Friedrich Kunath @ Pace Gallery, NYC - 'Aimless Love' Exhibition

Friedrich Kunath: Aimless Love

Pace Gallery, New York

Through December 20, 2025

Friedrich Kunath 

You Told That Joke Twice, 2024-2025 

© Friedrich Kunath, courtesy Pace Gallery

Photography by Evan Walsh

Pace presents an exhibition of new paintings by Friedrich Kunath at its 510 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This is the artist’s first solo show in the city since 2019 and his debut presentation with the gallery, which began representing him in May 2025. The exhibition coincides with the release of a new monograph from Monacelli tracing Kunath’s work from the last 30 years. This publication features a new essay by Naomi Fry, staff writer at The New Yorker.

Known for his layered, lyrical work across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video, the German-born, Los Angeles-based artist reimagines rich and diverse source material in cathartic images and objects. Many of Kunath’s paintings depict vibrant landscapes of worldly beauty, often incorporating poetic phrases and quotations from music, film, and literature. Drawing inspiration from Romanticism, popular culture, and his own personal history, he imbues his art with a myriad of seemingly disparate references and resonances, navigating the murky spaces between irony and sincerity, tragedy and comedy. Thereby, Kunath sees himself as a composer of ideas and images across mediums, working fragments into artworks that become worlds unto themselves.

His first presentation at Pace in New York, Aimless Love, meditates on coming and going, free from intent, with aimless momentum. The works are inspired by the artist’s memories of listening to music while traveling by train or car as a child, looking out the window and watching the world pass by. With his new paintings, Friedrich Kunath aims to immortalize the sense of total presence in those memories and experiences, while acknowledging the paradox of trying to hold onto an inherently fleeting, ephemeral feeling.

Installed in ascending and descending orientations that evoke an airplane’s trajectories during takeoff and landing, Kunath’s latest paintings lean more heavily into a meditative, contemplative space than his past bodies of work. These filmic, deeply personal compositions depict expansive seas and crashing waves, rugged cliffsides, scenic roads, and sweeping vistas, exploring moments of connection and loneliness, love and longing, absurdity and wonder. Seen through the windshield or mirrors of a car, the outside world takes on new resonances in the new works. In I Hope Future Me Is Happy (2024–25), a car rounds the bend of a mountain highway, about to disappear but still in sight. In another, a plane glides through a golden sky with the setting sun blazing through its windows. With Have Love, Will Travel (2025), Friedrich Kunath situates the viewer on the passenger side of a car, a decision that reflects his view of his artistic role.

Kunath’s process for these paintings brings forth a dialogue between the unconscious and the representational image. At the start, he embeds abstractions and writings into wet impasto on his canvases. These underside paintings are made in isolation of the image that is created on top, but, in the end, there is a miraculous synchronicity between the two layers— his writings in the dried, textural impasto are legible in his finished paintings, bringing new meanings and juxtapositions to his compositions. With this “voice coming from behind the image,” Kunath says, he invites the viewer to make their own readings of the work.

In addition to paintings, Aimless Love includes a new sculpture titled Following the Feeling (2025), comprised of one pair of dress shoes, shoelaces, wire, and nylon string. This work is a more somber, existential take on Kunath’s 2009 installation LA Trainer (Permanent Reminder Of A Temporary Feeling)—a new iteration of an artwork that he produced early in his career.

Beyond his exhibition at Pace in New York, Kunath’s work can be found in the collections of the city’s Museum of Modern Art and the Marieluise Hessel Collection at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson.

Artist Friedrich Kunath

Friedrich Kunath (b. 1974, Chemnitz, Germany) works across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video to create resonant, evocative, and often melancholy compositions. Based in Los Angeles since 2007, Friedrich Kunath creates work grounded in his experiences on the West Coast of the United States and his enduring relationship with Europe. His art combines references to German Romanticism and American popular culture, and it is informed, in part, by his interests in music, tennis, cars, and the practice of collecting. Kunath's paintings depict vibrant landscapes of otherworldly beauty, and he often incorporates poetic phrases and quotations from music or film into his canvases, forging a visual language distinguished by interplays of wit, emotional depth, and cultural memory. The artist graduated from Braunschweig University of Arts, Germany, in 1998.

Recent solo exhibitions of his work include Friedrich Kunath: Coming Home Was as Beautiful as Going Away, KINDLCentre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2023); Friedrich Kunath: I Remain Exhausted, Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium (2024); Friedrich Kunath: I Need Solitude, But I Also Need You, Nassima Landau, Tel Aviv, Israel (2024); Friedrich Kunath: AT THIS POINT IN MY LIFE (I'LL HAVE THE CALAMARI), G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig, Germany (2024); and Friedrich Kunath: One Day I’ll Follow the Byrds (Tutto Pasta), Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2024). 

Friedrich Kunath’s work is held in prominent public collections worldwide, including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, among others. 

PACE GALLERY NEW YORK

510 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Friedrich Kunath: Aimless Love

Pace Gallery, New York, November 7 – December 20, 2025

Ana Mendieta @ Marian Goodman Gallery, NYC - 'Back to the Source' Exhibition

Ana Mendieta 

Back to the Source 

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Through 17 January 2026

Ana Mendieta 

Untitled: Silueta Series, 1977

© The Estate of Ana Mendieta 

Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery

Plugging into Mexico was like going back to the source, being able to get some magic just by being there. – Ana Mendieta

Marian Goodman Gallery presents Back to the Source, the gallery inaugural exhibition of the work of Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) which is on view in their Tribeca space through 17 January 2026.

Back to the Source presents seminal works from 1972-1985, a prolific period of Mendieta’s work, spanning stages of time spent in Iowa, Mexico, and Cuba, including ten digitally remastered films, photographic works, newly available photographic prints and drawings, and ephemeral sculpture.

Ana Mendieta was a pioneer and innovator whose oeuvre spanned painting, drawing, photography, film/video, sculpture, and site-specific works. Her singular interventions in the landscape embraced nature and disrupted societal conventions. Exiled from her homeland of Cuba where she was born in 1948, Ana Mendieta spent her childhood and formative years in Iowa, in the 1960s. She later studied art at the University of Iowa, first as a painter, then later in performative art, a move which would ultimately change her approach as an artist. Her body of work testifies to a passionate engagement with themes of exile and displacement, reconnecting with the earth, and the search for belonging and origin, through power, magic and the universal.

Creating a rich and diverse body of work that included ephemeral sculptures, Ana Mendieta, in her film and photographic works, captures time and process through direct actions which transport her beyond conventional materials to the realm of the intangible and impermanent, using nature as a collaborator. With her body as material, and driven by nature’s symbolic meaning, she sought to integrate power, magic and knowledge into her work, using natural materials as well as the four elements –earth, air, fire, and water. Feathers, flowers, branches, moss, fireworks and gunpowder were easily accessible and were often part of ritual practices to return her to the land and connect her to the universal. These obsessive acts of reasserting my ties with the earth is really a manifestation of my thirst for being. In essence my works are the reactivation of primeval beliefs. The photographs become the afterimage of primordial remembrances at work within the human psyche. – Ana Mendieta, Proposal for Rome Prize Fellowship, 1983

Using the earth as a sculptural medium – which she molded, impressed, and burned – Ana Mendieta conveyed notions of existence, resurgence and renewal through site-inclusive works that were exquisitely ethereal and transitory. Contemplative and existential meditations on mortality and the natural world, these works were part of living processes.

An interest in themes of transformation – birth, life, death, regeneration – is evident throughout her oeuvre, and can be seen in Ñañigo Burial, 1976, installed in the first floor gallery. Comprised of black candles which originally outlined the contours of the artist’s body, its title points to the influence of the Abakuá society of Cuba, also known as Ñañiguismo, which offers spiritual protection to its members. Drawn to this and Afro Cuban Santeria traditions, which blend the Yoruba religion of West Africa, Roman Catholicism, and Spiritism, Ana Mendieta sought magic and the divine to regenerate life within her work and through nature.

Ana Mendieta developed the Silueta Series from 1973-1980, first inspired by a visit to Mexico, in a signature period of expression in which she utilizes her own body, prior to removing herself from it. Moving away from traditional notions of sculpture as object, and towards the experience of living process and geological time as a medium, Ana Mendieta rendered silhouettes through hieroglyphs of imprints, outlines, and absences within the earth, which were left to erode and return to it.

Their timeless memory is preserved through related photographic works, such as Silueta Sangrienta, 1975, a new print. Other silueta works followed in 1976-79, such as Silueta Series (Tree of Life), 1978, and a selection which are presented here. A color print, Incantation to Olokun-Yemaya Encantación a Olokún-Yemayá (Incantation to Olokun-Yemaya), 1977, depicts a silueta in the earth, invoking two identities of the West African Yoruba goddess known as a river mother and fertility deity. A work from 1978 shows a spiral impression in the earth, creating a metaphorical association with land-based work- in this case with a human scale silueta at its center. In other works, figures are carved into the earth, such as in Black Venus, 1980, a black and white photograph which features an earthen imprint of a female form. Its title refers to a legendary symbol against slavery, an affirmation, as Ana Mendieta writes, of those who are free and refuse to be colonized. This work is in dialogue with La Venus Negra, 1981, which also features a detailed imprint resembling the human form, created on a rock surface — its deliberate placement on stone suggesting a connection between the human form, nature and the earth. Black and white photographs of two Sandwoman works from 1983 document outlines of organic female forms hand carved in the sand, reiterating temporality and impermanence. A newly framed and never before seen small-scale drawing of the hand with heart — imparts the artist’s fascination with ancient Egypt, hieroglyphs, and cave drawings, reiterating her journey “back to the source.” These works are accompanied by an additional selection of Untitled works on paper from 1978-79 and 1983-1985, depicting organic forms.

I have thrown myself into the very elements that produced me, using the earth as my canvas and my soul as my tools. - Ana Mendieta, Proposal for the New York State Council on the Arts, 17 March 1982

On view are ten films created between Iowa and Mexico which span from 1972 to 1978, and in which we see a representation of the various elements – from fire, water, and air, to gunpowder, and blood. The earliest of these, Chicken Movie, Chicken Piece, 1972, originally filmed in Super 8, documents a primitive action in which Ana Mendieta holds a decapitated chicken, a familiar form of sacrifice in Santería resulting in a splattering of blood, which thematically connects to universal and spiritual power. The theme of self-transformation is introduced in Blood + Feathers, captured in a recently discovered 1974 color photo in which Ana Mendieta initiates a transfer of energy, covering her body in feathers and blood, as if to divine herself as an unearthly avian spirit, becoming a bird or, as she had said, “the white cock.” Silueta del Laberinto (Laberinth Blood Imprint), 1974, shot the same year, begins with a silueta outline on a ceremonial site near Oaxaca, Mexico, the contours of which are flooded beyond their recessed lines, spilling beyond the corporeal outline to resemble an organic shape. In Silueta del Laberinto, one of the first films in which Ana Mendieta uses a silhouette to stand in for her own body, she also circumnavigates the site's labyrinthian architecture with a handheld camera, anticipating later works.

Energy Charge, a silent 16 mm film from 1975, evokes an avatar of Laberinth Blood Imprint, by featuring a figure with upraised arms emerging from a dark landscape which transforms into a bright red silueta shape before vanishing, the polarizing color recalling its memory. Two more films, each from the Silueta Series, are additionally sanguine in nature. Silueta Sangrienta, made in Iowa City in 1975, shows the artist naked and face up with uplifted arms in the excavated earth, which is later emptied, then re-filled with red pigmented liquid, in which she lies face down and partially submerged. Untitled: Silueta Series, 1978, filmed at Old Man’s Creek, Iowa, introduces the element of fire, showing hands created from clay emerging from a tree trunk which then becomes engulfed with rising flames. Silueta de Arena, 1978, depicts a silueta emerging from the shallow waters of a riverbank, forming an island unto itself.

On the second floor, the suite of color photographs, Body Tracks, 1974, traces an early action documented in Iowa prior to Mendieta’s move into nature. Here Ana Mendieta uses tempera to create imprints of her hands, repeated through a performative gesture of kneeling and dragging her red hands down to create markings in two parallel tracks on pink fabric.

In Grass Breathing, made in Iowa in 1975, Ana Mendieta becomes one with the earth, positioning herself beneath a mound of earthen sod in a meadow, inhaling and exhaling, the movement of her body causing the grassy verdant mound to rise and fall, then rest.

Upcoming solo exhibitions include a significant retrospective at the Tate Modern opening in July 2026 that will feature many important works, along with newly remastered films, early paintings, and late sculptural pieces, many of which will make their U.K. debut.

Ana Mendieta’s work has been exhibited in important solo exhibitions and museum retrospectives; exhibitions include those at MUSAC, León, Spain (2024); SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, Brazil (2023); Baltimore Museum Of Art, Baltimore, Maryland (2020); Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2019); Middleheim Museum, Antwerp, Belgium (2019); Institute for Contemporary Art, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (2018); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany (2018); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California (2016) The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel (2014); Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, United Kingdom (2013); Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (2013); Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (2011); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2004); Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2004); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California (1998); Helsinki City Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland (1996); Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (1996); New Museum, New York, New York (1987).

Ana Mendieta received many prestigious awards in her lifetime, including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1977 and 1980) and Fellowship (1982); Creative Arts Program Services Grant, New York Foundation for the Arts (1979); John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1980); New York State Council on the Arts Grant (1982); Rome Prize, American Academy in Rome (1983); Award in the Visual Arts, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Salem, North Carolina (1984). A Visual Arts Lifetime Achievement Award was posthumously bestowed by The Cintas Foundation, New York in 2009.

A catalogue will be published on occasion of the exhibition and released in early 2026. Pre-orders will be available online and in the gallery.

MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY

385 Broadway, New York, NY 10013 

www.mariangoodman.com

Ana Mendieta: Back to the Source 

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 7 November 2025 - 17 January 2026

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

To define a feeling 

Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965 

Curated by Sarah Roberts 

David Zwirner, New York 

November 6 — December 13, 2025 

Joan Mitchell 

Untitled, c. 1963 

© Estate of Joan Mitchell

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

—Joan Mitchell in ARTnews, April 1965

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

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

As Sarah Roberts notes of the exhibition:

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

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

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

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

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

Artist Joan Mitchell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DAVID ZWIRNER

537 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.davidzwirner.com

Uman @ Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield - 'After all the things …' Exhibition

Uman: After all the things …

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

October 19, 2025 - May 10, 2026

Uman 

melancholia in a snowy walk, 2025

© Uman

Courtesy of the artist, Nicola Vassell Gallery and Hauser & Wirth 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents Uman’s first institutional solo exhibition, After all the things …, where she debuts a new body of work that includes paintings, works on paper, video, and sculpture, all of which span the entirety of the Museum’s first floor galleries. The exhibition is on view at The Aldrich through May 10, 2026.

Uman’s practice is interdisciplinary and ever-evolving. Comprising painting, drawing, murals, mosaic, sculpture, and glass, her work is rooted in the tangibility of color and the transportive power of images. Shaped by memories, dreams, and the constant flux of life around her, Uman’s visual language is intuitive and multilayered, adaptable and free; it is neither exclusively abstract nor metaphorical—it grows out of what is indeterminate and into the transcendent. Uman’s inspirations range from her childhood in East Africa and diasporic experiences in Europe and the US, to a love for textiles and transcontinental fashion. Her subject matter evokes the flamboyant fabrics worn by women in the Somali bazaars, the slanted flourishes of Arabic calligraphy taught in the madrasas, and the vast countryside of Kenya and Upstate New York.

Created with oil, acrylic, spray paint, oil stick, and even sometimes incorporating elements of collage and sewing as well, Uman’s compositions dance with animated hues and phantasmagoric patterns. She favors solid and bold colors—reds, yellows, greens, and blues—that she uses to create spirals, grids, and pendants, all-seeing eyes, circles and stars, interspersed with whimsical creatures and native botany. Working on many pieces simultaneously, Uman builds her pictorial arrangements—many of which reference nineteenth-century French painting, surrealism, and visionary abstraction alongside the natural world—with energetic mark making methods, using dry brushes and even her fingers and palms, resulting in surface treatments that disrupt the conventional distinction between paintings and drawing. Fusing art history with autobiography and spirituality with reality, Uman’s work pursues the metaphorical through a close attention to, and reverence for, the natural world. 

A publication, co-published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., accompanies the exhibition, featuring an essay by the curator, images of the works on view, and installation images.

Artist Uman

Born in Somalia, Uman was raised in Kenya before migrating to Denmark as a teenager and later to New York in her early adulthood. Reflecting her experiences growing up across continents and cultures, her vibrant visual vocabulary draws upon memories of her East African childhood, rigorous education in traditional Arabic calligraphy, deep engagement with dreams, and fascination with kaleidoscopic color. In 2010, she relocated to Upstate New York, where she currently lives and works.

Uman has had solo exhibitions at Nicola Vassell, New York; Hauser & Wirth, London and Zurich; Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens; Fierman, New York; Anne De Villepoix, Paris; and White Columns, New York. She has been featured in group exhibitions at Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, Canada; For-Site Foundation at Fort Mason Chapel, San Francisco; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Karma, New York; and Ramiken Crucible, New York. In 2022, she was the recipient of the inaugural grant for The Cube at TRIADIC’s FORMAT Festival in Bentonville, AR. This year, her work is exhibited at the 12th SITE SANTA FE International. 

The exhibition at The Aldrich will be followed by a survey at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College. A public program related to both exhibitions will be presented at the Hessel in 2026.

Uman: After all the things … is organized by Amy Smith-Stewart, Diana Bowes Chief Curator.

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877 

www.thealdrich.org

Isaac Tin Wei Lin @ Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia - 'Intertwined Infinities' Exhibition

Isaac Tin Wei Lin 

Intertwined Infinities 

Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia 

November 20, 2025 — January 17, 2026 

Isaac Tin Wei Lin 

Intertwined Infinities, 2025 

Flashe and acrylic gouache on linen 

16 ⅛ × 12 ½ in (41 × 31.8 cm), ILI 662

© Isaac Tin Wei Lin, courtesy of Fleisher/Ollman

Fleisher/Ollman presents Intertwined Infinities, a solo exhibition with Isaac Tin Wei Lin featuring paintings on paper, panel, and canvas; and drawings on paper and photographs. Lin continues his ongoing exploration of how calligraphic gestures can be melded with abstract elements like lattices, biomorphs, and op-art shapes. A new theme in his work are images of tentacle and vine forms that appear part animal part plant. Lin’s paintings often reference patterns and structures found in nature bringing to mind single cellular organisms, plants, DNA helices, and clouds. Lin’s abstraction can also transcend the terrestrial and the somatic and move outward into the cosmos where constellations pulsate with colorful vibrancy and alien life forms sprout from strange vases and egg-like sacs. While Lin’s practice is distinctly his own, his work nonetheless resonates with the history of 20th century abstraction by artists such as Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, and Bradley Walker Tomlin; and the extreme patterning of contemporary artists like Barry McGee and Andrew Jeffrey Wright.

Lin’s play between the earthly and the cosmic might be the fruit of his 2025 residency at Oreum on the volcanic island of Jeju, South Korea. This unusual setting allowed for a new experience where he engaged with the wonders of a primordial landscape that evoke both the origins of our planet and the universe itself. The drawings on photographs on view in the exhibition depict the otherworldly lava rock formations on Jeju as well as other sites he visited while traveling in Asia. The Oreum residency was a much needed respite from a period in Lin’s life marked by alienation and doubt, where he found time to make paintings that he views as “meditations on absence, temporality, gravity and the fabric of space, emptiness and fullness—how both can seem the same.”

Isaac Tin Wei Lin (b. 1976; lives and works Philadelphia, PA) has had solo exhibitions at Temple Contemporary, the Asian Arts Initiative, the Print Center, Fleisher/Ollman, and Gallery 543 at URBN (all in Philadelphia); Park Life, Queen’s Nails Annex, Woodward Flats, RVCA, and Needles and Pens (all in San Francisco); and Lamp Harajuku, Tokyo. Isaac Tin Wei Lin participated with the DFW collective in Arts Le Havre, 2012 Contemporary Art Biennial, France. He has been featured in group exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, Fleisher/Ollman, Painted Bride Arts Center, and the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art (all in Philadelphia); the Hole, Bravin Lee, and Franklin Parrasch (all in New York); MASS Gallery, Austin; Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Somerset House, London, UK; and Scooters for Peace, Tokyo, among others. Isaac Tin Wei Lin has been commissioned to paint several large-scale murals, including three through Mural Arts Philadelphia; a multi-story stairway mural for Facebook's headquarters in San Francisco; and a thirteen-story mural in Heerlen, the Netherlands, commissioned by Stichting Street Art Foundation. His work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum, and the Free Library of Philadelphia. Isaac Tin Wei Lin was a resident at Oreum, Jeju Island, South Korea in 2025.

FLEISHER/OLLMAN

915 Spring Garden Street, Philadelphia PA 19123

www.fleisher-ollmangallery.com

Li Songsong @ Pace Gallery, NYC - 'History Painting' Exhibition

Li Songsong: History Painting

Pace Gallery, New York

November 7 - December 20, 2025

Li Songsong 

Revolution, 2025

© Li Songsong, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents History Painting, an exhibition of new paintings by the Beijing-based artist Li Songsong, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Showcasing a selection of paintings created this year, the presentation spotlights Li’s enduring engagement with history as both inspiration and substance for his work. History Painting is accompanied by an exhibition booklet from Pace Publishing featuring an essay by the gallery’s Curatorial Director, Xin Wang.

One of the most celebrated contemporary painters in China, Li Songsong has honed his distinct style—marked by his use of reliefs, bold brushstrokes, and solid color blocks—over the last 20 years as part of his pursuit “to paint something that had a certain distance from reality,” as he once put it. Contending with history, politics, and culture, Li’s art is forged in enactments of accumulation and subtraction, of exposure and obscuration. At once personal, imaginative, and truthful, his deeply expressionistic paintings often depict fragmented, semi-abstract figurations underpinned by narratives that the viewer is invited to decipher and absorb.

Over the last several decades, the artist has deconstructed and reconstructed recognizable images from newspapers, films, historical photographs, and other media, reinterpreting them through the lens of his own experiences and memories while also creating new textural dimensions within his works. In abstracting images from their original contexts, Li Songsong has cultivated a unique visual language that asks viewers to see the world in new terms—from a different aesthetic perspective.

“History has always been a prime substance, if not subject, throughout Li’s practice, and the artist works with it not as evidence, but as symptom and pathos,” Xin Wang writes in her new text for the artist’s  show. “It is not so jarring, then, that in his recent series explicitly titled History and Past, representational content has given way to the visceral and relational.”

In his presentation with Pace in New York, the artist, who has been represented by the gallery since 2009, shows new paintings from his body of work titled History, which he began in 2023. Entirely abstract, these paintings, all of which are square in format, can be understood as portraits of his ever-evolving relationship to the medium.

“This new group of works has lost its reliance on visual sources,” Li Songsong says. “I simply let the language extracted from (painterly) practice become the protagonist and construct a historical metaphor in the form of ‘painting.’”

Building up his compositions in grids as part of his process, Li Songsong uses color to express his state of mind at the moment the paint meets the surface of his canvases. He sees each of his brushstrokes as agentive and idiosyncratic, indelible and eternal even as they are folded ever deeper into the painterly layers and recesses of his works.

Li Songsong’s paintings animate the fragmentary nature of images and memory, paying particular attention to the people, events, and themes of modern and contemporary Chinese history. Li is interested in the way images cultivate histories and provoke memories, even if their relationship or reference to the past is nebulous and indirect. Although his compositions draw on found imagery—with a range of sources including restaurant advertisements, historical photographs, and movie stills, among others—Li freely reinterprets his sources, altering or omitting visual information. The resulting works eschew narratives, presenting pieces and traces of something rather than a totalizing record, creating new ways of looking at existing information.

PACE

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Portia Zvavahera @ David Zwirner, Los Angeles - 'Zvibereko zvemweya wangu' Exhibition

Portia Zvavahera

Zvibereko zvemweya wangu

David Zwirner, Los Angeles

November 14, 2025 – February 7, 2026

Portia Zvavahera

Takasunungurwa, 2025 

© Portia Zvavahera. Courtesy Stevenson and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents Zvibereko zvemweya wangu, its third solo exhibition with the Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera. Taking place at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles, this presentation features a series of new works that continues to develop Zvavahera’s experiments with different painting processes and subject matter by joining her carefully charted dream worlds with her lived experience and daily rituals. Portia Zvavahera expands her practice with familiar motifs and narratives; her works are populated by symbolic creatures that become powerful conduits for the interpretation of spiritual visions and the contemplation of our earthly existence. 

In her paintings, Portia Zvavahera gives form to emotions beyond the domains of everyday life and thought. Her vivid imagery is rooted in the cornerstones of our earthly existence—life and death, pain and pleasure, isolation and connection, and love and loss. These deeply personal visions are realized through layers of vibrant color and ornate, veil-like patterns that the artist builds up into palimpsestic surfaces through a combination of expressive brushwork and elaborate printmaking techniques. Zvavahera’s compositions draw on particular traditions of figuration in past and present Zimbabwe, first expressed in the work of Thomas Mukarobgwa in the 1960s, while also pointing to postwar artistic practices that probe the nature of the human condition.

Zvavahera’s latest exhibition powerfully continues this exploration of the human condition. Themes of love, loss, fear, family, and protection recur throughout this new series of paintings, mirroring her broader practice. The show title Zvibereko zvemweya wangu loosely translates from Shona as the “fruits of my soul,” aptly describing the intense creative output behind these works. These monumental paintings are among her most energetic to date, deeply inspired by her love for family and, particularly, the passing of her late grandmother. Here, Portia Zvavahera resumes her study of dreamscapes, delving into subject matter that women, especially mothers, have experienced across time. She strips away the protective veneer of modern society, exposing core emotions that relate to the profundity of life and death. Incorporating new motifs like vessels, trees, water lilies, and snakes, Zvavahera’s paintings guide viewers on journeys, telling abstracted stories about the strength within the maternal and matriarchal world, where reality and imagination merge.

Shona is the artist’s native language, which she speaks at home; titles in Shona are provided with a translation only when Portia Zvavahera feels that the English words suffice. Experimenting with batik and block printing, oil sticks, and acrylic paints, Zvavahera's canvases are applied with layers, and then, like dreams, unfold into camouflaged compositions rich in symbolism and psychological depth. Within Zvibereko zvemweya wangu, Portia Zvavahera portrays small figures, children unbound by the canvas and surrounded by protecting arms and feathered veils painted with leaves, using a traditional wax-resist batik method, in works such as Kubuditswa muhari (2025). Others like Kubudiswa (redeemed) (2025) show a series of bowing figures—a community seemingly praying as a form of collective strength, demonstrating their power in numbers.

Artist Portia Zvavahera

Portia Zvavahera was born in 1985 in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she currently lives and works. She studied at the BAT Visual Arts Studio, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, from 2003 to 2005. She then received a diploma in fine arts from Harare Polytechnic in 2006.

Portia Ndakaoneswa murima, the artist’s first solo presentation in New York and her second with the gallery, was on view at David Zwirner, New York, in 2021. Zvavahera’s first exhibition with the gallery, Ndakavata pasi ndikamutswa nekuti anonditsigira, was at its London location in 2020.

The artist has presented several solo exhibitions with Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg (2014–2020), and a solo exhibition with Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles (2017). The National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, presented her solo exhibition Under My Skin in 2010, and in 2020, the Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean, Port Louis, Mauritius, held her solo exhibition Walk of Life. She was invited to show her work as part of the Zimbabwean Pavilion exhibition Dudziro: Interrogating the Visions of Religious Beliefs at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. In 2022, her work was included in the 59th Venice Biennale.

In 2024, Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, England, presented Portia Zvakazarurwa, a solo exhibition of the artist’s work organized in collaboration with Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, where the show traveled in 2025. Curated by Tamar Garb, this exhibition marked Zvavahera’s first solo institutional presentation in the United Kingdom. Also in 2024, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, presented Imba yerumbidzo (House of praise), as the fifteenth iteration of its Open Space solo exhibition series. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, opened Hidden Battles / Hondo dzakavanzika, Zvavahera's first institutional solo exhibition in the United States, in August 2025. The artist also opened her first solo institutional exhibition in Germany at Fridericianum, Kassel, on September 27, 2025.

DAVID ZWIRNER LOS ANGELES

616 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA

www.davidzwirner.com

R. Crumb @ David Zwirner, Los Angeles - 'Tales of Paranoia' Exhibition

R. Crumb: Tales of Paranoia

David Zwirner, Los Angeles

October 10, 2025 – January 10, 2026

Panel from R. Crumb, I'm Afraid, 2025

© Robert Crumb, 2025 

Courtesy the artist, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of new drawings and prints by iconic illustrator and cartoonist R. Crumb (b. 1943), on view at the gallery’s 616 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. In his works of the last several years Crumb reflects on life in his eighties and his sixty-year career as well as themes of personal and mass paranoia during these times of social and political unrest. Crumb’s most mordant attacks are, as always, reserved for himself and show him contending with his own manic anxieties in a humorous and insightful manner.

The new works in this exhibition represent Crumb’s first extensive solo comic work in over two decades, marking an impressive late-career resurgence. Many of these incisive, introspective, and formally adventurous illustrations were made for the artist’s publication, Tales of Paranoia. This new comic book—Crumb’s first in twenty-three years—was published this month by Fantagraphics. Created in the wake of the 2022 passing of Crumb’s wife and longtime artistic partner, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, these works reveal a mind turning inward without its usual counterpoint—absent her grounding presence, the work veers further into obsessive, unfiltered reflection. As Crumb noted in 2019, “Success and the love of real women helped me a lot. Aline really saved my dismal ass.” [1] Crumb and Kominsky-Crumb had frequently collaborated, particularly in the decade preceding her death, and her absence is felt directly in the content of these recent works.

While Crumb’s early work skewered both mainstream and countercultural figures with a hyper-libidinal, satirical edge, his recent drawings meditate on paranoia, particularly around medicine and disease. These works convey a heightened self-awareness, oscillating between genuine suspicion and conspiracy; they incisively mirror a broader culture of mistrust of authority and the erosion of shared meaning and reliable information in the world today. In A Difficult Conundrum (2025), each panel depicts an increasingly agitated Crumb, his speech bubbles multiplying in a spiraling monologue directed against a pharmaceutical company. Through the familiar conventions of the comic form, Crumb constructs a self-portrait steeped in uncertainty and vulnerability. In other works he revisits his past, exploring difficult and disturbing moments that continue to affect him. As the title suggests, The Very Worst LSD I Ever Had (2025) documents a harrowing acid trip that Crumb experienced in 1966, which led him to seek several sessions of regressive hypnosis.

Also on view is a rare sketchbook from earlier in Crumb’s career, which offers an intimate glimpse into Crumb’s process and preoccupations. Placed in dialogue with the recent drawings, it highlights not only the evolution of the artist’s style and tone but also the enduring idiosyncrasies—formal, psychological, and narrative—that continue to define his work. Numerous recent etchings Crumb produced in collaboration with the renowned print studio Two Palms, New York, are also featured.

Artist R. Crumb

Born in Philadelphia, R. Crumb (b. 1943) moved to the dynamic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco in 1967, and relocated in 1991 to the south of France, where he currently lives and works. Crumb joined David Zwirner in 2006. This is Crumb’s seventh solo exhibition with the David Zwirner gallery.

Solo exhibitions of Crumb’s work were presented at the Contemporary Art Galleries, University of Connecticut, Mansfield (2020), and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, California (2018). In 2016, the Cartoonmuseum Basel organized Aline Kominsky-Crumb & Robert Crumb: Drawn Together, the first comprehensive museum presentation of the artists’ joint work. A retrospective of Crumb’s work was held in 2012 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 2011, his work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators, New York. A major solo show devoted to Crumb’s work was organized by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, in 2007, and traveled from 2008 to 2009 to the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston; and the Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, California. Other solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have been organized by the Whitechapel Gallery, London, a show that traveled to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (both 2005); and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2004). Terry Zwigoff’s documentary Crumb was named the best film of 1994 by the late critic Gene Siskel and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995

Work by the artist is represented in major museum collections worldwide, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles; Musée régional d'art contemporain Occitanie, Sérignan, France; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

[1] Nadja Sayej, “Robert Crumb: ‘I am no longer a slave to a raging libido’,” The Guardian, March 7, 2019. Accessed online.

DAVID ZWIRNER, LOS ANGELES

616 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA

www.davidzwirner.com

Clare Grill @ Derek Eller Gallery, NYC - 'Parlance' Exhibition - Text by Mark Krotov

Clare Grill: Parlance

Derek Eller Gallery, New York 

October 17 – November 15, 2025

Clare Grill

Flit, 2025 

Oil on linen, 46 x 42 inches

© Clare Grill, courtesy Derek Eller Gallery

Derek Eller Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by Clare Grill entitled Parlance.

Thick vertical lines hum close to the surface of Flit like folds in a translucent curtain. Toward the top of the painting, a faded orange circle hovers off to the right of a smaller, more emphatic version of the same. A sun and its ghost? A siren and its shadow? Clare Grill’s paintings are, among much else, documents of accretion, profoundly attuned to their own past lives and to the gestures that conveyed the work from there to here. These flickers and remnants of earlier work never disappear into the background—they linger, waiting for Grill to arrange them in pictorial space and activate them in the painting’s hierarchy.

For Grill, the background texture of a painting is as consequential as the marks and shapes that populate the foreground. “I care about the whole thing,” Grill says, down to the edge of the canvas, the corner where its face turns to become its side, which she attends to with her typically unwavering conscientiousness.

As Grill’s paintings evolve over months and sometimes years, she paints Signets, small works on paper that concentrate the most cherished elements of a work just before it’s transformed and repainted. Once Grill embarks on a new painting, she might return to some of these Signets, treating them as clues or leads—“more bits of information to collaborate with,” as she puts it. In this way, Grill’s artistic process itself becomes a key touchstone for her own work alongside other, more interior forms of inspiration.

The beautiful and disarming paintings in Parlance overflow with surprising juxtapositions of color and texture. They encourage infinite chains of association both stubbornly physical (the background of Flit as mesh or gauze, the possibility of a log and a stump in Lop) and mysterious and ethereal (autumn leaves drifting in a puddle, a sudden vision of the sky in Weld that one might confuse for a hole in the canvas). The surprising use of shadow in Flit calls to mind the blocky lettering on a midcentury movie poster, while the diaphanous simultaneity of shape and background in Dune is so enfolding that it can only refer to an emotion or a mood—to something total and all-consuming.

As pleasurable and open as these paintings are, they’re also dense with private references—words, letters, figures that might be words or letters. What registers at first glance as a constellation of stray components quickly coalesces into a parlance at once intimate and detectable to anyone willing to stop and look. Parlance is full of allusions to Grill’s great-grandmother’s shorthand writing, and to her young daughter’s invented “witch language” and her fake cursive, a pattern that possesses the fluid and halting quality of handwriting but isn’t actually writing—not quite. As with the traces of lettering Grill uncovers in antique embroidery samplers, these subterranean forms of writing exude meaning even as they resist definitive interpretation. Much like abstraction itself.

-- Text by Mark Krotov, 2025

Clare Grill (born 1979, lives and works in Queens, NY) received her MFA from the Pratt Institute in 2005 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include Cutwork, Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid, Spain; and Wich Language and Oyster, M+B, Los Angeles, CA.. Group exhibitions include Things I Had No Words For at the Center for the Arts, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Interisland (New Paintings from New York and Hawai'i), University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; Of Flesh and Air, Marta Cervera Gallery, Madrid, Spain; The Feminine in Abstract Painting, Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, NY; Deep! Down! Inside!, Hales Gallery, NY; and New Skin, curated by Jason Stopa, Monica King Gallery, New York, NY. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, ArtNews, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe. This is her third solo show with Derek Eller Gallery. 

Upcoming Exhibitions at Derek Eller Gallery:

Nancy Shaver, Bus Stop, November 21, 2025 - January 10, 2026

In the North Room: Karl Wirsum, Slideshow: Drawings from the Sixties, November 21, 2025 - January 10, 2026

DEREK ELLER GALLERY

38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.derekeller.com

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

The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion 

Adolph Gottlieb and Kim Whanki

Pace Gallery, Seoul

October 31, 2025 – January 10, 2026

Kim Whanki 

Untitled, 1967 

Oil on canvas, 177 x 127 cm 

© Whanki Foundation · Whanki Museum

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

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

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

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

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

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

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

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

Grace Weaver @ Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin - 'Mothers' Exhibition

Grace Weaver: Mothers

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

11 September – 29 November 2025

Grace Weaver 

Untitled (Madonna of the Pinks), 2025

Photo: def image

© Grace Weaver, courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler

Galerie Max Hetzler presents Mothers, an exhibition of new paintings by Grace Weaver at Goethestrasse 2/3. This marks the artist’s fifth solo presentation with the gallery, and her first in one of the Berlin spaces.

In her latest series, Grace Weaver turns to archetypal motifs, including the mother and child, and the female nude. For Weaver, the body is not just a subject but a site – a stage on which line is choreographed in lyrical gestures, and through which emotion comes to the fore. Despite their monumental scale, Weaver’s new works disclose humble subjects and tender sentiments.

Across a series of large square-format canvases, Weaver’s mothers pose in enveloping embraces: swaying, kneeling, or cradling children in their laps. Stretching five metres in length, two paintings present the mother and child in frieze-like proportions, drawing the viewer’s eye along their sweeping arcs. Along the gallery’s far wall, a grid of twenty-six smaller canvases unfolds a chorus of female figures in tender embrace – some nurturing children, others folding their arms around themselves in bowing stances reminiscent of Eve or Aphrodite, attempting to shield their nude bodies from the viewer’s gaze. By contrast, the mother and child paintings propose a triangularity of gazes: at times either mother or child stares outward, at others they remain locked in one another’s gaze. Elongated, curving necks recall the postures of Weaver’s ‘Flowers’ series (2024). As in this earlier body of work, Weaver’s central motif is recognisable, and yet drifts towards abstraction; limbs taper into space, and abbreviated lines merely suggest garments or contours. Whether in flowers or figures, Weaver’s primary subject seems to be posture itself, used as a means to convey subtleties of mood.

Grace Weaver paints on the floor, using an all-over fresco-like process. Over a base of black, she applies watery matte washes of paint with over-sized brushes. Working wet-on-wet, the artist paints ‘in the round’, moving around the canvas as though executing a dance of deliberate, curving gestures. The saturated canvas becomes a responsive ground, absorbing each mark and resisting revision. Lines rhyme and harmonise. Surrounding the figure’s arcing outlines, haptic drips from Weaver’s overloaded brush register her movements, bringing the immediacy of drawing into painting. Grace Weaver prepares for each painting in successive ballpoint pen sketches, reducing figures to a few essential lines, so that the final act of painting proceeds in a determined choreography. The painting’s palettes – inky cobalts, pale pastels and papery cream tones – recall the materials of drawing.

Weaver’s investigation of the mother and child motif began in sketches of a diminutive fifth-century BCE Boeotian terracotta figurine of a woman nursing a young child, inspired by its formal abstraction and emotive reality. As she developed the series, references multiplied, with subsequent works drawing from Cranach’s Madonnas, with their crimped coiffure and rubbery anatomy. Throughout, Grace Weaver cites poses from Cypriot sandstone figurines, Netherlandish altarpieces, Egyptian statuettes of Isis and Horus, Orthodox Marian icons, and countless ancient Greek ‘kourotrophoi.’ Despite the breadth of influences, in their immediacy, Weaver’s paintings step outside of the specificities of time, space and allegory. Unadorned and close, they speak not of divine authority but of physical intimacy, vulnerability and a rare looseness of posture and presence.

Grace Weaver’s work is also on view as part of a joint exhibition with Günther Förg at Galerie Max Hetzler | Salon in Athens through 8 November 2025.

GRACE WEAVER (b. 1989, Vermont) lives and works in New York and Berlin. Solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have been held in international institutions including Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Neues Museum Nürnberg (both 2023–2024); Oldenburger Kunstverein; Kunstpalais Erlangen (both 2019); Kunstverein Reutlingen (2017); and DakshinaChitra, Chennai (2012). Weaver’s work has also been exhibited in group exhibitions including Oldenburger Kunstverein (2025); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2023); Braunsfelder, Cologne; Wilhelm Hallen, Berlin; Miettinen Collection, Berlin; Neue Galerie, Gladbeck; Villa Merkel, Esslingen (all 2022); Kunstmuseum Ravensburg (2021); Galerie Wedding, Berlin (2018); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum (2016); University of Georgia (2015); Burlington City Arts (2013); Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, Burlington (2012); Colburn Gallery, University of Vermont, Burlington (2011); and Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne (2010).

GALERIE MAX HETZLER

Goethestrasse 2/3, 10623 Berlin

www.maxhetzler.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