Joan Mitchell @ David Zwirner, NYC - 'To define a feeling: Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965' Exhibition Curated by Sarah Roberts

To define a feeling 

Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965 

Curated by Sarah Roberts 

David Zwirner, New York 

November 6 — December 13, 2025 

Joan Mitchell 

Untitled, c. 1963 

© Estate of Joan Mitchell

I’m trying for something more specific than movies of my everyday life: To define a feeling.

—Joan Mitchell in ARTnews, April 1965

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) that focuses on the years 1960 to 1965, a brief but critical juncture in the artist’s development. Capping off a yearlong celebration of the centennial of the artist’s birth, this presentation is curated by Sarah Roberts, senior director of curatorial affairs at the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and brings together a significant group of works from public and private collections, as well as that of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. 

During these years, Joan Mitchell spent many weeks each summer and fall living on a sailboat and exploring the Mediterranean from a home base along France’s Côte d’Azur with her companion, painter Jean Paul Riopelle, and her works from this period are inflected by these voyages and the sites of the Mediterranean. Back in her Parisian studio, Mitchell drew on the experience of looking out at the water, horizon, and rocky coasts, resulting in paintings that depart radically from those of the preceding years, and are distinct from those that would follow. Characterized by dark, central masses of swirling brushstrokes in deep greens and blues partially obscuring rich tonal colors embedded beneath, these turbulent canvases exchange the grounding armature that had structured much of her previous landscape-inspired work for more experimental compositional strategies. Constituting, as the poet John Ashbery described, “an unhurried meditation on bits of landscape and air,” the profound, dramatic works on view offer insight into Mitchell’s distinctive process in evolving the structural and chromatic composition of her paintings, while dynamically engaging many of the key themes and motifs that extend throughout her oeuvre.

As Sarah Roberts notes of the exhibition:

For Joan Mitchell, abstract painting had a singular capacity to capture and communicate multiple layers of human experience—things seen, touched, felt, and remembered—in a single visual field. From 1960 to 1965, her days and nights included frequent Mediterranean sailing trips to Corsica and Italy with her partner Jean Paul Riopelle, time spent reading and discussing poetry with friends, deep thinking about painting, and keenly felt losses of loved ones, as well the assassination of John F. Kennedy and growing social unrest in both the US and France. Reflecting on this tumultuous period later in life, Mitchell named all these events as impacting the direction of her work. Never seeking to create direct representations of particular moments or to simply channel a single emotion or thought, she sought instead to render in paint something new that articulated the sum of experiences in all their complexity and ambiguity—to define a feeling.

The selection of paintings and drawings gathered here shows Mitchell at work from 1960 to 1965, responding to the sea’s expanse and surrounding landscapes, and generating fresh ideas about painting itself. Central masses of densely applied paint in somber tones began to emerge in her canvases in 1960. By 1962, she had narrowed the range of hues to the darkest greens, browns, and blues, colors so deep that this group of works has frequently been referred to as the “black paintings,” though true black was rarely included. Mitchell concentrated her swirling central masses into floating islands of color within subtly varied, off-white fields. Within just two years, she would shift again, opening the concentrations into constellations of loose, squared forms and tangled brushwork as she continually experimented.

Reflecting on recent work in her 1965 oral history with art historian Dorothy Seckler, Mitchell noted, “Clement Greenberg said there never should be a central image, so I decided to make one.” With this body of work, Mitchell also patently challenged prevailing conventions of balanced composition and harmonious color, choosing an enigmatic palette with flashes of sharp contrast, shifting her “central” forms slightly off axis, and playing with backgrounds and corners. Echoes of Mediterranean light and rocky, shrub-studded coastlines were met with the turbulence and toughness in her painting technique, giving rise to one of Mitchell’s most daring, moody, and probing bodies of work.

Highlights from the exhibition include Mandres, c. 1962 (Private Collection, courtesy of McClain Gallery), an important transitional work that shows Mitchell beginning to experiment with central forms; Untitled, 1963 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), an expansive triptych characteristic of Mitchell’s growing engagement with multi-panel works during this period; as well as a selection of small-scale paintings that were inspired by stations on the Paris Metro and debuted in her 1965 solo exhibition at Stable Gallery, New York, including one on loan from the Hofstra University Museum of Art. Also on view are several large-scale paintings from the collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation that span these years, as well as a grouping of rarely seen works on paper made using charcoal and crayon—sometimes in combination with watercolor—that extend Mitchell’s exploration of form and color in a different medium.

The exhibition is supplemented by a selection of primary materials from the archives of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. A fully illustrated catalogue with new scholarship on this period by Sarah Roberts and other authors is forthcoming from David Zwirner Books.

Artist Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) established a singular visual vocabulary over the course of her more than four decade career. While rooted in the conventions of abstraction, Mitchell’s inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately conjure individuals, observations, places, and points in time. Her prodigious oeuvre encompasses not only the large-scale abstract canvases for which she is best known, but also smaller paintings, drawings, and prints.

Born in Chicago and educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which she received a BFA (1947) and an MFA (1950), Joan Mitchell moved to New York in 1949 and was an active participant in the downtown arts scene. She began splitting her time between Paris and New York in 1955, before moving permanently to France in 1959. In 1968, Joan Mitchell settled in Vétheuil, a small village northwest of Paris, while continuing to exhibit her work throughout the United States and Europe. It was in Vétheuil that she began regularly hosting artists at various stages of their careers, providing space and support to help them develop their art. When Mitchell passed away in 1992, her will specified that a portion of her estate should be used to establish a foundation to directly support visual artists.

In 1951, Joan Mitchell became one of the few female members of the exclusive Eighth Street Club, and, that spring, her work was included in The Ninth Street Exhibition, organized by charter members of The Club with the assistance of Leo Castelli, which helped to codify what became known as the New York School of primarily abstract painters. During her lifetime, Mitchell’s work was exhibited in solo presentations at numerous influential galleries in the United States and Europe, including Stable Gallery, New York (1953, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1961, 1965); Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles (1961); Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris (1967, 1969, 1971, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1992); Martha Jackson Gallery, New York (1968, 1972); Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York (1976, 1977, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1985, 1986); and Robert Miller Gallery, New York (1989, 1991). The Joan Mitchell Foundation was previously represented by Cheim & Read, New York, where the artist’s work was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, in 1997, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2014, 2016, and 2018.

Her first institutional solo exhibition, My Five Years in the Country, was held in 1972 at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York. Subsequent museum presentations during Mitchell’s lifetime were held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1974, 1992); Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1982); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (traveled to Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; and La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, California; 1988–1989).

In 2002, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized a posthumous retrospective of Mitchell’s work, which traveled to Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; and Des Moines Art Center, Iowa. In 2010, the Joan Mitchell Foundation organized Joan Mitchell in New Orleans, which included a symposium on her life and work, and three concurrent exhibitions held at Tulane University’s Newcomb Art Gallery, New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans. In 2015, Joan Mitchell Retrospective: Her Life and Paintings was presented at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, and subsequently traveled to Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Additional recent museum solo presentations include those at Kunsthalle Emden, Germany (2008; traveled to Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy and Musée des Impressionnismes, Giverny, France, 2009); Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (2010); and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, France (2014). In 2017, Mitchell / Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation opened at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2018); and Fonds Hélène et Édouard Leclerc, Landerneau, France (2018–2019).

A comprehensive Joan Mitchell traveling retrospective was co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The retrospective was first on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2021, before traveling to the Baltimore Museum of Art the following year. The exhibition was subsequently presented at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, through 2023, where the complementary exhibition, Monet – Mitchell, was also on view. The Saint Louis Art Museum presented an adaptation of Monet – Mitchell in 2023, featuring eight works by Mitchell and two by Monet.

Mitchell’s work can be found in prominent institutional collections worldwide, including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Anderson Collection at Stanford University, California; Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nakanoshima Museum of Modern Art, Osaka, Japan; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

DAVID ZWIRNER

537 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.davidzwirner.com

Pat Steir @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - 'Before the Rain' Exhibition

Pat Steir: Before the Rain 

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

October 3 – November 15, 2025

Pat Steir 

Winter Daylight, 2021-22 

Oil on canvas, 108 x 108 inches

© Pat Steir, courtesy Locks Gallery

Locks Gallery presents Before the Rain, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Pat Steir. This marks the artist’s eighth solo show with the Locks Gallery.

A monumental figure in contemporary painting, Pat Steir developed her distinctive style of Waterfall paintings in the 1980s, embedding deep, lyrical meaning in the free expression of paint. Surrendering herself to chance and “non-intention”, Steir’s process of dripping, pouring, and throwing paint marked a defining moment in her exploration of materiality and of the artist’s role in creation, opening a way for her continued mastery of this dance between paint, gravity, gesture and ground.

Steir’s new works find her building upon and refining these guiding variables. Against a darkened ground, as seen in Many Colors II (Blue) (2022) and Winter Daylight (2021-22), dripping multi-colored brushstrokes act as prisms within the encompassing layers of poured paint while precise white lines recall her underlying interest in grids and matrices.

Pat Steir 

Monday Circus, 2022-23

Oil on canvas, 108 x 72 inches

© Pat Steir, courtesy Locks Gallery

In tandem with the darkened palette and hypnotic allure of these paintings, Steir’s nomenclature also entwines itself with a certain poetics, inspiring viewers not just to look but to ruminate. The artist has said, “[T]he poetry of the title is part of the picture for me. It’s absolutely the same thing.” Take Monday Circus (2022-23), where swinging strokes of chartreuse, maroon, and orange conjure a myriad of evocations from playful to melancholic. In her succinct yet nuanced phrases, such as One Green One (2025), Pat Steir incorporates rhythm in the language of her titles that helps instill the image in the “mind’s eye.”  

Artist Pat Steir

Pat Steir (b. 1938) was born in Newark, New Jersey and currently lives and works in New York. 

Throughout her renowned career, she has been the focus of numerous solo museum exhibitions and site-specific installations. 

Pat Steir was the recipient of a Guggenheim Artist’s Fellowship (1981), a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Grant (1973), an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art from Pratt Institute (1991) and a Distinguished Alumni Award from Boston University (2001). 

She is a founding board member of Printed Matter, Inc. in New York and the landmark feminist journal, ‘Heresies’. 

Her work is represented in major collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, CA; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Tate Gallery, London.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Gene Hedge @ Lincoln Glenn Gallery, New York - 'Pieces Of The City' Exhibition

Gene Hedge: Pieces Of The City

Lincoln Glenn Gallery, New York

November 13 – December 20, 2025

Lincoln Glenn Gallery presents Gene Hedge: Pieces of The City, a solo exhibition of the artist’s collages, paintings, and constructions from the 1950s through the 1970s. Hedge’s alternative practices reveal a singular way of seeing the world—an approach that infused his work with depth, dimension, and a quiet sense of reverence for form.

This exhibition marks Lincoln Glenn Gallery’s second presentation of Hedge’s work since the artists passing in 2017. Pieces of The City bring to light a remarkable body of paintings and constructions that remained hidden for decades in his SoHo studio—works that encapsulate both the discipline and devotion of an artist who lived entirely for his craft.

Although Gene Hedge initially found success in the vibrant postwar art world, he ultimately turned away from commercial recognition. By the early 1970s, he had withdrawn from the gallery circuit entirely, devoting himself instead to teaching, travel, and the creative achievements of his peers. Living and working in his SoHo loft on Bleecker Street, Gene Hedge chose a life of solitude and pure artistic pursuit. He painted obsessively, not for sale or acclaim, but for the sake of the work itself—an act of quiet defiance in a market-driven era.

Born and raised in Indiana, Gene Hedge served in the military from 1946 to 1947 and used G.I. Bill tuition assistance to study art at Ball State University. Inspired by the writings of László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), he moved to Chicago in 1949 to attend the Institute of Design, founded as the New Bauhaus by Moholy-Nagy in 1937. After graduating, Gene Hedge relocated to New York in 1956, where he began working industrial paper used in highway construction—transforming the material into organic abstractions that bridge art, nature, and technology.

In 1965, Gene Hedge radically reimagined his process by experimenting with acrylic paint. He poured pigment directly onto canvas, coaxing it into biomorphic shapes with a squeegee to create rhythmic compositions that balance control and chance. These works, often produced in sets, explore infinite variations of a single visual idea—each canvas an intimate meditation on movement, repetition, and restraint.

Hedge’s works are represented in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other major institutions.

Gene Hedge: Pieces Of The City is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Clanci Jo Conover.

LINCOLN GLENN GALLERY

542 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lincolnglenn.com

Friedel Dzubas @ Lincoln Glenn Gallery, NYC - 'The Slow Unfolding: Friedel Dzubas' Final Abstractions' Exhibition

The Slow Unfolding: Friedel Dzubas' Final Abstractions 

Lincoln Glenn Gallery, New York

September 11 - November 8, 2025

Lincoln Glenn Gallery presents The Slow Unfolding: Friedel Dzubas' Final Abstractions, a solo exhibition of the artist’s late-career works, created between 1980 and 1989. These vibrant canvases mark Friedel Dzubas’ return to a more instinctive, expressive approach to painting, centered on gesture, movement, and color.

During the 1980s, Friedel Dzubas moved away from his earlier reliance on preparatory sketches and maquettes. Embracing improvisation, he worked with broad, chromatically rich forms to animate the surface of his canvases. The resulting works reflect a deep commitment to spontaneity and a refined understanding of balance, rhythm, and scale.

Rather than progressing through discrete artistic phases, Firedel Dzubas’ career reveals a continual cycle of renewal. His late abstractions recall the vigor of his early work while advancing it through decades of experimentation. Stacked color bands and drifting forms create tension and motion across the picture plane. His work on large-scale monotypes in the mid-1980s further influenced this period, underscoring his openness to varied techniques and ideas.

Born in Berlin in 1915, Friedel Dzubas immigrated to the United States in 1939, escaping Nazi Germany. He soon became part of the New York art scene, connected with Clement Greenberg, Jackson Pollock, and Helen Frankenthaler, with whom he shared a studio. Friedel Dzubas exhibited at major New York galleries including André Emmerich, Tibor de Nagy, Knoedler & Co., and Leo Castelli, and was the subject of a 1983 retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. His works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum, The Met, Guggenheim Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, MFA Boston, and others.

The Slow Unfolding is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by curator and critic Dan Cameron.

LINCOLN GLENN GALLERY

542 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lincolnglenn.com

Adolph Gottlieb and Kim Whanki @ Pace Gallery, Seoul - 'The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion' Exhibition

The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion 

Adolph Gottlieb and Kim Whanki

Pace Gallery, Seoul

October 31, 2025 – January 10, 2026

Kim Whanki 

Untitled, 1967 

Oil on canvas, 177 x 127 cm 

© Whanki Foundation · Whanki Museum

Pace  presents The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion, a pair of exhibitions of works by American Abstract Expressionist Adolph Gottlieb and pioneering Korean painter Kim Whanki, at its Seoul gallery. On view across two floors of the gallery, these dual presentations—organized in collaboration with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and the Whanki Foundation—offer viewers an opportunity to witness how two 20th century figures with different cultural and philosophical backgrounds visualized their unique perspectives and forged a universal language through abstraction.

Gottlieb’s paintings fuse intuitive shapes with bold color fields to visualize emotion and the unconscious, while Kim’s canvases employ repeated dots and refined chromatic structures to evoke an Eastern sense of meditation and cosmic order. Deeply moved by his first encounter with Gottlieb’s work in the U.S. Pavilion at the São Paulo Biennale in 1963, Kim Whanki subsequently relocated to New York, where he embarked on one of the most intense periods of his career. Immersed in the city’s dynamic art scene, he gradually eliminated figurative references from his work, refining his language into dots, lines, and planes. His restrained compositions and luminous fields of meticulously placed dots evoke skies, seas, and constellations, transforming time and space into poetic abstractions. His celebrated Dot Paintings series, completed during these years, played a key role in the introduction of Korean Modernism to the global stage. Pace’s exhibition of Kim’s work from the late 1960s to the early 1970s focuses on the development of his Dot Paintings from structural compositions using crosses and quadrants (Sibjagudo).

A central figure of the New York School alongside Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb was at the vanguard of American Abstract Expressionism. His Pictographs of the 1940s used an all-over grid structure and invented symbols to give form to the unconscious, and in the 1950s he developed his signature Burst series: paintings that juxtapose a floating orb with explosive brushwork. These compositions dramatize the tensions between order and chaos, color, and form, inviting universal and intuitive responses rather than prescribing narrative meaning. Pace’s presentation in Seoul includes a selection of works produced by Adolph Gottlieb during the 1960s and 1970s, including the large-scale painting Expanding (1962), along with canvases from his Imaginary Landscapes series, which utilize the form of landscape painting to include unlimited perception.

Though their practices were rooted in distinct cultural contexts, Kim and Gottlieb are connected by a shared pursuit of universality—using color, symbol, and structure to explore humanity, the cosmos, and the realm of emotion. The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion is conceived as a dialogue, where the visual and emotional resonances between their works illuminate the boundless possibilities of abstraction and its enduring significance in art history.

Adolph Gottlieb (b. 1903, New York; d. 1974, New York) is recognized as a key figure of the New York School. Initially informed by Italian Renaissance painting, Impressionism, and the European avant-garde, Gottlieb became an advocate of abstraction from the 1930s onward, notably organizing the protest of an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1950, for which he and a group of fellow artists became known as the Irascibles. Producing paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and tapestries, Adolph Gottlieb developed an aesthetic vocabulary from Jungian theory, underpinned by aspects of automatism, primitivism, and Surrealism. He continued to refine these stylistic means throughout his career, pursuing images that evoke an immediate and visceral impact on the viewer, through his series of Pictographs, Imaginary Landscapes, and Bursts.

Kim Whanki (b. 1913, Jeollanam-do, Korea; d. 1974, New York) is recognized as one of the pioneers of abstract modernism in South Korea during the twentieth century. The artist studied at Nihon University, Tokyo, from 1933 to 1936, a period during which he began exploring abstraction. From 1946 to 1950, he served as a professor in the Department of Western Painting at Seoul National University, and from 1952 to 1955 as professor and dean of the Department of Western Painting at Hongik University, Seoul. He was appointed as President of the Fine Arts Association in 1963.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

Ding Yi @ Lisson Gallery, London - 'The Road to Heaven' Exhibition

Ding Yi: The Road to Heaven

Lisson Gallery, London

Through 22 November 2025

For his inaugural solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery and his first return to exhibit in London in over five years, renowned Chinese abstractionist Ding Yi presents a new body of work. This latest series is deeply informed by the history and cosmology of the Naxi people of Yunnan in southwestern China, offering a rich cultural and conceptual dimension to his distinctive visual language. In line with his larger corpus, the artist’s latest drawings and paintings employ a systematic iconography in the service of a layered, subjective response – a continuous act of translation rather than a fixed text.   

In 1988, while a student at Shanghai University, Ding Yi adopted the cross, either in the form of a ‘+’ or ‘x’ symbol, as a leitmotif. Initially arranging crosses in strict grids, he later developed complex geometric patterns in fluorescent colours, producing works that mirrored the architectural and economic explosion of Shanghai in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  Since 2011, Ding Yi has shifted toward a broader perspective, exploring themes of the cosmos, nature, and the universe, gradually moving beyond the strict rationality of his earlier work toward a more emotive and intuitive sensibility. Following his 2022 solo exhibition in Tibet, he began to engage more deeply with specific cultural and geographic contexts, with recent works reflecting a turn inward—toward spiritual reflection and contemplative states.

In 2024, following three research visits to Yunnan and in-depth conversations with scholars and Dongba priests, Ding Yi studied and internalised the texts and beliefs of the Dongba religion—an ancient tradition blending animism and Tibetan Buddhism. This belief system is preserved through sacred manuscripts composed in a unique pictographic script – the most significant and visually striking being The Road to Heaven. Used in funerary rituals, the long scroll depicts the soul’s symbolic passage from the earthly realm to the afterlife, and lends its title to this exhibition.

Drawing from the scroll’s visual and spiritual resonance, Ding Yi created a group of works executed on coarse-fibred Dongba paper using acrylic and water-soluble coloured pencil. These compositions reinterpret The Road to Heaven through his signature cross motif. The drawing transposes the Dongba writing system into a sequence of intricate schemes, each composed from a dense array of crosses. In this fusion of Dongba cosmology and his distinctive abstraction, Ding Yi invites viewers to perceive two worlds at once—entwined yet distinct in sensibility. Featured in the exhibition is The Road to Heaven 2024-B17, a four-panel work on Dongba paper. Each panel alludes to the transmigration of the soul through allegorical topographies: Nine Black Mountains, The Underworld, The Natural World, and Heaven.

The exhibition also features a suite of horizontal-format works on Dongba paper, continuing his iconic Appearance of Crosses series. For Ding Yi, works on paper hold a vital place in his practice, serving as both experimentation and refinement. In these, tiny crosses applied in various colours form mosaic-like compositions that oscillate between microcosmic and macrocosmic resonance. Blocks of dense black hatching – inset with constellatory motifs – echo the starry skies that have featured in Ding Yi’s works for two decades. Elsewhere, streaming blue diagonals conjure the two fundamental elements of life,  according to the Naxi – ‘Qi’ (energy) and water, linking to the ‘Twenty-eight mansions’ of Naxi astrology: the nightly resting places of the moon.

A group of larger relief paintings, rendered in chiselled basswood, features tiered zigzags that evoke the sacred Hengduan mountains of Yunnan in the guise of psychedelic abstraction. Coloured diagonals offset the faint underlying grid, while bold geometry, as often in Ding Yi’s art, compresses a sense of the minute, the handmade and the contingent, reflected in the tiny carved compartments that constitute each painting.

Ding Yi defined the first two stages of his career in terms of ‘steadying’ (the cultivation of a formal language) and ‘overlooking’ (the application of that language to the rapidly evolving world around him). The third, ongoing stage is that of ‘looking up’ – of widening his horizons, both spatial and temporal, to the cosmos and its ancient conceptualisations. The mathematical construction of his works belies a deep interest in the idiosyncratic and irrational dimensions of human thought and cultural tradition. The cross itself – at once Modernist and pre-modern, personal and functional – encapsulates the beguiling duality of his art. As curator Cui Cancan has observed, the “Winding Path” of Ding Yi’s practice “has no terminus – it sways fiercely between the poles of locality and globalisation.” The series of work featured in this exhibition is also on view at Ding Yi: The Winding Path at Contemporary Gallery Kunming and Anthropology Museum of Yunnan University, China, until 9 November 2025.

Artist Ding Yi

A leading figure in Chinese contemporary art, Ding Yi works across painting, sculpture, installation, and architecture. Since the late 1980s, his signature motif—the cross “+” and its variant “x”—has served as a symbol of structure, rationality, and a visual language exploring the essence of being. Trained in both art and design, Ding Yi began experimenting with abstraction in 1982. During his student years, he developed a strong conviction about how to paint and what kind of artist he would become. Rejecting the Expressionism and Surrealism then prevalent in China, he chose a rational path “free from ideology.” Profoundly influenced by Western artists such as Piet Mondrian and Frank Stella during the 1985 “New Wave” art movement, Ding Yi launched his iconic Appearance of Crosses series in 1988, aiming to create “an ultimate impression of abstraction”. At the time, he “designed” paintings resembling plans for fabrics or blankets, using rulers and tape to eliminate traces of hand gestures—rigorously precise compositions formed through the

repetition of the cross.

Ding Yi’s methodical structures are animated by vibrant, reflexively chosen colours, introducing an element of chance and tension into the work. Through colour and form, his paintings reflect on China’s rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, with visual motifs echoing QR codes and the sensory intensity of an information-driven society. Since 2010, Ding Yi has adopted a more expansive perspective in his examination of the world, integrating reflections on the broader human condition. His more recent works reveal greater luminosity and intensity, carrying a deeper emotional resonance.

Ding Yi was born in Shanghai in 1962, where he continues to live and work. He studied Design at the Shanghai Art & Design Academy (1980–1983), and later traditional Chinese painting at Shanghai University’s Fine Arts Department (1986–1990). His recent solo exhibitions include those at Contemporary Gallery Kunming and Anthropology Museum of Yunnan University (2025); Mostyn, Llandudno, Wales (2025); Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne (2024), Paris and St. Moritz (2025); Château La Coste, Provence (2024); Ningbo Museum of Art and Huamao Museum of Art Education (2023); MOCAUP, Shenzhen (2023); Mojie Art Museum, Taiyuan (2023); TAG Art Museum, Qingdao (2022); Jebumgang Art Center, Lhasa (2022); Galería RGR, Mexico City (2022); ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai (2018) and Singapore (2022); Timothy Taylor, New York (2021) and London (2019); Long Museum, Chongqing (2020) and West Bund, Shanghai (2015); Nova Contemporary, Bangkok (2020); Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich (2019); Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou (2018); Xi’an Art Museum (2017); and Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan (2016).

Ding Yi has exhibited extensively in major international group exhibitions at institutions such as The British Museum, London; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Power Station of Art and MOCA Shanghai; SFMOMA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao; Mercedes-Benz Contemporary, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg; MAXXI, Rome; UCCA, Beijing; and touring exhibitions in Bern, Hamburg, and Barcelona. He has also shown in biennales and triennales including the Venice Biennale (1993), Asia-Pacific Triennial (1993), Biennale of Sydney (1998), Yokohama Triennale (2001), Shanghai Biennale (2006), Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale (2012), and Busan Biennale (2016). 

LISSON GALLERY

67 Lisson Street, London

www.lissongallery.com

Ding Yi: The Road to Heaven

Lisson Gallery, London, 27 September – 1 November 2025

Stanley Whitney @ Gagosian, Athens - 'Return to the Garden' Exhibition

Stanley Whitney: Return to the Garden

Gagosian, Athens

October 2, 2025 – January 17, 2026

Stanley Whitney

The Courage of the Poet, 2025

Oil on linen

60 x 60 inches (152.4 x 152.4 cm)

© Stanley Whitney

Photo: Owen Conway

Courtesy Gagosian

Stanley Whitney: Return to the Garden, 

Installation View, 2025

© Stanley Whitney

Photo: Stathis Mamalakis

Courtesy Gagosian

Gagosian presents Return to the Garden, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Stanley Whitney in Athens. This is Whitney’s first exhibition in Greece since his participation in Documenta 14 in 2017.

The exhibition’s title, Return to the Garden, evokes themes of arcadian innocence and harmony with nature. Unencumbered by preconceived subjects or narrative elements, these vibrant abstractions offer viewers the opportunity to engage with a heightened awareness of color and perception.

Stanley Whitney asserts the power of color through loose grids of roughly rectangular shapes, creating compositions of three or four rows separated by horizontal bands that traverse the canvas. Characterized by active brushwork, layered pigment, and jostling borders, each field is defined in relation to its neighbors and to each painting as a whole. In some works, he repeats variations of the same hues either between multiple blocks or extended across their lateral bands, establishing myriad formal connections and contrasts. 

Stanley Whitney

On the Street Where You Live, 2024

Oil on linen

60 x 60 inches (152.4 x 152.4 cm)

© Stanley Whitney

Photo: Owen Conway

Courtesy Gagosian

Stanley Whitney: Return to the Garden, 

Installation View, 2025

© Stanley Whitney

Photo: Stathis Mamalakis

Courtesy Gagosian

By sustaining this format, Stanley Whitney has developed a compositional framework from which to produce individual canvases full of unexpected, energetic harmonies between vivid colors and fluid gestures. Influenced by traditions including Abstract Expressionism and quiltmaking, his paintings additionally parallel the polyphonies and syncopation of jazz, forming compelling expressions of creativity and freedom.

Stanley Whitney also admires ancient Greek vase painting, particularly of the preclassical Geometric and Archaic eras (c. 900–500 BCE). Painted by hand and divided into banded registers, the abstract linear patterns of these early vases underly the compositions of later, more figurative styles. In looking to such ancient sources when developing his stacked compositions, Stanley Whitney draws upon an interest in archaic forms that similarly motivated both the Abstract Expressionists and earlier modernists.

Stanley Whitney: Return to the Garden, 

Installation View, 2025

© Stanley Whitney

Photo: Stathis Mamalakis

Courtesy Gagosian

Stanley Whitney

Roma 55, 2023

Oil on linen

24 x 24 inches (61 x 61 cm)

© Stanley Whitney

Photo: Owen Conway

Courtesy Gagosian

In another connection with Mediterranean antiquity, the title of the Roma series (2017–) speaks to the inspiration Stanley Whitney found in Rome, where he lived and worked for five years in the 1990s. It was then that he consolidated the approach to abstraction that he continues to explore, a method sparked in part by the ancient architecture and murals that he encountered there and in Egypt. Unlike the straight lines of modern construction, the weathered, hand-built structures of the ancient world possess irregular contours and surfaces that correspond with the gestural demarcations of Whitney’s paintings.

Other works featured in Return to the Garden include new paintings from the ongoing Stay Song series (2017–), which Stanley Whitney debuted in Athens for Documenta 14, as well as the Monk & Munch paintings (2020–). In these rectangular canvases, he pays homage to jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk and expressionist painter Edvard Munch, highlighting essential relationships between art and music.

GAGOSIAN GALLERY

22 Anapiron Polemou Street, Athens 11521

gagosian.com

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Stanley Whitney: Drawings

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Stanley Whitney: Paintings

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Sean Scully @ Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg - 'Stories' Retrospective Exhibition

Sean Scully. Stories 

Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg

27 June - 2 November 2025 

Sean Scully in Sean Scully. Stories, 

Bucerius Kunst Forum, Photo: Ulrich Perrey

Exhibition view: Sean Scully. Stories, 

Bucerius Kunst Forum, Photo: Ulrich Perrey

Exhibition view: Sean Scully. Stories, 

Bucerius Kunst Forum, Photo: Ulrich Perrey

In celebration of his 80th birthday, the Bucerius Kunst Forum presents a comprehensive retrospective of the artist Sean Scully. The exhibition features artworks spanning over six decades of his career. In addition to Scully's large-scale paintings, the exhibition displays works on paper, sculptures, and photographs. 

Scully's best-known works are large paintings on which he applies multiple layers of oil paint, creating a striking, tactile texture. Along with the heavy application of paint and broad brushstrokes, his works are distin-guished by their large scale and checkerboard patterns. In the exhibition, his iconic paintings are displayed alongside discoveries and experiments, including his photographies created since the 1960s. Visitors can expect a journey through the decades, illustrating how an artist's career evolves in response to personal turning points, political developments, and artistic trends. The retrospective format highlights how Sean Scully continuously explores new forms of expression: Whereas he painted figuratively in the 1960s, de-picting recognizable objects, places, and people, he eventually became one of the most important non-representational artists of today through his in-volvement with the hard-edge movement and sharply defined areas of colour. Alongside his well-known paintings, the exhibition presents several redis-covered works, especially from his early career, which have rarely been ex-hibited before.

Exhibition view: Sean Scully. Stories, 

Bucerius Kunst Forum, Photo: Ulrich Perrey

Exhibition view: Sean Scully. Stories, 

Bucerius Kunst Forum, Photo: Ulrich Perrey

Exhibition view: Sean Scully. Stories, 

Bucerius Kunst Forum, Photo: Ulrich Perrey

Exhibition view: Sean Scully. Stories, 

Bucerius Kunst Forum, Photo: Ulrich Perrey

Combined with stories and anecdotes about his works, the show demonstrates that, despite its non-representational nature, Scully's art is far from in-accessible. By telling stories it evokes emotions and memories in the viewer. Visitors will encounter childhood memories, the artist’s personal experiences of key political events, and impressions from his travels. Scully's themes are marked by deep melancholy, great joy, and poetic and philo-sophical reflections on the human condition, including experiences of loss and longing. The exhibition combines art, personal notes by Sean Scully, numerous explanations and sound, offering the opportunity to experience non-represen-tational painting through personal stories and emotional connections.

Sean Scully reinterprets abstraction, as for him, nothing is truly abstract. His works are expressions of self-perception, reflecting an inner state. This is why Sean Scully continues to paint over his pieces, giving them new meaning — a process that is also explored in the exhibition. His photographs of house facades, landscapes, and architectural structures reveal the visual sources of his inspiration. In the exhibition, the abstract nature of his oversized works is paired with images of real places, providing an associative guide for the viewer.

Exhibition view: Sean Scully. Stories, 

Bucerius Kunst Forum, Photo: Ulrich Perrey

Exhibition view: Sean Scully. Stories, 

Bucerius Kunst Forum, Photo: Ulrich Perrey

Exhibition view: Sean Scully. Stories, 

Bucerius Kunst Forum, Photo: Ulrich Perrey

Exhibition view: Sean Scully. Stories, 

Bucerius Kunst Forum, Photo: Ulrich Perrey

Sean Scully was born in Dublin in 1945 and raised in the south of London. He now lives and works between New York, London, and Mooseurach in the south of Germany. His connection to Germany was primarily shaped by his role as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 2002 to 2007. Over his more than six decades of creative work, Sean Scully has participated in numerous exhibitions. Vertical and horizontal bands of colour have served as the re-curring foundation of his works, a structure he continually revisits using various techniques and materials. Initially, he used adhesive tape to create precise striped edges. In the 1980s however, he moved away from this preci-sion and began painting freehanded. The multiple layers of paint and visible brushstrokes are clearly visible in his pieces. In 2014, Sean Scully became the first Western, non-representational artist to have a dedicated retrospective in China. He was made a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2013 and has received honorary doctorates from several institutions. His work is part of many prestigious permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Sean Scully in Sean Scully. Stories, 

Bucerius Kunst Forum, Photo: Ulrich Perrey

Exhibition view: Sean Scully. Stories, 

Bucerius Kunst Forum, Photo: Ulrich Perrey

Exhibition view: Sean Scully. Stories, 

Bucerius Kunst Forum, Photo: Ulrich Perrey

In addition to two freely accessible sculptures in the atrium, the artist's work Air Cage is installed in front of the exhibition building on Alter Wall. This installation not only makes Scully's art visible but also invites visitors to linger in Hamburg's city centre. The outdoor sculpture is part of the pilot project within the Hamburg initiative „Verborgene Potenziale - Gemeinschaftliche Entwicklung der Nutzungsvielfalt für eine lebendige und resiliente Hamburger Innenstadt“, funded by the Zukunftsfähige Innenstädte und Zentren program of the Federal Ministry of Housing, Urban Development, and Building.

BUCERIUS KUNST FORUM

Alter Wall 12, 20457 Hamburg

www.buceriuskunstforum.de

Related Post:

Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas 

Philadelphia Museum of Art , April 11 – July 31, 2022

Adam Pendleton @ Pace Gallery, Berlin - "spray light layer emerge" Exhibition

Adam Pendleton

spray light layer emerge

Pace Gallery, Berlin

September 11 - November 2, 2025

Adam Pendleton

Black Dada (D), 2025

© Adam Pendleton, courtesy of Pace Gallery

Pace presents spray light layer emerge, an intimate selection of paintings and works on paper from Adam Pendleton’s Black Dada and Untitled (Days) bodies of work, presented across both floors of Die Tankstelle, the gallery’s new space in Berlin. The exhibition’s title, spray light layer emerge, reflects the various “acts” played out in the Black Dada paintings: materially, theoretically, poetically, and ultimately, visually.

A central figure in contemporary American painting, Adam Pendleton is known for continuously redefining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. His paintings begin on paper by exploring the full breadth of mark-making. He layers paint, spray paint, ink, and watercolor, while integrating fragmentary text and geometric forms, often using stenciling techniques. These works on paper are photographed and then combined through a screen-printing process. Blurring distinctions between painting, drawing, and photography, the resulting paintings are tangible manifestations of his belief in painting as a powerful “visual and conceptual force.”

Pendleton’s Black Dada paintings, shown on the first floor, are conceptually rich and subtly expressionistic: thought-acts suspended in mid-flight, the ghost of an urban scrawl, the impression of dispersed and diffused light. Composed as diptychs on black-gessoed grounds, they direct attention to the fundamental attributes of painting—surface, edge, figure, ground—and to the artist’s unique approach to compositional logic and visual thought. Each painting features one or two hard-edged letters from the phrase BLACK DADA, which function as a “figure” within each composition. BLACK DADA refers to Pendleton’s ongoing exploration of conceptions of Blackness and abstraction. These textual characters hang, rest, or hover within the visual field—where drips, sprays, splatters, and other gestures play against an invisible grid set by the symmetry of the diptychs. By foregrounding the modes and methods of composition, Pendleton’s Black Dada works invite viewers to engage with and question the formal, conceptual, and material possibilities of painting itself. 

Adam Pendleton is currently the subject of a major exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen—his first solo exhibition in the city—runs from April 4, 2025, through January 3, 2027, and features new and recent paintings alongside a single-channel video. The exhibition highlights Pendleton’s singular contributions to contemporary American painting and engages with both the architecture of the museum and the historical context of the National Mall. In April 2026, Adam Pendleton will also present a solo exhibition at the Langen Foundation in Neuss, Germany. 

This May, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced its acquisition of all 35 works from Pendleton’s Who Is Queen? exhibition (2021–2022). This landmark acquisition includes paintings and drawings from the Black Dada and WE ARE NOT bodies of work, as well as three video works: Notes on Resurrection City, Notes on the Robert E. Lee Monument, Richmond VA (figure), and So We Moved: A Portrait of Jack Halberstam. 

Adam Pendleton: An Abstraction

Pace Publishing, 2025

Text by Marc Glimcher

Hardcover, 160 pages, 11 ¾ × 9 ½ in.

Image courtesy of Pace

Pace published Adam Pendleton: An Abstraction. Both a document and evolution of Pendleton’s first solo exhibition at Pace New York in a decade, the volume features a new text by Marc Glimcher.

PACE GALLERY BERLIN

Die Tankstelle, Bülowstrasse 18, 10783 Berlin

www.pacegallery.com

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Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC

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David Adjaye / Adam Pendleton

Pace Gallery, Hong Kong, May 18 – Junu 30, 2021

Mika Tajima @ Pace Gallery, London - "Anthesis" Exhibition

Mika Tajima: Anthesis

Pace Gallery, London 

September 3 - October 4, 2025

Mika Tajima

Negative Entropy (Sound Bath, Full Width, 

Pale Lime, Quad), 2025 

© Mika Tajima, courtesy Pace

Pace presents Mika Tajima: Anthesis, an exhibition of new and recent work by Mika Tajima, at its Hanover Square gallery in London. This solo presentation, the artist’s first in London since joining the gallery’s program in 2022, debuts a new body of work, titled Negentropica.

Paintings and sculptures from Tajima’s Art d’Ameublement, Negative Entropy, and Pranayama series also feature, representing her latest investigations into energy, invisible forces, and the self in a networked age.

For almost two decades, Taijma’s multidisciplinary practice, which spans painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, has given substance to the ideas and qualities that circumscribe human agency within our built and virtual environments. Examining three consistent concepts—of control, freedom, and performance—her work is grounded in the material and sensorial, translating extensive theoretical research into physical objects.

The exhibition at Pace takes its title, Anthesis, from the term used to describe the moment a flower reaches full bloom—when the plant is at its most functional and expressive state. Drawing on this idea, the works on view employ recording, transformation, and containment—arduous attempts to resist natural decay and simultaneously underscore impermanence. In this context, anthesis, associated with both scientific quantification and aesthetic brilliance, offers a metaphorical framework for the show, capturing possibilities of becoming and the fragility of presence.

At the center of Anthesis, two new works—Negentropica 1 and 2 (both 2025)—feature iris flowers arranged within pierced and carved black marble boulders that serve as vessels. Their decay has been chemically slowed, altering their corporeal presence; illuminated in ultraviolet (UV) light, they emit a spectral glow that likewise recasts the typical bounds of human perception. Held within the stone’s carved cavities, the transience of plant life meets the slow, dense temporality of tectonic formation. Tajima’s reconfiguration of both organic and geological elements gestures toward greater forces of human intervention: the deep, structural extraction of the earth, and contemporary attempts to prolong—or “hack”—human biology.

Negentropy—from which this body of work takes its title—refers to a system becoming more ordered and internally structured, in contrast to entropy, which describes a move toward disorder. The tensions in these works between temporal scales, nature, and technology unsettle how we perceive time, presence, and transformation. In Tajima’s words: “To the flower, our years would stretch into near-geological time; to us, the flower is fleeting—intense and beautiful, then gone.”

Four new works from the artist’s ongoing Negative Entropy series (2010–present) echo themes within Anthesis, giving form to the ephemeral through captured and preserved sound. These woven spectrograms are derived from two distinct recording sites: a production facility of the international company Buffalo Inc., which manufactures data storage and network devices, and the immersive, sensorial space of a sound bath meditation. One site is defined by industrial precision and technological control, the other by embodied experience and spiritual resonance. Their contrast reflects the divergent ways we harness, interpret, and are shaped by flows of energy and information.

Two small rose quartz sculptures from Tajima’s Pranayama series are also on view. In this body of work, the artist pierces wood, glass, or mineral surfaces with bronze nozzles cast from Jacuzzi jets, evoking the practices of physical and mental reform in both traditional wellness regimens and technocratic optimization. Titled after yogic breath practices—prāṇāyāma meaning “control of vital air” in Sanskrit—these sculptures are marked at acupuncture meridian points, referencing traditions that seek to reveal and regulate interior flows. Rose quartz, a semi-precious stone, is prized in New Age beliefs and valued for its piezoelectric properties—the ability to emit an electric charge under pressure. Gesturing toward invisible circulations of energy in bodies, objects, and spaces, these works reflect how both ancient practices and contemporary technologies aim to systematize, reform, and transform life.

Continuing this field of projection, new works from Tajima’s Art d’Ameublement series explore the idea of artworks as ambient structures onto which viewers project context and association. The series takes its name from Erik Satie’s Musique d’ameublement—infinitely repetitive compositions conceived as background music. In these paintings, airborne pigment is atomized and applied to the interiors of glossy, transparent, thermoformed shells using an industrial spray gun, forming vivid color gradients that shimmer like atmospheric pressure fields. These misted surfaces act as porous membranes—reflective, immersive, and resonant—inviting the viewer into their depths, coded by transitional hues and personal associations. Each work is subtitled with the name of a remote, often deserted, island suggesting psycho-geographic drift and the pull of unreachable places—spaces at once internal and expansive, where imagination meets estrangement.

PACE LONDON

5 Hanover Square, London W1S 1HQ

www.pacegallery.com

Related Post:

Mika Tajima: Energic - With a biography of the artist

Pace Gallery, New York, January 12 - February 24, 2024

Upcoming exhibition at Pace London:

Sonia Gomes: É preciso não ter medo de criar

October 14 – November 15, 2025

Mary Heilmann @ Hauser & Wirth Zurich - Works on Paper

Mary Heilmann. Works on Paper 

Hauser & Wirth Zurich

26 September – 20 December 2025

Mary Heilmann

Tea Garden, 1984

Watercolor on paper, 76.2 x 55.9 cm / 30 x 22 in

Photo: Thomas Müller

© Mary Heilmann

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and 303 Gallery, New York

Mary Heilmann

Untitled Watercolor Study, ca. 1986-1988

Watercolor and pencil on paper, 12.7 x 17.5 cm / 5 x 6 7/8 in

Photo: Thomas Müller

© Mary Heilmann

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and 303 Gallery, New York

Mary Heilmann returns to Hauser & Wirth’s Zurich gallery on Limmatstrasse with an exhibition of more than 30 drawings made between 1975 and 2005. Expanding on the artist’s exhibition of works on paper, ‘Daydream Nation’, at Hauser & Wirth New York last year, this presentation continues the recent in-depth exploration into Heilmann’s long-standing drawing practice and coincides with the release of a new publication from Hauser & Wirth Publishers, ‘Mary Heilmann. Works on Paper: 1973 – 2019’. 

Raised in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Mary Heilmann (b. 1940) completed a degree in literature, before receiving her M.A. in ceramics and sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. Only after moving to New York in 1968 did she begin to paint and in the early 1970s establish a drawing practice that continues to this day.  

Ranging from watercolor studies to paintings on paper in their own right, ‘Mary Heilmann. Works on Paper’ brings together a selection of rarely and never-before-seen drawings that fluctuate in scale and materiality. The exhibition is a celebration of Heilmann’s talent for translating complex images and ideas into deceptively simple geometric forms and abstract gestural marks.  

Mary Heilmann

Untitled Watercolor Study, ca. 1983-86

Watercolor and graphite on paper, 17.8 x 12.7 cm / 7 x 5 in

Photo: Genevieve Hanson

© Mary Heilmann

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and 303 Gallery, New York

Mary Heilmann

Untitled Watercolor Study, ca. 1987-1989

Watercolor and pencil on paper, 27.9 x 21.6 cm / 11 x 8 1/2 in

Photo: Genevieve Hanson

© Mary Heilmann

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and 303 Gallery, New York

Many of Heilmann’s most well-known and admired series – Fans, Chairs, Serapes, Grids – are represented in the installation as are drawings that have related works in important European museum collections. 'Untitled Watercolor Study' (ca. 1983 – 1986) is one of two drawings in the exhibition that are part of a series of works by Heilmann in tribute to the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian that includes ‘M.’ (1985), a painting in the collection of the Museum Kunstpalast. ‘Islands’, (1988), one of the larger watercolors on view, was made after ‘Laurens’ (1986), an oil on canvas in the collection of the De Pont Museum. 

The works on view not only demonstrate Heilmann’s work serially but also her tendency to revisit and reimagine certain arrangements of form and color. Made 15 years apart, ‘Broken Study’ (2005) is a recompilation of an early red, black and white composition, ‘Untitled Watercolor Study’ (ca. 1989) and Heilmann’s web imagery seen in ‘Blue Net’ (1991).  

As an artist known for working across mediums and for installations that playfully combine disparate works, the exhibition also includes a selection of ceramic ‘Spots’ and sculptural chairs.  

Mary Heilmann: Works on Paper, 1973–2019

Text by Alexis Lowry, Jo Applin, Ilana Savdie

Hauser & Wirth Publishers

English Paperback, 26 x 20 cm; 152pp

16 September (UK, ROW & US)

An in-depth study of Mary Heilmann’s mesmerizing works on paper that explores drawing as a form of daydreaming and memory-making for the influential abstract painter. 

Mary Heilmann’s works on paper are suffused with the same sensibility as her influential abstract paintings, a casual playfulness animating a rigorous attention to form and colour, resulting in joyful, evocative geometries. Their suggestive power reflects Heilmann’s process of what she calls ‘daydreaming’: a conjuring of the sights, sounds, and events of past and future travels, the cyclical nature of memory informing her return to various motifs across nearly five decades of work. Edited and with an introduction by curator Alexis Lowry, ‘Mary Heilmann: Works on Paper, 1973 – 2019’ includes an essay by art historian Jo Applin and a personal reflection by painter Ilana Savdie, all together offering a compelling account of this previously underexamined aspect of Heilmann’s practice. 

Artist Mary Heilman

Considered one of the preeminent contemporary Abstract painters, Mary Heilmann is best known for incorporating a fusion of personal and cultural influences and craft traditions into an artistic practice including paintings, ceramics, and furniture. 

Mary Heilmann is the subject of two major institutional exhibitions, ‘Mary Heilmann. Starry Night’ at Dia Beacon in Beacon NY and ‘Mary Heilmann. Water Way’ at Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY both close in October 2025. On view at the Whitney Museum of American Art until January 2026 is ‘Mary Heilmann: Long Line,’ a site-specific installation that celebrates the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Whitney Museum’s downtown building.  

Her work is included in many prominent international collections, such as those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany.

HAUSER & WIRTH ZURICH

Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zürich

www.hauserwirth.com