Nadia Kaabi-Linke @ Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami - "We Didn’t Know We’re Ready" Exhibition

Nadia Kaabi-Linke

We Didn’t Know We’re Ready

Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami

Through August 30, 2025

Nadia Kaabi-Linke

Fatima, 2010

© Nadia Kaabi-Linke, courtesy of Piero Atchugarry Gallery

Piero Atchugarry Gallery presents We Didn’t Know W'e’re Ready by Tunisian artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke curated by Silvia Cirelli. The expressive journey of Kaabi-Linke delves into the complexities of human nature revealing an “architecture of pain” marked interdependent power dynamics and the struggles of mankind's vulnerability. Her work shows how people are affected by power, memory, and vulnerability. Memory is central to her work — it's the starting point for telling both personal and collective stories. Her artworks act like emotional records, helping us understand hidden parts of our culture today.

The title chosen for Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s Miami debut solo exhibition goes exactly in this direction, it is an invitation to encompass time fluidity, to better understand the evolutionary codes of our living. We Didn’t Know We’re Ready, deliberately embraces a grammatical slip, blending verb tenses to highlight the constant convergence of yesterday and today. This temporal dissonance becomes a conceptual tool, a transversal narrative that invites a comprehensive reading, where each artwork acts as an emotional archive, a mosaic of confessions that reflects and translates the codes of contemporary culture. It is on this metaphorical bridge between past and present that the artist projects her own cultural space.

The complex relationship between artistic research and historical testimony unfolds through the evocative installation Blindstrom for Kazimir, inspired by Kazimir Malevich, a Ukrainian artist often wrongly labeled as Russian. Like many Ukrainian artists, Malevich suffered censorship. Nadia Kaabi-Linke honors these artists with black panels that represent missing or destroyed paintings, showing the damage caused by political violence. Cracks in the panels resemble wounds, revealing a deep sense of loss.

Another work, No One Harms Me Unpunished (2012), is based on a Scottish legend. A Viking raid was stopped when a warrior stepped on a thistle and cried out in pain, warning the locals. The thistle became a symbol of resistance. Nadia Kaabi-Linke places real thistles on a mattress frame, symbolizing the pain and abuse that are often hidden in everyday life, especially in intimate spaces.

In Protected Area (2025), a bench covered with sharp bird spikes makes it impossible to sit. What’s usually a place to rest becomes unwelcoming. This sculpture speaks about how public spaces are becoming more exclusive and less inviting, highlighting issues of social exclusion.

Tackling issues related to geopolitics, migration, identities and violence, Nadia Kaabi-Linke captures the collective memory and offers it to the viewer, urging them to share and participate in the emotion. An emotion that exposes a silent suffering. “The invisible violence, present or past, is active even if we don’t see it or decide to look away from it,” she states, “but like the unconscious, sooner or later the covered truth will come up to the surface and be acted out while controlling us simultaneously.”

Nadia Kaabi-Linke Portrait, 2020

Courtesy of Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami

NADIA KAABI-LINKE (b. 1978, Tunis) is a multimedia conceptual artist based in Berlin. After graduating with an MA from the Tunis School of Fine Arts, she received a PhD from the Pantheon Sorbonne in Paris. Growing up between Tunis, Kyiv, and Dubai, her personal history developed through the migration across cultures and borders that greatly influenced her artistic practice. Her work gives physical presence to that which tends to remain invisible in contemporary societies, be it people, structures, or the geopolitical forces that shape them. In a visually powerful way, she straddles beauty and violence, refinement and brutality, as well as the sublime and the vulgar, engaging the viewer in the play of conflicting forces of fear and attraction, repulsion and desire.

PIERO ATCHUGARRY GALLERY, MIAMI

5520 NE 4th Avenue, Miami, FL 33137

pieroatchugarry.com

Nadia Kaabi-Linke: We Didn’t Know We’re Ready

Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami, June 14 - August 30, 2025

Keith Tyson: Universal Symphony @ Serlachius Museum, Mäntä

Keith Tyson: Universal Symphony

Serlachius Museum, Mäntä

Through 26 October 2025

KEITH TYSON

Installation view from the exhibition

Universal Symphony

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

KEITH TYSON

Installation view from the exhibition

Universal Symphony

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

KEITH TYSON

Installation view from the exhibition

Universal Symphony

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

In the art of British artist Keith Tyson, everything is surprisingly interconnected and without hierarchy. This is also indicated by the name of his exhibition, Universal Symphony.

Defining KEITH TYSON (b. 1969) as an artist is challenging, as he is not interested in recognisable style or self-expression. He has always been fascinated by the interstices between art, science and technology, how things are connected and how one thing leads to another. 

In his works, Tyson examines the different forces, relationships and processes we use to understand the world and through which things and phenomena gain meaning. These include, for example, various physical and chemical chains of events, language models and algorithms used by artificial intelligence, and the latest achievements in quantum physics, but also poetry and mythology.

KEITH TYSON

Installation view from the exhibition

Universal Symphony

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

KEITH TYSON

16m3 of Ocean (Atlantic), 2024

Courtesy the artist

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

KEITH TYSON

16m3 of Ocean (Atlantic), 2024 (detail)

Courtesy the artist

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

According to the exhibition’s curator, Timo Valjakka, Keith Tyson sees art as an attempt to express what cannot be conveyed in other ways. His works are based on knowledge and emotion as well as on the viewer’s experience in front of them. One example of this is the monumental 16m3 of Ocean (Atlantic), 2024. The bronze sculpture is an accurate representation not only of the surface of the ocean, but also of its mass.

Majority of the works in the exhibition are new and on display for the first time. They are placed in context by a number of earlier works. Four of them were implemented with the help of the Art Machine, developed by Keith Tyson in the 1990s, and challenge us to consider the relationship between humans and machines. 

Art Machine is a set of algorithms programmed into a computer. When the Art Machine processes the material fed to it according to the given conditions, it produces a set of instructions for Tyson to implement the artwork. The instructions include the subject of the work, dimensions, materials and other parameters required at any given time. 

KEITH TYSON

Installation view from the exhibition

Universal Symphony

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

KEITH TYSON

Nature Painting (Deep Impact), 2010

Courtesy of the artist

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

The large-scale Nature Painting (Deep Impact), 2010, on the other hand, was created as a result of the combined effects of gravity, fluid dynamics and chemical reactions. In doing so, Keith Tyson relinquished almost all control of the process and let the chemicals carve out their own paths. He calls the work a nature painting because it is not an image of nature, but a manifestation of the forces that shape nature.

KEITH TYSON

Scholar's Stonei, 2023

Patined bronze

Courtesy of the artist

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

KEITH TYSON

Dark Sundial, 2024

Bronze, stainless steel, electronic guidance,

motor, stone plinth

Courtesy of the artist

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

On display in the Serlachius Manor’s Park is the kinetic sculpture Dark Sundial (2024), where Keith Tyson has replaced the traditional worldview represented by a sundial with an incomparably larger one. The long index finger of the stylised human figure shows us at every moment where the massive black hole Sagittarius A* is in the centre of the Milky Way. It is 27,000 light-years from Mänttä.

ARTIST KEITH TYSON

After his early studies in engineering, Keith Tyson pursued art at Carlisle College of Art in 1989 and at the University of Brighton from 1990 to 1993. He held his first solo exhibitions in London and New York in 1996.

Keith Tyson has held numerous solo exhibitions and participated in group shows in museums and galleries across various countries in Europe, Asia, Australia, North and South America, and South Africa. He has also taken part in the Berlin and Venice Biennale in 2001 and the São Paulo Biennale in 2002. In 2002, he was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize. He was named an Honorary Doctor of the University of Brighton in 2005.

Curator of the exhibition: Timo Valjakka

SERLACHIUS MUSEUM

Serlachius Manor, Joenniementie 47, Mäntä

serlachius.fi

Keith Tyson: Universal Symphony 

Serlachius Museum, Mäntä, 24 May – 26 October 2025

Sophie Calle @ Galerie Perrotin, Paris - Exposition "Catalogue raisonné de l’inachevé. SÉANCE DE RATTRAPAGE"

Sophie Calle

Catalogue raisonné de l’inachevé

SÉANCE DE RATTRAPAGE

Galerie Perrotin, Paris

26 avril - 24 mai 2025

Please scroll down for English Version

« En 2023, pour une exposition intitulée “À toi de faire, ma mignonne”, j’ai investi le musée Picasso.

Le Catalogue raisonné de l’inachevé occupait le dernier étage.

J’avais commencé par dresser la liste de tous les projets réalisés depuis mes débuts, afin d’établir une sorte de bilan de ma vie professionnelle.

Puis, je me suis demandé ce qu’il adviendrait, quand ma vie s’interromprait, des idées qui piétinent, qui attendent leur heure dans des tiroirs, des boîtes… des cercueils?

J’ai donc décidé d’inventorier et d’analyser les ébauches, les tentatives, les abandons.

Donner vie aux intentions. Achever l’inachevé.

Seulement, soit il y avait trop à lire dans les trois premiers étages, soit le musée allait fermer, et certains visiteurs ne sont jamais parvenus au quatrième.

C’est pourquoi j’ai souhaité organiser à la galerie Perrotin Paris, une séance de rattrapage. Sophie Calle  

“In 2023, for an exhibition entitled ‘À toi de faire ma mignonne’, I took over Picasso museum.

The project Catalogue raisonné de l’inachevé occupied the top floor.

I began by listing all the projects I had completed since the start of my career—taking stock of my professional life.

Then I asked myself: What happens, when life ends, to the ideas that remain dormant—languishing in drawers, boxes…and coffins?

So I decided to inventory and analyze the sketches, the attempts, the abandonments.

To give life to intentions. To finish the unfinished.

However, either there was too much to read on the first three floors or the museum was about to close—but some visitors never made it to the fourth floor.

That’s why I wanted to organize a catch-up session at Perrotin Paris.” Sophie Calle 

GALERIE PERROTIN PARIS

76 rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris

perrotin.com

Terry Atkinson @ Galleria Six, Milan

Terry Atkinson

Galleria Six, Milan

12 April - 14 June 2025

TERRY ATKINSON

FRONTISPIECE

© Terry  Atkinson

Courtesy of Galleria Six, Milan

Galleria Six presents a solo exhibition by TERRY ATKINSON.

For his third exhibition at Galleria Six, a new cycle of works entitled FRONTISPIECE is presented and exhibited together with Terry Atkinson's works from the late 1970s and 1980s. A dialogue between a present and a past that comes alive again.

The initial elements of the new series of works, which is still ongoing, are two books. The first is From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics by Quentin Skinner, published in 2018. The second is Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, published in 1964. 

These two stimuli are quickly followed by a third, triggered by the fact that Terry Atkinson introduced a portrait of himself from 1964 as a recurring motif in some of the works in the series. 

"The works are a mix of certain what I consider to be relevant words and images relevant to the task in hand. The words are frontispiece, portal, threshold, hubris, and maybe some others to come as the series move on. The images , thus far, are photocopies of my two daughters when they were young on a visit to German concentration camp at Natzwiller-Struthof  in the Vosges, images from Goya, a portrait of myself, Hobbes’ frontispiece for Leviathan, and a number of other images.

I attempt to construct the works not least through resonating the words inscribed on the tableaux  - Portal, something you see through or view from; Threshold, something you cross; Hubris – in this case an attempt to maneouvre the concept of the artist as an extreme self-assured projection, the model of the artist as a self-confirming centre of truth.  And so on …"

Terry Atkinson April 2nd, 2025

TERRY ATKINSON (1939, Thurnscoe, UK). Lives and works in Leamington Spa. An English visual artist and theorist, in his long career he has challenged the traditional conception of aesthetics in art, criticising the conventions of artistic production and fruition. 

‘If the work I have made over the last 40 years,’ says Terry Atkinson, ’has one characteristic that runs through it, it is a concern to make a critique of art rather than a celebration of it.

After studying at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, he emigrated to New York in 1967 where he met minimalist, conceptual and land artists such as Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, Carl Andre and Robert Smithson. In 1968 he founded the conceptual collective Art & Language together with Michael Baldwin, Harold Hurrell and David Bainbridge, together they exhibited at documenta 5 (1972) curated by Harald Szeemann. He left the group in 1974 to pursue a solo career. He exhibited in 1984 at the 41st Venice Art Biennale. In 1985 he was a finalist for the Turner Prize. 

GALLERIA SIX 

Piazzale Gabrio Piola, 5 - 20131 Milano 

www.galleriasix.it

Eeva-Riitta Eerola @ Helsinki Contemporary Gallery - "C" Exhibition

Eeva-Riitta Eerola: C

Helsinki Contemporary

11 April - 4 May 2025

Eeva-Riitta Eerola

Vessel (Garden) IV, 2025

Acrylic on canvas, 90 cm x 90 cm

Photo: Erno Enkenberg

Courtesy of Helsinki Contemporary

Eeva-Riitta Eerola

Vessel (Garden) III, 2025

Oil on acrylic on canvas, 46 cm x 50 cm

Photo: Erno Enkenberg

Courtesy of Helsinki Contemporary

EEVA-RIITTA EEROLAs paintings seem to materialize like apparitions, exuding effortless simplicity, but also a sense of potency. Echoing her desire to simplify, Eeva-Riitta Eerola has named her new exhibition after a single letter of the alphabet: C. This emblem can be read in many ways: as a visual symbol, as a phoneme, or even as a word. Visually, its shape both encloses and opens outwards, recalling the phase of the lunar cycle when the Moon is visible only as a narrow crescent. In ancient carvings, the map of the Garden of Eden is inscribed as a fertile crescent at the confluence of four rivers, or as a rounded vessel containing paradise.

Eeva-Riitta Eerola

Observer (Garden) III, 2025

Oil on acrylic on canvas, 42 cm x 33 cm

Photo: Erno Enkenberg

Courtesy of Helsinki Contemporary

Eeva-Riitta Eerola

Act (Garden) IV, 2025

Oil on acrylic on canvas, 50 cm x 80 cm

Photo: Erno Enkenberg

Courtesy of Helsinki Contemporary

Abstracted maps, streams and paths are among the prominent recurring elements in Eerola’s paintings, as are hands and eyes. The eye motif is significant in that the letter ‘C’ can represent the English verb ‘to see’, or its imperative form. Eerola’s paintings invite our gaze to roam and for us to immerse ourselves experientially. The eye and the hand can be interpreted as symbolizing the painting process: when painting is reduced to its basic essentials, the gaze and the manual gesture are the painter’s most important tools.

Eeva-Riitta Eerola’s paintings engage in close study of the way we humans experience images. She is interested in exploring painting’s ability to convey an experience of spatiality and presence. In her new exhibition, spatial experiences are conveyed through images of gardens. Eerola’s gardens are semi-abstract, however, representing more of a conceptual and symbolic space than a physical one.

Eeva-Riitta Eerola

Courtesy of Helsinki Contemporary

Eerola’s practice also reflects her interest in the history of painting. In the exhibition C, Eeva-Riitta Eerola has drawn inspiration from symbolism, an historic art movement that used symbolic images to suggest emotions and universal human experiences. She first became interested in symbolism after experiencing a death in her family as a teenager. What especially drew her to symbolism was its compelling manner of invoking death, life, continuity, finality and infinity. While preparing for this exhibition, Eeva-Riitta Eerola took inspiration from a beloved painting of her youth, The Garden of Death (1896) by Hugo Simberg, a small-scale depiction of skeletons tenderly caring for uncanny flowers in a garden situated somewhere between the living and the dead.

HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY

Bulevardi 10 - 00120 Helsinki

helsinkicontemporary.com

Bruce Nauman @ Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles - "Pasadena Years" Exhibition

Bruce Nauman

Pasadena Years

Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles 

19 February - 26 April 2025

From left to right: Bruce Nauman, Justine Nauman,

Marcia Tucker, and Nauman’s son, Erik, 1970

Photo courtesy Bruce Nauman / Marian Goodman Gallery

Marian Goodman Gallery presents its first solo exhibition with BRUCE NAUMAN. Pasadena Years is a historical reflection on the prolific decade that established one of the most important contemporary artists of our time. The exhibition emphasizes the radical foundation of Nauman’s practice while he lived in Los Angeles between 1969-79. Across the entire gallery and garden, works on view include sculptures, installations, sound works, videos, works on paper, and editions. Pasadena Years notably marks Nauman’s first exhibition in Los Angeles in over 30 years and includes Text for a Room, 1973-2025, a work that the artist recreated for the first time since its debut at his earliest retrospective, which originated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1972.

In 1969, Bruce Nauman arrived in Los Angeles at the age of 27 with his wife and son. Following his MFA from the University of California, Davis, and an NEA grant in Southhampton, New York, he subsequently relocated to Los Angeles for his small but notable community based there: his parents, his dealer, Nicholas Wilder, and his friends—Walter Hopps, Edward Kienholz, and Richard Jackson. He and his family lived for eight years in Hopps’s Pasadena house along with Jackson before moving to nearby Altadena. In 1972, Bruce Nauman was the subject of a retrospective coorganized by LACMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, which thereafter traveled extensively through Europe. As Jane Livingston, the LACMA curator who co-organized the retrospective with Marcia Tucker, described in 1972: “[Bruce] is not only ahead of his audience but ahead of himself.”

The 1960s in Southern California was an important period for conceptual art. The Ferus Gallery (1957-66), founded by Hopps and Kienholz, was largely focused on avant-garde work from the West Coast. In 1962, Hopps became the curator of the Pasadena Museum of Art, famously opening the first U.S. exhibition of Marcel Duchamp shortly thereafter. LACMA opened to the public three years later, in 1965. Within this decade, Light and Space, Finish Fetish, California pop art and assemblage movements had all simultaneously emerged. In 1966, while based in Northern California, Nauman had his first commercial solo exhibition at Nicholas Wilder Gallery (located up the block from Ferus), which contextualized him with the emergence of West Coast conceptualism. This development would help pave the way for a coming decade that would bring Nauman into relationships with other prominent LA-based artists such as Larry Bell, Vija Celmins, Maria Nordman, and Ed Ruscha.

This exhibition opens with works from 1968-69, highlighting a time when Bruce Nauman gained exposure in several significant group shows across Europe, including documenta (1968), When Attitudes Become Form (1969), and Anti-Illusion (1969). Performance Corridor, 1969, on loan from the Panza Collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, marks a crucial transformation in Nauman’s practice that focused on phenomenological explorations in space. Initially used by the artist as a set for a video piece, it was later exhibited in Anti-Illusion as an autonomous sculpture with a narrow walkway and dead end that leads viewers to imagine the physical constraints of engaging the object. This gesture would open up his practice to an era of thinking through a wide variety of room-sized and corridor-like structures that relate to the body, space, movement, and light. On one side of the Performance Corridor, rare performance instructions from 1968 are on view.

In dialogue with Performance Corridor, just across the gallery, is a selection of videos that grew out of Nauman’s activities in his studio. Revolving Upside Down, 1969, and Violin Tuned D.E.A.D., 1969, were both made in Pasadena and represent the breadth of his simple and persistent, action-as-material performances for video. Bruce Nauman, in his own words, considers these works an answer to “the fundamental question of what an artist does when left alone in the studio. My conclusion was that [if ] I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.”

On view in the garden, Dark (1968) is a 4’ x 4’ x 4” solid steel slab with the work “dark” written on the bottom. In 1968, Bruce Nauman proposed Dark to the Southwestern College of Chula Vista, CA Purchase Award Exhibition, and subsequently won. Once the acquisition was announced, students and faculty responded in outrage to the use of school funds for such an austere work, which led John Baldessari, an art faculty member at the time, to defend the work in a public lecture. A minimal tombstone meant to be displayed outdoors, the piece was included in Nauman’s 1972-74 retrospective tour throughout the United States and Europe, and recalls other other straightforward works by the artist that mentally confront viewers with the imaginative, abyssmal space of the elsewhere. Nearby, for Microphone/Tree Piece (1971), originally conceived for legendary Los Angeles art patrons Stanley and Elyse Grinstein, Nauman discreetly places a microphone into a pre-drilled hole upon a tree and amplifies the sound of the tree growing into the neighboring, interior lobby space of the gallery.

A gallery dedicated to Nauman’s text-based works presents early examples of his conceptual practice with linguistic play, propositions, and puns. During this period, Bruce Nauman began concurrently creating editions with Marian Goodman through her former art publishing company, Multiples, Inc. The two worked together on several works, including one on view: the artist book LAAir (1970), featuring spreads of color photographs the artist took of the city’s smog. In addition, a selection of his rare presstypes are on view, along with additional prints made with Gemini G.E.L. and Cirrus.

The Main Gallery is transformed into a rigid architectural setting that consists of two large works: Funnel Piece (Françoise Lambert Installation), 1971, and Text for a Room, 1973-2025.

Bruce Nauman originally designed Funnel Piece to physically wedge and occupy the entirety of a pre-existing room of a gallery in Milan. The floating walls are a variation on his corridor works that look at human physiology and how it shapes our perception of space. Text for a Room, recreated for the first time since its 1973 debut, includes a sheet of performance instructions at its narrow entryway; the viewer enters, prepared to execute an action, but is unaware of what will be encountered. The sensation echoes what Nauman would later reflect on in 1980: “the feeling that I had about a lot of that work was going up the stairs in the dark and either having an extra stair that you didn’t expect or not having one that you thought was going to be there—that kind of misstep that surprises you every time it happens.”

This exhibition was organized by Philipp Kaiser with Samantha Gregg of Marian Goodman Gallery, and in close collaboration with Bruce Nauman and his studio.

Bruce Nauman has been the focus of over 250 solo exhibitions, most recently at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2024); SITE Santa Fe, NM (2023); and Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana, Venice (2021-22). Recent retrospectives include those at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2022-23) and M Woods, Beijing (2022). An eponymous survey at Tate (2020) traveled to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2021), while Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts, a comprehensive retrospective, made its debut at Schaulager, Basel (2018) and then traveled to The Museum of Modern Art, New York and MoMA P.S.1 (201819). Notable awards include the Praemium Imperiale (2004) and the Frederick Kiesler Prize (2014) and the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (2009 and (1999).

MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY, LOS ANGELES

1120 Seward Street, Los Angeles, CA

www.mariangoodman.com

Sophie Calle Exhibition @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Sophie Calle

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

February 27 – April 12, 2025

Fraenkel Gallery presents an exhibition by Sophie Calle. For more than forty years Calle has made work that draws from her life, transforming elements from her public and private relationships into intimate narratives. The exhibition features several series exploring questions about legacy and loss, topics Sophie Calle approaches with her typical humor and candor. Making its U.S. debut, catalogue raisonné of the unfinished focuses on projects Sophie Calle previously conceptualized but didn’t pursue. Each piece pairs fragments from the project with Calle’s text about its failure. Another series, Picassos in lockdown, comprises photographs Sophie Calle made at the Musée National Picasso in Paris during the pandemic. Each shows a painting covered for protection while the museum was closed. The exhibition also features a selection of works looking at death and remembrance through the lens of Calle’s relationship with her parents. This is Sophie Calle’s fifth exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery, since 1994.

The series catalogue raisonné of the unfinished collects photographs, handwritten notes, comic books, and other documents, each paired with a short text describing the artwork Sophie Calle had originally imagined and how it came to (not) be. A red stamp across each text pronounces her reason for rejecting the work. The projects range from Calle’s request for museum visitors to propose ideas for her to enact (“Not exhilarating”), to an attempt to insert herself into a Mexican comic book collection that included the word “Calle” in the title (“Anecdotal”). Together, the series presents a sort of self-imposed salon des refusés, revealing glimpses of Calle’s process and celebrating the transformation of many dead ends into a final positive form.

In 2023, Musée National Picasso presented a solo exhibition of Calle’s work, timed to the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso. The deliberately retrospective exhibition, titled À toi de faire, ma mignonne, (“It’s up to you, my darling”) included photographs Sophie Calle made while the museum was closed during the pandemic, recording the cloth and paper coverings that shielded Picasso’s paintings from light and dust. Sophie Calle has described her encounter with the paintings: “The Picassos were under protection, wrapped up, hidden. Underneath — a ghostlike, less intimidating presence,” she writes. Titled after the works they conceal, the photographs in Picassos in lockdown encourage the viewer to recall the original painting.

A third gallery presents selections from Autobiographies and other elegiac, family-focused works, pairing photographs and texts in frames or urn-like wooden boxes. In Autobiographies (Morning), Sophie Calle awaits her father’s last words, while Autobiographies (My Mother Died) reproduces notes about death from Calle’s diary and her mother’s. A glass-fronted box titled Necrology presents the obituary Sophie Calle commissioned for herself, hidden behind pinned butterflies to remain unreadable. The piece incorporates Calle’s commentary about her decision to obscure the writing: “So as not to attract too much attention from death, I decided it was best to cover up what I did not want to read,” she notes. In these and other works, Sophie Calle addresses her own mortality with characteristic honesty and wit, taking on the question of how we remember and are in turn remembered.

Sophie Calle was recently featured in Sophie Calle: Overshare at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Absences: Sophie Calle & Toulouse-Lautrec at the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo. Her work was presented in the solo exhibition Finir en Beauté (Neither Give Nor Throw Away), held in the cryptoporticus at Arles as part of the photography festival Rencontres d’Arles in France. Her work has been shown in museums around the world and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Tate, London, among many others. Sophie Calle is the recipient of numerous awards, including most recently the Praemium Imperiale Award in 2024, as well as the Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal, an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, among others. 

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

fraenkelgallery.com

RELATED POST ON WANAFOTO

In English

Sophie Calle: Missing, Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, San Francisco, June 29 – August 20, 2017 

Sophie Calle: My mother, my cat, my father, in that order, FraenkelLAB (Fraenkel Gallery), San Francisco, June 23 – August 26, 2017

Sophie Calle, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, 29 October – 24 December 2015 

Sophie Calle, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark, 23 June - 24 October 2010

In French

Sophie Calle: À toi de faire, ma mignonne, Musée Picasso, Paris, 3 octobre 2023 - 7 janvier 2024 

Sophie Calle et son invité Jean-Paul Demoule - Les fantômes d’Orsay, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 15 mars - 19 juin 2022

Sophie Calle, Musée d'art moderne Louisiana, Humlabaek, Danemark, 23 juin - 24 octobre 2010

SOPHIE CALLE. M'AS-TU VUE, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 19 novembre 2003 - 15 mars 2004

Yoko Ono Exhibition @ Tate Modern, London - "YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND" + @ K20, Dusseldorf

YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND

Tate Modern, London 

February 15 – September 1, 2024 

K20, Dusseldorf 

September 28, 2024 – March 16, 2025

YOKO ONO

Yoko Ono with Glass Hammer 1967 

from HALF-A-WIND SHOW, Lisson Gallery, London, 1967 

Photo © Clay Perry

© Yoko Ono

YOKO ONO

Installation view of Apple 1966 from 

Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971, MoMA, NYC, 2015 

Photo © Thomas Griesel

© Yoko Ono

YOKO ONO

Yoko Ono, Helmets (Pieces of Sky), 2001, 

from ‘Between The Sky and My Head’ 

at Baltic Centre For Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2008. 

Photo © Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art

© Yoko Ono

YOKO ONO

Installation view of PEACE is POWER, first realised 2017, 

in ‘Yoko Ono: The Learning Garden of Freedom’ 

at Fundação de Serralves – Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, 2020 

Photo © Filipe Braga

© Yoko Ono

YOKO ONO

Sky TV, 1966/2014 

© Yoko Ono

Courtesy the artist 

Photo Cathy Carver

Installation view courtesy of 

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden 

Photo © Cathy Carver

Tate Modern presents the UK’s largest exhibition celebrating the ground-breaking and influential work of artist and activist YOKO ONO (b.1933, Tokyo). Ono is a trailblazer of early conceptual and participatory art, film and performance, a celebrated musician, and a formidable campaigner for world peace. Spanning seven decades of the artist’s powerful, multidisciplinary practice from the 1950s to now, YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND traces the development of her innovative work and its enduring impact on contemporary culture. Conceived in close collaboration with Ono’s studio, the exhibition brings together over 200 works including instruction pieces and scores, installations, films, music and photography, revealing a radical approach to language, art and participation that continues to speak to the present moment.

Ideas are central to Yoko Ono’s art, often expressed in poetic, humorous and profound ways. The exhibition starts by exploring her pivotal role in experimental avant-garde circles in New York and Tokyo, including the development of her ‘instruction pieces’ – written instructions that ask readers to imagine, experience, make or complete the work. Some exist as a single verb such as FLY or TOUCH. Others range from short phrases like ‘Listen to a heartbeat’ and ‘Step in all the puddles in the city’ to tasks for the imagination like ‘Painting to be Constructed in your Head’. Each word or phrase aims to stimulate and unlock the mind of the reader. Previously unseen photographs show Yoko Ono’s first ‘instruction paintings’ at her loft studio in New York – where she and composer La Monte Young hosted experimental concerts and events – and in her first solo exhibition at AG Gallery in 1961. The typescript draft of Ono’s ground-breaking self-published anthology Grapefruit, compiling her instructions written between 1953 and 1964, is displayed in the UK for the first time. Visitors are invited to activate Ono’s instructions, concealing themselves in the interactive work Bag Piece 1964 – first performed by Yoko Ono in Kyoto, in the same concert in which she performed her iconic work Cut Piece 1964 – and bringing their shadows together in Shadow Piece 1963.

The heart of the exhibition charts Yoko Ono’s radical works created during her five-year stay in London from 1966. Here she became embedded within a counter-cultural network of artists, musicians and writers, meeting her future husband and longtime collaborator John Lennon. Key installations from Yoko Ono’s influential exhibitions at Indica and Lisson Gallery feature, including Apple 1966 and the poignant installation of halved domestic objects Half-A-Room 1967. Ono’s banned Film No. 4 (Bottoms) 1966-7 which she created as a ‘petition for peace’ is displayed alongside material from her influential talk at the Destruction In Art Symposium, in which she described the fundamental aspects of her participatory art: event-based; engaged with the everyday; personal; partial or presented as unfinished; a catalyst to creative transformation; and existing within the realm of the imagination. Visitors can participate in White Chess Set – a game featuring only white chess pieces and a board of white squares, with the instruction ‘play as long as you can remember where all your pieces are’ – a work first realised in 1966 that demonstrates Yoko Ono’s anti-war stance.

Key themes that recur throughout Yoko Ono’s work are explored across decades and mediums. These include the sky, which appears repeatedly as a metaphor for peace, freedom and limitlessness. As a child fleeing Tokyo during World War II, Yoko Ono found solace and refuge in the constant presence of the sky. It appears in the instruction piece Painting to See the Skies 1961, the 1966 installation SKY TV, broadcasting a live video feed of the sky above Tate Modern, and the moving participatory work Helmets (Pieces of Sky), first realised 2001, inviting visitors to take away their own puzzle-piece of the sky. The artist’s commitment to feminism is shown in films like FLY 1970-1, in which a fly crawls over a naked woman’s body while Yoko Ono's voice chart its journey, and Freedom 1970, in which Ono attempts and fails to break free from her bra. In a section devoted to Yoko Ono’s music, feminist anthems such as Sisters O Sisters 1972, Woman Power 1973 and Rising 1995 embolden women to build a new world, have courage and rage, amplifying Ono’s works that denounce violence against women.

Yoko Ono has increasingly used her art and global media platform to advocate for peace and humanitarian campaigns, initially collaborating with her late husband John Lennon. Acorns for Peace 1969 saw Yoko Ono and John Lennon send acorns to world leaders, while the billboard campaign ‘WAR IS OVER!’ (if you want it) 1969 used the language of advertising to spread a message of peace. The film BED PEACE 1969 documents the second of the couple’s infamous ‘bed-in’ events staged in Amsterdam and Montreal, during which they spoke with the world’s media to promote world peace amid the Vietnam War. Tate Modern has also staged Ono’s recent project Add Colour (Refugee Boat), first activated in 2016, inviting visitors to add paint to white gallery walls and a white boat while reflecting on urgent issues of crisis and displacement.

The exhibition culminates in a new iteration of Yoko Ono’s participatory installation My Mommy Is Beautiful, first realised 2004, featuring a 15-metre-long wall of canvases to which visitors can attach photographs of their mother and share personal messages. Moving beyond the exhibition space, Yoko Ono’s work also extends across Tate Modern’s building and landscape. Gallery windows overlooking the River Thames feature the artist’s powerful intervention, PEACE is POWER, first shown 2017, translated into multiple languages, while the interactive artwork Wish Tree, first realised 1996, greets visitors at the entrance to the exhibition, inviting passers-by to contribute individual wishes for peace.

YOKO ONO

Music of the Mind

Edited by Juliet Bingham, Connor Monahan and Jon Hendricks

Contributions by Yasufumi Nakamori, Andrew Wilson, 

David Toop, Midori Yoshimoto, Helen Molesworth, 

Sanford Biggers, Catherine Lord

Yale University Press - Published in association with Tate

304 Pages, 6.75 x 9.25 in, 60 color + 200 b-w illus.

ISBN: 9780300276343

TATE MODERN, LONDON

www.tate.org.uk

Related Post on Wanafoto:

Yoko Ono : Lumière de l'aube (in French)

Musée d'art contemporain, Lyon 

9 mars - 10 juillet 2016 

Yoko Ono: Grapefruit (in English)

Moderna Museet, Stockholm 

6 June – 16 September 2012

 

Yoko Ono: Between the Sky and My Head (in English)

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 

14 December 2008 – 15 March 2009

Yoko Ono: Have You Seen the Horizon Lately? (in English)

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

November 26, 1999 - May 31 2000

Roni Horn: The Detour of Identity @ Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek

Roni Horn: The Detour of Identity

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek

2 May – 1 September 2024

RONI HORN

The Detour of Identity, 1984–85

Gouache on paper/ board

© Roni Horn

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

RONI HORN

Untitled (Weather) 2010-2011

Detail

© Roni Horn

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. 

Photo: Alex Delfanne

RONI HORN

Untitled (Weather) 2010-2011

Detail

© Roni Horn

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. 

Photo: Alex Delfanne

With cinematic art as its prism, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents American artist RONI HORN (b. 1955). This exhibition introduces a new approach to photography, drawing and sculpture by one of the most distinctive voices of our time. Iconic scenes from some of cinema’s greatest films form part of the presentation of the artist’s work. In keeping with Roni Horn’s preoccupation with the changing weather – with light and movement – the extensive exhibition is being shown in daylight – natural light – in Louisiana’s South Wing.

“The inspiration Roni Horn takes from film, her fascination for film imagery and the narrative of images, is new ground on which to present her work. Louisiana’s guests will move through the South Wing, crosscutting between Horn’s works and sequences from film, which constitute an active and significant part of the material that has shaped the artist.”

– Poul Erik Tøjner, Louisiana’s Director.

Roni Horn often applies the language and effects of film in her practice, and, as in the world of film, she exploits the tension between the outer world, where the socially defined body predominates, and the inner world of conscious reality, where the body, with its urges and desires, resides. Throughout the exhibition these clips from some of history’s most famous film narratives form a parallel path to Roni Horn’s oeuvre.

There is something very powerful about the work of Roni Horn. Seemingly razor-sharp and cool, it juxtaposes humans and landscape, permanence and changeability, obscurity and transparency in a flow of light, water and weather. Horn tackles themes such as identity and sexuality. Who am I? What does my gender mean? What language do we have to express emotions? Are emotions private? What is the order of nature vis-à-vis humankind?

Her questions are philosophical and fundamental; her answers are tangible works of art. But the works never come across as answers – they are more like quasi facts that require interpretation. Horn does not beg for our attention in order to be permitted to reveal. We must ask ourselves what we are seeing; there is little use in asking Roni Horn because the artist cares little for the notion that we require information before encountering her art. Knowledge, she says, can act as an obstacle to experience.

Identity is the central and recurring theme in the exhibition’s selection of films and film clips – the quest for identity, loss of identity, mistaken or stolen identity, and so on. Each of the films has, on some level, been important to Roni Horn, and therefore each represents another identification, be it with the actions of the character or with the knowledge that organises the film’s narrative and imagery.

The exhibition is an imaginary journey through the artist’s imagery, expanding to include the sense of community that has emerged around many of these celebrated films. A few examples of the film clips in the exhibition are Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Vertigo, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, Claude Chabrol’s The Does and Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.

RONI HORN

Dead Owl, 1997

Detail

© Roni Horn

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth 

Photo: Bill Jacobson

RONI HORN

Untitled ("My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. 

I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. 

I have often thought that with any luck at all 

I could have been born a werewolf, 

because the two middle fingers 

on both my hands are the same length, 

but I have had to be content with what I had. 

I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. 

I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, 

and Amanita phalloides, the deathcup mushroom. 

Everyone else in my family is dead.") 2012-2013

© Roni Horn

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Genevieve Hanson

Roni Horn has been represented in Louisiana’s collection for over twenty years. From some Thames (2000) was acquired for the collection in 2002. Later came the glass sculpture Untitled (“The sensation of longing for an eclipse of the moon.”) from 2013 and the major work a.k.a. (2008–2009), which deals with identity and consists of thirty photographs from Roni Horn’s life, all depictions of her taken by different people over time. The same person is at once both herself and 29 others. It is a beautifully lucid and entirely undogmatic demonstration of how difficult it can be to say exactly who and what someone is; and the fluidity, the things that cannot be captured or fixed – from the weather to the light to water to sexuality, to dreams, to, well, who you are – flows through Louisiana’s exhibition, even in the handsome sculptures of infinitely slowly setting tempered glass that let light play in colours of immense beauty.

RONI HORN - THE DETOUR OF IDENTITY

Published by Steidl / Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

472 pages, 539 images

Otabind softcover, 24.7 x 29.7 cm, English

ISBN 978-3-96999-378-1

The exhibition is accompanied by an international publication (in English) entitled The Detour of Identity. The publication, edited by Jerry Gorovoy, is published in collaboration with Louisiana Museum of Modern Art by the German publisher Steidl and  features texts by Briony Fer, Elisabeth Bronfen and Gary Indiana. Foreword by Poul Erik Tøjner and introduction by Jerry Gorovoy.

The exhibition has been curated by Roni Horn’s long-time friend Jerry Gorovoy, also known as the personal assistant to Louise Bourgeois for four decades, in collaboration with Louisiana’s Director Poul Erik Tøjner.

Louisiana Channel has produced the videos Roni Horn – Saying Water (2013) and Roni Horn – Interviewed by Dayanita Singh (2013). Both are available on Louisiana Channel: https://channel.louisiana.dk/

LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Gl. Strandvej 13 - 3050 Humlebæk

louisiana.dk

Artist Roni Horn Exhibition @ Museum Ludwig, Cologne - "Roni Horn: Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death" + Catalogue

Roni Horn 

Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death

Museum Ludwig, Cologne 

March 23 – Au­gust 11, 2024

Museum Ludwig presents Roni Horn: Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death, a solo exhibition of works by influential American artist Roni Horn. The exhibition includes over 100 works, spanning from the beginning of the artist’s decades long career to present day.

Roni Horn's work spans from photography to drawing, artist books, sculpture, and installation. Behind this openness lies the artist's understanding that everything in the world is mutable and cannot be subjected to fixed attribution. The exhibition at the Museum Ludwig examines this idea through three recurring themes in Roni Horn's work: nature, identity, and language.

The title of the exhibition is derived from a quote by Patrick Henry, an advocate for American independence in the eighteenth century, who concluded a speech with the words, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Roni Horn is more interested in the visual power of the quote than its original context; in her adaptation of the structure of Henry’s famous exclamation, she substitutes the word "paradox" for "liberty", thus equating the meanings of both terms. For Roni Horn, paradoxes are a way to access ambiguity, a quality in which things may contain their opposites.

Upon entering the exhibition, viewers are greeted by This is Me, This is You (1997-2000), a photographic work installed on two opposing walls. Each wall contains 48 framed photographs of the artist’s niece, which were taken over a two-year period during her adolescence. Every photograph corresponds with one on the opposing wall, showing subtle changes between split seconds. As she explains in a 1989 interview, “The pair form, by virtue of the condition of being double, actively refuses the possibility of being experienced as a thing in itself.” Here, Horn not only employs doubles or pairs, but also speaks to identity’s constant flux.

Yilmaz Dziewior, curator of the exhibition, comments, “Roni Horn began exploring fluid representations of gender long before terms such as 'genderqueer' and 'nonbinary' entered public discourse. In her (self-)portraits, you see a person who fluctuates between genders without needing to find a specific term to describe this mode of being. She shows humans as organisms constantly manifesting themselves in a state of perpetual transformation. While extremely precise and highly aesthetic, her objects, photographs, and drawings have a liberating and emancipatory potential because they are often intangible and indefinable.”

Moving through the exhibition, viewers encounter never before exhibited drawings from the late 1970s, in addition to a selection of pigment drawings produced between 1983 and 2018. 

Photographic works on view include the seminal work Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) (1999), comprised of 15 photographs which act as a portrait of the River Thames in Southern England; a.k.a. (2008-09), which depicts the artist at different moments throughout her life, and Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Huppert) (2005-06), where Horn has photographed actress Isabelle Huppert posing as characters from her films.

Sculptures in the exhibition include works from the series When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes (1993-2008), where Roni Horn has recreated poems by Emily Dickinson; Gold Field (1980/1994), a work composed of 99.99% gold foil; and Untitled (“The tiniest piece of mirror is always the whole mirror.”) (2022), a ten-unit solid cast glass work that reflects its surrounding environment.

RONI HORN

Roni Horn was born in New York in 1955. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975. In 1978, Roni Horn graduated with a master’s degree in sculpture from Yale University. Her oeuvre focuses on conceptually oriented photography, sculpture, drawing, and books. Since 1975, Roni Horn has traveled extensively in the more remote landscapes of Iceland. These solitary experiences have long been important influences in her life and work. Literature and Roni Horn’s prodigious reading have had a similarly profound impact on her work across various media.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Fundació Joan Miro, Barcelona; De Pont Foundation, Tilburg, The Netherlands; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, MD; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, TX; Pola Museum of Art, Hakone, Japan; Bourse de Commerce – Pi­nault Collection, Paris; Winsing Arts Foundation, Taipeh; Centro Botín, Santander, Spain; He Art Museum, Guangdong, China. This year, in addition to the exhibition at Museum Ludwig, Roni Horn have a major solo show at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark.

Roni Horn: Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death   

The exhibition is accompanied by the catalogue Roni Horn: Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death, ed. by Yilmaz Dziewior; with text contributions by Yilmaz Dziewior, Zoë Lescaze, Andrew Maerkle, Isabel de Naverán, and Kerstin Stakemeier; German/English. Hard­cover, 312 pages, 21.5 × 27.5 cm, approx. 180 col. ill., Steidl Verlag, Co-published with the Museum Ludwig - ISBN 978-3-96999-379-8

MUSEUM LUDWIG, COLOGNE 

Heinrich-Böll-Platz, 50667 Köln 

www.museum-ludwig.de 

American conceptual artist Glenn Ligon Exhibition @ Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong

Glenn Ligon

Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong

25 March – 11 May 2024

Best known for his text-based paintings, celebrated American conceptual artist Glenn Ligon has created new works for his first solo exhibition in Greater China. The display includes a continuation of his Stranger paintings, a new abstract painting series titled Static, and a series of untitled drawings on Kozo paper. These works all use excerpts from James Baldwin’s landmark essay ‘Stranger in the Village’ (1953) and exemplify the artist’s radical use of text to explore the politics of culture and identity.

GLENN LIGON

Stranger #98, 2023

Oil stick, etching ink, coal dust, acrylic 

and pencil on canvas

289.6 x 223.5 cm / 114 x 88 in

Photo: Ronald Amstutz 

© Glenn Ligon. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

‘Stranger #98’ (2023) is from Glenn Ligon’s Stranger paintings, his longest running series, which first began in 1997 and renders excerpts from James Baldwin’s 1953 essay, ‘Stranger in the Village.’ In the text, Baldwin recounts his experience of visiting the small mountain village of Leukerbad, Switzerland, where he encountered villagers who had never met a Black man before him. He connects the experiences to global structures of racism, colonialism and white supremacy and analyses how they manifest in both the United States and Europe. 

In the Stranger series, Glenn Ligon stencils text onto the canvas with oil stick, creating a relief made of sentences. As the stencil is moved across the canvas, oil stick residue and smudges from previous words mark the canvas, obscuring some of the text. The text is further abstracted by the addition of coal dust—a black, gravel like waste product of coal mining—to the surface of the painting. Through the work’s varying degrees of legibility, Ligon evokes both hypervisibility and invisibility in the Black experience and explores language’s inability to fully articulate issues surrounding race, citizenship and subjecthood. As Ligon remarks, ‘The essay is not only about race relations but about what it means to be a stranger anywhere.’ [1] 

GLENN LIGON

Static #8, 2023

Oil stick, coal dust and gesso on canvas

170.2 x 129.5 cm / 67 x 51 in

Photo: Ronald Amstutz 

© Glenn Ligon. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

The new Static series sees Ligon building on this technique but to more abstract ends. Like his Stranger paintings, Ligon stencils excerpts from Baldwin’s text; however, here he uses white oil stick on a white gesso ground, subsequently rubbing black oil stick on the raised forms. In applying pigment to the overlapping layers of letters, the artist creates different degrees of abstraction and emphases their illegibility. The resulting compositions come to form a visual representation of static: the absence of a coherent transmission signal on a radio or television and the resulting noise. This series questions whether language—in our ‘post-truth’ world—can function as a way to describe the cultural moment we find ourselves in. 

GLENN LIGON

Untitled #41, 2024

Carbon and graphite on Kozo paper

45.7 x 30.5 cm / 18 x 12 inches

20 3/4 X 14 3/4 x 1 1/2 inches (framed)

Photo: Thomas Barratt

© Glenn Ligon. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Similarly in his untitled works on paper, Glenn Ligon pushes the limits of abstraction by employing the traditional rubbing technique of frottage. Using a single Stranger paintings as a textured surface on which Kozo paper is placed, the artist rubs carbon and graphite to translate the blurred text from canvas to paper. The spontaneous forms that emerge build upon the idea of ‘improvisational abstraction,’ which is central to the artist’s practice, exploring the tension between accident and intention, conscious and subconscious. All three series offer a reflection on, in Glenn Ligon’s words, ‘the things that can be said and the things that cannot be said, or the things that are difficult to say, or that remain opaque despite this will to be clear and explain…’ [2] 

[1] Glenn Ligon quoted in Jason Moran, ‘Glenn Ligon,’ Interview Magazine, June 8, 2009, unpaginated. 

[2] ‘Glenn Ligon: In the Studio,’ Brooklyn, New York, 2021 © Glenn Ligon / Hauser & Wirth.

A new publication ‘Glenn Ligon: Distinguishing Piss from Rain; Writings and Interviews’, edited by James Hoff, will be released by Hauser & Wirth Publishers on 25 June 2024.

Glenn Ligon’s solo exhibition ‘Glenn Ligon: All Over The Place’ will be held at Fitzwilliam Museum (the University of Cambridge’s principal museum) from 20 September 2024 – 2 March 2025. Alongside his paintings, sculptures and prints, the artist will curate a series of site-specific interventions throughout the museum aimed at peeling back layers of its exhibition history.

Portrait of Glenn Ligon

Photo © Paul Mpagi Sepuya

© Glenn Ligon. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

GLENN LIGON (b. 1960) is an artist living and working in New York. Throughout his career, Glenn Ligon has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across bodies of work that build critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. He earned his BA from Wesleyan University (1982) and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (1985). In 2011, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a mid-career retrospective, Glenn Ligon: America, organized by Scott Rothkopf, that traveled nationally. Important solo exhibitions include Post-Noir, Carre d’Art, Nîmes (2022); Glenn Ligon: Call and Response, Camden Arts Centre, London (2014); and Glenn Ligon – Some Changes, The Power Plant Center for Contemporary Art, Toronto (traveled internationally) (2005). Select curatorial projects include Grief and Grievance, New Museum, New York (2021); Blue Black, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (2017); and Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions, Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Liverpool (2015). lenn Ligon’s work has been shown in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2015, 1997), Berlin Biennial (2014), Istanbul Biennial (2019, 2011), and Documenta XI (2002). 

HAUSER & WIRTH HONG KONG

G/F, 8 Queen’s Road Central, Central, Hong Kong

www.hauserwirth.com