Warhol/Cutrone @ Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich - Exhibition curated by James Hedges

Warhol/Cutrone

Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich 

Through September 30, 2025

Warhol/Cutrone, an exhibition at Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich, curated by James Hedges, juxtaposes Andy Warhol and Ronnie Cutrone, including paintings, drawings, and unique polaroids.

“Ronnie Cutrone was a painter and illustrator known for his Post-Pop imagery featuring cartoon characters like Woody the Woodpecker, Bart Simpson, and Bugs Bunny. Cutrone’s life and career make us remember New York at its creative apex. Reminiscing of another era, Cutrone said, “New York was elegant and sleazy. Now it’s a shopping mall for dot-commers. We need our crime rate back. I want my muggers and hookers back.” - James Hedges 

Andy Warhol and his right-hand man Ronnie Cutrone were the perceived masters of Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s.

Working in synergistic fashion with Andy Warhol, Ronnie Cutrone helped execute some of the artist’s most iconic silkscreens. The duo’s collaborations countenance: Hand Tinted Flowers (ca. 1972), Invisible Sculpture (1972-83), Drag Queens/Ladies and Gentlemen (1974-75), Oxidation (Piss Paintings) (mid-late 1970s), Sex Parts/Torso (mid-1970s), Hammer & Sickle (1976-1977), Skulls (1976-77), Gems (1978), Shadow Paintings (1979), and Butcher Knives, Guns, Dollar Signs (1982).

With Andy Warhol one special focus of this exhibition is on his unique polaroids. Many of Warhol’s polaroid photographs have never been exhibited before and feature stars such as Grace Jones, Joseph Beuys, Keith Haring, Lou Reed and Candy Darling. Cutrone’s three-dimensional photographs of the Factory, shown publicly as well for the first time ever, give a historic and unprecedented peek into Warhol’s circle.

While with Ronnie Cutrone the focus of this exhibition is on his cartoon-infused painting, sculpture and drawings which shocked the New York scene in the 1980s. These works garnered him major solo shows in the inaugural Post-Pop wave, whilst igniting debates over the sanctity of the American symbols such as the flag and Mickey Mouse. After 1983, when Ronnie Cutrone left Warhol’s Factory, he perused his independent art career which reached great heights, including highly lauded museum exhibitions at the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, and the L.A. County Museum of Art, amongst many others.

“One thing I picked up from Andy: say loud and clear because if the WHOLE world gets it, the art world will get it too.” - Ronnie Cutrone 

Artist Ronnie Cutrone

Ronnie Cutrone (10 July, 1948 - 21 July, 2013) worked as Andy Warhol’s preeminent assistant from 1972 to 1982, though his collaborations with Warhol well preceded this. Ronnie Cutrone met Andy Warhol when he was only sixteen years old. Ronnie Cutrone, in 1966, joined the ranks of The Velvet Underground, formed by Lou Reed, John Cale, and Warhol, as a performer/dancer. Three years later, Ronnie Cutrone began writing as a columnist for Warhol’s Interview magazine, lauded for dovetailing reviews on avant-garde art exhibitions and features on celebrities, nightlife fixtures, and even politicians like Nancy Regan.

In 1972, Cutrone’s took up the mantle as Warhol’s apprentice, a post he maintained for the next decade. This was the zenith of Warhol’s international fame, and the Pop Art bastion took Ronnie Cutrone under his wing, entrusting Cutrone to, unlike Warhol’s other assistants, “work on the one thing he cared about the most, which was his art”. Although Ronnie Cutrone was, by this point, already burgeoning as a nascent artist of his own right—having assisted with programming John Giorno’s “Dial-A-Poem” at MoMA in the 1970 “Information” exhibition curated by Kynaston McShine.

Ronnie Cutrone’s responsibilities varied, ranging from conceptualizing Warhol’s subjects, mixing palettes, photographing live models and executing the silkscreen. Indeed, as the two artists ‘artistic relationship matured, the lines of influence became bi-directional. As philosopher, critic, and Warhol expert Arthur Danto observed in his biography, Andy Warhol (2009), “Cutrone played an important role in the later phase of Andy’s artistic career”.

During Cutrone’s time at Warhol’s Factory, he rubbed shoulders with Lou Reed, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, Grace Jones, Lucio Amelio, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fred Hughes, VictorHugo, Paul Morrisey, Gerard Malanga, Anjelica Huston, Debbie Harry, Salvador Dali and Alice Cooper, amongst others. After long days and nights of helping Warhol at the Factory, Ronnie Cutrone would frequent artist hubs like Max’s Kansas City, drinking “all night with bob Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Malcolm Morlye and Robert Smithson” or unwinding at the Mudd Club.

GALERIE GMURZYNSKA

Paradeplatz 2, Zurich

www.gmurzynska.com

Warhol/Cutrone @ Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich, June 14 – September 30, 2025

Rétrospective Suzanne Duchamp @ Kunsthaus Zürich

Rétrospective Suzanne Duchamp 

Kunsthaus Zürich

Jusqu'au 7 Septembre 2025

Le Kunsthaus Zürich consacre à SUZANNE DUCHAMP la première rétrospective au monde. Ses compositions minimalistes et pourtant graphiquement marquantes, associées à des titres suggestifs comme «Usine de mes pensées», sont entrées dans l’histoire de l’art et néanmoins source d’inspiration jusqu’à nos jours. Malgré son appartenance à l’une des familles d’artistes les plus célèbres, son oeuvre est restée jusqu’à présent largement inconnue du grand public. Cette exposition, qui réunit des prêts exceptionnels provenant d’institutions publiques et de collections privées renommées, rend à Suzanne Duchamp la place de premier plan qu’elle mérite.

Dadaïste, peintre, SUZANNE DUCHAMP (1889, Blainville-Crevon – 1963, Neuilly-sur-Seine) a laissé à la postérité une oeuvre aux multiples facettes dont certains éléments figurent dans des collections réputées, mais qui pour l’essentiel est surtout appréciée d’un public d’initié(e)s. Duchamp entretenait des liens étroits avec les avant-gardes de son époque et a enrichi l’histoire de l’art d’apports très personnels. Soeur de Marcel Duchamp, de Raymond Duchamp-Villon et de Jacques Villon, elle échangeait beaucoup avec eux. En 1919, elle a épousé l’artiste suisse Jean Crotti, dont le Kunsthaus Zürich possède des oeuvres clés, et avec qui Suzanne Duchamp a occasionnellement coopéré. La dernière exposition d’ampleur consacrée aux deux artistes a eu lieu en 1983 au Centre Pompidou, à Paris, en coopération avec la Kunsthalle Bern. Il est donc grand temps de mettre à l’honneur le travail de Suzanne Duchamp et d’en montrer toute la profondeur. Par son langage visuel subtil, esthétique et plein d’humour, elle incarne une combinaison hors du commun dans le mouvement dadaïste. Quelle ville conviendrait mieux que Zurich, cité natale de Dada, pour enfin donner à cette artiste d’exception toute l’attention qu’elle mérite?

SUZANNE DUCHAMP : À LA FOIS ABSTRAITE ET FIGURATIVE

Dans son art, Suzanne Duchamp a exploré des voies variées. À Paris, dans le sillage du cubisme, elle commence par se pencher sur la fragmentation d’intérieurs intimes et de paysages urbains, avant de se tourner vers le mouvement Dada. Ses oeuvres associent peinture et poésie dans une démarche expérimentale qui joue avec différents supports et matériaux.

Même si sa peinture évolue de plus en plus vers l’abstraction dans les années 1910, Suzanne Duchamp reste toujours fidèle à certains repères visuels, renforcés par des titres énigmatiques. En 1922, pour des raisons diffuses, elle rompt inopinément avec Dada pour se tourner vers une peinture figurative aux accents souvent ironiques et naïfs.

Dans les décennies qui suivent, elle crée des oeuvres contenant un large spectre de motifs, qui se caractérisent par des expérimentations sur les pigments et par l’importance structurante du dessin. En 1949, son influente amie Katherine S. Dreier la qualifie de « peintre semi-abstraite » – ce qui est une formulation pertinente pour une oeuvre échappant à toutes les conventions de l’histoire de l’art.

UNE EXPOSITION INTÉGRANT LES TOUTES DERNIÈRES RECHERCHES

Cette rétrospective réunit les oeuvres dadaïstes de Suzanne Duchamp et des travaux datant de ses phases antérieures et postérieures de création. Talia Kwartler, commissaire invitée, a étudié pendant plusieurs années l’oeuvre de Suzanne Duchamp et soutenu une thèse de doctorat sur cette artiste au University College de Londres. En 2024, elle a été chargée de cours à l’université de Zurich sur le thème des femmes dans le mouvement Dada.

La détermination de Talia Kwartler a permis de transformer la présentation prévue en une vaste rétrospective, la première jamais consacrée à cette artiste, élaborée avec Cathérine Hug, commissaire au Kunsthaus et spécialiste du mouvement Dada. L’exposition s’inscrit ainsi dans la longue tradition des présentations de Dada organisées au Kunsthaus Zürich depuis 1966, et peut être considérée comme un événement majeur dans la recherche en histoire de l’art. Réunissant près de 50 tableaux, 20 travaux sur papier ainsi que des documents d’archives rares et des photographies d’époque, cette rétrospective offre une vue d’ensemble de toute l’oeuvre de Suzanne Duchamp. De nombreux travaux n’ont été redécouverts qu’au terme d’intenses recherches. Parmi les prêteurs figurent des institutions comme le MoMA de New York, le Philadelphia Museum, l’Art Institute de Chicago, le Centre Pompidou de Paris, la Bibliothèque nationale de France et la Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet à Paris, le Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, mais aussi d’importantes collections privées comme la Bluff Collection et la collection de Francis M. Naumann et Marie T. Keller. Cette rétrospective a vu le jour en étroite collaboration avec l’Association Duchamp Villon Crotti.

SUZANNE DUCHAMP : PUBLICATION

À l’occasion de l’exposition, la première monographie consacrée à Suzanne Duchamp vient de paraître, avec de nombreuses reproductions. L’ouvrage comporte une biographie détaillée rédigée par Talia Kwartler, ainsi que des articles d’historiennes de l’art comme Carole Boulbès, Cathérine Hug et Effie Rentzou, auxquels s’ajoutent des perspectives artistiques de Jean-Jacques Lebel (interview) et Amy Sillman (images). La postface est signée Anne Berest, autrice de best-sellers. Cet ouvrage de 192 pages est paru aux éditions Hatje Cantz.

Cette rétrospective est une coopération avec la Kunsthalle Schirn de Francfort (10 octobre 2025 - 11 janvier 2026), où le commissariat est assuré par Ingrid Pfeiffer.

KUNSTHAUS ZURICH  

Heimplatz, 8001 Zurich

www.kunsthaus.ch

Retrospective Suzanne Duchamp 

Kunsthaus Zürich, 6 Juin - 7 Septembre 2025

Ed Clark: Paint is the Subject @ Hauser & Wirth Zurich - Exhibition Curated by Tanya Barson

Ed Clark: Paint is the Subject

Hauser & Wirth Zurich

13 June – 13 September 2025

Ed Clark in his studio, early 2000s

© The Estate of Ed Clark

Courtesy the Estate and Hauser & Wirth

Ed Clark in Paris, 1954

© The Estate of Ed Clark

Courtesy the Estate and Hauser & Wirth

Ed Clark

Untitled, ca. 1968

Acrylic on shaped canvas

294 x 408.3 x 4.1 cm / 115 3/4 x 160 3/4 x 1 5/8 in

Photo: Fredrik Nilsen

© The Estate of Ed Clark

Courtesy the Estate and Hauser & Wirth

Ed Clark

Untitled, 2002

Acrylic on canvas

170.2 x 239.1 cm / 67 x 94 1/8 in

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

© The Estate of Ed Clark

Courtesy the Estate and Hauser & Wirth

Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse presents ‘Ed Clark. Paint is the Subject,’ the first solo exhibition in Switzerland dedicated to this pioneering American abstractionist. Curated by Tanya Barson in close collaboration with the artist’s estate, the exhibition brings together key works spanning seven decades, offering a comprehensive overview of Clark’s groundbreaking practice. The exhibition features a broad selection of his dynamic large-scale paintings and works on paper, as well as early works and an example of his use of the shaped canvas. The presentation is complemented by archival photographs and documents that provide biographical and historical context, tracing the evolution of his innovative approach and lasting impact on modern painting

Ed Clark remained under-acknowledged for much of his career, but he received late recognition in his lifetime, a recognition that continues to grow. A member of the New York School, Ed Clark contributed towards redefining abstraction in the 1950s with two characteristic features—the deployment of the shaped canvas, and his unconventional use of a household broom to create sweeping, gestural compositions—the show’s title coming from a quote by the artist indicating the centrality of his medium to his work. Stylistically, his work bridges the physicality and spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism with the structured clarity of hard-edged abstraction, cementing his significance in postwar painting.

Born in New Orleans in 1926 and educated in Chicago and Paris, he travelled widely throughout his career, each location, its light and palette, impacting his work. Ed Clark maintained close ties to Europe, living between New York and Paris from the 1960s onward. His aesthetic was shaped by the influence of European artists such as Nicolas de Staël and Pierre Soulages, while his artistic and intellectual circles included Joan Mitchell, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Beauford Delaney, Jack Whitten and James Baldwin, among others.

Ed Clark’s early work was figurative, exemplified in the Zurich exhibition by ‘Standing Woman at the Chair’ (1949–50), before shifting toward abstraction in the early 1950s. During his time in Paris, he explored abstract form. His painting ‘Untitled’ (1954) encapsulates this early period. Immersed in the French contemporary art scene, Ed Clark came to believe that the true essence of painting lies not in realistic representation, but in the expressive application of paint, explored for its own sake: ‘I began to believe […] that the real truth is in the stroke. For me, it is large, bold strokes that do not refer distinctly to seen nature. The paint is the subject. The motions of the strokes give the work life. This began to enter into my paintings in a very personal way.’

Back in New York, Ed Clark continued to innovate. In 1956, he began exploring shaped canvases and supports, which can be considered one of the earliest investigations within American abstract modernism, predating the shaped works of Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Al Loving and Sam Gilliam. He later experimented with oval canvases, first conceived during a stay at Joan Mitchell’s house in Vétheuil, France, in 1968. Works on view in Zurich such as ‘Untitled’ (1970) and ‘Silver Stripes’ (1972) reflect this development, the ellipse motif and the oval support in his work aimed at expanding the field of vision, enhancing the immersive qualities of the canvas.

Ed Clark

Untitled (Acrylic #1 from the series Louisiana), 1978

Acrylic on canvas

168.9 x 233.7 x 1.9 cm / 66 1/2 x 92 x 3/4 in

Photo: Matt Grubb

© The Estate of Ed Clark

Courtesy the Estate and Hauser & Wirth

Clark’s use of the broom began in Paris and evolved significantly in New York. By the mid-1960s, he was laying his canvases on the floor and using large brooms to deliver sweeping horizontal strokes that captured speed and motion. His gestural language and ever greater emphasis on the brushstroke became central to his practice. A key highlight of the show is ‘Untitled (Acrylic #1 from the series Louisiana)’ (1978), where Ed Clark uses acrylics to capture the palette of the landscape of the Southern United States. Dividing the canvas into three sections—evoking earth, air, and water—he applied paint with broom, brush, and by hand, translating these environmental elements into abstract form. His choice of colors, ranging through pinks, blues, and beiges, deepens the specific sense of atmosphere evoking the landscape of his early childhood, and his return there to teach at Louisiana State University in the late 1970s.

Ed Clark

Untitled, ca. 1990s

Acrylic on canvas

139.1 x 179.1 cm / 54 3/4 x 70 1/2 in

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

© The Estate of Ed Clark

Courtesy the Estate and Hauser & Wirth

As the 1980s progressed, Ed Clark began exploring a new compositional approach he termed his tubular paintings, first seen in the series of ‘Broken Rainbow’ works. These supplanted the structures of narrow horizontal lines he employed in the previous decade, with curved strokes that introduced a suggestion of rotation as in ‘Untitled’ (ca. 1990s). In later works such as ‘Untitled’ (2002), Ed Clark continues this exploration through broad, sweeping gestures and a looser, more fluid structure that became characteristic of his later style.

The Zurich exhibition provides a rare opportunity to experience the full scope of Clark’s practice, placing him in relation to diverse histories of abstraction and highlighting the enduring relevance of his work. It emphasizes how for Ed Clark abstract art represented a greater truth than any realist depiction of the world and that for him ‘paint is the subject.’

Several works by Ed Clark are also currently on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris as part of the exhibition ‘Paris Noir: Artistic circulations and anti-colonial resistance, 1950 – 2000’ at the Centre Pompidou (19 March – 30 June 2025), which explores the presence of black artists in France. His inclusion highlights the important African American diaspora working in Paris and the long-standing influence of Europe on his practice, situating his work within broader transatlantic narratives.

HAUSER & WIRTH ZURICH

Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zurich

www.hauserwirth.com

Featured Related Posts:

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 

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Ed Clark 

Turner Contemporary, Margate, 25 May - 1 September 2024

Beyond the Spectrum: Abstraction in African American Art, 1950-1975

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, January 11 – March 8, 2014

Philip Guston @ Hauser & Wirth Zurich - "Philip Guston. Singularities" Exhibition

Philip Guston. Singularities 

Hauser & Wirth Zurich 

7 June – 7 September 2024 

Philip Guston in his Woodstock studio, 1970 

Photograph by F. K. Lloyd 

Image courtesy of The Guston Foundation and Hauser & Wirth

Philip Guston

Painter’s Forms, 1972

Oil on panel

121.5 x 152.2 x 2.3 cm / 47 7/8 x 59 7/8 x 7/8 in

125.6 x 156.5 x 5 cm / 49 1/2 x 61 5/8 x 2 in (framed)

© The Estate of Philip Guston

Courtesy the Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Christopher Burke

Philip Guston

Feet on Rug, 1978

Oil on canvas

203.2 x 264.2 cm / 80 x 104 in

206.7 x 268.3 x 5.1 cm / 81 3/8 x 105 5/8 x 2 in

(framed)

© The Estate of Philip Guston

Courtesy the Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Christopher Burke

‘I really only love strangeness.’ – Philip Guston

Hauser & Wirth Zurich presents an exhibition of late figurative PHILIP GUSTON paintings dated between 1968 and 1979 at the gallery’s second floor Limmatstrasse space. Curated in collaboration with Musa Mayer, the artist’s daughter and President of The Guston Foundation, ‘Philip Guston. Singularities’ presents well-known paintings alongside never-before exhibited works that explore the liberated motifs and instinctual forms that emerged in Philip Guston’s late works as they continued to evolve until his death in 1980. This exhibition in Zurich follows the major retrospective ‘Philip Guston’ at the Tate Modern, which closed in February 2024.

Excerpt from Musa Mayer’s guide to the exhibition:

The strange forms that inhabit the 12 paintings in this exhibition of Philip Guston’s late works are intensely personal and packed with imagery that haunted the artist throughout his painting life. Yet they also speak to us in a metaphysical language that resists analysis, but that we grasp deeply, intuitively. 

When asked, Guston would resist interpretating the iconic symbols that appeared in his paintings. He would respond that he, too, was mystified by these inexplicable forms, these singularities. ‘If I speak of having a subject to paint,’ he wrote, ‘I mean there is a forgotten place of beings and things, which I need to remember. I want to see this place.’ 

From this forgotten place emerge the artist’s singular responses to the beauty, pain and cruelty of the world, to the intimacies of his daily life, love and the passage of time and loss. These works are neither cerebral nor removed; they are timeless. And they feel alive, as if freshly painted. Complex surfaces disclose an exuberant love of the act of painting itself, Guston’s fidelity to an ancient process cultivated over a lifetime of close observation and rigorous interrogation of the art he loved and the necessity of painting. 

Philip Guston

Untitled, 1979

Oil on canvas

122 x 107 cm / 48 x 42 1/8 in

126 x 111 x 5.5 cm / 49 5/8 x 43 3/4 x 2 1/8 in (framed)

© The Estate of Philip Guston

Courtesy the Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: EPW Studio - Ellen Page Wilson

Philip Guston

Future, 1978

Oil on canvas

213 x 272 cm / 83 7/8 x 107 1/8 inches

216 x 275 x 5 cm / 85 x 108 1/4 x 2 inches (framed)

© The Estate of Philip Guston

Courtesy the Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Jon Etter

Philip Guston

Untitled, 1969

Acrylic on panel, 76.2 x 101.6 cm / 30 x 40 in

© The Estate of Philip Guston

Courtesy the Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

The exhibition opens with ‘Painter’s Forms’ (1972), one of Philip Guston’s masterpieces and according to the art historian Dore Ashton a ‘true distillation of Guston’s late oeuvre into a single painting.’ A few of his most familiar objects spew out of the painter’s mouth against a washed-out pink background: a boot, a bottle, a cigarette, the sole of a shoe, the top of an easel and a nameplate bearing his initials. It is a painting about the act of painting.

In many of these enigmatic late works, the distinction between interior and exterior space largely disappears, as domestic elements merge with outdoor scenes. In the allegorical landscapes in which these strange dramas unfold, Philip Guston’s signature cadmium red medium dominates the lower terrain, while the upper sections are a tranquil cloudless blue. 

In ‘Feet on Rug’ (1978), two feet are stranded in a barren red landscape against a sky-blue horizon, standing on a rug whose fringes morph into crawling insect legs. The bug-amoeba form is echoed in ‘Future’ (1978), where it appears to rotate alongside a snail like creature as a despairing human figure sinks into a postapocalyptic ground or sea. In ‘Untitled’ (1969)—one of the never-before exhibited paintings—an earlier version of this snail form, nautilus-chambered, curls its way into a cozy but colorless domestic interior.

In a 1972 slide talk, Philip Guston told students that when he returned to Italy after first exhibiting his late work, he wanted to see the paintings of the past that he loved. But not for their beauty. 

‘I wanted to see early frescoes of Last Judgments and end-of-the-world paintings. Particularly Romanesque paintings and Sienese fresco painters who paint huge, marvelous frescoes of the damned, all the tortures in hell, and so on. Heaven is always very dull, just a lot of people lined up. Like trumpets, they’re all lined up. There’s not much to look at. But when they’re going to hell the painter really goes to town. All kinds of marvelous stuff. That’s when they really enjoyed painting. I feel we live in comparable times. Oh yeah, and I want to paint that. I don’t want to copy, but I feel that’s the big subject matter. I don’t know how it’s going to come out. Well, I’ve begun. I’ve begun with this story.’

Philip Guston

Door and Room, 1978

Oil on canvas

203.2 x 292.1 cm / 80 x 115 in

© The Estate of Philip Guston

Courtesy the Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Sarah Muehbauer

Philip Guston

Aegean, 1978

Oil on canvas

172.7 x 320 cm / 68 x 126 in

176.5 x 322.9 x 5.7 cm / 69 1/2 x 127 1/8 x 2 1/4 in (framed)

© The Estate of Philip Guston

Courtesy the Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Genevieve Hanson

‘Door and Room’ (1978), on view for the first time, suggests a story of forced entry into the artist’s studio. The realities of the world intrude into his sanctuary, leaving the artist as witness to perpetual acts of war. The red and black scene is relieved only by the narrow strip of blue at the top, like a slight breath of air or a hope for peace. Yet in the bloody field of combat are unmistakable signs of a painterly, exuberant celebration of dynamic form and color. 

A demonstration of Philip Guston’s ability to introspectively capture the struggles of his time with meticulous composition and nuanced detail is ‘Aegean’ (1978). In this large painting, the convergence of outstretched hands, arms and shields in the form of trash can lids recalls his early work from the ‘40s, in which he depicted childhood street fights that mimicked the theatrics of warfare. But these games are clearly more than child’s play; they are precursors of war. The late Philip Guston addresses the inherent nature of violence as it manifested in the political turmoil of his era, evoking the Holocaust, the Vietnam War and the civil unrest that permeated the late 1960s. Expanding on this theme, Guston’s ‘Untitled’ (1979)—made in the last year of his life—can also be understood as an allegory of human struggle. Shields float in the void, creating a bizarre scene that oscillates between violence and humor. Philip Guston said, ‘I wanted to include everything. I felt, like everybody, disturbed about everything to such an extent that I didn’t want to exclude it from the studio, from what I did. Paint it. I didn’t think I was illustrating anything.’

Philip Guston’s late paintings retain a mysterious quality and all are driven by the artist’s desire to tell stories that not only reflect his state of mind but also provide insights into the social and political climate of his time. When seen together, they show the singular depth and complexity of his rich personal iconography.

Related posts: 

Philip Guston Now, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, March 2 – August 27, 2023 

Philip Guston - Late Paintings, Peder Lund, Oslo , September 20 - November 8, 2014 

Philip Guston: Works on Paper, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, May 2 - August 31, 2008

Philip Guston: Mind and Matter, McKee Gallery, New York, November 11 - December 23, 2003

Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse

Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zürich

www.hauserwirth.com

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione @ Kunsthaus Zurich - "Baroque Brilliance – Drawings and prints by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione"

Baroque Brilliance – Drawings and prints by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione

Kunsthaus Zürich

10 December 2021 - 6 March 2022

The Kunsthaus Zürich presents the first exhibition in a German-speaking country devoted to the graphic oeuvre of virtuoso Baroque artist GIOVANNI BENEDETTO CASTIGLIONE (1609–1664). This innovative master, whose graphic works bear the influence of Rembrandt, invented the monotype technique in the 17th century. His painterly brush drawings in oils were an important source of inspiration for artists who came after him. The exhibition includes rarely seen works from numerous European collections.

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione embodies everything that makes the Baroque so enduringly fascinating: its celebration of inspired artistic brilliance, opulent magnificence and a striving to enrapture the viewer’s senses. Yet Castiglione, who hailed from Genoa and was also dubbed ‘Il Grechetto’, has been overshadowed by Italy’s more celebrated artists. The last comprehensive exhibition to focus on his graphic works called him a ‘lost genius’. He carved out a path of his own between Titian, Bernini and Poussin – artists whom he greatly admired – and left behind a highly individual body of work that curators Jonas Beyer and Timothy J. Standring have condensed into a representative exhibition of some 80 works on paper.

GIOVANNI BENEDETTO CASTIGLIONE: DRAWINGS WITH A DELICATE TOUCH

With an almost instinctive mastery of drawing that was every bit the equal of his painting, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione was a unique artist of the 17th century. He committed his motifs to paper with astonishing nonchalance, employing a remarkable technique to do so: he mixed his pigments with linseed oil – probably in response to the rapidly executed oil sketches on primed wooden panels popularized by Rubens and van Dyck – and, depending on how heavily he loaded his brush, could produce everything from flowing, painterly lines to rough, expressive strokes. The spontaneity with which he guided his oil-laden brush across the paper prompted contemporary observers to label his brushwork ‘grazioso’ and ‘facile’: ‘facile’, that is, in the sense of simple but not simplistic, referring instead to the supreme virtuosity of an artist who perfected the skill of seeming effortlessness and apparent ease in tackling what was in fact a challenging task.

GIOVANNI BENEDETTO CASTIGLIONE: A FAVOURITE AMONG CONNOISSEURS

Castiglione’s drawings in oils, which have been described as miniature ‘drawn paintings’, were not simply preparatory studies for larger pieces but works of art in their own right; and this no doubt explains the admiration in which they were held by celebrated artists such as Tiepolo and Fragonard. His works were also much appreciated by legendary art aficionados including Count Francesco Algarotti. To this day, the largest assembly of drawings by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione is in the illustrious hands of the British Royal Collection; the Kunsthaus is fortunate to be showing more than a dozen of the finest sheets from Windsor Castle. They are joined by works from equally precious holdings, including the Devonshire Collections at Chatsworth House and the Collection Frits Lugt, which is held by the Fondation Custodia in Paris. 

GIOVANNI BENEDETTO CASTIGLIONE: DRAWINGS, ETCHINGS, MONOTYPES

However, Castiglione’s drawings are only one side to his talents. He is equally peerless in his practice of printmaking. His etchings stand in the tradition of the ‘capriccio’, dealing with subjects that are as enigmatic as they are eccentric, such as scenes from the apocrypha and mythology, played out between objects from time immemorial distributed around the picture space and exposed to the elements. His unmistakeable style is also in evidence in the etchings. A significant part of their appeal lies in the manner of their execution: Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione worked with restlessly drawn networks of lines and tiny, intertwined hook strokes that spread across the picture surface almost like natural growths. Moreover, that search for a highly individual formal language most probably explains Castiglione’s unending experimentation with new means of expression. One is the monotype, which he is credited with inventing. Unsurprisingly the monotype process, which involved painting directly onto a plate and then making a print from it, is regarded as a hybrid technique. The result is somewhere between drawing and print, marking Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione out once again as a crossover artist working in diverse media, and allowing him to achieve highly dramatic chiaroscuro effects that are without parallel in the graphic arts of his time.

GIOVANNI BENEDETTO CASTIGLIONE: THE APPEAL OF THE SEEMINGLY UNFINISHED

Castiglione’s attachment to an aesthetic of the apparently unfinished and fragmentary gives his work a decidedly modern aspect. Many of his etchings look like exercises that are not fully elaborated, placing them on a level with the prints of his great contemporary Rembrandt. Castiglione’s drawings, meanwhile, are often committed to paper so swiftly that it is literally possible to retrace the process of their creation. They lack finish – deliberately so, because Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione wanted viewers to be enthralled by his virtuoso signature. 

KUNSTHAUS ZURICH

Heimplatz 1, 8001 Zurich

www.kunsthaus.ch

Christo @ Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich - Nature | Environments - Curated by Lorenza Giovanelli

Christo, Nature | Environments 

Curated by Lorenza Giovanelli

Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich

Through November 20, 2021

“All our projects involve areas, whether in an urban or a rural area, where people live. Jeanne-Claude and I have always been interested in the space that people use […]. We’ve always said that it was wonderful to lend us the spaces that belonged to others.”

– CHRISTO

Galerie Gmurzynska presents “Nature | Environments,” Christo’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

The exhibition, curated by Lorenza Giovanelli, features collages and drawings dating from the artist’s early projects to the never realized Over the River, and explores Christo’s diverse artistic work within natural environments worldwide.

Starting with Wrapped Coast in 1969 in Australia to the iconic Umbrellas, the incredible Running Fence and the Wrapped Trees at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, the works in the exhibition bear witness to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s often decades long efforts to realize their projects. The meticulous preparation as well as the aesthetic aspects of the collages and sketches show the dedication and work processes behind the implementation of the installations:

“Works on paper can be a combination of photographs, fragments of other projects, technical information […] the drawings reflect the evolution of the project. It doesn’t emerge from my thoughts ‘fully equipped’.”

– CHRISTO

“Taking place simultaneously in Zurich and New York – evoking The Umbrellas project, conceived and realized as a diptych – this exhibition aims to explore the kaleidoscopic variations of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s environmental art and how it dialogued with the ecosystem they set within.” – Lorenza Giovanelli

GALERIE GMURZYNSKA 

Talstrasse 37, Zurich 

www.gmurzynska.com

Leiko Ikemura @ Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich - Colors in Motion

Leiko Ikemura: Colors in Motion 

Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich 

June 19 - July 31, 2021 

Galerie Peter Kilchmann presents the first solo exhibition of Leiko Ikemura with the gallery. LEIKO IKEMURA was born in Tsu, Mie Prefecture, Japan and emigrated to Europe in 1973. A Japanese-Swiss dual citizen, Ikemura has been living and working between Berlin and Cologne since 1990. The exhibition will feature four groups of works that reflect and develop the artist's extensive œuvre in both its conceptual and technical versatility. Each one of the five exhibition spaces is dedicated to a cycle of works and maintains its own intimate character, although the series refer to each other and form poetic parallels. On view are medium and small format paintings and works on paper, a new group of glass sculptures as well as a video installation.

Since the beginning of her artistic career, Leiko Ikemura's work has been closely interwoven with her personal journey and the various stations in her life. Formative memories from her native Japan find as much resonance as the impressions from her early stays in Spain and Switzerland in the 1970’s and 80’s, which accompany her to this day. The intimate metamorphosis of a lifelong painting process manifests itself in landscapes in which human figures and nature merge, amorphous forms and hybrid mythical creatures in continuous transformation.

Upon entering the gallery, visitors are immersed in the world of Girls, a series characteristic of Ikemura's painting since the mid-1990’s. Each of the four paintings in the exhibition shows a female figure in an unfamiliar landscape. In Chica & Pink (2019, 120 x 100 cm), the monochrome colour palette of the purple background is interrupted only by the pale blue stripe of a spherical horizon in the lower third of the composition. The ethereal being in the foreground is a silhouette of transparent chromaticity that stands out from its surroundings in warm golden yellows and soft blues. This principle of contrast and transparency is repeated in works such as Girl with Green Hair (2019, 90 x 60 cm) or Girl with Blue Face (2019, 130 x 90 cm), each in a new combination of colours. The figures seem vulnerable and unreachable. As if trapped in an intermediate world, they lag in their own melancholic mind games.

In the video installation In Praise of Light (2020), presented in the lower floor, the harmonious synthesis of a total work of art, characteristic of Ikemura’s works, becomes apparent. It is an interplay of light and flowing colour. The slow movements are reminiscent of the liquid colour pigments of a watercolour that has not yet dried, that recombine anew to form ever changing shapes. The work conveys the idea of painting as a process rather than a finished product. The viewers are urged to linger in a moment of contemplation and let the gentle visual surges draw them into an alien universe. The installation was first presented in the Matthäus Church in Berlin in 2020 and was originally conceived for the church’s apse. For the exhibition at the gallery, the installation was reworked by the artist in order to fit the intimate exhibition space.

In Praise of Light is directly related to the series ABC Akt (2020, 70 x 50 cm) in the middle space of the upper floor. Never before has the artist moved so far away from figurative painting. The abstract compositions combine elements of calligraphic brush drawing with the flat watercolour aesthetic from the Girls series. The translucent application of paint is reduced so that the fine structure in the fabric of the support of the painting becomes visible. It is a painting technique that absorbs the natural light of the room and seems to radiate it back. The works were created during the first lockdown in Berlin in the spring of 2020 and capture a zeitgeist marked by uncertainty and elementary life questions. In a moment of social standstill, the world moves on into the unknown.

In the left wing of the upper level abstraction gives way to a universe of surreal landscapes that invites the viewers to dream. The transparent application of paint and the heavy luminosity in works such as Yellow Scape (2019, 110 x 180 cm) provide a bridge to other works in the exhibition. Already familiar motifs, such as the figure of a cowering girl in Zarathustra (small) (2014, 50 x 70 cm), are now found nestled among trees, valleys and mountains. These landscapes address issues of humankind’s longing for harmony with nature and are described by the artist herself as landscapes of the soul. The monumental triptych Fuji Scape (2015, each 100 x 150) is reminiscent of the landscape paintings of old Japanese masters. Dream-like sequences, such as the facial features on a volcanic mountain, play with elements of a holistic understanding of nature that assumes the spiritual animation of mountains, rocks and plants.

Similar hybrid creatures can be found in the group of glass sculptures in the right wing, with works such as Kitsune (2020, 20 x 32 x 13 cm) or Trees on Head in Yellow Glass (2020, 14 x 18 x 11 cm). The figure of the reclining head, from which the branches and leaves of a delicate tree grow, is a subject that had already appeared in early ceramics by the artist. For the exhibition, Leiko Ikemura worked with glass for the first time. Due to the translucency of the coloured glass, the sculptures seem like living beings that have emerged from the previously viewed landscapes, closing in this way the harmonious circle of the exhibition’s narratives.

LEIKO IKEMURA's works have been presented in solo and group exhibitions worldwide since the early 1980s. Most recently, the Centro de Arte Caja Burgos exhibited the solo show Leiko Ikemura: Aun más mañanas (spring 2021). Further solo exhibitions were presented in the following institutions (selection): Kunsthalle Rostock (2020); St. Matthäuskirche, Berlin (2020); Kunstmuseum Basel (2019); Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, Skärhamn (2019); The National Art Center, Tokyo (2019); Deutsches Keramikmuseum Hetjens, Dusseldorf (2017); Nevada Museum of Art, Reno (2016); Museum of East Asian Art, Cologne (2015); The Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum, Mishima (2014); Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe (2013); Asian Art Museum, Berlin (2012) and The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2011). Most recently, Leiko Ikemura has been involved in group exhibitions at Esther Shipper, Berlin (until 27 June); Hekinan City Tatsukichi Fujii Museum of Contemporary Art, Hekinan-shi (2021); Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi (2020); Pincesshof National Museum of Ceramics, Leeuwarden (2020); The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2019) and Museum of the Seam, Jerusalem (2019), among others. A selection of works is momentarily on view in the exhibition Schweizer Skulptur seit 1945 in the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau (2021).

Works by Leiko Ikemura are represented in the collections of major institutions such as the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau; Albertina, Vienna; Bundeskunstsammlung, Berlin; Bundesamt für Kultur, Berne; Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur; Kunsthaus Zürich; Kunstmuseum Basel; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; MCBA-Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne; MOMAT-The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; mumok-Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: Kupferstichkabinett; Takamatsu City Museum of Art, Takamatsu; The Centre Pompidou, Paris; The National Museum of Art, Osaka, and many more.

PETER KILCHMANN

Rämistrasse 33, 8001 Zürich

www.peterkilchmann.com

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Zaha Hadid @ Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich - Abstracting the Landscape

Zaha Hadid: Abstracting the Landscape 

Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich 

Through 31 July, 2021 

Zaha Hadid passed away in Miami on March 31, 2016 at the age of 65. On the 5th Anniversary of her death, Galerie Gmurzynska presents an immersive homage to the visionary Architect. 

The shared interests between the gallery and Zaha Hadid for the Russian avant-garde fortuitously crossed paths in 1992 at the monumental exhibition "The Great Utopia," at the Guggenheim Museum for which Zaha Hadid designed the rotunda – the first architect tasked with reimagining the Frank Lloyd Wright architectural icon. From early in her career, her peerless aesthetic was deeply inspired by Kazimir Malevich and the Suprematists, on whom she prepared her graduation thesis in 1976. 

The gallery’s active collaboration with Zaha Hadid from 2010 until her death began with the idea to again combine her knowledge of the Russian avant-garde with her architectural practice, which had advanced deeper since the Guggenheim exhibition. Thus, in 2010, the exhibition "Zaha Hadid and Suprematism" was held at Galerie Gmurzynska’s headquarters on Paradeplatz in Zurich. The exhibition and book, published together with Hatje Cantz, became a global event. This first collaboration with Zaha was followed by many other exhibition projects, including at Art Basel. On the occasion of the important Malevich retrospective held in 2014 at Tate London the star architect was asked to take part in a long documentary about Malevich with the BBC. Part of this documentary included an interview with Galerie Gmurzynska CEO Mathias Rastorfer and Zaha Hadid about Malevich and the nature of architecture and art. 

The final project completely planned by Zaha Hadid was again to show the dramatic development of her architecture in the context of another foundational modern master: Kurt Schwitters. The exhibition architecture was planned entirely by Hadid, and the selection of works by Schwitters was as well rigorously curated by her. Hadid unfortunately died before the opening of the show and left behind an architectural monument remaining unchanged in the Galerie Gmurzynska on Paradeplatz, open to the public. 

The latest exhibition at Galerie Gmurzynska titled "Abstracting The Landscape" was conceived and created with the same team with whom the gallery planned and executed all Zaha Hadid exhibitions since 2010. It has been a fruitful and euphoric collaboration for all involved, for which Galerie Gmurzynska expresses its heartfelt gratitude to the entire Zaha Hadid design and archive team. In this spirit of long-term collaboration and the highest respect for her perpetual vision, historical projects with models and drawings, as well as sculptural objects realized since her passing have been individually selected to be integrated into a custom floor design displaying Hadid’s best traits. The exhibition also features site-specific objects, as well as never-before exhibited designs. 

GALERIE GMURZYNSKA 

Paradeplatz 2, Zurich 

www.gmurzynska.com

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Yael Davids @ Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich - One Is Always a Plural

Yael Davids: One Is Always a Plural 

Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich 

22 May - 5 September 2021 

YAEL DAVIDS

Horizontal – from image to movement, 

Chart for the Feldenkrais lesson 

with works from the collection, 2021 

Collage, pencil and pen on paper 

Courtesy the artist

Exhibition with works by Yael Davids in dialogue with Eleanor Antin, Phyllida Barlow, Heidi Bucher, Thea Djordjadze, Marlene Dumas, VALIE EXPORT, Graciela Gutiérrez Marx, Ferdinand Hodler, Dorothy Iannone, Senga Nengudi, Luis Pazos, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Cathy Wilkes from the collection of the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and loans from the Noa Eshkol Foundation for Movement Notation and Jon Mikel Euba.

For the exhibition One Is Always a Plural, artist Yael Davids has selected art from the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst’s collection to bring into dialogue with her own works. She engages with the institution and its collection in an unusual manner. The foundational ideas of the Feldenkrais Method play a key role in the design of the exhibition and selection of works. This holistic body-oriented technique believes that movement principles form the basis of every human action, and it aims to expand self-image through carefully performed movement sequences. Davids examines the potential of the Feldenkrais approach in a completely different area, in the experience of art. She invites visitors not only to “see” art but also to find another way of accessing it through body and movement.

The artistic practice of Yael Davids (*1968, Jerusalem) focuses on performative work using the body. Davids views the body as a vessel for personal and collective memories, as well as a place in which to intertwine individual and social narratives. The body is to be interpreted as a configuration of everything that exists within and outside of its own boundaries. It always exists in relation to its environment, both as a starting and an end point, and is heavily influenced by encounters with others: “one is always a plural.” In this sense, the exhibition is not a conventional solo show; rather, it brings together a variety of voices and positions – collection works, loans and works by Davids – in order to compile them and establish links between them. The artist’s own works serve to bring all of this together: on the one hand, they choreograph visitors’ movements, owing to how they are positioned, or open up different views of works, depending on the viewer’s perspective; on the other hand, her works serve as a structure that offers a platform for other voices and artistic positions.

Yael Davids’ approach to the museum and its collection is influenced by her intensive study of the Feldenkrais Method (she has been a Feldenkrais practitioner for many years). Moshé Feldenkrais (1904, Ukraine – 1984, Israel), a scientist and enthusiastic judoka, developed a method in the late 1940s based on the knowledge that people are capable of lifelong learning and changing. With this, he anticipated the existence of what is now known as “neuroplasticity.” The method developed by Feldenkrais is thus a body-oriented, therapeutic, and pedagogical practice in which specific movement sequences are carefully performed in order to help participants recognize their own movement habits and, in doing so, their ability to create a change. This allows users of this method to find and internalize alternatives to that which has become habitual or entrenched. The objective is not to perfect a certain “type” of movement, but to work with the possibilities of our own bodies and improve our functional movements – such as standing, sitting, bending and grasping.

One of Moshé Feldenkrais’s main concerns was to create a beneficial and supportive learning environment. Similarly, Yael Davids wants to establish the museum as a place for common learning: a body-oriented, “organic” type of learning shaped by curiosity and openness. The artist describes the act of learning as a profoundly emancipatory moment with a unique aesthetic form. For her, learning also contains the potential for each individual to change and expand – from one to plural. With this in mind, Davids has designed two rooms as a school where visitors are invited to participate in lessons, led by professional Feldenkrais teachers, over the course of the exhibition.

Over two weekends, Yael Davids will lead her own Feldenkrais lessons, which she has designed on the basis of works from the museum’s collection. She has examined artistic works for aspects such as orientation, stability, gravity, texture, etc., and transferred these intrinsic properties into corresponding Feldenkrais exercise sequences. This allows participants to experience the works in a new way: lying down with their eyes closed, guided by the artist, practicing in a group setting, moving their bodies. The aim here is not to rationally learn something about the works; rather, it is to learn from and with them. The charts produced by Yael Davids for each of these lessons serve as a script and educational instrument for the practice sessions. Here, relationships between works of art and Feldenkrais principles are shown in the form of image/text collages. To a certain extent, the charts are at the core of the exhibition, as they illustrate Davids’ artistic considerations, manifested, for example, in the spatial context of the art works. The works that Davids draws on in her Feldenkrais lessons were selected by museum employees with whom she had been regularly practicing Feldenkrais for a number of months prior to the exhibition; they can be viewed at the school space in the exhibition.

Yael Davids also based her exhibition concept on the work of Noa Eshkol (1924–2007), an Israeli dancer, choreographer and movement theorist who developed a system in the 1950s, together with Avraham Wachman (1931–2010), with a view to recording the movement of the human body and its organization in graphic form (known as Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation). A close friend of Moshé Feldenkrais, Eshkol was responsible for the transcription and notation of most of his lessons. At the exhibition, visitors can view a significant number of sketches, drawings and photographs from the Noa Eshkol Foundation’s archives, which are displayed in a cabinet created by Yael Davids and designed on the basis of the axes and spheres of the notation principle. For Davids, Eshkol, who consistently practiced collective living, working and learning, is an important reference both for her own work and for the exhibition at large.

By transferring questions and perceptions of bodily connections (which are essential to Feldenkrais teachings) into the context of artistic practice and the museum space, Yael Davids draws the focus away from the individual works of art and toward the reference points and lines linking them. The artist views the process of designing the exhibition as a key part of her project. For her, this is similar to writing a script for a performance, with the museum seen as the body and the collection as its backbone.

Yael Davids scrutinizes the conventions concerning the dissemination of knowledge by institutions; she shifts the parameters for experiencing art; and she allows visitors to join her in examining how increased self-awareness changes the way in which we approach the works of art, the exhibition and the museum.

The exhibition is curated by Nadia Schneider Willen (collection curator, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst); she was assisted by Marie-Sophie Dorsch (Trainee, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst). An iteration of the exhibition was first presented at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in 2020, where it was initiated and curated by Nick Aikens (research curator, Van Abbemuseum). It was produced as part of Creator Doctus, a new research format launched by the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, with Yael Davids as the inaugural “candidate.”

A workbook documenting the artistic research project and both exhibitions by Yael Davids will be published in September 2021. With contributions by Nick Aikens, Janine Armin, Frédérique Bergholtz, Jeroen Boomgaard, Yael Davids, Sher Doruff, Roobina Karode, Nadia Schneider Willen and Grant Watson. The publication is realized in cooperation with the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam and is published by Roma Publishers.

Yael Davids lives and works in Amsterdam. Her works and performances have featured in the following exhibitions, among others: A Daily Practice (solo exhibition), Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2020; Dying Is a Solo (solo exhibition), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, 2018; documenta 14, Athens / Kassel, 2017; La distance entre V et W (solo exhibition), Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris, 2015; Gesture in Diaspora, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, 2015; Ending With Glass (solo exhibition), Kunsthalle Basel, 2011; Learning to Imitate in Absentia I (solo exhibition), Picture This, Bristol, 2011; Where Times Becomes Art, Palazzo Fortuny, performance division, Venice Biennale, 2005.

MIGROS MUSEUM FÜR GEGENWARTSKUNST

Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zurich

migrosmuseum.ch

Wyatt Kahn @ Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich

Wyatt Kahn

Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich

Through March 13, 2021

Galerie Eva Presenhuber presents its fifth solo exhibition by the New York-based artist WYATT KAHN.

For the past ten years, Wyatt Kahn has been shaping wooden stretchers to produce canvas-covered wall reliefs that engage and indict Modernist legacies of both painting and sculpture. With each body of work, viewers have encountered shifts in scale, geometric adjacencies, contorted shapes, saturation of color, experimentation with surface treatments, and forays onto paper.

In his newest reliefs, Wyatt Kahn strays from the previous two-dimensional line of advancement and initiates a third dimension in a deeper constellation. “This past year made me look back at the foundational structures of my practice and add layers of chaos on top of them,” explains Wyatt Kahn. The usual cadence of shapes, which shares affinities with Harvey Quaytman’s swooning forms and the strategies of the Supports/Surfaces movement, is redirected into an echo. Planes that would usually radiate outwards, right and left, now pile up on top of each other, obstructing each other, complicating the picture with physical depth and shadowy perspective.

The arcs and circles in Piled Up (Ben’s Dream) and Untitled, which harken back to Lygia Clark’s Neo-Concrete Ovo, suggest the fast passing of solar and cyclical time. The titles of particular works, such as Seated Bather or The Old Man, are nods to early Modernism’s preoccupations with lush arcadias, strewn with figures, even if we are only left with its foundational parts and limbs. Language, unspoken, unshared, or solemnly uttered in a vacuum, piles up. The way in which these new occlusions incite the body to move in a new choreography of apprehending recalls Willys de Castro, as well as Lee Bontecou. And yet, this absorption of references, forced through the simplest materials, is expressed in a visual language that is Wyatt Kahn’s alone. It is an inventory of the artist’s syntax that guides us into the histories that inform his lexicon.

WYATT KAHN was born in 1983 in New York, NY, US, and lives and works in New York, NY, US. Recent institutional solo exhibitions include Variations on an object at Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Trento, IT (2016); and Object Paintings at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, US (2015). The artist was also included in the group exhibition Jay DeFeo: The Ripple Effect at Le Consortium, Dijon, FR, which traveled to the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO, US (both in 2018). His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, US; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, US; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, US; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, FR; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, US; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, US; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, US; CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, US; and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, US.

GALERIE EVA PRESENHUBER, MAAG AREAL, ZURICH

Zahnradstrasse 21, CH-8005 Zurich

www.presenhuber.com

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Ian Anüll - Pia Fries - Christian Lindow - Harald F. Müller - Christoph Rütimann - Albrecht Schnider - Rémy Zaugg @ Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich

.CH

Ian Anüll - Pia Fries - Christian Lindow - Harald F. Müller - Christoph Rütimann - Albrecht Schnider - Rémy Zaugg

Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich

January 29 – March 27, 2021

Mai 36 Galerie presents the exhibition «.ch» bringing together works by Ian Anüll, Pia Fries, Christian Lindow, Harald F. Müller, Christoph Rütimann, Albrecht Schnider and Rémy Zaugg in seven of the gallery’s rooms. What all of these artists have in common is a personal link with Zurich and Switzerland.

Ian Anüll (born 1948; lives and works in Zurich) uses various techniques and media such as photography, sculptural objects and sculptural installations. The diverse materials he deploys are often found objects from the worlds of consumerism, mass media, signs and nature. Anüll reinvents and recalibrates familiar signs and symbols in ingenious ways, subtly alienating and transforming them, with shifts in context that reveal surprising new forms of interpretation.

Pia Fries, born in Beromünster LU in 1955, has been living and working in Düsseldorf for many years. A leading light of European abstract painting, her bold painterly approach shows colors, forms and structures as individually organized constructs, abandoning traditional systems of order and values. The paint converges and merges, forming pathways, traces and fluid movements that lend form to the whole. In recent years, Pia Fries has also adopted structures from found images, screen-printing them onto the carrier and using this as the starting point for her painting.

Christian Lindow was born in Thüringen/Germany in 1945 and settled in Bern in the late 1960s. After working on geometric sculptures and conceptual photography, he later began painting in an illustrative style. Soon, he began applying the paint more thickly, with broader, brisker and more gestural strokes, lending his paintings, which consist mostly of a single motif, an overall architectural feel. Christian Lindow died in Bern in 1990. His estate is represented by Mai 36 Galerie.

Harald F. Müller (born 1950 in Karlsruhe) lives and works by Lake Constance. His oeuvre includes photography, painting and sculpture, often in combination with architecture. Photographic materials, gathered through extensive research in archives and libraries, form an integral part of his colorful, sculpturally-inclined and mostly multi-part wall pieces. In addition, Müller often works with architects to create color concepts for buildings as well as creating color-oriented sculptures for public spaces.

The oeuvre of Christoph Rütimann (born in Zurich in 1955, lives and works in Mühlheim TG) ranges from performance art to word and sound installations, from photo and video work to drawing, painting and sculpture. He constantly questions the fundamental parameters of these diverse artistic media. For all their disparity, certain shared constants can be discerned between these artistic forms of expression in his oeuvre: line and color, the role of chance, and scientific phenomena such as gravitation.

The visual work of Albrecht Schnider (born 1958 in Lucerne, lives and works in Hilterfingen BE) emerges between the two poles of drawing and painting, starting with a spontaneous sketch and developing into a painting of almost iconic radiance. The drawings are created with maximum freedom and independence, unburdened by any primary aim to compose or design, but instead allowing the line to flow directly from the hand, as in a kind of écriture automatique.

The image itself lies at the heart of the artistic output of Rémy Zaugg (born 1943 in Courgenay JU) and forms the basis for exploring the meaning of perception, its conditions and limitations. For Zaugg, the artwork could not exist without perception. He used this as a stylistic means of addressing and discussing fundamental issues in his images, texts and projects. He died in Basel in 2005.

Mai 36 Galerie//Victor Gisler 

MAI 36 GALERIE

Raemistrasse 37, 8001 Zürich

mai36.com

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Michel Pérez Pollo @ Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich - Perfume

Michel Pérez Pollo: Perfume
Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich
Through August 8, 2020

Mai 36 Galerie presents new paintings by Michel Pérez Pollo in a third solo exhibition of his works.

The exhibition at Mai 36 Galerie presents the new series PERFUME, in which Michel Pérez Pollo explores the formal and conceptual characteristics of the perfume bottle cap as a medium of pleasure and beauty and, in doing so, combines the physical object with its specific and expressionistic style. The resulting figurative situations and the objects portrayed within the image space take on a surreal and at the same time poetic effect.

Perfume, defined as an alcohol-based liquid containing fragrant essential oils and aroma compounds, implies a permeative and long-lasting scent that can conjure intense and unforgettable memories in the human mind. On this basis, Michel Pérez Pollo’s new series forges a connection between the aspects of beauty, scent and inherent recall, and makes a serially produced object – the decorative cap of a perfume bottle – the focal point. It is a kitsch object. The artist calls this into question by putting it through the artistic process of sketching and modelling until eventually a sculpture is created that defines the object somewhere between the exaggerated and the monumental.

On viewing the scale of the work, the relationship between the motivic and the organic reveals itself through the exploration of both the olfactory and the visual, whereby the inherently subtle connection between nature and perfume becomes visible. Michel Pérez Pollo’s painting thus represents reflection on a level that goes beyond the formal characteristics of the perfume bottle.

Michel Pérez Pollo was born in 1981 in Manzanillo/Cuba and currently living and working in Madrid. He studied at the Escuela Profesional De Artes Plásticas in Holguín and at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. His works are exhibited internationally and were recently presented in the 2019 solo exhibition MARMOR at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana.

MAI 36 GALERIE
Raemistrasse 37, 8001 Zürich
mai36.com

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Jitka Hanzlova @ Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich

Jitka Hanzlová
Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Through August 8, 2020

Mai 36 Galerie presents its third solo exhibition of works by JITKA HANZLOVA. The artist’s wide-ranging photographic oeuvre, which evolved between the two cultural systems of East and West, reflects personal and overarching historical processes of transformation.

Through her direct and meticulous approach, she lends her subjects a compelling immediacy and presence; the person and even the setting seem to address the viewer almost personally. What appears self-evident to the viewer harks back to her own personal attachment to the people and things she photographs. She studies them carefully and patiently, rather than merely making an image of them. In her portraits, it is not only the appearance and history of the subjects that are rendered visible, but also Jitka Hanzlová’s personal connections and attitudes to them. Her works reveal references to the history of photography and art as well as to media beyond the confines of the artworld. This is evident, for instance, in the series There is something I don’t know, aesthetically evolved out of her studies of quattrocento painting, as it is in Vanitas, based on scientific herbarium illustrations.

Irrespective of her broad knowledge of aesthetic theory, ranging from John Berger to Roland Barthes, the central focus of Jitka Hanzlová’s work is her subjective approach to that which she portrays – the subject matter she captures with a direct and unadulterated gaze, lending it an emancipatory role within the existing world.

The exhibition at Mai 36 Galerie focuses on works from the new series WATER and conceptualizes these as an integral part of the artist’s earlier and current serial work. In her latest series, Jitka Hanzlová expands on her themes by complementing them with aspects of the contemporary debate about resources, and by exploring the various ways in which the material, seemingly open to interpretation, manifests itself in seemingly self-evident ways, in the form of air, water, and ice. In addition, individual works from the series Brixton, Cotton Rose, Flowers, Hier, Horse, Tonga and the earlier series Rokytník, Bewohner and Forest are also being shown for the first time as freely juxtaposed pieces within an exhibition context, rather than as a series.

JITKA HANZLOVA was born 1958 in Náchod; grew up in Rokytnik, Eastern Bohemia, in former Czechoslovakia. She came to Germany in the 1980s and studied photography at the Folkwang Universität der Künste in Essen, where she still lives and works. Her works are exhibited internationally; most recently at the National Gallery of Prague (2020) in the first major retrospective of her thirty years of artistic work. From 2005 to 2007, the artist taught at the Akademie der Künste in Hamburg and from 2012 to 2016 at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. 

MAI 36 GALERIE
Raemistrasse 37, 8001 Zurich
mai36.com
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