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

Wolf Kahn @ Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC - Exhibition Curated by M. Rachael Arauz

Wolf Kahn

Miles McEnery Gallery, New York

30 October - 20 December 2025 

Wolf Kahn

Uphill Yellow Field, 2008 

Oil on canvas, 52 x 60 inches, 132.1 x 152.4 cm

© Estate of Wolf Kahn, courtesy Miles McEnery Gallery 

Miles McEnery Gallery pesents an exhibition of works by Wolf Kahn, curated by M. Rachael Arauz, Ph.D., on view at 520 West 21st Street. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by M. Rachael Arauz.

Wolf Kahn painted the world around him with a reverent devotion. To Kahn, even the most familiar landscapes were a wellspring of limitless inspiration. By returning again and again to idyllic vistas, densely packed woods, and humble barns, he mined the same scenes for meaning, each canvas reflecting the subtle shifts of season or time of day while also satisfying his drive for material exploration. As a master colorist, his palette was not limited to the naturalistic or muted tones of traditional landscape painting; with vibrant oranges, pensive lilacs, and acidic greens, Kahn moved beyond mere representation and captured the complex interplays of himself within these changing surroundings.

M. Rachael Arauz, Ph.D., notes that Kahn’s paintings were “about chromatic experiments, the physicality of mark-making, and the fusion of plein air immediacy with sensory memory as he painted the rural landscape in his urban studio. They are also beautiful paintings of landscapes he knew intimately and properties he cared for. They are not coded critiques of environmental decay, nor are they celebrations of a conquering eye. Kahn’s constructions of landscape, however, direct the viewer to pay attention to what we think we see and to look again at the hidden spaces where disparate elements meet.”

Artist Wolf Kahn

Wolf Kahn (b. 1927 in Stuttgart, Germany) immigrated to the United States by way of England in 1940. In 1945, he graduated from the High School of Music & Art in New York, after which he spent time in the Navy. Under the GI Bill, he studied with renowned teacher and Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, later becoming Hofmann’s studio assistant. In 1950, he enrolled in the University of Chicago. He graduated in 1951 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

After completing his degree in only one year, Wolf Kahn decided to return to being a full-time artist. He and other former Hofmann students established the Hansa Gallery, a cooperative gallery where Kahn had his first solo exhibition. In 1956, he joined the Grace Borgenicht Gallery, where he exhibited regularly until 1995. Wolf Kahn received a Fulbright Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, an Award in Art from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Medal of Arts from the U.S. State Department.

Wolf Kahn married the artist Emily Mason in 1957. Their marriage lasted sixty-two years until Emily’s death in December 2019, just a few months before his passing. The pair lived and worked between New York City and West Brattleboro, Vermont.

Wolf Kahn regularly exhibited at galleries and museums across North America. His work may be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Hirshhorn Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA.

Wolf Kahn died in 2020 in New York, at the age of 92.

MILES McENERY GALLERY

520 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

www.milesmcenery.com

Esteban Vicente @ Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC - A Survey Exhibition of a member of the first generation of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism

Esteban Vicente 

Miles McEnery Gallery, New York

4 September - 25 October 2025

Esteban Vicente 

Water Mill, 1963 

Oil on linen, 36 x 40 inches

© Esteban Vicente Foundation, courtesy Miles McEnery Gallery

Miles McEnery Gallery presents a focused survey of works by Esteban Vicente. This is the artist’s eighth solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Daniel Haxall, PhD.

The only Spanish-born member of the first generation of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, Esteban Vicente was a master colorist. While rooted in the energetic mark-making of Abstract Expressionism, Vicente’s canvases resist bombast or overt drama. He was interested in what he described as the “capacity of color to become light,” and intentionally stripped away “fanciful” brushwork as a means of preserving a pure chromatic landscape, one where the artist’s hand receded. The distinct luminosity of Vicente’s canvases is a testament to the success of his pursuit. 

The works on view span four decades of Vicente’s career, from 1960 to 2000. This survey includes the traditional medium of oil painting alongside collages and mixed media pieces, which were integral components of his practice. In particular, collage brought a heightened physicality to his artistic investigations, grounding the ephemeral nature of color in a tactile, constructed surface. It also served as a means of resolving the interplay of form and hue.

Deeply influenced by his natural surrounds, Vicente’s compositions pulse with a radiant sensibility that is less about depicting nature than distilling its essence: the furtive bloom of Spring, the fleeting moments of light before the world moves into evening, or the brooding quiet before a storm. In his canvases and collages, color is both subject and atmosphere, which he transforms into an emotive force that effortlessly stirs memory and sensation.

Artist Esteban Vicente

Esteban Vicente was born in Turégano, Spain in 1903. His father served in the Civil Guard, a police force in the Castile region and was an amateur painter who took the young Vicente with him on visits to the Prado Museum. In 1918, Vicente entered military school, but left after three months. At fifteen years old, Vicente began at the School of Fine Arts of the Real Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. As a young man living in Madrid, Barcelona, and Paris, he developed friendships with artists and writers. In 1928, he had his first exhibition with Juan Bonafé at the Ateneo de Madrid. 

Esteban Vicente left Europe for New York City in 1936. The United States became the artist’s permanent home. His contemporaries and associates included Willem de Kooning (their 10th Street studios were on a shared floor), Elaine de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and Ad Reinhardt. 

Esteban Vicente spent a good portion of his career teaching. He was among the faculty at Black Mountain College, Black Mountain, NC; the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, New York, NY; and the University of California, Berkeley, CA, among other institutions. 

His work may be found in important collections and museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, among others. 

At the end of his life, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, a museum in his honor, was opened in Segovia by the Spanish government. Vicente attended the museum’s opening in 1998. 

Esteban Vicente died at the age of 97 in 2001 in Bridgehampton, NY, ten days before his 98th birthday. He had a long and prosperous career, living and working with multiple generations of artists and painting well into his 90s.

Miles McEnery Gallery represents the Esteban Vicente Foundation.

MILES McENERY GALLERY

520 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

www.milesmcenery.com

Liza Giles @ Flowers Gallery, London - "In Flux" Exhibition

Liza Giles: In Flux

Flowers Gallery, London

5 June - 5 July 2025

LIZA GILES

Elgin, 2025 

Acrylic on raw canvas, 130 x 155 cm

© Liza Giles / Courtesy Flowers Gallery

LIZA GILES

Ledbury, 2025 

Acrylic on raw canvas, 150 x 180 cm 

© Liza Giles / Courtesy Flowers Gallery

LIZA GILES

Portand, 2025 

Acrylic on raw canvas, 95 x 110 cm

© Liza Giles / Courtesy Flowers Gallery

Flowers Gallery presents In Flux, a solo exhibition of new works by London-based artist Liza Giles. The exhibition title reflects Giles’ process-driven approach, where the act of creation is continuously evolving and in constant transformation. Throughout her practice, Liza Giles explores the tension between fluidity and control, presence and absence, capturing the dynamic, ever-changing nature of her work as it unfolds. This sense of flux permeates each piece, allowing the works to emerge organically, shifting and adapting as they progress.

Known for her large-scale, multi-panel paintings, Liza Giles begins with painted collage maquettes, repositioning elements until a balance emerges. Her method is one of intuitive improvisation, allowing the work to evolve through trial, flux, and chance.

For the first time, Liza Giles introduces six-panel works that are flipped and switched both vertically and horizontally, allowing her to expand the physical and visual complexity of her compositions. As with earlier works, the paintings are built on unprimed canvas, laid flat to maintain control over form and surface. Each piece features a contrast of hard-line edges and painterly raw edges, reflecting a tension between precision and gesture that runs throughout the exhibition.

Liza Giles works with a limited colour palette inspired by the natural landscape, earthy siennas and umbers, grass greens and sky blues, grounded by large areas of her signature ultra-matt black, a pigment that absorbs 99% of light and creates a velvet-like depth. These colours move across the surface with a quiet rhythm, creating a strong sense of push and pull between the positive and negative spaces. 

While rooted in the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, with echoes of Franz Kline, and Helen Frankenthaler, Liza Giles’ work is also shaped by her background in printed textiles and her ongoing dialogue with the urban environment. Living and working in London, she draws from the city’s energy, architecture, and moments of visual interruption, shadows, reflections, street markings, and graffiti.

Liza Giles’ process resists overthinking. Each painting evolves through spontaneous reconfiguration and visual experimentation, often refined through photographing different panel combinations around the studio. In a world increasingly governed by distraction and digital saturation, her practice becomes a form of mindfulness, an effort to switch off from modern noise and return to a flow state. For Liza Giles, painting is a way of disconnecting from the algorithmic feedback loops of contemporary life.

Rather than offering fixed meanings, Giles’ paintings invite viewers to connect with their own responses, to feel rather than interpret. 

ARTIST LIZA GILES (b. 1971)

“My works are driven by an impetus to ‘switch off’ and re-engage with our instinct. I want my art to speak honestly to its observer in a pure and simple way. My work is essentially about how it makes you feel.” – Liza Giles

British artist Liza Giles’ paintings communicate directly through the use of colour, shape, composition and scale. The abstract, elemental forms found in her large-scale paintings are developed from making smaller collages using found scraps and painted cut-outs. Set across multiple raw canvas panels, Liza Giles intuitively reconfigures the paintings to produce new shapes and unexpected compositions.

Working flat to control the movement of the paint, Giles’ works are characterised by an interplay between expressive feathered marks and formal hard-edge lines. Drawing inspiration from the architectural landscapes of London, where she lives and works, the paintings are imbued with a sense of light and space, as well as the immensity and solidity of the city’s skyline.

Liza Giles graduated with a BA Hons in Printed Textiles from Liverpool John Moores University in 1994. She began working as a textile designer before pursuing an 18-year career as an art director, working on interior photo shoots around the world. Now represented by the gallery, Liza Giles first exhibited at Flowers Gallery in the exhibition Hidden UK, Hidden Ireland, curated by Sean Scully in the summer of 2022. 

FLOWERS GALLERY

21 Cork Street, London W1S 3LZ

www.flowersgallery.com

George Morrison Exhibition @ The Met, NYC - "The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York"

The Magical City 

George Morrison’s New York

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

July 17, 2025 – May 31, 2026

GEORGE MORRISON

The Antagonist (detail), 1956 

Oil on canvas, 34 1/8 × 50 1/16 in. 

(86.7 × 127.2 cm)

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; 

Gift of Mrs. Helen Meredith Norcross 57.26 

© Estate of George Morrison

The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York. Born in Chippewa City, a remote Native American village on the shore of Lake Superior in northern Minnesota, George Morrison (Wah-wah-ta-ga-nah-gah-boo and Gwe-ki-ge-nah-gah-boo, Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, 1919–2000) overcame innumerable challenges—poverty, a life-threatening childhood illness, social isolation, racial and cultural barriers—to become a leader of the American Abstract Expressionist movement, which he collaboratively defined both publicly and behind the scenes.

“George Morrison’s life and work has inspired generations of artists,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO. “Anchored by works from his time in New York, this meaningful exhibition celebrates Morrison’s creative achievements and explores how his American Indigenous perspective shaped his unique cultural legacy.”

George Morrison’s influence on the American Abstract Expressionist movement began in September 1943, when he arrived in New York City by train to study at the Art Students League on a fine arts scholarship. Immersing himself in the city’s vibrant cultural scenes, Morrison studied painting and drawing, contributed to numerous exhibitions and publications, and openly challenged the mainstream art establishment of his generation. He also formed important connections with peer artists including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Lois Dodd, and Louise Nevelson, among others. Morrison’s deep appreciation for urban life—specifically industrial landscapes, jazz, and literature—shaped his artistic practice and imagery and permanently impacted the trajectory of the New York School.

Technically trained in figure drawing, portraiture, landscape painting, and graphic arts, George Morrison shifted to abstract approaches in his New York years, specifically automatism, propelling his unique visual language—a fusion of his interest in the subconscious, Ojibwe aesthetic sensibilities, and ties to his homelands. The artist’s involvement with the rise of Abstract Expressionism enhanced the movement’s broader “American” context by imbuing it with a distinctive Indigenous perspective. Between 1943 and 1970, George Morrison lived and worked in New York and regularly exhibited in group shows and solo exhibitions. His work was consistently noted by well-known art critics. A 1953 Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the University of Aix-Marseilles in France—followed by a John Jay Whitney Fellowship the same year—earned him international recognition.

Morrison’s prolific career lasted until 2000, long after his return to Minnesota from New York. It culminated with his famous Horizon Series, a suite of small-scale oil and acrylic paintings that synthesized his technical skill and creative imagination with his love for his home on the Grand Portage Indian Reservation, along the north shore of Lake Superior.

Patricia Marroquin Norby (P’ urhépecha), Associate Curator of Native American Art in The Met’s American Wing, said: “This celebration of George Morrison’s work at The Met is long overdue. We are thrilled to honor the artist’s major contributions to the New York School with this exhibition and publication. Morrison strongly impacted the development of the American Abstract Expressionist movement as well as the work of his professional colleagues—artists who respected him as a leader and a voice for their generation. This exhibition offers an important opportunity to engage deeply with Morrison’s evolving practice, supported by rarely seen archival materials that reveal the depth and complexity of his artistic journey.”

The exhibition asserts Morrison’s significant contributions to the New York School and explores his urban aesthetic inspirations that were rooted in his love of New York, which he called a “Magical City.” Featuring 35 of his paintings and drawings, including a number of generous loans from the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the exhibition culminates in his Horizon Series. It also features rare archival material that places George Morrison at the heart of the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. The exhibition debuts two works recently acquired by The Met: White Painting (1965), the first oil painting by George Morrison to enter the Museum’s collection, in 2021, and Construction in Fantasy (1953), a gouache and ink drawing that the artist created in France on the Côte d’Azur, acquired by The Met in 2023.

The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York is curated by Patricia Marroquin Norby (P’ urhépecha), Associate Curator of Native American Art in The Met’s American Wing.

The exhibition is accompanied by the summer 2025 issue of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, with contributions by historian Dr. Brenda Child (Red Lake Ojibwe), artist Hazel Belvo, and art historian Dr. Laura Joseph (Director of Cultural Affairs, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum).

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 746 North, 

The Erving and Joyce Wolf Gallery, The American Wing

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028

metmuseum.org

Robert Rauschenberg: Sympathy for Abandoned Objects @ Gladstone Gallery, New York - Survey exhibition of Rauschenberg sculptural practice

Robert Rauschenberg 

Sympathy for Abandoned Objects 

Gladstone Gallery, New York 

May 1 - June 14, 2025 

Presented in collaboration with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation on the occasion of the artist’s Centennial, Gladstone presents the first survey of Rauschenberg’s sculptural practice in thirty years, spanning his production from the 1950s through the late 1990s.

Examining Rauschenberg’s sculptures through the lens of scale, the exhibition showcases over 30 sculptures that relate in size to the human body, whether floor-, pedestal-, or wall-based. Drawing from myriad media and disrupting the distinction between abstraction and empirical representation, Rauschenberg's sculptures are rooted in his career-long dedication to artistic experimentation.

Robert Rauschenberg is renowned for blurring the line between artistic genres, painterly gesture, and three-dimensionality. The artist maintained a robust sculptural practice throughout his long and prodigious career. Underscoring the artist’s remarkable use of found and readymade materials, the works on view are assembled from industrial detritus, everyday objects, decorative items, and organic forms. They are the result of improvisatory gestures—gathering, twisting, combining, adhering, tying—that Rauschenberg described as responses to items found in his environment, “treasures” that he would bring back to his studio, seeing in them a potential for new form. Claiming a “sympathy for abandoned objects,” he created a body of strictly sculptural work that is rarely presented as such.

For this exhibition, Gladstone presents key works from various series, including the Scatole Personali (1952–53), Elemental Sculptures (1953/59), Combines (1954-64), Kabal American Zephyrs (1981– 83/1985/1987–88), Gluts (1986–89/1991–94), and the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI; 1984–91) in an installation designed by Selldorf Architects to reveal the continuity of his unique vocabulary within an expansive set of sculptural positions. Given Rauschenberg’s protean imagination, this exhibition also features a number of his sculptures that were not aligned with specific series and exist on their own formal terms. Key loans from institutional and private collections augment the selection of work from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation to further argue for the artist’s keen sculptural sensibility, even if he resisted aligning himself with one medium. This exhibition traces the trajectory of Rauschenberg’s creative output as a whole, with the three-dimensional objects serving as key touchpoints in an expansive and almost uncategorizable oeuvre. The last survey of Rauschenberg’s purely sculptural output prior to this show was in 1995 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

This exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue designed by Chris Svensson with an essay by sculpture expert, Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, entries on each of the individual sculptural series represented, and detailed exhibition histories.

In 2025, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation commemorates Robert Rauschenberg’s 100th birthday with an international celebration of the artist’s expansive creativity, spirit of curiosity, and commitment to change.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

Born on October 22, 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, Robert Rauschenberg worked in what he called the gap between art and life. Over the course of his sixty-year career, Rauschenberg’s art embodied a spirit of experimentation with new materials and techniques. Dubbed an enfant terrible for his assemblages of urban detritus (the Combines of 1954-64), Robert Rauschenberg continued exploring many different mediums and technological advancements in the years following his 1970 decampment to Captiva Island in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Florida coast.

Although he demurred from affiliations with any particular movement, he has been called a forerunner of essentially every postwar artistic development since Abstract Expressionism.

In addition to his own artmaking practice, Robert Rauschenberg became an advocate for artists and the creative community at large. In September 1970, he founded Change, Inc., a non-profit organization that helped artists with emergency expenses. From 1984-91, he personally funded the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI), traveling to ten countries outside of the United States to spark cross-cultural dialogue through art.

Robert Rauschenberg died on May 12, 2008 in his Captiva studio. His artistic legacy and his lifelong commitment to collaboration with artists, performers, writers, artisans, and engineers worldwide was recognized long before his death. His expansive artistic philosophy lives on through his highly innovative and influential work to the present day.

About the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation builds on the legacy of artist Robert Rauschenberg, emphasizing his belief that artists can drive social change. Robert Rauschenberg sought to act in the “gap” between art and life, valuing chance and collaboration across disciplines. As such, the Foundation celebrates new and even untested ways of thinking.

GLADSTONE GALLERY

530 West 21st Street, New York City

www.gladstonegallery.com

Louise Fishman @ Van Doren Waxter, NYC - "always stand ajar" Exhibition

Louise Fishman

always stand ajar

Van Doren Waxter, New York

April 10 – June 27, 2025 

LOUISE FISHMAN 

Loose the Flood, 2009 

Oil on jute, 66 x 39 in (167.6 x 99.1 cm) (LF 48)

© Louise Fishman Foundation, courtesy Van Doren Waxter

Van Doren Waxter presents LOUISE FISHMAN: always stand ajar, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by the venerable American painter organized with the Louise Fishman Foundation. This is the gallery’s first exhibition of the artist since the announcement of representation in 2024. Accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog that includes an essay by poet Nathan Kernan, this exhibition highlights Fishman’s works titled after Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens’ poems and the artist’s long-standing curiosity about the synthesis of paintings and written language.

 

Over six decades, Louise Fishman dedicated her career to the pursuit of original, complex, and sincere imagery. As painter Amy Sillman wrote, Fishman was “a serious-ass painter” who held herself to the highest standard of experiment and self-reflection in her studio, tackling each painting with the fullest intention to connect with the surface, the paint, and the movement of her body. Alongside her rigorous and disciplined studio practice, Louise Fishman nurtured friendships with writers and activists such as Bertha Harris, Jill Johnston, and Esther Newton, who created pioneering works in lesbian and queer studies which informed the multifariousness of Fishman’s identity as an artist. While Louise Fishman resonated with the gestural and geometric language of abstract painting, she persistently challenged the boundaries of Abstract Expressionism and averted the disposition towards the removal of personhood in the movement. She maintained consciousness of her state of being, in her own words, “a working-class Jewish Lesbian” and of the impossibility of separating the paintings from her greater experience as a human. Fishman’s energetic yet precisely organized brushstrokes are an advertent extension of her athleticism, caring hands, and earnest inquiry into the mystery of what makes a painting.

 

The exhibition showcases Fishman’s refined and magisterial works from the final twenty years of her life, which she titled after phrases from poems by American poets Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. She was first introduced to poetry by her paternal aunt, Razel Kapustin, who was also a painter. During her time at Tyler School of Fine Arts, Fishman learned from poet Gerald Stern, with whom she became lifelong friends. She took inspiration from the works of poets, as Grace Hartigan did with Frank O’Hara and Jane Freilicher with John Ashbery. Intuitively and profoundly, Fishman understood the pictorial roots of language and the parallel between text and brushstroke, the legible and illegible.

LOUISE FISHMAN was born in 1939 in Philadelphia. In 1956, she began studying art at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, then at Stella Elkins Tyler School of Art, where she earned her BFA in Painting and Printmaking and a B.S. in Art Education in 1963. She completed her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana and headed directly to New York in 1965, where she lived and worked until her passing in 2021. Her work is represented in many public collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, PA; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; and the Jewish Museum, New York, among many others. 

VAN DOREN WAXTER, NEW YORK

23 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021

vandorenwaxter.com

Iria Leino @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - An undeservedly forgotten and undervalued artistic estate

Iria Leino

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

March 28 – May 4, 2025

Galerie Forsblom has been granted the rare opportunity to explore an undeservedly forgotten and undervalued artistic estate in which history is palpably present. The gallery presents an exhibition featuring IRIA LEINO, a pioneer of the 1960s New York art scene and a figure enigmatic to contemporary audiences.

Iria Leino (1932-2022) was a Helsinki-born artist and fifties supermodel who made her mark as a pioneer of abstract art. At the height of her international modelling career, she left the fashion world to settle in New York’s SoHo, where she forged an exceptional career as an abstract expressionist. Her artistic journey reflected the cultural and artistic upheavals of New York in the 1960s.

Iria Leino combines the influences of Color Field painting with a meditative style of brushwork. After surviving a serious accident in 1968, she turned to Buddhism, which added a spiritual dimension to her artistic practice. Exemplifying this spiritualism is The Elephant Series, in which elephants symbolize wisdom and enlightenment. Leino’s exhibitions were well received by contemporary critics, who praised her innovative, norm-defying style of abstract expressionism.

Iria Leino’s meditative approach to painting is epitomized by The Dreamings Series (1988-1989), in which spiritual dimensions are invoked by colorful arches and dotted details. Leino was a reclusive figure whose one-of-a-kind serial oeuvre owes its existence to her dedication to solitude and spiritual guidance. Leino fused elements of Finnish nature and design with the traditions of American abstract expressionism to create an enduring legacy that is unique in art history.

Iria Leino surrendered herself to a life of solitude, meditation, and the guidance of a spiritual guru, enabling her to perfect her idiom through steadfast dedication to painting serially. By interweaving cross-cultural influences – Finnish nature and design with American traditions of abstraction – she created an unprecedented legacy shared by Finland and the United States.

Related Post on Wanafoto:

Iria Leino: 1968–1970, Harper's, New York, September 4 – October 19, 2024

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

Max Wade @ Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole - "Dodge and Burn" Exhibition

Max Wade: Dodge and Burn 

Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole 

September 20 - November 3, 2024 

MAX WADE 

Steeplechase, 2020-2024 

Oil on linen, 51 1/4 x 39 3/8 inches

© Max Wade, courtesy Maya Frodeman Gallery

MAX WADE

Foothills, 2024 

Oil on linen, 74 3/4 x 63 inches

© Max Wade, courtesy Maya Frodeman Gallery

MAX WADE

Mirror, 2022 

Oil on linen, 35 3/8 x 27 1/2 inches

© Max Wade, courtesy Maya Frodeman Gallery

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY presents, Dodge and Burn, a solo exhibition of work by British artist MAX WADE.

Dodge and Burn, Max Wade’s first solo exhibition with Maya Frodeman Gallery and in the US, presents twelve oil paintings which further expand on his autobiographical painting practice and demonstrate his growing interest in technique and materiality. Rooted in representation, Max Wade’s paintings are imagined landscapes in flux, where forms emerge and dissolve within fields of color and texture, resisting objective interpretation. Titled after the analog photography technique of “dodging and burning,” which is used during the darkroom process to physically manipulate the exposure of subjects separate from their environment in photographic prints, Dodge and Burn nods to Max Wade’s painting process. In his practice in which planes interchange and motifs are obscured, Max Wade has his own physical process of manipulation and interruption as he applies and removes paint to create depth, texture, and a sense of ambiguity that invites the viewer into an ever-evolving dialogue with the work.

Max Wade consciously strives for ambiguity in his works. He cultivates paintings that ask questions of the viewers, striking up a conversation, rather than attempting to give answers. Despite this ambiguity, his works remain firmly grounded in the real world. Max Wade pulls his subjects from his everyday life and travels, as he is drawn especially to overlooked spaces, with a sustained focus on the liminal areas in-between objects as he often builds forms from negative space rather than the subjects themselves. His process begins with his sketchbook drawings, which are both a conscious exercise and a tool for his practice. These drawings are airy networks of relations, shapes cast by suspended encounters, rather than detailed documentation of Max Wade’s day-to-day life. From these representational drawings, Max Wade gathers new forms and spatial relations to work from. After further exploring and synthesizing these forms through further drawing and repetition, Max Wade takes his harvest to large-scale canvases, first drawing with charcoal and then rapidly applying the oil in washes of pigment. As he pushes, pulls, scrapes and jabs his medium, most often layering wet paint on wet paint, his work blooms as he adds elements from other drawings to create a patchwork of distilled experience. Max Wade’s practice of addition and subtraction is intuitive as he works between many paintings at once. These pieces unfold over months and even years, as with Steeplechase (2020-2024).

Max Wade’s style is marked by sweeping, gestural brushstrokes indicative of his process-driven approach and his deep engagement with the act of painting itself. Often taking on a large scale, Max Wade invokes the physical style of Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Grace Hartigan, as well as contemporaries like Amy Sillman. Max Wade’s use of a bright, saturated palette contributes to his works’ undeniable joyous, emphatic quality. Their compositions are defined by the lyrical tension between these colors, textures and suggested subjects. It is a tension that isn’t so much resolved as channeled, by means of repetition, adaptation and restatement, into a rewarding vitality. Max Wade is also concerned with the physicality of the painting process, especially at a large scale. The vestigial movement, rhythm, and energy are ever-present and lend to dynamic, expressive paintings which pulsate with life, inviting viewers into a space where lived experience and abstraction converge. Each work’s rhythm and mood are largely set by music, another tool central to Max Wade’s practice. A combination of styles and genres, from frantic jazz to repetitive minimalist compositions, this music paces and invigorates the physicality of Max Wade’s studio practice.

MAX WADE was born in 1985 in London. Max Wade studied Fine Art Painting at Brighton University. Max Wade’s recent solo exhibitions include ‘Dodge and Burn’, Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole, USA; ‘Go Bang’, Sid Motion Gallery, London, UK 'Whisper Down the Lane', Sid Motion Gallery, London, 2021; ‘Sowing the Soil with Salt’, Sid Motion Gallery, London, 2020; ‘Platform: London’, hosted by David Zwirner (online), 2020; ‘Wind for the Sails’, Messums Wiltshire, Salisbury, 2020; ‘Between the Dog and the Wolf’, Sid Motion Gallery, London, 2019; ‘For Tina’, curated by Roxie Warder hosted at Cob Gallery, London, 2019. Recent group exhibitions have included ‘Abstract Colour’, Marlborough Gallery, 2023. ’Stand with Ukraine', Hales London, 2022. His residencies include Artist’s Workshop & Exchange, Muscat, Oman in 2013. Max Wade lives and works in London.

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY

66 South Glenwood Street Jackson Hole, Wyoming 83001

www.mayafrodemangallery.com

Iria Leino @ Harper's, New York - First exhibition from the estate of New York-based Finnish artist Iria Leino (1932–2022)

Iria Leino: 1968–1970

Harper's, New York

September 4 – October 19, 2024

Harper’s presents Iria Leino: 1968–1970, the first solo exhibition from the estate of New York-based Finnish artist IRIA LEINO (1932–2022). The exhibition features a selection of nine historic paintings at Harper’s Chelsea 512, marking the posthumous discovery of a virtually unknown artist who created a prolific body of work in solitude for over 40 years. 

In her lifetime, Iria Leino rarely engaged with the gallery system. The artist instead opted for an existence devoted to her studio practice and her faith in Buddhism, seeing her work as a means of spiritual enlightenment rather than a commercial endeavor. This presentation highlights the first two series that sparked her lifelong exploration of acrylic paint’s viscosity across a range of styles: the Color Field series and the Buddhist Rain series. Several of Leino’s Buddhist Rain pieces are included in the gallery’s booth at The Armory Show from September 5–8, 2024. These presentations offer the public a chance to experience Leino’s paintings for the very first time, half a century after they were produced.

Iria Leino was born in Finland in 1932 and completed her degree at Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1955. Immersed in both painting and fashion during her student years, she moved to Paris after graduation to continue her training at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts. Leino became a fashion correspondent to supplement her studies in this pivotal time, reporting on the latest trends emerging from the city’s avant-garde cultural scene. With her striking high cheekbones and piercing blue-green eyes, she caught the attention of the late Madame Grès—the queen of haute couture—and Karl Lagerfeld, who launched her career as a model. Leino then set aside her brush to grace the runways of Europe as the supermodel IRIA, walking for major fashion houses such as Christian Dior and Pierre Cardin, and popularizing a hairstyle known as nouvelle vague. Despite being embraced by the world of luxury, she suffered immensely throughout this period, struggling with an eating disorder and enduring various mental health challenges driven by the industry’s unsustainable beauty standards. At the peak of her success in 1964, she suddenly abandoned her modeling career and settled in a gritty SoHo loft among New York City’s bohemian community, more than 3,500 miles from the capital of couture. This dramatic transition marked the beginning of Leino’s ascetic life as a dedicated abstract painter.

Soon after relocating to New York, Iria Leino began to cultivate her distinctive language of abstraction at The Art Students League under the guidance of Larry Poons. She juxtaposed brilliant primary colors in dynamic arrangements within her deeply gestural practice, responding to the charged compositions produced by the first generation of Abstract Expressionists. Leino’s improvisational approach to color and form was driven by her desire to fully express herself through painting and nothing else—a commitment to the medium that echoed the philosophical provocations of the New York School. While the work she created at The Art Students League demonstrated that she was already a natural talent, it was a health crisis that would catalyze her unique vision.

In 1968, Iria Leino suffered a severe head injury that left her in a coma for weeks. This event profoundly impacted her art practice, provoking her to reassess her aesthetic direction. After her recovery, Leino embraced a monastic Buddhist discipline, embedding the insights she learned from her faith into her formal studio experiments. Favoring the contemplative nature of pure color and its sensuous immediacy over the spontaneous intensity of gestural abstraction, Leino dedicated several years to developing dozens of immersive color field and lyrically abstract paintings. Iria Leino: 1968–1970 encompasses some of the most compelling examples from this moment of creative innovation.

Within both the Color Field and the Buddhist Rain series, Leino’s sweeping expanses of warm and cool acrylic pigments subtly evoke the landscape, cosmos, and Earth’s fauna in their abstract forms. The artist’s methodical process involved staining unprimed canvases with ethereal hues by spraying, pouring, and splattering the paint directly onto the surface—all without the use of a brush. In the Buddhist Rain series, these prismatic fields of color were then layered with delicate pastel markings, executed with meticulous precision. Across these luminous works, hundreds of thin, diagonal strokes extend to infinity as they cascade down radiant washes of color. In Kevainen Lampi (Spring Pond), glowing orange tones encircle the edge of the frame, drawing all energy toward the center as the shades bleed into swaths of sage and yellow, while bands of emerald and ivory dashes trickle across the composition. In the painting Explosive Thunder, she takes a more all-over approach, with amber and saffron pastel striations gently fading into fields of green.

For the Color Field series, the artist incorporated multifaceted styles, openly experimenting with different media and techniques. Leino began to use aerosol and other staining methods in her compositions to reveal the interplay between broad areas of acrylic paint on her surfaces. At times, she sprayed pigments with varying intensities over pastel or colored pencil tracings, while on other occasions, she rubbed layering blotches into the cotton fibers to conjure organic forms. The pulsing gradients of orange and golden hues softly coat vascular lines in Balloons #4, while a tear-shaped black stain seems to penetrate a crimson sphere in Eyes Apple. In both paintings, Leino appears to reference the body at the cellular level, while also alluding to the works of early modernist artists like Wassily Kandinsky, who believed that abstract manifestations of the physical world could capture the spiritual dimensions of our inner selves.

Iria Leino’s vigorous manipulation of acrylic pigment was particularly significant in this formative period of the 20th century: the water-based medium was relatively new and not favored by artists at the time. The paint’s viscous nature and ability to dehydrate quickly without the oily blemishes associated with dried linseed paint offered exponential opportunities for formal exploration. Like her peers in the second generation of the New York School—Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and her former teacher, Larry Poons—Leino was a pioneer in the turn towards lyrical abstraction, inviting acrylic paint to inform the terms of this nascent artistic vocabulary. 

Although Iria Leino was exceptionally ambitious, foregrounding a rigorous painterly practice comparable to her contemporaries, the artist repeatedly rejected the idea of transforming her creations into a professional endeavor. She ultimately believed that her creative pursuits served a higher metaphysical purpose, one that could not be fulfilled by the materialistic gains of fame and commercial recognition. Iria Leino would continue to experiment with color and repetitive mark-making within her oeuvre until her death in 2022. Through her process-based works, which she approached with the discipline required by meditation itself, the artist found spiritual and emotional liberation beyond the confines of the official art world. For, in her mind, the competitive industry of visual culture was all too similar to the fashion milieu she left behind. During her lifetime, Leino’s body of work remained hidden from the public eye, staged like frozen opera in the time capsule of her loft. Despite her withdrawal from the limelight, the artist sustained a momentous yet silent dialogue with her generation. Iria Leino: 1968–1970 pays homage to this undiscovered painter, shedding light on her incisive contributions to the history of postwar abstraction.

HARPER'S CHELSEA 512

512 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

www.harpersgallery.com

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

Arthur Dove: Yes, I Could Paint a Cyclone 

Schoelkopf Gallery, New York 

September 29 – December 1, 2023 

Arthur Dove, 1880–1946

Tanks and Snowbank, 1933

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SCHOELKOPF GALLERY

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

schoelkopfgallery.com

Heroines of the Abstract Expressionist Era @ Southampton Arts Center - SAC

Heroines of the Abstract Expressionist Era 

Southampton Arts Center 

Opening October 6, 2023 

Southampton Arts Center (SAC)  presents Women of the Abstract Expressionist Era, curated Christina Strassfield. The Abstract Expressionist movement is best known for its male superstars, but women were also pioneers of the genre. This exhibition showcases the work of artists such as Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Perle Fine, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Alice Baber, Lynne Drexler, and others—women whose artwork finds long overdue acclaim and new appreciation with a contemporary audience. We are also celebrating women whose work, while not abstract, is associated with the Abstract Expressionist era and are individuals who were part of the New York art scene, such as Mercedes Matter, Hedda Sterne, Jane Freilicher, and Jane Wilson. These works by First and Second-generation Ab Ex Women artists are exclusively from the collection of Rick Friedman and Cindy Lou Wakefield.

This exhibition features paintings, sculptures, and works on paper that are visually mesmerizing and technically complex. It offers the widest breadth of any private assemblage of this genre, featuring over 100 works by 32 women artists. The artwork demonstrates how these artists pushed themselves in new directions as leaders and total participants in the Abstract Expressionist movement. The artists and their work were undervalued and overlooked for many years but have recently been revisited and re-evaluated, giving these artists their due.

Abstract Expressionism was the first specifically American style to achieve international influence, and, as a result, 1940s New York replaced Paris as the center of the art world. The style was characterized by experimental, gestural, and nonrepresentational painting, and for some artists associated with the movement, abstract art and blurring the lines between representational and abstraction expressed ideas concerning nature, the spiritual, and the mind. For others, it was a way to explore formal and technical concerns. This exhibition differs from other exhibitions by focusing on the 1950 New York School and the migration of many of these artists to the Hamptons.

From 1947 to 1951, several Abstract Expressionists developed their signature painting styles, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, and Mark Rothko. During the following years, these artists, informally called the First Generation of the New York School, received growing recognition nationally and globally. Several groundbreaking women artists from this same period are featured in this exhibition, including Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Hedda Sterne, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and Joan Mitchell.

For more than sixty years, these women's contributions to the movement were forgotten, while works by men such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning have been canonized in the history of American art. It has taken the dedication of scholars and curators—and the commitment of a handful of visionary collectors like Rick Friedman and Cindy Lou Wakefield—to restore these women artists to their rightful place in the history of American art.

The exhibition includes works by the following artists: Mary Abbott, Alice Baber, Nell Blaine, Janice Biala, Dusti Bonge, Louise Bourgeois, Elaine de Kooning, Dorothy Dehner, Lynne Drexler, Amaranth Ehrenhalt, Perle Fine, Audrey Flack, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan, Carol Hunt, Buffie Johnson, Lee Krasner, Fay Lansner, Emily Mason, Mercedes Matter, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, Irene Rice Pereira, Hilla Rebay, Ethel Schwacher, Hedda Sterne, Yvonne Thomas, Michal Corinne West, Jane Wilson.

About the Collectors Cindy Lou and Rick Friedman

For the last 17 years, Cindy Lou and Rick Friedman have enjoyed the never-ending journey of researching and assembling a collection of “talented but underappreciated “women artists who helped pioneer the 1950s era AbEx movement, the so-called New York School, and their subsequent migration to the East End. The art world has embraced their contributions recently, resulting in several museum shows, books, and insatiable demand for their works. This is perhaps the most comprehensive survey produced in this genre, featuring 30 acclaimed women artists of that NYC-based movement, with close to 100 pieces. 

Rick Friedman notes, “Although our collection was displayed prior at the Fenimore Art Museum and the Nassau County Museum of Art, SAC is the most appropriate venue for this newly expanded survey. Over the past half-century, many of the artists in this show, pioneers of the AbEx movement, proudly exhibited their work in this historic SAC building during their illustrious careers. So this is sort of a ‘homecoming’ show for them. This Fall 2023 show provides guests with a ‘rediscovery’ of the breakthrough and innovative mid-century art movement, considered by many as America’s most significant art movement of the 20th century. It also provides a new generation of viewers an opportunity to discover these influential artists, many of whom lived and worked locally. We have enthusiastically worked closely with Christina Strassfield over the years. We value her deep understanding, respect, and appreciation for these artists’ oeuvre and their significant contributions to art in America. Her long experience helped guide this curation and display. We are very enthusiastic to team up again with SAC, having produced the Hamptons Fine Art Fair on their grounds two years ago. We are pleased to offer select pieces available for public acquisition, some of which benefit SAC.”

SOUTHAMPTON ARTS CENTER

25 Jobs Lane, Southampton, New York 11968

southamptonartscenter.org

Richard Pousette-Dart @ Pace Gallery, NYC - 1950s: Spirit and Substance

Richard Pousette-Dart

1950s: Spirit and Substance

Pace Gallery, New York

November 11 – December 17, 2022

Portrait of Richard Pousette-Dart, 

Eagle Valley Road, c. 1952-53 

© The Richard Pousette-Dart Foundation

The presentation spotlights Richard Pousette-Dart’s paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and journals from the 1950s, a pivotal decade of the artist’s career during which he moved from New York City to Rockland County, located in the Lower Hudson River Valley of New York state. The works in Pace’s exhibition—which is curated by Joanna Pousette-Dart, the artist’s daughter— have never been shown together. Holistically, the presentation offers an unprecedented, in-depth look at a protean period in which Richard Pousette-Dart’s painterly investigations were directed toward the extremes of color, light, and physical density, further amplified by his multidisciplinary practice that included sculpture and photography. This exhibition presents seemingly dissimilar but deeply interconnected bodies of work, unified by their underlying structures and additive processes, to immerse viewers in the artist’s expansive vision.

The rich, varied works in Pace’s presentation, which diverge and converge in surprising ways, reflect the artist’s interest in cross-pollination among various mediums. These pieces also speak to the natural world’s profound influence on his artistic sensibility. Richard Pousette-Dart’s 1951 move to New York’s Rockland County, which freed him from the confines of his smaller studio in the city, had a liberating effect on his art. Working in a new, spacious environment, the artist followed his ideas to unexpected conclusions, allowing his thought processes to interact across canvas, sculpture, and paper.

While he is widely known as a first-generation Abstract Expressionist painter, Richard Pousette-Dart’s distinctive and richly inventive formal experimentations should be understood beyond that movement. Often exploring the spiritual and transcendental possibilities of art making through a personal philosophy and iconography of organic and biomorphic forms, Richard Pousette-Dart built on his innovations of the 1930s and 1940s to draw inspiration from the beauty, complexity, and wholeness of nature, continuing to expand his vision over the following four decades of his practice.

“Art for me is the heavens forever opening up, like asymmetrical, unpredictable, spontaneous Kaleidoscopes,” Richard Pousette-Dart said in his 1951 talk at the SMFA in Boston, which focuses on his artistic philosophy and working process. “It is magic, it is joy, it is gardens of surprise and miracle. It is energy, impulse. It is question and answer. It is transcendental reason. It is total in its spirit.”

The exhibition at Pace, which has represented the artist’s estate since 2013, brings together some of the most iconic paintings created by Richard Pousette-Dart during the 1950s, including loans from private collections as well as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. These pieces are shown alongside his work in other mediums, providing a deep and nuanced look at the breadth of his practice.

The exhibition showcases a selection of the artist’s oneiric and ethereal White paintings—first shown at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York and later featured in the exhibition Pousette-Dart: Predominantly White Paintings at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.—in which graphite lines are etched into layers of white, coalescing in intricate abstractions. These are shown in juxtaposition with Richard Pousette-Dart’s Gothic and Byzantine paintings, including the 1958 work Blood Wedding, to shed light on the artist’s investigations of intense color saturation and physicality. The wire and metal sculptures in the presentation, such as The Woman with a Horn (Wire Sculpture #4) (1951), are further manifestations of this cross-media conversation.

Archival materials in the exhibition call attention to the way Richard Pousette-Dart’s interest in photography informed his ideas about light and materiality. In addition to the paintings, wire sculptures, drawings, photographs, and notebooks on view in Pace’s exhibition, a group of pocket-sized brass sculptures contextualizes the featured works, underscoring the art historical richness of Richard Pousette-Dart’s bold output and bringing into focus his process of synthesizing varied structures, forms, and materials. Presented in their own vitrine, the artist’s hand-cut, geometric brass sculptures, which he introduced into his practice in the late 1930s, directly relate to the paintings in the exhibition. The semi-abstract forms from Richard Pousette-Dart’s brass works often figure in his works on canvas and paper, cultivating a sense of continuity across his practice.

Beyond Pace’s exhibition, Pousette-Dart’s artworks can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, and Whitney Museum in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice; and other international institutions.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Pace Publishing produced a new catalogue featuring an interview between Joanna Pousette-Dart and curator Lowery Stokes Sims—who organized the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York’s 1997 Pousette-Dart exhibition—as well as the text of a talk delivered by the artist at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1951, published in its entirety for the first time.

RICHARD POUSETTE-DART (b. 1916, St. Paul, Minnesota; d. 1992, New York) is grouped with the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters, although he took his own path throughout his long career, achieving a cohesive body of work with expressive form, color, and gesture. He participated in the pivotal Subjects of the Artists and Studio 35 groups, which were key to defining the New York School. Richard Pousette-Dart was the first of these artists to create a muralsized easel work (Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental, 1941–42, now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), prior to other Abstract Expressionists’ adoption of large formats. He drew inspiration from varied sources including Native American and Oceanic art, as well as Asian philosophy and American Transcendentalism. Never embracing action painting and instead pursuing his own aesthetic, Richard Pousette-Dart aspired to universal significance in his art, expressed through nonobjective means

PACE

510 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.pacegallery.com

Jane Ehrlich, Margaret Fitzgerald, A’Driane Nieves @ Susan Eley Fine Art, NYC - Three Abstract Artists

Three Abstract Artists 

Jane Ehrlich, Margaret Fitzgerald, A’Driane Nieves 

Susan Eley Fine Art, New York 

Through April 29, 2021 

Susan Eley Fine Art presents Three Abstract Artists, a group exhibition featuring abstract paintings by Jane Ehrlich, Margaret Fitzgerald and A’Driane Nieves. The show features over two dozen acrylic, oil and mixed media paintings on canvas in a range of sizes.

Margaret Fitzgerald first worked with the gallery in 2016 and exhibited her painting Tortuga in TWOXFIVE. A’Driane Nieves participated in the gallery's 2020 online exclusive show, AMERICANA Part II, which highlighted the work of three Black artists. This is Jane Ehrlich’s first time showing with Susan Eley Fine Art. 

The Abstract Expressionist movement arose in the US in the 1940s in response to the global chaos of wartime and in reaction to the art historical precedents of representation and realism. While the male artists who pioneered abstraction became household names—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, to name a few—the female abstract artists, many painting in parallel— Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler and others—didn’t receive the attention and critical acclaim of their male counterparts during their lifetimes. In the past few years, museums and galleries have forged a corrective course to alter the current perception of AbEx artists and shine a long overdue light onto the work of these legendary women. 

How do we approach, study and enjoy abstraction? Are we expected to find meaning or symbolism in the shapes, patterns and colors? Are we meant to feel and react viscerally? These are questions we’ve been posing since Pollack’s first drip paintings.

Three Abstract Artists consists of Margaret Fitzgerald’s Crayola-colored creations, rendered with bold markings and graffiti-like expression; A’Driane Nieve’s canvases, built up with linear, yarn-like strokes in earth tones against white backgrounds; and the contrasting calm, near monochromatic paintings of Jane Ehrlich, softly stacked and woven with layers of translucent tones of orange, pale yellow and green.

Each of the artists have put themselves into their paintings. They have worked through the distress and pain, as well as small victories and joy that the last year has brought. The paintings reflect the unseen and the unpaintable, each functioning as its own self-portrait. 

A'DRIANE NIEVES

A’Driane Nieves paints to work through past traumas and the suffering that results from reliving distressing events. By using the act of painting as way to process constructively, her emotional journey throughout the past year is cemented in acrylics, graphite, house paints and soft pastels on canvas. In No.2 (2021), solid groups of reds, oranges and yellows rest in the background with frenzied, decisive strokes atop in grey, red and teal. A’Driane Nieves began to layer heavy body acrylic paint in her latest body of work as an ode to the physicality of painting, both the painting as an object and the act of putting brush to canvas. The layers of paint reflect an excavation of sorts, her smaller work wilder and more chaotic than her larger canvases. Thick, white textured shapes in No.5 (2021) contrast with thinner layers of house paint. For A’Driane Nieves, working small was/is about survival. Nieves’ action paintings are full of angst, energy, anxiousness, earnestness and discovery. A’Driane Nieves lives and works in the Greater Philadelphia area.

MARGARET FITZGERALD

Margaret Fitzgerald’s newest paintings are another example of an artist not unaffected by the pandemic and self-isolation. Her canvases ask the question, “What is it to be human?” in a world threatened by environmental destruction and where technology is ever-omnipresent. During the painting process, Margaret Fitzgerald lays her canvases on the ground and walks on them while she paints. She alternates between floor and wall, all while brushing, scraping, rolling and dragging her oils. Deep red oil stick meanders around the drop cloth in Peering Through (2020). Repetitive blue squares sit atop a thick, white background that also supports forest green gestures. Through this organic practice, Margaret Fitzgerald has effectively become a part of the painting. By viewing the paintings as an extension of herself, it becomes impossible to detach art from artist. Margaret Fitzgerald will forever be enmeshed in the rich, expressive colors and character of her canvases. The artist, born in the UK, lives and works in Albuquerque, NM.

JANE EHRLICH

In contrast to the work of Nieves and Fitzgerald, Jane Ehrlich’s paintings are quieter and more subdued. Starting with a single ground color on canvas, Jane Ehrlich begins the slow process of building up thin layers of white in straight, zigzag and curvilinear lines. Sometimes the paint is applied thickly and other times it is more fluid, resulting in past decisions remaining visible underneath more recent strokes. This method of applying paint informs the viewer of its history and process. The white acrylic brushstrokes in ORwW (2020) weave through each other on top of a bright orange background. They snake across the canvas, following paths of planned randomness. Jane Ehrlich notes that “light is elemental to [her] work. As the series continues, the gestures become more simplified, more minimal, the way I like to live.” When reflecting on her overall approach, Janes Ehrlich says “I search for a space within my paintings that I can coexist with. I want to be in my space and let the painting live in its own space. I don’t want to be overwhelmed. I want to look at the painting and let it evolve, and slowly discover its nuances.” Jane Ehrlich lives and works in Hudson, NY.

SUSAN ELEY FINE ART

46 W 90th Street, New York, NY 10024

susaneleyfineart.com

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Masterwork by Clyfford Still @ Phillips' Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art

Monumental Rare Masterwork by Clyfford Still to Star in Phillips’ Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art

Phillips, New York

Auction: December 7, 2020

CLYFFORD STILL

PH-407, 1964

Estimate: In the Region of $17 million

Photo Courtesy of Phillips

Phillips announces a rare, Maryland work by Clyfford Still as a major highlight of the fall season. Known as one of the fathers of Abstract Expressionism, Still was regarded as an influencer to some of the most significant artists of the 20th century, including Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. This magnificent, large scale work was painted in 1964 after Still left the New York art scene and relocated to the Maryland countryside, specifically keeping his work out of public view. A testament to his concern for the paintings he created during this time, he left a will with strict instructions to keep them together in a Museum dedicated to his works. As a result, PH-407 is now one of only a few dozen paintings that are estimated to remain in private hands. It is a superb example from the artist’s body of work from the Maryland years of production, which are being celebrated for the first time in the current exhibition at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. Bearing impeccable provenance and exhibition history, this monumental masterpiece is estimated in the region of $17 million and will be included in Phillips’ Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art on 7 December at 7pm, marking the first time that it is being sold publicly.

Miety Heiden, Deputy Chairwoman and Head of Private Sales, said, “Clyfford Still is a titan of 20th century Abstract Expressionism, but his work seldom appears on the market. Only 30 to 40 are estimated to remain in private hands, with the vast majority held in The Clyfford Still Museum and other institutional collections around the globe. His Maryland works, such as PH-407, are especially rare as he only allowed one gallery show in the last two decades of his career, refusing to part with these works and only selling on the fewest of occasions. We are honored to include such a magnificent work in our December sale, especially during a larger art historical reconsideration of his mature period.”

Despite his widespread influence, Clyfford Still’s process was particularly unique. Instead of filling canvases with expressive yet momentary gestures, as many of his peers did, the artist would gradually build up the surface of his works layer by layer, forming complex expanses of paint and emotion. While the red field that composes much of PH-407 may appear monochromatic at first glance, upon further inspection the tonal nuances and brushstrokes begin to reveal themselves. Featuring a chromatic intensity and emotive depth characteristic of Clyfford Still’s finest works, the incendiary crimson expanse and jagged black and blue shapes of PH-407 pulsate with energy. What truly defines Clyfford Still’s late work, however, is the sense of simmering movement that permeates throughout. Towards the bottom of the painting, a black form evoking a flame flickers, emitting a vibrant cobalt ember and scarlet smoke. This dynamism—lent to the work not by one form but by the relationship between multiple forms—is characteristic of Still’s mature canvases, which coalesce kinetic energy with a reductive approach. Continuously shifting in color and texture, PH-407 is emblematic of Clyfford Still’s extraordinary approach, which forever altered the course of art history. The concept for the work was originally conceived five years earlier in 1959 in a pastel study that is now part of the Clyfford Still Museum’s permanent collection. He did not return to the subject until 1964, during his famed Maryland years.

Clyfford Still refused to conform to the rules of the commercial art world and the desires of critics. And so, in 1961, he relocated from New York to an overgrown ranch in rural Maryland, a lifestyle closely resembling his childhood in Alberta, Canada. Though he had already disconnected himself from the New York art world, in order to keep developing his craft and to continue growing as an artist as he aged, Still felt he had to establish empty physical space around him to fill with his work. He converted a barn on the homestead into a studio and felt a renewed and refreshed drive to paint.

Clyfford Still went on to spend the last two decades of his life in Maryland, unequivocally the most fertile period in the artist’s career. Between 1961 and 1980, he executed approximately 380 paintings and 1,100 works on paper, more than he had created in the forty years prior. Most of these works remained in his collection and are now held in the Clyfford Still Museum, as he strived to keep them all. In 1969, however, he sold about 35 works on canvas, including PH-407, to Marlborough-Gerson Gallery—the only time his works entered the commercial art world following his disassociation from his gallerists in 1951. Several of those Marlborough works have since entered institutional collections: one has found its way back to the Clyfford Still Museum, and others are now housed by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. 

In 1979, the Metropolitan Museum of Art honored Clyfford Still with the greatest highlight of his career, a monumental retrospective, for which he selected 79 paintings to include from his own collection. The Met retrospective’s emphasis on Clyfford Still’s time in Maryland illuminated how the artist regarded his late period as the culmination of his oeuvre: almost half of the paintings exhibited were from the last two decades of his career.

PH-407 is only the third work from Clyfford Still’s Maryland period to ever appear at auction.

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