Showing posts with label artist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label artist. Show all posts

12/09/25

The Bridges of Michael Kenna @ Robert Mann Gallery, New York

The Bridges of Michael Kenna
Robert Mann Gallery, New York
September 4 - October 18, 2025

Bridges span rivers, connect cities, and carry us over what once seemed impassable. Where once there was only a divide — a river too wide, a ravine too deep — now there is a line drawn through space. We drive over bridges, walk across them, sometimes without even thinking. Yet Michael Kenna impressively photographs these bridges stretching across the globe in a unique light of the feat of human construction through time.

Kenna’s first show with Robert Mann Gallery opened in 1997 around the time the movie, The Bridges of Madison County was released; a moving love story about a photographer on an assignment to shoot historic bridges. Michael Kenna shares this fascination in capturing these structures, 
“Bridge structures are usually geometric and stationary with straight lines, verticals, horizontals and other angular constructs. The universe is constantly moving, flowing organic, uncontrollable and unpredictable. The abstract relationship between the two, almost like yin and yang, can be visually stunning and continues to fascinate and attract me.”--Michael Kenna
The bridges in this exhibition cross over bodies of water, from Sydney Harbour Bridge, Study 1, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, to Brooklyn Bridge, Study 1, New York City, USA carrying multiple lanes of traffic, trains, and possibilities. While other small bridges such as Canal Bridge, Banbury, Oxfordshire, England and Ponte dei Sospiri, Venice, Italy stretch a short distance suitable only for individuals to journey across. Each bridge featured in the exhibition has its own historical significance and the possibility of one day being replaced. Michael Kenna beautifully captures the bridge’s story, often at dawn or dusk, along with often solidifying its place in the world. 

What was once the end of the road becomes a place of crossing. What was once isolation becomes relationship. The landscape is no longer defined by separation, but by the possibility of reaching across. In The Bridges of Michael Kenna, the artist’s careful treatment of each composition is apparent from frame to frame, in which every detail is given its due consideration to express this relationship between the bridge and the land. The images in the exhibition represent over 50 years of Kenna’s exploration of this subject matter.

With dozens of monographs and hundreds of solo exhibitions held around the world, Michael Kenna is one of the most widely exhibited and beloved photographers working today. His work has been shown at the Tacoma Art Museum, the Palazzo Magnani Museum in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and Bibliothèque Nationale de France, to name a few. Kenna's photographs are included in many distinguished public collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Shanghai Art Museum; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; the Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague; Museum of Art and Photography, Bangalore, India; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The Bridges of Michael Kenna is on view in conjunction with the artist’s exhibition, Japan: A Love Story, at the International Center of Photography through September 28, 2025. 

ROBERT MANN GALLERY 
508 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

11/09/25

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

Warhol/Cutrone
Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich 
Through September 30, 2025

Warhol/Cutrone, an exhibition at Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich, curated by James Hedges, juxtaposes Andy Warhol and Ronnie Cutrone, including paintings, drawings, and unique polaroids.
“Ronnie Cutrone was a painter and illustrator known for his Post-Pop imagery featuring cartoon characters like Woody the Woodpecker, Bart Simpson, and Bugs Bunny. Cutrone’s life and career make us remember New York at its creative apex. Reminiscing of another era, Cutrone said, “New York was elegant and sleazy. Now it’s a shopping mall for dot-commers. We need our crime rate back. I want my muggers and hookers back.” - James Hedges 
Andy Warhol and his right-hand man Ronnie Cutrone were the perceived masters of Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s.

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

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

While with Ronnie Cutrone the focus of this exhibition is on his cartoon-infused painting, sculpture and drawings which shocked the New York scene in the 1980s. These works garnered him major solo shows in the inaugural Post-Pop wave, whilst igniting debates over the sanctity of the American symbols such as the flag and Mickey Mouse. After 1983, when Ronnie Cutrone left Warhol’s Factory, he perused his independent art career which reached great heights, including highly lauded museum exhibitions at the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, and the L.A. County Museum of Art, amongst many others.
“One thing I picked up from Andy: say loud and clear because if the WHOLE world gets it, the art world will get it too.” - Ronnie Cutrone 
Artist Ronnie Cutrone

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

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

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

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

GALERIE GMURZYNSKA
Paradeplatz 2, Zurich

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

Roger Ballen Exhibition in Austria at Museum Gugging, Maria Gugging - "roger ballen.! drawing meets photography" Exhibition

Roger Ballen.! drawing meets photography
Museum Gugging, Maria Gugging, Austria
September 25, 2025 – February 15, 2026

Roger Ballen
Roger Ballen
Funeral rites, 2004
© Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen
Roger Ballen
Untitled, 2020
© Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen
Roger Ballen
Wall shadows, 2003
© Roger Ballen

The exhibition roger ballen.! drawing meets photography by South African-based photo artist ROGER BALLEN (*1950) transcends the boundaries between photography and other art forms, at museum gugging.

Nina Ansperger and Roger Ballen in museum gugging
Nina Ansperger
and Roger Ballen in museum gugging
© NÖ Museum Betriebs GmbH, Daniel Hinterramskogler
"With Roger Ballen, we are bringing one of the most important and influential photographic artists of the 21st century to museum gugging," explains Nina Ansperger, the exhibition's curator. Over the past decades, his artistic work has evolved from narrative photography to a work increasingly dominated by drawing. Drawing is therefore the focus of this exhibition. "Roger Ballen is closely connected to Jean Dubuffet's idea of ​​Art Brut and defines himself as an 'outsider.' Drawing, as a central element of his photographic art, is simultaneously the most important medium of the art from Gugging. Thus, not only the subject matter but also the location of the exhibition could not be more appropriate," Nina Ansperger asserts. 

Roger Ballen, who refers to himself as an “outsider,” said: “I have brought drawing and photography into painting to produce a mixed medium image. It has been my goal to break down the boundaries between photography and other arts, taking photography out of its self-isolation as a form.” 

Roger Ballen in museum gugging
Roger Ballen
in museum gugging
© NÖ Museum Betriebs GmbH, Daniel Hinterramskogler

New York-born Roger Ballen has lived in South Africa for several decades. His photographic works, created over 40 years, possess incredible narrative power because they oscillate between painting, drawing, installation, and photography. His “Ballenesque” aesthetic is unsettling, vehemently demands self-reflection and leads to a journey into one’s own unconscious.

Curator: Nina Ansperger

MUSEUM GUGGING
Am Campus 2, 3400 Maria Gugging

Robert Therrien @ The Broad, Los Angeles - "Robert Therrien: This is a Story" - The largest museum exhibition of the artist’s work to date

Robert Therrien: This is a Story
The Broad, Los Angeles
November 22, 2025 – April 5, 2026

Robert Therrien
Robert Therrien
No title (folding table and chairs, dark brown), 2007
Painted steel and aluminum, fabric, and plastic 
Courtesy of Glenstone Museum 
Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

The Broad presents Robert Therrien: This is a Story, the largest museum exhibition of the late artist’s widely-adored work to date. Therrien’s meditations on scale and material are a deeply influential and well-known approach within the field of contemporary sculpture, significant to The Broad’s own identity as a museum, and long admired by visitors of all ages. The installation will showcase Therrien’s personal vocabulary of images and symbols—from enormous tables, chairs, and dishes, to intimate drawings of snowmen, birds, and chapels—as they become a language of continuous creation and transformation for the artist over time. Featuring more than 120 works spanning five decades, the exhibition offers unprecedented access to the artist’s exploration of scale, memory, and perception, just miles from the downtown Los Angeles home and studio space he operated out of for close to thirty years beginning in 1990. Many of the works on view, including those created just before Robert Therrien’s untimely death in 2019, have never been featured in museum exhibitions and will offer new avenues of understanding his practice.
“Robert Therrien has longstanding ties to The Broad and was one of the very first L.A.-based artists to enter the Broad collection decades ago, in its first, formative years. His massive sculpture Under the Table has captivated visitors to our museum’s galleries since the day The Broad opened in 2015, as a surreally enlarged wooden table offering layers of the artist’s intellectual and art historical inquiry within an aura of domestic familiarity,” said Joanne Heyler, Founding Director and President of The Broad. She added, “For our visitors who know and love Under the Table, this ambitious show will reveal a deeper and wide-lens look into the completely unique world Therrien created–a Los-Angeles-based body of work that reshaped contemporary sculpture.”
Robert Therrien
Robert Therrien
No title (bent cone relief), 1983 
Lacquer and wax on wood 
Courtesy of The Broad Art Foundation
Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

Robert Therrien
Robert Therrien
No title (black witch hat), 2018 
Carved Delrin plastic
Courtesy of Robert Therrien Estate.
Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

Robert Therrien (1947–2019) was born in Chicago and relocated to Los Angeles in the 1970s to complete an MFA at the University of Southern California. Despite the prominence of conceptual and minimalist practices at the time, he developed his own adjacent artistic vernacular that saw the infinite potential of ordinary objects across basic forms and their three-dimensional counterparts, varying in size, color, and detail. A single Robert Therrien gesture can expand, contract, change materially, or seamlessly transform into other images entirely. A chapel will become an oil can; the oil can will become a pitcher; the pitcher, a cone, then morphing into a witch hat. At the heart of Therrien’s practice is a sense of artistic animation, by turns fun, playful, and serious.
“Los Angeles has been and remains a historically important place to make sculpture and Robert Therrien is vital to that story” said Ed Schad, Curator and Publications Manager at The Broad. “From his handmade and intimate responses to Minimalism in the 1970s, to his early involvement in what would become a golden age of L.A. fabrication, Therrien made important contributions to many of sculpture’s central conversations for over forty years. However, the most important thing to know about Therrien is that he can evoke a sense of wonder. What starts in Therrien’s personal and closely guarded memories and passions, becomes a mysterious place in which a viewer can think about and dwell in one’s own.”
Visitors will be able to walk under and around large tables and chairs, approach enormous hanging beards, and navigate around large, stacked dishes designed to appear to be in motion and alter one’s sense of balance. In addition, a special collaboration with the artist’s estate will expose visitors to partial reconstructions of Therrien’s studio environment, including his project tables, drawings, and tools, to full-sized rooms full of surprises and encounters that are a hallmark of the artist’s practice. Therrien’s living and working space in Downtown L.A. remains pivotal to his understanding of space and size.

In addition to being the largest solo museum presentation of his work to date, Robert Therrien: This is a Story places his legacy within the broader arc of contemporary sculpture in Los Angeles and beyond. An exhibition catalog published by DelMonico Books will develop these connections further, edited by curator Ed Schad and featuring texts by Kathryn Scanlon, Richard Armstrong, and Darby English, as well as reflections from Vija Celmins, Vicky Arnold, Jacob Samuel, Christina Forrer and more.

THE BROAD
221 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012

09/09/25

Daniel Richter @ Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg - "Mit elben Birnen" Exhibition

Daniel Richter: Mit elben Birnen
Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg
Through 27 September 2025

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg presents a new series of paintings by German artist DANIEL RICHTER. Created over the past year, these large-scale works navigate a space between figuration and abstraction, characterised by chaotic entanglements of fragmented bodies. Creature-like forms are depicted against jagged fields of colour in bright, contrasting tones, evoking a sense of rebellious energy and electric vibrancy.

Daniel Richter’s painting has been marked by a continual formal transformation since the beginning of his career. While opaque, monochrome areas of colour characterised Richter’s work of the past few years, the backgrounds of these new, intensely colourful compositions appear torn or singed. At times, the candy-coloured shapes that seem to race across the canvas are delineated by black, dense lines; at others, they seem to detach from the background or erupt across the pictorial space.

In some works, the artist leaves behind traces of his physical presence as visible fingermarks on the canvas, intensifying a heightened sense of primordial energy and unresolved conflict. ‘The dynamic in my work is mainly based on pushing and shoving, or on elements that are being confronted by each other – mingling, pushing, pulling,’ Daniel Richter explains.

The temporal and spatial indeterminacy of scenes refuses to resolve into a coherent time, place, or even pictorial space. The works appear to depict surreal landscapes of the mind or imagination rather than representations of any external world. Colours clash or recede with intense emotional charge, the bold contrasts and abstract patterns recalling the formal vocabulary of Clyfford Still. And yet, despite the underlying violence, the works convey a touching sensuality and beauty that counterbalances their restless energy.

The exhibition’s title references the opening line of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem Half of Life, which Daniel Richter cryptically rephrases. The poem is centred around a stark contrast between idealised beauty and a world marked by emptiness. The lines, which sound almost prophetic in today’s political climate, accompanied Daniel Richter during the creation of this series. Hölderlin’s image of creaking weathervanes can be read as a symbol of the fragile, often fractured order of our time.

Friedrich Hölderlin
‘Half of Life’

With its yellow pears
And wild roses everywhere
The shore hangs into the lake,
O gracious swans,
And drunk with kisses
You dip your heads
In the sobering holy water.
Ah, where will I find
Flowers, come winter,
And where the sunshine
And shade of the earth?
Walls stand cold
And speechless, in the wind
The weathervanes creak.

The anarchic humour of his titles is typical of the artist, whose sensibility for the absurd and the drastic is also closely linked to the Hamburg music scene and punk. The city, where Daniel Richter studied under Werner Büttner from 1992 to 1996, has played a pivotal role in his life and career, serving as both a formative backdrop for his artistic development and a long-standing base from which he emerged as one of Germany’s most influential contemporary painters.

Artist Daniel Richter

Born in Eutin, Germany, Daniel Richter lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg from 1992–96 under Werner Büttner, and later worked as an assistant to Albert Oehlen. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of Richter’s work have been held at Kunsthalle Tübingen (2023); Space K, Seoul (2022); 21er Haus, Vienna (2017); Camden Arts Centre, London (2017); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2016); TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol, Innsbruck (2014); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2014); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2011); CAC Málaga and Denver Art Museum (both 2008); Hamburger Kunsthalle (2007); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2005); and Kunsthalle Kiel; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2001).

Daniel Richter’s works are included in renowned collections worldwide, among them the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Hamburger Kunsthalle; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; the Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig; the Kunstmuseum Den Haag; the Contemporary Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Denver Art Museum; and the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg. In 2023, the Oscar-winning director Pepe Danquart released the documentary Daniel Richter, offering a multifaceted insight into the artist’s life and work.

In December, a major retrospective will open at the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Schloss Gottorf (until February 2026).

THADDAEUS ROPAC SALZBURG
Salzburg Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Salzburg

Related Posts:

In English

Kunsthalle Tübingen (2023)

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2005)

En Français

Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa (2005)

Daniel Richter: Mit elben Birnen
Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg, 25 July — 27 September 2025

07/09/25

Visual Language: The Art of Irving Penn - Auction @ Phillips, New York

Visual Language: The Art of Irving Penn
Phillips, New York
Auction viewing: 30 September – 7 October 2025
Auction: 8 October 2025

Irving Penn
Irving Penn
Mouth (For L’Oréal) (A), New York, 1986
© The Irving Penn Foundation, © Condé Nast
Estimate: $200,000 – 300,000

Irving Penn
Irving Penn
Harlequin Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn), New York, 1950
© The Irving Penn Foundation, © Condé Nast
Estimate: $200,000 – 300,000

Irving Penn
Irving Penn
Ginkgo Leaves, New York, 1990
© The Irving Penn Foundation, © Condé Nast
Estimate: $200,000 – 300,000

Phillips will host Visual Language: The Art of Irving Penn, a landmark auction of photographs and artworks from The Irving Penn Foundation. This standalone sale, featuring photographic prints and paintings that Penn made during his seven decades-long career, marks the first time that the foundation has offered the artist's work through auction. This historic event will celebrate Penn’s remarkable talents, highlighting his unique vision and masterful craftsmanship across a variety of photographic print processes. The 70-lot sale will take place on 8 October 2025 ahead of Phillips' seasonal Photographs sale on 9 October.
Tom Penn, Executive Director of The Irving Penn Foundation, said, “As stewards of Irving Penn's artistic legacy since 2010, this auction is a pivotal moment for The Irving Penn Foundation as we aspire to expand our charitable and educational program. My father would say to me, ‘whatever you do in life, do it with complete passion.’ It was with passion that he sought excellence in everything he did, and each object included in this sale reflects the innovation and exactitude that defined Penn’s practice. The artworks selected for the auction span the range of mediums and subjects Penn explored across his career, presenting rarely seen images alongside his most well-known photographs that provide a new perspective on the diversity of his production. Through this carefully considered sale, we demonstrate Irving Penn's mastery and enduring influence in the field of photography.”
Irving Penn
Irving Penn
Black and White Hat, New York, 1950
© The Irving Penn Foundation, © Condé Nast
Estimate: $25,000 – 35,000

Irving Penn
Irving Penn
Untitled, circa 1987
© The Irving Penn Foundation, © Condé Nast
Estimate: $30,000 – 50,000

Irving Penn
Irving Penn
Miles Davis Hand on Trumpet,
New York, 1986
© The Irving Penn Foundation, © Condé Nast
Estimate: $70,000 – 90,000

Irving Penn
Irving Penn
Télégraphiste, Paris, 1950
© The Irving Penn Foundation, © Condé Nast
Estimate: $30,000 – 50,000

Irving Penn was one of the 20th century’s most significant photographers, known for his arresting images, technical mastery, and quiet intensity. Though he gained widespread acclaim as a leading Vogue photographer for over sixty years, Penn remained a private figure devoted to his craft. Trained under legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch in Philadelphia, he began his career assisting at Harper’s Bazaar before joining Vogue in 1943, where editor and artist Alexander Liberman recognized Penn’s distinctive eye and encouraged him to pursue photography. Penn’s incomparably elegant fashion studies reset the standard for the magazine world, and his portraits, still lifes, and nude studies broke new ground. His 1960 book Moments Preserved redefined the photographic monograph with its dynamic layout and high-quality reproductions. In 1964, Penn began printing in platinum and palladium, reviving this 19th-century process to serve his own distinct vision. He was one of the first photographers to benefit from the burgeoning fine art photography market of the 1970s, and he earned a growing following of collectors and curators leading to major exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Art Institute of Chicago, and National Portrait Gallery, London, among many other institutions.

Irving Penn
Irving Penn
Irving Penn in a Cracked Mirror (Self-Portrait) (A)
New York, 1986
© The Irving Penn Foundation, © Condé Nast
Estimate: $25,000 – 35,000

Irving Penn
Irving Penn
Mud Glove, New York, 1975
© The Irving Penn Foundation, © Condé Nast
Estimate: $50,000 – 70,000

Irving Penn
Irving Penn
Three Tulips ‘Red Shine’, ‘Black Parrot’, ‘Gudoshnik’
New York, 1967
© The Irving Penn Foundation, © Condé Nast
Estimate: $70,000 – 90,000

Irving Penn
Irving Penn
Marriageable Young Woman of Imilchil, Morocco, 1971
© The Irving Penn Foundation, © Condé Nast
Estimate: $20,000 – 30,000

An innovator in every sense, Penn’s approach to photography was bold. Few photographers of his generation experimented as widely with both conventional and historic print processes, and none achieved Penn’s level of excellence in all. Phillips’ auction will feature work in a variety of photographic media, including Penn’s bravura gelatin silver prints, such as Coffee Pot, nuanced platinum-palladium prints like Harlequin Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn), and rare dye-transfer prints, led by the iconic Ginkgo Leaves.
Vanessa Hallett, Phillips’ Deputy Chairwoman and Worldwide Head of Photographs, said, “Irving Penn was one of the foremost photographers of our time, standing alongside the great contemporary artists who have come to define the 20th-century art historical canon. Today, Penn’s vision and skill remain unequaled. Phillips is honored to work with the foundation in its 20th-anniversary year, shining a spotlight on Penn’s technical genius, creative process, and extraordinary output while presenting this groundbreaking work to a new audience. These works were preserved for decades by the artist and his foundation, hence their incredible provenance and condition. We are thrilled to provide a platform that educates the next generation of collectors on Penn’s impact, while assisting the foundation further its mission of preserving and advancing Penn’s legacy for years to come.”
Irving Penn
Irving Penn
Cracked Egg, New York, 1958
© The Irving Penn Foundation, © Condé Nast
Estimate: $30,000 – 50,000

Irving Penn
Irving Penn
Cigarette No. 37, New York, 1972
© The Irving Penn Foundation, © Condé Nast
Estimate: $150,000 – 250,000

Irving Penn
Irving Penn
Coffee Pot, New York, 2007
© The Irving Penn Foundation, © Condé Nast
Estimate: $20,000 – 30,000

Heralding an exceptional opportunity for collectors, many of the works selected from the foundation's archives have never before appeared at auction; this includes several examples from Penn's influential 1950 Black and White series for Vogue, and the large-scale four-panel platinum-palladium print of Mud Glove with typography advertising his 1977 Street Material exhibition at The Met. In addition to his work as a photographer, Irving Penn was also an accomplished painter and draftsman. For the first time at auction, Phillips will also showcase his work in these mediums, taking the opportunity to set forth the full range of this remarkable artist's creative output.

The Irving Penn Foundation was established in 2005 to promote knowledge and understanding of Irving Penn’s artistic legacy, including the diversity of techniques, mediums, and subject matters the artist explored. It is the largest repository of Irving Penn's work.

PHILLIPS NEW YORK 
432 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022
Click here for more information: 

Coco Fusco @ El Museo del Barrio, NYC - "Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island" Exhibition

Coco Fusco
Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island
El Museo del Barrio, New York 
September 18, 2025 — January 11, 2026

Coco Fusco
Coco Fusco
Photo by Aurelio Fusco

Coco Fusco
Coco Fusco
Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word (still), 2021
HD Video, 13:30 mins
Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM

Coco Fusco
Coco Fusco
A Room of One's Own: Women and Power
in the New America, 2006-2008
Performance documentation
Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM

El Museo del Barrio presents Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island, the first U.S. survey of the influential Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist and writer COCO FUSCO (b. 1960, lives in New York). The exhibition is spanning more than three decades of Fusco’s groundbreaking career.

Widely recognized for her incisive explorations of the dynamics of politics and power, Fusco’s interdisciplinary practice spans video, performance, installation, photography, and writing. Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island traces her extensive practice through a selection of more than twenty of her works, created since the 1990s and extending to a new photographic series on view for the first time at El Museo del Barrio.
“Coco Fusco stands among the most provocative voices in contemporary art. Her work challenges conventions, sparks vital conversations, and continues to resonate powerfully at a time of profound social and political reckoning.” —Patrick Charpenel, Executive Director, El Museo del Barrio
Organized thematically, the exhibition explores central concerns that Coco Fusco has addressed across her practice, including immigration, military power and surveillance, post-revolutionary Cuban history, and the lasting legacies of colonialism. The presentation offers an expansive view of her multidisciplinary approach through key bodies of work, including:

Immigration Narratives: Works addressing the perception of immigrants in the US and Europe, including Everyone Here is a New Yorker (2025), a new photographic suite that extends from Fusco's 2024 public art video animation commission by More Art, Inc.

Intercultural Misunderstandings: A room dedicated to Fusco’s projects, created in counterpoint to the 500th anniversary of the so-called “discovery” of the Americas, including a reproduction of her iconic Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992/2025), originally performed in collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

Interrogation Tactics: Video, photographs, and performance documentation that consider military tactics, surveillance technologies, and the exploitation of female sexuality in the War on Terror.

Poetry and Power: A focused selection of video, featuring several works that reflect on the history of artists’ challenges to the Cuban government—a central subject in Fusco’s oeuvre. Together, this selection illuminates the breadth and depth of Fusco’s artistic vision—one that remains acutely relevant in today’s national political and cultural climate.

Coco Fusco
Coco Fusco 
La noche eterna (The Eternal Night), 2023
HD Video, 1:13:45 mins
Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM

Coco Fusco
Coco Fusco 
La plaza vacía (The Empty Plaza), 2012
HD Video, 11:53 mins
Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York 
Acquisition enabled by VEZA New Media Fund 2022 
and headline supporters South SOUTH and Niio 

Coco Fusco - Paula Heredia
Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia
The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey, 2003
Video, 31 mins
Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York
Acquired through "PROARTISTA: Sustaining the Work 
of Living Contemporary Artists," 
a fund from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust 2008.1
“El Museo del Barrio has been a steadfast supporter of Coco Fusco’s groundbreaking practice from early on, recognizing the power and potency of her work. This includes her participation in the groundbreaking 2008 exhibition Arte No es Vida, as well as her presence in recent collection-based shows such as Culture and the People and Something Beautiful. This survey extends that dialogue, offering audiences a deeper understanding of an artist whose voice remains as vital as ever.” —Susanna V. Temkin, Interim Chief Curator, El Museo del Barrio
Tomorrow, I will Become an Island is organized by El Museo del Barrio in collaboration with MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

Borrowing its title from the artist's recent monograph publication, Tomorrow, I will Become an Island is organized at El Museo del Barrio by Susanna V. Temkin, interim chief curator, and Rodrigo Moura, former chief curator, with support from Lee Sessions and Maria Molano Parrado. Exhibition design by Solomonoff Architecture Studio/SAS and graphic design by estúdio gráfico.

ARTIST COCO FUSCO

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. She is a recipient of a 2023 Free Speech Defender Award from the National Coalition Against Censorship, a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award, a 2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship, a 2021 Anonymous Was a Woman award, a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.

Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented at the 56th Venice Biennale, the Sharjah Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008, and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Whitney Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. 

Coco Fusco is the author of numerous books, and she contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books and numerous art publications. Her monograph publication Tomorrow, I will Become an Island was published by Thames & Hudson in 2023.

Coco Fusco received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985), and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007). She is a Professor at the Cooper Union School of Art.

EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO, NEW YORK
1230 5th Avenue at 104th Street, New York, NY 10029

Nicasio Fernandez @ Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco - "Light Whispers" Exhibition

Nicasio Fernandez: Light Whispers
Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
August 21 – October 16, 2025

Berggruen Gallery presents Light Whispers, an exhibition of new work by New York artist NICASIO FERNANDEZ. This marks the gallery’s first solo presentation with Nicasio Fernandez. 

In Light Whispers, Nicasio Fernandez’s paintings convey a quiet intensity within moody, introspective settings, where his figures are steeped in a spectrum of emotions ranging from uncertainty and tension to concern and doubt. Drawing on film noir motifs—low-key light, deep shadows, and psychological intensity—Nicasio Fernandez places otherworldly figures in eerie, dramatic atmospheres that leave the viewer both unsettled and curious. Though traces of the domestic linger, the paintings deliberately omit any indicators of place, cultivating an enigmatic sense of space.  

Rather than referencing specific film stills, Fernandez’s works are instead constructed around a captivating moment, lingering feeling, or a memory Nicasio Fernandez has held onto and reshaped into his own vision. All but one painting conceal their cinematic references. "Dark Corner", titled after the 1954 film, depicts a forward-leaning figure in motion, the face and long brown overcoat partially backlit by an ambiguous source just outside the frame. The figure moves swiftly through a mysterious nightscape—perhaps in pursuit of something—seems to pause in hesitation, as if aware of a lurking presence.

While Nicasio Fernandez is known for his vibrant chromatic choices, subtle dark humor, and precise handling of materials—demonstrating an ability to be loud and provocative—this body of work marks a decisive shift toward restraint and alteration. His bold palette has been pared down and placed within a uniform tonal temperature. Scratchy brushwork reveals parts of the underpainting, while sharp, crisp edges begin to dissolve. The use of light nods not only to cinema but also to the art historical references such as Rembrandt’s portraiture and the soft glow of Vuillard’s domestic interiors. Fernandez’s purposeful obscuring of elements of the paintings in deeper shadows acts as a framing device to guide the viewer’s eye across the canvas.

Nicasio Fernandez refers to these small paintings as whispers; much like the transfer of sound, these works require close proximity to spark an exchange—inviting the viewer to step into the scene in order to fully dissect and absorb its information. Like considered sequences from cinema, the paintings invite open dialogue and allow space for interpretation. Through this quietness, Fernandez’s paintings offer a light whisper to the viewer, gently luring them into a mysterious, contemplative state.

NICASIO FERNANDEZ (b. 1993, Yonkers, NY) received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2015. Most recently, his work has been exhibited at Harper’s, Los Angeles, New York, and East Hampton (2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2018); Half Gallery, New York (2023, 2022); Alexander Berggruen, New York (2023, 2022); Ross + Kramer, New York and East Hampton (2022, 2021, and 2020); Over the Influence, Hong Kong and Los Angeles (2020, 2019). Fernandez’s work is included in the collections of the Hall Art Foundation, North Adams, MA; and The Bunker, Palm Beach, FL. His work has appeared in Artnet, At Large, and New American Paintings, among other publications. Nicasio Fernandez lives and works in upstate New York.

BERGGRUEN GALLERY
10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

06/09/25

Matt Kleberg @ Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco - "Bless Babel" Exhibition

Matt Kleberg: Bless Babel
Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
August 21 – October 16, 2025

Berggruen Gallery presents Bless Babel, an exhibition of new work by San Antonio-based artist Matt Kleberg. This exhibition will mark the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Matt Kleberg.

In Bless Babel, each painting builds around a singular central niche, suggesting the absence of a subject. Confronted with this vacancy, the viewer finds themselves at the center of Kleberg’s geometric abstractions. Influenced by architectural and ritualistic spaces, the works in Bless Babel investigate the tropes through which conception is framed by institutional or personal belief. Kleberg’s paintings are not interested in objective truth, but rather in how belief transforms our relationship to space and objects. These paintings are not portals, unless you believe they are. They are not windows, unless you believe they are. 

This exhibition derives its title from Donald Barthelme’s 1987 essay Not Knowing, in which the writer and critic considers uncertainty, improvisation, and discovery as fundamental to the creative act. Barthelme speaks of commentary, elaboration, exegesis, and contradiction as necessary modes of engagement between a piece of art and the earlier works of previous makers that inform it. Babel and the scattering of languages offer an example of how different approaches to the same concept are inherent to human expression. Kleberg’s new paintings embrace the constraints of particular shapes borrowed from Tramp Art frames and Italian Renaissance devotional objects, to explore how different resolutions can come out of multiple iterations of the same motifs.

Matt Kleberg’s paintings contradict themselves, oscillating between ecstasy and oblivion, exuberance and tranquility. Hues of pink, terracotta, and bright blue radiate amongst moody browns, maroon, and sap green. Scumbled surfaces complicate illusionistic shadows; interior space collapses into itself as one moves closer. Shimmering like television static or speckled concrete, colors that appear solid break apart upon inspection. Chromatic undertones shift in their nature–perhaps waiting to coalesce. Some paintings tower, their stripes and bands undulating, monumental and inviting, formal yet playful. Indebted as much to American folk art traditions as to Duccio and the Sienese School, Kleberg’s paintings pay homage—yet with their vacancies and their tensions, the drama is of their own conjuring. A frame within a frame within a frame. The pleasure is in the not-knowing. 

MATT KLEBERG was born in 1985 in Kingsville, Texas. He received his BA from the University of Virginia in 2008 and his MFA from the Pratt Institute in 2015. Coverage of his work can be found in various publications, including The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Artsy, Vice, Maake Magazine, ArtDaily, Juxtapoz Magazine, Square Cylinder, and Hyperallergic. His work is featured in multiple private and public collections, including the Williams College Museum of Art, the AD&A Museum of the University of California Santa Barbara, the Old Jail Art Center, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the National Gallery of Art. Matt Kleberg currently lives and works in San Antonio, TX.  

BERGGRUEN GALLERY
10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

04/09/25

Alexandre Diop @ Stephen Friedman Gallery, London - "Run For Your Life !" Exhibition

Alexandre Diop
Run For Your Life !
Stephen Friedman Gallery, London
19 September - 1 November 2025

Alexandre Diop
Alexandre Diop
A Vos marques ! Prêt ! Illegal, 2025
© Alexandre Diop, courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery

Stephen Friedman Gallery presents Run For Your Life !, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Franco-Senegalese artist ALEXANDRE DIOP. This marks the artist's debut show with the gallery and his first solo exhibition in London.

Alexandre Diop’s powerful mixed-media works explore themes of history, metaphorical archaeology and socio-political change, with this body of work focusing on the relationship between movement and time, represented by dance or migration. The title of the exhibition, Run For Your Life !, is an invitation to stand for change, show tolerance, and be alert to crises around the world. Diop’s practice is interdisciplinary; his experience as a dancer, musician, and visual artist allows him to create artworks that transcend traditional paintings.

Physicality is central to the artist’s process. Diop’s rigorous approach to his work—which he refers to as object-images—combines found and recycled materials such as scrap metal, wood, leather, and textile remnants with classical techniques like oil painting. The materials are sourced from scrapyards, urban streets and derelict buildings, and then transformed through an intensive process of layering, burning, tearing, stapling and collaging onto wood panels. His material language, while firmly rooted in personal and political narratives, also engages with multiple art-historical lineages. His work draws from movements such as Dada, Art Brut, Expressionism and the Viennese Secession, while maintaining a strong dialogue with both West African aesthetic traditions and the visual codes of contemporary urban culture.

Alexandre Diop’s practice is anchored in drawing. He combines calligraphic strokes, symbols, and layered images that are painted, drawn, or sprayed. Figures— both human and animal—emerge from textured surfaces that blur the boundaries of painting, sculpture, and relief. Their stance recalls the awareness of a dancer, attuned to the body’s own rhythms. In this sense, the works look inward: they stage a dialogue between movement and stillness, surface and depth, becoming mirrors through which viewers may glimpse fragments of their own inner reality.

At the same time, Alexandre Diop’s work confronts the world beyond the self. It reflects on how individuals are bound by external forces—systems of illegality, oppression, and exclusion. In A Vos marques ! Prêt ! Illegal, 2025, a central figure cries out yet remains unheard, embodying the suffocation of life within unjust structures. The work echoes the story of Jesse Owens, the African-American runner who won Olympic gold in 1936 under Nazi rule, and becomes a call for freedom, justice, and resilience against overwhelming odds. Alexandre Diop constructs new worlds where historical, political, and social narratives unfold, offering his figures a space to resist, endure, and reimagine history.

Artist Alexandre Diop

Alexandre Diop is a Franco-Senegalese artist whose powerful, mixed-media works interrogate themes of ancestry, beauty, violence and social transformation. Drawing upon his experience as a dancer, musician, and visual artist, Alexandre Diop brings a multidisciplinary lens to his practice, crafting works that are deeply visceral and formally innovative. Alexandre Diop was born in Paris, France in 1995. He lives and works in Vienna, Austria.

Alexandre Diop’s work has been the subject of major solo museum exhibitions. In 2023, his work was presented with 18th century anatomical wax models of bodies and body parts in Anatomie at Josephinum Medical Museum, Vienna, Austria. His residency at the Rubell Museum in Miami culminated in a touring exhibition, Jooba Jubba, l’Art du Défi, the Art of Challenge, shown in Miami (2022) and Washington DC (2023). In 2022, Alexandre Diop exhibited alongside Kehinde Wiley in La Prochaine Fois, Le Feu, presented by Reiffers Art Initiatives in Paris.

Notable group exhibitions include Les Apparitions, Reiffers Art Initiatives, Paris, France (2025); De Sculptura, Albertina Klosterneuburg, Klosterneuburg, Austria (2025); The Beauty of Diversity, Albertina Modern, Vienna, Austria (2024); Being Mortal, Dom Museum, Vienna, Austria (2023); The New African Portraiture, Shariat Collections, Kunsthalle Krems, Krems an der Donau, Austria (2022); and Le Mouton Noir, Gesso Art Space, Vienna, Austria (2021).

Alexandre Diop’s works can be found in the collections of Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; AMA Venezia, Venice, Italy; AMOCA, Cardiff, Wales, UK; Espacio Tacuarí, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Josephinum Medical Museum, Vienna, Austria; Kunsthalle Krems, Krems an der Donau, Austria; MB Collection, Germany; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington DC, USA; Reiffers Art Initiatives, Paris, France; Rubell Museum, Miami, Florida and Washington DC, USA; Ståhl Collection, Norrköping, Sweden; Stora Wäsby Public Collection, Stockholm, Sweden and The Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach, Florida, USA.

STEPHAN FRIEDMAN GALLERY LONDON
5-6 Cork Street, London W1S 3LQ 

Emma Luukkala @ HAM Gallery - Helsinki Art Museum - "Night Wash" Exhibition

Emma Luukkala: Night Wash
HAM Gallery, Helsinki 
20 September - 9 November 2025

Emma Luukkala
Emma Luukkala
Night Wash, 2025 (detail)
Photo: Emma Luukkala

In her HAM gallery exhibition, EMMA LUUKKALA ponders the overlap between the sacred and the everyday. Life flows in endless piles of things and to-do lists, with moments of meaning, intense in their brightness, at the heart of the chaos.
Jobs I’ve done today: swept the floors, folded the laundry, and moved things from place to place. From somewhere, I can hear a blackbird singing.
Not even the grandest and most solemn situations are pure and uncontaminated by the outside world – they are always adorned with everyday chores and annoying dirt. Emma Luukkala asks what sacred could mean in a new materialist context, where the world is not divided dualistically into the superior spiritual and the inferior material, but instead consists of a wide range of intertwined players.

EMMA LUUKKALA (b. 1992) is a Helsinki-based artist who uses painting materials in a variety of ways, combining flat blocks of colour with relief details. She graduated with a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts in 2020. In recent years, her work has been exhibited at venues including Jyväskylä Art Museum, Kunsthalle Helsinki, tm•gallery and Galerie Anhava.

HAM GALLERY - HELSINKI ART MUSEUM
Eteläinen Rautatiekatu 8, 00100 Helsinki

03/09/25

Vik Muniz on Photography, Mind, and Matter - The Photography Workshop Series - Aperture, 2025 - A Workshop Experience in a Book

Vik Muniz on Photography, Mind, and Matter
The Photography Workshop Series
Aperture, 2025

Vik Muniz
Vik Muniz on Photography, Mind, and Matter
The Photography Workshop Series
Aperture, 2025
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of pages: 128
Number of images: 99
Publication date: 2025-08-12
Measurements: 7.5 x 10 x 7.5 inches
ISBN: 9781597114455

In Aperture’s newest volume of The Photography Workshop Series, Vik Muniz—known for his playful pictures that complicate what is understood as a photograph, sculpture, or painting—offers his insight into thinking creatively and seeing the familiar in new and surprising ways.

Aperture works with the world’s top photographers to distill their creative approaches, teachings, and insights on photography—offering the workshop experience in a book. The goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography.

Through images and words, Vik Muniz—whose signature style appropriates and reinterprets iconic images—shares his creative practice and discusses a wide range of topics, from generating ideas and creating artworks that challenge viewers’ perceptions, to thinking through collaboration, imperfection, and the interplay of subject, scale, and material.

Vik Muniz on Photography, Mind, and Matter is published by Aperture and available at aperture.org/books.

Public programs planned in conjunction with the new publication include a book signing with the artist at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins in New York on September 6 at 1:00 p.m, and an artist talk at the School of Visual Arts, New York, on September 9 at 6:30 p.m. Details are posted at aperture.org/events.

Vik Muniz (born in São Paulo, 1961) is a prolific, internationally recognized artist, whose signature style appropriates and reinterprets iconic images of our time. His work is featured in major collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He has published many books, including the Aperture titles Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer (2005) and Postcards from Nowhere (2020). Waste Land, a documentary about his work in the favelas and landfills around Rio de Janeiro, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2010.

Lucas Blalock is a Brooklyn-based photographer whose work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. His work has been featured in publications including Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, W Magazine, British Journal of Photography, and Time.

APERTURE
aperture.org

Yuan Fang @ Skarstedt Gallery, NYC - "Spaying" Exhibition

Yuan Fang: Spaying
Skarstedt Gallery, New York
September 4 – October 25, 2025

Skarstedt Chelsea presents Spaying, Yuan Fang’s second solo exhibition with the gallery (the previous one was in London). In this deeply personal and formally rigorous body of work, Yuan Fang turns inward, offering a meditation on illness, identity, and the intricate architecture of womanhood. In addition to her large-scale canvases, Yuan Fang debuts a suite of smaller, more intimate paintings—what the artist refers to as “subplots,” fragments of a larger, lived narrative.

The exhibition’s title alludes to the medical and emotional ramifications of Fang’s recent breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatments, functioning as a reference not only to the potential biological consequences of her treatment, but also the literal act of cutting—a gesture central to her process. Through cycles of modification, layering, and erasure, Yuan Fang pares down each composition until a dominant “entity” emerges. These central forms, always abstract yet bodily, function as torsos, anchoring each painting with a visceral sense of presence. “I need my paintings to be confrontational,” Yuan Fang notes, and indeed, each image carries that charge, meeting the viewer with both the emotional weight of her experience and a visual strength that builds like a storm on the horizon. 

New to this body of work is Fang’s embrace of negative space. Informed by the tradition of “leaving blank” in Chinese painting, these compositional voids focus the viewer’s attention on what remains. Separately, the rhythm of her studio practice has slowed, inviting longer periods of contemplation and greater attention to detail. The resulting compositions feel more deliberate with each painting charged with quiet intensity.

Autobiographical threads run throughout. Several works incorporate the artist’s own medical imaging subtly embedded in the compositions, such as Accumulating, Breaking Through the Defense Line. Others channel the psychic toll of external expectation and all of the rage, pressure, and fatigue that accompany it. 

Throughout the show, Yuan Fang navigates the porous boundaries between vulnerability and strength, life and death. This emotional duality is echoed in the palette of deep burgundies, forest greens, and indigos, and in the evocative titles of works such as Standing, Injured Horse and Bloody Meteorite Falling from the Sky. In the ease of her oil transitions and the fluidity of her lines, there is a quiet but profound sense of release. The works in Spaying may emerge from pain, but they insist on clarity. Though anchored in personal experience, Spaying broadens Fang’s ongoing investigation into the construction of feminine identity and the quiet rebellions required to reclaim it. Confronting her own mortality has yielded a new lucidity, and with it, a sharpened resolve to live on her own terms.

SKARSTEDT NEW YORK CHELSEA
547 West 25th New York, NY 10001