Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht (NL).

Tjebbe Beekman’s work can be found in various public, private and institutional collections including Aedes Art Collection, Amsterdam (NL); ABN Amro Art Collection, Amsterdam (NL); Akzo Nobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (NL); De Nederlandsche Bank, Amsterdam (NL); Straus Family Collection, New York, NY (US); THE EKARD COLLECTION; Collection De Heus-Zomer, Barneveld (NL); The Hort Family Collection, New York, NY (US); ING Art Collection, Amsterdam (NL); Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (NL); Sanders Collection (NL); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL) and Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam (NL).

GRIMM 

54 White Street, New York, NY 10013

www.grimmgallery.com

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

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - Mirror-works and Drawings (2004 - 2016)

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

Mirror-works and Drawings (2004 - 2016)

James Cohan Gallery, New York

48 Walker Street, January 29 -  March 6, 2021

291 Grand Street, January 29 - February 27, 2021

MONIR SHAHROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN

Untitled Maze, 2015

Mirror and reverse glass painting on plaster and wood

53 1/8 x 53 1/8 in., 135 x 135 cm

Courtesy James Cohan Gallery

James Cohan presents an exhibition of work by Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, on view from January 29 through March 6 at 48 Walker Street and January 29 through February 27 at 291 Grand Street. The exhibition spans both of the gallery’s locations, with a presentation of two major sculptural series in Tribeca and a selection of the artist’s geometric drawings and Convertible sculptures in the Lower East Side. This is the late artist’s first exhibition with James Cohan.

Over six decades, MONIR SHAHROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN (1922 - 2019) investigated the intricate geometries of her Iranian heritage, reconfiguring traditional craft techniques to explore the philosophical, poetic, and perceptual possibilities of interlocking primary forms. In her work, rigorous structure and repetition are the foundations of invention and limitless variation. Spanning mirrored mosaics, sculptural assemblage, drawings, textiles and monotypes, Monir’s multidimensional practice centered on incorporating elements from her inherited past into her own designs—which blended a range of compositional influences, from classical Persian interior decoration to Western modernism. 

Monir is best known for her geometric mirror-works, in which cut polygonal fragments of reverse-painted, reflective glass are arranged into kaleidoscopic compositions grounded on principles of Islamic geometry. Tied to a mystical understanding of primary shapes as sacred and connected to a divine natural order, her unit-based compositions of luminous glass reveal uniformity, repetition, and precedent as the basis for endless recombination. This two-part exhibition brings together major mirror-mosaic works and related geometric drawings from the prolific period following Monir's return to Iran in 2004.

On view at the Tribeca gallery are five major Maze works: Triangle Maze, Square Maze, Pentagon Maze, Hexagon Maze (all 2014), and Untitled Maze (2015). In these sculptures, the traditional surface of the mirror-mosaic is dissected and reassembled into a maze form, opening up spatial arrangements drawn from architectural convention to new possible interpretations. For Monir, the luminous reverse-painted glass pathways in these wall-based sculptures invoke the mazes of Persian gardens as well as the extravagant hedge labyrinths of English and French estate gardens. Her Maze works incorporate sacred geometries to give meditative, physical expression to the Farsi adage Hameesheh yek raah hast—“there is always a way”—inviting the viewer to discover their way in and their way out of the path laid out by the artist.

Monir often grouped her work in series she called “families,” suggesting a familial and conceptual affinity of form, dimensionality, or structure between works in each group. Each family comprises eight sculptures, which begin with the fundamental form of the triangle and progress through the remaining seven regular polygons in Euclidean geometry. In the central gallery, three exemplary works from Monir’s Fourth Family (2013) are each anchored by central, multi-sided linear shapes whose features define an outward-spanning tessellation of form. Like the sequence of Maze works in the previous gallery, Fourth Family Pentagon, Fourth Family Hexagon, and Fourth Family Octagon unfold in a progression of geometric complexity, each subsequent form composed of more facets and more angles.

The Convertible sculptures on view in Tribeca marry Monir’s enduring interest in repetition and seriality with explorations into modularity and permutability. Each wall-based mirror work is composed of segments that can be assembled in myriad patterns, folded and unfolded according to diagrams drawn by the artist—some based on extant decorative patterns, and others of her own invention. In Monir’s own words, they enable her to “play with ideas of infinity.” Khordad - Convertible Series (2011) is named for the third month of the Persian solar calendar, a timekeeping system that begins each year on the vernal equinox. The work is composed of four individual forms that each suggest the sinuous trefoil arches of early Islamic architecture. Reflection Five (2010) is a wall-based sculpture that consists of one central rhombus and four identical square-shaped forms which, in the Islamic tradition, symbolize North, South, West, and East. By organizing the forms according to her own design, and invoking concepts central to Minimalism such as modularity, the shape’s axes are complicated, demonstrating the fluidity and generative potential of geometric structure.

With Installation of 9 elements (2004), on view at the Lower East Side gallery, Monir employs diagrammatic organization to establish a spatial order between dissimilar, mirrored forms. Layering contemporary ideas with an Islamic integration of mathematics, bodily presence, and spirituality, this immersive installation work reconnects 20th century abstraction with its theological roots to invite sublime perceptual experience grounded in the body of the viewer. Monir explained in a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, “With the reflections, you’re also a part of the art piece. Your own appearance, your own face, your own clothing—if you move, it is a part of the art. You’re the connection: it is the mix of human being and reflection and

artwork.”

Exhibited alongside this nine-element installation are two mirror works whose shapes respond to Sufi mathematical principles, and a selection of historically significant drawings. Drawing was an integral throughline in Monir’s wideranging practice, providing a means for exercising dimensional thinking through experimentation with geometric structure. The drawings on view in this exhibition were created in the 1990s and 2000s, when Monir returned to Tehran after a 26-year period of exile in New York following the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Collectively, they demonstrate her decades-long, two-dimensional exploration of sculptural possibilities and sculptural production, as well as what curator Suzanne Cotter describes as the “intensely spatial nature of Monir’s artistic thinking.”

The work of MONIR SHAHROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN (b. Qazvin, Iran, 1924 - d. 2019) has been exhibited internationally beginning in the 1960’s. Her forthcoming solo exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA will open in 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include Sunset Sunrise, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2018), which travelled to Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates (2019); Mirror Variations: The Art of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Grand Rapids Art Museum, MI (2018); Lineages, Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2017); Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings, 1974-2014, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal (2014), which travelled to Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2015); and Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (2017); Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Convertibles and Polygons, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2013); and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Mirror Mosaics, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom (2007).

Her work is held in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, including the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; the Barry Art Museum, Norfolk, VA; Grand Rapids Museum of Art, Grand Rapids, MI; Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, France; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Monir Museum, Negarestan Museum Park Gardens, Tehran, Iran; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, Tehran, Iran; Niavaran Cultural Center, Tehran, Iran; Queensland Gallery of Contemporary Art, Queensland, Australia; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran, Iran; Toledo Art Museum, Toledo, OH; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom.

JAMES COHAN GALLERY

48 Walker St New York, NY 10013 

291 Grand St New York, NY 10002

www.jamescohan.com

Chart Gallery Inaugural Exhibition: Reductive Seduction

Reductive Seduction - Inaugural Exhibition
Chart, New York
May 2 - June 29, 2019

SHEREE HOVSEPIAN 

Whole Other, 2018

© Sheree Hovsepian - Courtesy Chart, New York

CHART announces the inaugural exhibition of its new dynamic program and Tribeca location. Founded by former Paul Kasmin Gallery Partner, Clara Ha, CHART will establish a collaborative platform that offers different perspectives from art world professionals by presenting special projects, exhibitions and site-specific installations. For its inaugural exhibition CHART invited Simone Joseph of SGJ Fine Art, to co-curate Reductive Seduction, featuring the work of Jean Arp, Louise Bourgeois, James Lee Byars, Loie Hollowell, Sheree Hovsepian, Deborah Kass, and others.

The inaugural, co-curated exhibition sets the tone for CHART as a collaborative platform and establishes a precedent for a cooperative dialogue between visual thinkers and creators. Clara Ha’s extensive experience and knowledge of the changing landscape of the art community led her to reconsider the traditional gallery model.

Reductive Seduction is a transgenerational group exhibition exploring the ways in which sensuality can be expressed through a minimal formal language. Bringing together a selection of works from the mid-20th Century to the present, the group of works create a dialogue of sensual depiction that was once more typically associated with Baroque gestures, that is replaced here by refined and incisive accumulation of elements and materials. These works utilize drastically refined and distilled form to evoke corporeal sensation and somatic charge.

Reductive Seduction includes works by Jean Arp, Louise Bourgeois, James Lee Byars, Dadamaino, Suzan Frecon, Marcia Hafif, Loie Hollowell, Sheree Hovsepian, Deborah Kass, Nevine Mahmoud, Carmen Herrera, Maximilian Schubert, Leon Polk Smith, Vincent Szarek and Alice Tippit.

Founded and owned by Clara Ha, CHART will present exhibitions of emerging, and established artists engaged in interdisciplinary practices. A collaborative platform, CHART’s objective is to highlight diverse perspectives in contemporary art. Projects will include site specific installations and special exhibitions organized with guest curators.

CLARA HA is a gallerist with more than twenty years of experience in the art world. A former partner at Paul Kasmin Gallery, Ha has worked with artists such as Walton Ford, Robert Indiana, Deborah Kass, Claude and Francois- Xavier Lalanne, Kenny Scharf, Frank Stella and numerous estates such as The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Estate of Morris Louis and The Estate of Robert Motherwell amongst others. Ha has worked on various public projects including Will Ryman “The Roses” on Park Avenue and most recently Hangang Art Park, Seoul, S. Korea.

SIMONE JOSEPH has spent over twenty years working in the international art world. She has been the director of several prominent art galleries, and produced numerous exhibitions and independent projects including: David Hockney: Portraits, Louise Nevelson: Black Wall Constructions and re:construction: Interplay between Form and Function. Joseph founded SGJ Fine Art LLC, New York, in 2011, a professional art advisory service.

Courtesy of designer and dealer Malcolm James Kutner, CHART presents a selection of French Reconstruction era furniture throughout the gallery.

CHART
74 Franklin Street, New York, NY, 10013
chart-gallery.com