Artist Jan Wade @ Richard Saltoun Gallery, New York - "Colored Entrance" Exhibition

Jan Wade 

COLORED ENTRANCE

Richard Saltoun Gallery, New York

2 May - 22 June 2024

JAN WADE

Mama Story (1996)

Richard Saltoun Gallery New York presents its inaugural solo exhibition COLORED ENTRANCE, by African-Canadian artist JAN WADE (b. 1952).

COLORED ENTRANCE is Jan Wade's first solo exhibition in the United States, on the occasion of the acquisition of her work, Epiphany, by the National Gallery of Canada and her upcoming retrospective Soul Power opening at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario in June 2024. Previously touring from Vancouver Art Gallery (2022), this marked the first solo show by a Black woman artist in the museum's ninety-year history.

“We couldn’t be more excited to present Jan’s works to a US audience, given the incredible wealth of connections and references to her Southern-American roots and the historic slave trade, and their resounding contemporary political relevance. This will be the first major showing of her work in America and coincides with her touring retrospective opening in June, in Hamilton, Ontario; we have selected both historic and new works to showcase the full breadth of her practice here.”

- Niamh Coghlan, Director

JAN WADE 

Epiphany (1994 - 2012) and Spirit House (2021)

Installation View at Soul Power, 

Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, 2022 

Jan Wade's practice explores Black identity in a post-colonial landscape from a deeply personal perspective, drawing from her heritage, African diasporic spiritual practices, and the history of Southern Slave Cultures. She was born in 1952 in Hamilton, Ontario, to a Black Canadian father with familial origins in the American South and a Canadian mother of European descent. Raised in a relatively segregated but close-knit community, Wade's formative years were heavily influenced by her local African Methodist Episcopal Church, Southern African-American culture and aesthetics from the perspectives of her paternal grandmother and great-grandmother. Although it stems from personal experience, Wade's work seeks to articulate a new understanding of her ancestors' traumas and the discrimination they themselves suffered. 

Exhibition Highlights include a new iteration of Wade's most iconic work Epiphany (1994-), an installation comprising crosses made of found pieces of wood and embellished with thrift store finds and objects connected African-American culture, acting as a monument to cultural survival and perseverance. Exhibited at the 1st Johannesburg Biennale AFRICUS (1995), and included in Jan Wade's touring retrospective Soul Power, this is the first time Epiphany is shown in the USA. A previous iteration of this work has recently been acquired by the National Gallery of Canada for their permanent collection. 

JAN WADE 

Memory Jug, 2016

Also on view is a new series of Jan Wade's ongoing Memory Jugs, which she was inspired to make after seeing an archival photograph of memory jugs placed on Slave cemeteries in the American South. These funerary vessels were traditionally adorned with fragments-broken china, glass shards-and items beloved by the departed. Unlike historical memory jugs, Wade's pieces incorporate text as well as imagery in addition to found objects, rooted in the oral traditions of her African Methodist church. 

"Memory Jugs in particular have a fascinating history. Social Anthropologists believe they originated from BaKongo culture in Africa, which influenced slave communities in America. Their origins come from the tradition of African mourning vessels and were used as a way of honoring family members and friends. They were placed in Cemeteries and used as grave markers. (...) They had a revival in the Victorian era and even in the 50’s and 60’s but the original function and meaning had by then been mostly forgotten. I am dedicating mine to…. BLACK LIVES MATTER….and all those through the ages who have suffered and died at the hands of injustice….only the cameras are new….."

- Jan Wade

These vessels are exhibited alongside early paintings such as Mama Story (1996), and Women Cometh Forth Like a Flower (1995) which illustrate Jan Wade's enduring focus on the matriarchy of her family.

The show also features works from Jan Wade's decade-long project Breathe (2004-2022), a series of 70 embroidered canvases in abstract patterns that are informed by traditional Southern American, Gee Bend quilting techniques, and dedicated to the Black Lives Matter movement. The series is titled after the last words of Eric Garner, who was killed in a prohibited chokehold by a police officer in 2014. The repetition echoes the relentless recirculation of the spectacle of Garner's death, which was captured on video, pointing to the ongoing pattern of injustice and anti-Blackness. 

Additionally on view are Jan Wade's pastel-coloured skull drawings titled Boneheads (2001-), which evolved out of her interest in both the iconographies of the African Methodist church and the Cuban diasporic religion of Santería, delving into universal themes such as death and grief alongside poignant contemporary issues around environmental and racial politics.

“My "BONEHEAD" drawings emerged as a form of relief or an exploration of my own understanding that life and death are intertwined. Humor and vibrant colors play a significant role in my work, as they make it easier for me to delve into these images and explore my thoughts and emotions. In the midst of life, death is ever-present, as we witness in nature. When something or someone passes away, new life springs forth.”

- Jan Wade

Portrait of JAN WADE 

JAN WADE - SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Born in 1952 in Hamilton, Ontario, Jan Wade's work explores Black post-colonial identity, ethnicity, and spirituality. She produces paintings, textiles and mixed-media works that feature slogans and symbols that are made entirely from found or readymade objects, and recycled materials.

Jan Wade studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design (1972–76). She moved to Vancouver in 1983 and became part of the underground art and music scene in the city, with its innovative performances, do-it-yourself art shows, anti-establishment ethos and spontaneous happenings. During this period, Wade began her research into African diasporic spiritual practices and made art that reflected her roots and identity, commencing her unique artistic journey marked by self-sufficiency, empowerment, hope and radical joy.

After three decades spent on the fringe of the cultural mainstream, Jan Wade has received overdue acknowledgement for her unique contributions to Canadian art. Jan Wade: Soul Power—the landmark first solo exhibition by a Black woman in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s ninety-year history—presented the artist’s mixed-media assemblages, paintings, textiles, and sculptural objects from the 1990s to the present day.

RICHARD SALTOUN GALLERY | NEW YORK 

19 E 66th Street, New York, NY 10065 

www.richardsaltoun.com

The Echo of Picasso @ Almine Rech Galleries, NYC - Trebica and Upper East Side - Pablo Picasso in a contemporary perspective

The Echo of Picasso

Almine Rech Galleries, New York

November 8 — December 16, 2023 

In honor of the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death (April 8, 1973), Almine Rech presents The Echo of Picasso, a wide-ranging group exhibition curated by Eric Troncy, spanning across its two locations in New York City.

The exhibition offers two perspectives: one that revisits a time in history wherein Picasso's contemporaries sought to challenge his work, and a second in which living artists today echo the Spanish artist’s oeuvre. As Michael Fitzgerald* described, "instead of being a potential adversary in life, in death, Picasso became a voluminous encyclopedia of ideas and images for artists.” 50 years since Pablo Picasso's death, the contemporary works on view still echo the formal, technical, and conceptual inventions of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. The exhibition also allows us to see Pablo Picasso in a contemporary perspective.

*Excerpt from the text by Michael Fitzgerald - Kluger family Professor of Art History Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut - in Museo Picasso Malaga catalog, The Echo of Picasso.

The Echo of Picasso is on view simultaneously at both Almine Rech locations in Tribeca, and in the Upper East Side, in New York City.

Rare works by Pablo Picasso, including one of only six Glass of Absinthe sculptures from 1914 (on loan from Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso), is on view, alongside those by Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon (on loan from the Museum of Modern Art New York), Louise Bourgeois, George Condo, Jeff Koons, Farah Atassi, and Genesis Tramaine, among others (listed below).

The Echo of Picasso is curated by Eric Troncy, French art critic, curator, and Director of the Consortium Museum in Dijon, France and Editor-in-chief of FROG Magazine.

Artists featured in The Echo of Picasso, New York, are as follows: Joe Andoe, Karel Appel, Farah Atassi, Francis Bacon, Cristina BanBan, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Oliver Beer, Louise Bourgeois, Brian Calvin, César, Antoni Clavé, George Condo, Timothy Curtis, Jose Dávila, Urs Fischer, Jorge Galindo and Pedro Almodóvar, Jameson Green, Peter Halley, David Hockney, Thomas Houseago, Marcus Jahmal, Rashid Johnson, Willem de Kooning, Jeff Koons, Maria Lassnig, Cristina de Miguel, Annie Morris, Louise Nevelson, Pablo Picasso, George Rouy, Claire Tabouret, Genesis Tramaine, Rebecca Warren, Zio Ziegler.

ALMINE RECH NEW YORK GALLERIES

361 Broadway, Trebica, New York, NY 10013

39 East 78th Street, Upper East Side, New York, NY 10075

www.alminerech.com

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

Markus Lüpertz: Et in Arcadia ego

Michael Werner Gallery, New York

Through 29 April 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

MICHAEL WERNER GALLERY

4 East 77th Street, New York, NY 10075

www.michaelwerner.com

____________

16-02 / 29-04-2023

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

Francis Picabia

Women: Works on Paper, 1902-1950

Michael Werner Gallery, New York

27 April - 18 June 2022

We should mistrust

picturesque people

we should mistrust

old master painting

we should even mistrust painting

painted without mistrust

- Francis Picabia (1879-1953)

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

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

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

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

MICHAEL WERNER GALLERY

4 East 77th Street, New York, NY 10075

www.michaelwerner.com

Lucian Freud @ Acquavella Galleries, NYC - Monumental

Lucian Freud: Monumental
Acquavella Galleries, New York
Through May 24, 2019

Acquavella Galleries presents Lucian Freud: Monumental, a loan exhibition focusing on the artist’s naked portraits, a subject that has long enjoyed special significance in his oeuvre. Curated by the artist’s longtime studio assistant and friend, David Dawson, Monumental includes thirteen major paintings, including depictions of his most important models from the 1990s and 2000s.  

The exhibition begins with work from 1990, when Lucian Freud began painting the performance artist Leigh Bowery, who is featured here in two works. Inspired by Bowery’s impressive physique, Freud began working on a larger scale that emphasized the physical presence of his subjects. These large-scale portraits ushered in a new sense of monumentality in the artist’s body of work. Also on view is Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, one of two paintings in the show from the mid-1990s of Sue Tilley, the other essential model from this pivotal time in Lucian Freud’s career. David Dawson himself as well as Lucian Freud’s familiar whippets also make multiple appearances in paintings in the exhibition. 

Despite the grand scale, Lucian Freud’s subjects are depicted with a sense of intimacy, penetrating honesty and psychological depth. This was due in part to the extraordinary amount of time the artist spent with his sitters. Ria, Naked Portrait required the art handler Ria Kirby, whom Lucian Freud met while installing a show at the Victoria & Albert Museum, to come to the studio nearly every day for 16 months in 2006 and 2007.  

Being naked has to do with making a more complete portrait, a naked body is somehow more permanent, more factual…. When someone is naked there is in effect nothing to be hidden. Not everyone wants to be that honest about themselves, that means I feel an obligation to be equally honest in how I represent them. It is a matter of responsibility, in a way I don’t want the painting to come from me, I want it to come from them. It can be extraordinary how much you can learn from someone by looking very carefully at them without judgement. — Lucian Freud 

The show includes important loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Lewis Collection, in addition to other private collections. 

This is the sixth solo exhibition over the course of Acquavella Galleries’ longstanding relationship with Lucian Freud and, since the artist’s death in 2011, his estate. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog featuring essays by Dawson and Michael Auping, longtime chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, who interviewed Lucian Freud between May 2009 and January 2011. 

David Dawson was Lucian Freud’s assistant from 1991 through 2011, and he is now director of the Lucian Freud Archive. He co-edited last year’s two-volume survey of the artist’s work published by Phaidon. He is currently preparing an exhibition of Freud’s self-portraits for the Royal Academy, London, in October. Dawson also continues to work as a painter in his own right.  

Lucian Freud (1922–2011) was one of the most significant painters from the postwar period through the first decade of this century. A grandson of Sigmund Freud, he was born in Berlin and moved with his family to London in 1931. He served in the British navy during World War II, and immediately after began working full time as a painter. Committed to figurative painting for the entirety of his career, Lucian Freud built a formidable reputation as a painter of portraiture. 

The work of Lucian Freud is represented in major private and public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and the Art Institute of Chicago as well as the Tate and National Picture Gallery in London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid; among many others. 

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES
18 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075
www.acquavellagalleries.com