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

Robert Mangold: Pentagons and Folded Space @ Pace, New York - Part of Pace 65th anniversary year Exhibitions

Robert Mangold

Pentagons and Folded Space

Pace Gallery, New York

May 9 – August 15, 2025 

Pace presents a new body of work by Robert Mangold at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This exhibition—Pace’s fifteenth presentation dedicated to a new body of work by Mangold since 1991—spans the gallery’s second and seventh floors. It features paintings, including three multi-panel works, and works on paper created by the artist between 2022 and 2024.

This show is organized on the occasion of Pace’s 65th anniversary year, during which the gallery is mounting exhibitions of work by major 20th century artists—with whom it has maintained decades-long relationships—at its spaces around the world. It is accompanied by a new catalogue, with an essay by Dieter Schwarz, from Pace Publishing, which has produced 16 books on each new body of Mangold’s work since his first exhibition with the gallery in 1992.

Mangold has been a key figure in painting since the 1960s. Exploring the fundamental elements of composition, he has created boundary-pushing geometric abstractions on shaped canvases that charted new frontiers within the medium. Robert Mangold is part of a legacy forged with other major figures of Conceptualism and Minimalism, including his close friends Sol LeWitt and Robert Ryman and his wife Sylvia Plimack Mangold.

The body of work that the artist will present in his upcoming exhibition features broad planes of color across canvases of diverse shapes and sizes, reflecting a continuing engagement with shape, line, and color—and the effect these elements can have on each other—that has defined his practice for over 60 years. As with his preceding series, Mangold’s new and recent works are part of a continuous evolution, elaborating upon the paintings and drawings he showed at Pace in New York in 2022 while also reaching back to his earliest experimentations with color and form, symmetry and asymmetry, and notions of wholeness and fragmentation. Several loans from private and public collections will figure in the exhibition, including Four Pentagons (2022). This four-panel painting, loaned by the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of the largest works that Robert Mangold has produced in decades.

The multi-panel and individual canvases in the show speak to the artist’s enduring interest in the ways that line, color, and shape can give a painting a sense of extending into multiple dimensional planes. Meanwhile, the works on paper in this exhibition, all made in 2024, shed light on a crucial aspect of Mangold’s practice, offering a more intimate experience of his abstractions.

Throughout 2025, Pace is celebrating its anniversary year with 16 exhibitions of work by artists who have been central to its program for decades. Presented around the world, these exhibitions are odes to some of the gallery's longest-lasting relationships. Over the course of their careers, these figures, with Pace's support, charted new courses in the history of art. These special exhibitions are listed chronologically below:

Joel Shapiro — Tokyo, January

Louise Nevelson — New York, January; Seoul, April

Kenneth Noland — Seoul, January; Tokyo, March

Sam Gilliam — Seoul, January; Tokyo, March

Jean Dubuffet — New York, March; Berlin, May

Robert Indiana — Hong Kong, March; 

Robert Indiana: The American Dream  —New York, May

Robert Irwin — Los Angeles, April

Robert Mangold — New York, May

James Turrell — Seoul, June

Claes Oldenburg — Tokyo, July

Agnes Martin — New York, November

PACE NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

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

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

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

Song Dong Exhibition @ Pace Gallery, NYC - ROUND

Song Dong: ROUND

Pace Gallery, New York 

July 14 – August 19, 2023 

SONG DONG 

Zou Ma Deng (Spinning Lanterns) (detail), 2022-2023 

© Song Dong, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents Song Dong's latest series of works at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York, marking the artist’s first overseas solo exhibition since the COVID-19 pandemic. Titled Song Dong: ROUND, this exhibition focuses on Song’s practice over the past three years, placing ancient Chinese philosophy in a contemporary context and offering new understandings of ideas that figure prominently in his work.

Song Dong, who is one of the most important figures of the Conceptual art movement in China, blurs the boundaries between art and life in his interdisciplinary practice spanning painting, sculpture, performance, installation, and film. Song specializes in borrowing familiar, everyday objects and images as part of his artistic explorations. His open and highly speculative approach to art making lends his work a distinctive lightness that has earned him international attention and acclaim.

In his exhibition with Pace in New York, the artist uses the shape of the circle, which has rich meaning in traditional Chinese philosophy, as a central visual element. The new series Da Cheng Ruo Que, which translates to "the highest perfection is like imperfection," takes its title from ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu's seminal text Tao Te Ching. In these works, small-scale window frames are assembled into sculptures that forge nearly perfect circles, while still retaining zigzag notches at their edges.

Song Dong began the Da Cheng Ruo Que series in 2020, when, stranded in his studio due to the pandemic lockdown, he decided to make a gift for his daughter. The artist gathered the materials left over from the production of his previous series Usefulness of Uselessness, which was made from discarded construction waste produced during China's urban renewal process. The artist’s decision to reuse the leftovers of these discarded materials echoes the installation he created with his mother, Waste Not, which is his most internationally recognized work—it was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2009 and has since traveled to institutions in several other countries, including the Barbican Centre in London.

Using his mother's values and philosophies surrounding the preservation of seemingly useless objects to create a special work for his daughter, the artist continued to explore and experiment during the long hours of lockdown. Inevitably, he incorporated his experiences and feelings from the past three years into his process so that the work gradually took on its own form, expanding from a single piece into a new and complete series.

In Pace’s gallery space, this series of circular sculptures of various sizes are scattered on the walls like clusters of stars in the universe or cells in a microscopic view. The windows in these sculptures do not provide access to the outside world, but rather reflect the scenes before them, leaving illusionistic impressions on their colorful stained- glass surfaces. The title of the work alludes to Eastern philosophical speculation: what people perceive as perfection may be imperfect, while this seemingly deficient state can lead to more possibilities and a greater sense of completeness, which is the message the artist decided to share with his daughter.

Continuing its focus on the circle, the exhibition also features the light installation series Zou Ma Deng (Spinning Lanterns) and the sculptural work Thousand Hands, both of which were created in the past year. The artist created his first iteration of Zou Ma Deng during a four-month residency in London in 2000, using traditional moving-image techniques to represent his relationship with the environment and his imprint on urban spaces. In this latest work, Song’s bodily presence is erased, leaving the viewer with only the world around the artist as seen and documented from his own perspective over the last three years.

While Thousand Hands is forged from a discarded object, it is intended to be placed behind a statue of the Buddha Guanyin, whose thousand hands form a disc in a radial pattern of eyes, symbolizing the gods' care for the mortal world. In stark contrast to the purity of a perfectly crafted industrial product, this piece contains many black lines that were created during the firing process and are meant to be removed by the glaze factory. These randomly generated black textures shimmer with a mysterious aura that attracted the artist and, in some ways, coincided with his thinking on Da Cheng Ruo Que. Laying the vertical panel flat, the artist allows the eyes of the Bodhisattva, which originally overlooked the world, to become the object of the viewer’s gaze. At the same time, this work invites viewers to look at each other in a new way, evoking a contemplative experience and new realization.

SONG DONG's (b. 1966, Beijing) conceptual practice emerged from the avant-garde and experimental arts community in China, engaging with various forms of media including installation, performance, video, painting, and sculpture. His performances in the mid- and late 1990s positioned him as a major figure in the burgeoning contemporary art scene in Beijing, which often serves as the setting for his reflections. Song is one of the founding members of Polit-Sheer-Form Office (2005–), a multi-disciplinary art group centered on collective ideals and practices as a means of commentary on the political, spiritual, and cultural aspects of life in China.

PACE

540 West 25th Street, New York

www.pacegallery.com

Bartlett / Jensen / Judd @ 125 Newbury, New York - "No Illusions" Exhibition

Bartlett/Jensen/Judd: No Illusions

125 Newbury, New York

February 10 – April 1, 2023

“Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.” 

– Sol LeWitt 

125 Newbury presents its third exhibition, Bartlett/Jensen/Judd: No Illusions, which brings together works by Jennifer Bartlett (1941–2022), Alfred Jensen (1903–1981) and Donald Judd (1928–1994), three American artists who pioneered new possibilities in systems of abstraction. 

Reflecting different generations and distinct approaches to artmaking, Jennifer Bartlett, Alfred Jensen, and Donald Judd were linked by a deep commitment to art as material fact rather than illusion. Exploring the visual and conceptual resonances across their practices, the exhibition brings Jensen’s canvases of the 1960s and 1970s into dialogue with sculptures by Judd from the 1970s and 1980s and paintings by Bartlett from the 1970s, 1990s and 2000s. Throughout, the organizing system of the grid is transformed from a tool of objective and rational thought into a vehicle for deeply personal, subjective, and sometimes mystical expression.

A seminal figure in New York’s mid-century avant-garde, Alfred Jensen belonged to the first generation of the Abstract Expressionists, yet despite his central presence in the New York scene of the ’50s and his close relationship with Mark Rothko, he always identified as an outsider. Beginning in the 1960s, his work had profound impact on a younger generation of artists, in particular Donald Judd, who in 1963 wrote: “Now and then a chance occurs for a narrow, subjective, categorical statement: Jensen is great. He is one of the best painters in the United States.” Drawing on a wide range of references from pre- Columbian art to Guatemalan textiles to the Pythagorean theorem, Jensen materialized his synthetic and deeply personal philosophy in a language of vibrant color and pattern. “Jensen has elaborate theories based on Mayan, Babylonian and the other astrological, astronomical and calendrical schemes,” Judd observed, “The theories are important to him and completely irrelevant to the viewer. The color is particular to Jensen and very good.”

While the industrial materials and fabrication of Donald Judd’s art might seem at a remove the signature impasto of Jensen’s highly worked surfaces, Judd and Jensen were united by an investment in systems. Their works dissociate and dissolve those systems, however, transforming them from structures of logic into vehicles for unmediated experiences of the sublime. Judd’s plywood sculptures, a series of which are featured in the exhibition, evince the almost spiritual import he placed on humble, everyday materials and ubiquitous rectilinear geometries. Even as the sculptures’ open forms reveal their internal composition, they remain as inscrutable and mysterious as the symbols that populate Jensen’s canvases.

If Judd’s innovations of the 1960s sought to expand the definition of sculpture, Jennifer Bartlett’s paintings of the 1970s were similarly ambitious. Belonging to the generation of artists who emerged in reaction to the aesthetic austerity of Minimalism, Bartlett became known for re-introducing subjectivity into serial and process-based forms. She began exhibiting large-scale, multi-panel paintings on individual steel plates, which were arranged in gridded patterns on the wall. These plate paintings summoned the rhetoric of Minimal, Conceptual, and process-oriented practices yet remained emphatically painterly. They expressed the purity of mathematical and chromatic logics yet processed those organizing structures through a decidedly subjective filter. The resulting paintings incorporated the lessons of both Jensen and Judd, transmuting rational systems into a language of sensation and feeling. As assemblages of flat, metallic plates that adhere flush to the wall, Bartlett’s works celebrate the objecthood of painting. Just as Jensen’s heavy use of impasto ratifies the materiality of paint—and Judd’s unpainted plywood testifies to the sculpture’s presence as an object in the room—so too Bartlett’s steel plates, which operate more as things than images. Her compositions of dots, dashes, and lines unfold rhythmically, threatening to escape their containing grids, while announcing their status as hand-made marks and therefore traces of the artist’s own body. The resulting paintings refuse the logic of illusion, instead becoming talismans not only for the artist’s thought, but her embodied labor.

No Illusions celebrates this focus on the elemental fact of art as object—a refusal of illusion in favor of real presence—as a leitmotif that recurs across all three artists’ oeuvres.

About 125 Newburry

Gallery 125 Newbury, New York. A Project Space Helmed by Arne Glimcher

125 NEWBURY

395 Broadway at Walker Street, New York City (Tribeca)

www.125newbury.com

Robert Mangold @ Pace Gallery, Seoul - Paintings and Works on Paper 1989-2022 Exhibition

Robert Mangold 

Paintings and Works on Paper 1989-2022 

Pace Gallery, Seoul 

January 20 – March 11, 2023 

Robert Mangold 

Attic Series V, 1990 

© Robert Mangold 

Pace presents a survey exhibition of work by Robert Mangold—who for over six decades has investigated the possibilities of shape, line, and color as they relate to painting—at its recently expanded arts complex in Seoul. Robert Mangold: Paintings and Works on Paper 1989–2022, the artist’s first solo show in South Korea in nearly 30 years, features paintings created by the artist between the late 1980s and the present day as well as a selection of his works on paper. 

Robert Mangold has been a key figure in painting since the 1960s. Exploring the fundamental elements of composition, the artist has created boundary-pushing geometric abstractions on shaped canvases that charted new frontiers within the medium. He is part of a legacy forged with other major figures of Conceptualism and Minimalism, including his close friends Sol LeWitt and Robert Ryman and his wife Sylvia Plimack Mangold.

Included in the exhibition are the paintings Attic Series V (1990) and Red/White Zone Painting II (1996), which serve as shapeshifting structures in their own rights, reflecting the artist’s sustained and ever evolving explorations of color, line, and shape as well as his deep interest in enactments of balance and asymmetry, wholeness and fragmentation. His new painting Plane Structure 9 (2022) notably lacks a drawn element—since 2018, the artist has experimented with works free of drawing, breaking from his longstanding practice of incorporating line into his canvases.

While Robert Mangold’s paintings and drawings are rarely exhibited together, Pace’s exhibition in Seoul presents these works engaged in lively exchanges. The mingling of these mediums in the show sheds light on a crucial aspect of Mangold’s process-based, contemplative practice through which he uses drawing to parse his vision for a painting. The artist wrote in 1988 that his works on paper “are where the ideas are worked out and most of the important decisions are made, the momentum from them carry me into the painting.”

ROBERT MANGOLD (b. 1937, North Tonawanda, New York) has, since the 1950s, explored line and color on supports ranging in shape, size, and dimension. Committed to abstraction as a means of communication, he has worked within a consistent geometric vocabulary to produce a varied body of paintings and works on paper. His career has developed through an evolution of techniques for the application of paint onto his chosen surface—first plywood and masonite, and later, beginning in 1968, stretched canvas. Moving away from the conventions of paintings, he introduced shaped canvases, working with symmetrical and asymmetrical forms as well as curvilinear edges. For his early shaped and multi-panel constructions, Mangold airbrushed oil-based pigments in gradations of color, and later used a roller before ultimately adopting a brush to apply acrylic in subtle hues that near transparency. He remained intrigued by color as much as structure, and his relationship with it shifted throughout the decades. His initial palette, inspired by industrial objects—file cabinets, brick walls, and trucks—transitioned toward colors that evoke mood: warm ochres, light blues, deep oranges, olive greens, and other hues. Mangold’s mostly monochromatic compositions show an attention to gesture with the addition of hand-drawn pencil lines that curve across the planes of color.

PACE SEOUL

2/3F, 267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

Hank Willis Thomas: Another Justice: Divided We Stand @ Kayne Griffin Gallery, Los Angeles

Hank Willis Thomas

Another Justice: Divided We Stand

Kayne Griffin, Los Angeles

November 12, 2021 - January 8, 2022

Kayne Griffin presents Hank Willis Thomas’ second solo exhibition at the gallery, Another Justice: Divided We Stand. Comprising large-scale sculptures and mixed media quilted works, the exhibition of new work continues Thomas’ exploration of American iconography, color theory, and language.

Hank Willis Thomas’ recent works investigate the fabric of our nation—literally and figuratively—through the deconstruction and reconstruction of U.S. flags and striped prison uniforms. In drawing attention to the similarities of these materials, the artist navigates the complexity of distinguishing patriotism from nationalism. The work is part of Thomas’ negotiation of an enduring conundrum of the United States of America: Can “the land of the free” also be home to the largest prison population in the world?

The artist uses textiles from flags and prison uniforms to form abstract patterns and labyrinths of text that make reference to the founding ideals and complicated realities, past and present, of the American experiment. Though the 13th Amendment is popularly believed to have abolished slavery, in fact it intentionally created a loophole wherein the practice was allowed to continue as “punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Through this loophole, the prison system has continued to exploit and trade human beings and profit from their free labor. In her groundbreaking book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander writes “Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.” Inspired by his desire to imagine the U.S. living up to its ideals of perpetually becoming “a more perfect nation,” Thomas embeds his own language into these charged materials, highlighting the significance across time and space of ideas such as “liberty,” “justice,” and “capital.” 

Furthering the artist’s investigation into archival imagery and objects, Strike, a monumental sculpture, is also included in Another Justice: Divided We Stand. It is a continuation of Hank Willis Thomas’ Punctum series. The series is based on Roland Barthes’ photographic theory of the punctum, which refers to the detail in an image that pierces or wounds the viewer, creating a direct relationship between them and the pictured object or person. Hank Willis Thomas uses this concept to select or reframe areas of images, which he then transforms into large-scale sculptures. Rendered in stainless steel and painted aluminum, these works challenge the viewer’s positionality within scenes of oppression and resistance, encouraging reflection upon one’s own relation to systems of power. 

By magnifying select frames in three-dimensional objects, Hank Willis Thomas choreographs a spatial confrontation between his audience and the fraught subject matter of the original image. Depicting one hand stopping another’s swing of a police baton, Thomas’ Strike is based on the 1934 lithograph Strike Scene by Russian-American painter and printmaker Louis Lozowick. In isolating these disembodied gestures, the work prompts questioning of the enactment of justice: is justice the arm swinging the baton, or is it the force stopping it? Reflecting the viewer back in its polished finish, the work asks its audience, “What is your role in justice?”

This exhibition comprises one part of the greater Another Justice: By Any Medium Necessary, produced in collaboration with For Freedoms, the arts collective co-founded by Hank Willis Thomas. Taking place over the course of a year, the larger Another Justice invitation is a series of interdisciplinary projects and programs that contemplate what justice looks like internally and externally as we attempt to define our own needs and responsibilities, and connect that back to systems of power. This includes a series of billboards commissioned by the LANDBACK.Art campaign, a partnership between the organizations NDN Collective, For Freedoms, and INDÍGENA, centering upon the theme of “Land Back” in reference to the campaign led by Indigenous activists regarding decolonization and Indigenous sovereignty. Visible above Kayne Griffin is the billboard designed together by The Gabrielino-Shoshone Tribal Council of Southern California, artist Tekpatl Kuauhtzin, and photographer Josué Rivas. Across the country, For Freedoms and LANDBACK.Art have invited 20 Indigenous artists, community members, and their allies to illustrate their answer to “What does land back mean to you?”

With Another Justice: Divided We Stand., Hank Willis Thomas’ masterful manipulation of American iconography serves as a poignant reminder of the work that still needs to be done, initiating a call to action for new ways of relating to this country’s promise.

HANK WILLIS THOMAS is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands. Thomas’ work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth) and For Freedoms, which was awarded the 2017 ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. In 2012, Question Bridge: Black Males debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and was selected for the New Media Grant from the Tribeca Film Institute. Thomas is also the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017) and is a former member of the New York City Public Design Commission. Thomas holds a B.F.A. from New York University (1998) and an M.A./M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts (2004). He received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in 2017. Thomas is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Ben Brown Fine Arts, London; Goodman Gallery, South Africa; and Marauni Mercier, Belgium.

KAYNE GRIFFIN

1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90019

www.kaynegriffin.com

Jordan Carter Curator Dia Art Foundation

Jordan Carter

Curator at Dia Art Foundation

Dia Art Foundation announced (September 21, 2021) the appointment of JORDAN CARTER to the position of Curator. With a specialization in Fluxus and global Conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s, Jordan Carter will play a key role in Dia’s commissions, exhibitions, acquisitions, and public programming across its eleven sites. Jordan Carter comes to Dia from the Art Institute of Chicago, where he held the position of Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. He will begin his new role in December 2021.

“Jordan Carter brings with him broad expertise in the period of art history that sits at the core of Dia’s collection. His curatorial interests also offer a vital expansion of this period and its enduring influence on contemporary art, that will be key to Dia’s programming in the coming years. We are elated to welcome Jordan to the Dia team,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg director.

“I am thrilled to join Dia Art Foundation and to collaborate on a program that honors the institution’s history while advancing its role as a vibrant and essential hub of radical hospitality—hosting artists, publics, and risk in ways that let the outside in,” said Jordan Carter. “I look forward to contributing to Dia’s mission of championing and expanding the histories and legacies of Minimal and Conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s, and engaging living artists in sustained and meaningful ways that extend these stakes and dialogues into the twenty-first century.”

CURATOR JORDAN CARTER

Jordan Carter comes to Dia following a tenure of over four years at the Art Institute of Chicago, where most recently he held the position of Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. In his time at the Art Institute of Chicago, Jordan Carter curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions including Mounira Al Solh: I strongly believe in our right to be frivolous (2018); Ellen Gallagher: Are We Obsidian? (2018–19); Benjamin Patterson: When Elephants Fight, It Is the Frogs That Suffer—A Sonic Graffiti (2019); and Richard Hunt: Scholar’s Rock or Stone of Hope or Love of Bronze (2020–21). Jordan Carter is co-organizing upcoming exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago of the work of stanley brouwn and Shahryar Nashat. Jordan Carter is also co-curator of the exhibition Ray Johnson c/o, forthcoming at the Art Institute of Chicago. This exhibition marks the first major institutional presentation of the artist’s work since Ray Johnson: Correspondences, a 1999 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, organized by Donna De Salvo, currently Senior Adjunct Curator at Dia.

From 2015–17, Jordan Carter was a Curatorial Fellow at the Walker Art Center. Prior to his time at the Walker, he was the twelve-month Fluxus Collection Intern at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, where he researched, catalogued, and organized displays of MoMA’s Fluxus collection. Jordan Carter has also held curatorial and research positions at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Centre Pompidou in Paris. He holds a BA from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where he focused on Fluxus and global Conceptual art.

DIA ART FOUNDATION

www.diaart.org

Hank Willis Thomas: An All Colored Cast @ Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles

Hank Willis Thomas

An All Colored Cast

Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles

January 18 - March 7, 2020

Kayne Griffin Corcoran presents HANK WILLIS THOMAS’ first solo exhibition at the gallery. An All Colored Cast is an exploration of color theory, popular culture, the development of Pop Art, Color Field painting, Minimalism, and the Hollywood film industry. In this new body of work, Thomas examines the portrayals of gender, race, and identity through the lens of film, performance, and color motion pictures.

Using color theory and screen color calibration charts as an aesthetic starting point, Hank Willis Thomas re-examines the language surrounding “color correction” and “white balance” in order to demonstrate the charged language of color, particularly around the time of desegregation and the proliferation of Technicolor in America.

Hank Willis Thomas is interested in the notions of perspective and perception, specifically how framing and context influence what and how a viewer sees. The retroreflective prints and sculptural works on view in the exhibition are largely inspired by the work of Ellsworth Kelly, Joseph Albers, and Andy Warhol; 20th century performers such as Bert Williams, Hattie McDaniel, and Fredi Washington; and the pioneering work of major motion-picture directors such as Gordon Parks.

Hank Willis Thomas draws directly from film and television stills, depicting snapshots throughout American cinema in the 20th century, including Lime Kiln Field Day (1913), Sundown (1941), Anna Lucasta (1958), Easy Rider (1969), Mandingo (1975), and Dukes of Hazzard (1979).

With an ongoing fascination in the framing of history, Hank Willis Thomas draws upon appropriated, and in this case, archival film images, Hollywood stills, and mid-century black-cast posters. His sculptures create both a pause for reflection and an opportunity for the viewer to step into the frame, while his retroreflective works—which are activated by flash photography—encourage a viewer to look closely. Much of Thomas’ work demands that viewers shift their position and engage directly in order to see a moment in its entirety, as a reminder of the multiple ways of looking at a given moment or subject. Through this invitation to participate, the viewer plays an active role as an agent and image-maker.

HANK WILLIS THOMAS (lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. Solo exhibitions of his work have been featured at the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY among others. Hank Willis Thomas’ work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum and Brooklyn Museum (all New York, NY.)

KAYNE GRIFFIN CORCORAN

1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90019

www.kaynegriffincorcoran.com

General Ideas: Rethinking Conceptual Art 1987–2005, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco

General Ideas: Rethinking Conceptual Art 1987–2005

CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco

September 15 – November 13, 2005

The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts presents "General Ideas: Rethinking Conceptual Art 1987–2005," an exhibition that considers the legacy of conceptual art in works produced by a generation of artists born during or close to the first phase of conceptual art production (1965–1975). Organized by Matthew Higgs, adjunct curator for the Wattis Institute and Director of White Columns in New York, "General Ideas"  is on view in the CCA Wattis Institute's Logan Galleries on the San Francisco campus of California College of the Arts.

"General Ideas" seeks to explore works in the wake of conceptual art and how the ideas and approaches of this movement have influenced subsequent generations of artists. "Like their conceptualist precursors, the works in "General Ideas" employ the 'language, actions, processes, and existing cultural forms' of quotidian life to, in LeWitt's words, 'leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach,'" writes Matthew Higgs in an essay about the exhibition.

Featured artists include Francis Als, Jennifer Bornstein, Adam Chodzko, Martin Creed, Andrea Fraser, Liam Gillick, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jamie Isenstein, Emily Jacir, Emma Kay, Adam McEwen, Jonathan Monk, Gabriel Orozco, Rob Pruitt, Kay Rosen, Josh Shaddock, Santiago Sierra, Ron Terada and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Works in the show range from photographs and lithographs, to mixed media installations, video and new media works. Examples include Adam Chodzko's "The God Look-Alike Contest" (1992–93), a series of images born out of a classified advertisement he placed in a London newspaper long before the ubiquity of the internet and reality television; Andrea Fraser's video work "Little Frank and His Carp" (2001), depicting an unauthorized intervention in the newly opened Guggenheim Bilbao (designed by Frank Gehry) that followes the sexually suggestive subtext of the museum's audio-tour guide to its logical denouement; and "Five Coloured Words in Neon" (2003), in which through the cool glamour of neon, Ron Terada restages post 9/11 hysteria while making a sly historical nod to the artist Joseph Kosuth.

CCA WATTIS INSTITUTE FOR THE ARTS 

California College of the Arts, San Francisco

1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA 94107

www.wattis.org 

Mel Bochner Photographs, 1966–1969 at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA

Mel Bochner Photographs, 1966–1969

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

October 12, 2002 – January 12, 2003

The early photographs of Mel Bochner (b. 1940) are on view in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Forum Gallery. Mel Bochner Photographs, 1966–1969 showcases 34 important, little-known works that demonstrate Mel Bochner’s role during the formative years of the Conceptual art movement.

Mel Bochner, a Pittsburgh native and graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, is best known for installations and paintings that probe the abstract concept of measurement. In the late 1960s, Mel Bochner, like other Conceptual artists, turned away from self-expression, choosing instead to explore organized systems of thought, such as language and mathematics, through artistic practices that used minimal aesthetics.

Mel Bochner Photographs, 1966–1969 reveals the artist’s contributions to Conceptualism by highlighting the importance of his photography in the movement’s development. For Mel Bochner, photography was well suited to exploring the abstract ideas and systems behind artistic practice, which interested him more than focusing on the representation of objects.

Mel Bochner’s photographs treat a variety of subjects, investigating a range of artistic phenomena such as perspective, color, scale, and language. A number of pieces in the exhibition record Bochner’s experimentation working outside standard photographic formats, including several multi-panel and large-format works that the artist cut and manipulated. When installed several inches from a wall, these works produce an effect that blurs the distinction between two-dimensional media and sculpture.

Some pieces in the exhibition deal with mathematical ideas. 36 Photographs and 12 Diagrams (1966) depicts a numerical sequence, emphasizing the whole, as well as showing the incremental changes in its creation. To do this, Mel Bochner built and photographed a series of stacked wooden blocks, emphasizing the mathematical principle of the arrangement step-by-step.

Works like Surface Dis/Tension (1968) delve into the depiction of perspective. Beginning with a photograph of a grid, Mel Bochner soaked the print and peeled away the image-bearing surace, allowing it to wrinkle while drying. He then photographed the image of the grid as it appeared on this crumpled membrane. Next, Mel Bochner made positive and negative prints of the distorted grid on the same piece of paper, simultaneously revealing the original perspective as well as its altered form.

Other works probe how presentation affects perception. H-2 (1966–67), for example, minimizes the difference between sculpture and photography. The piece is a gelatin silver print of stacked wooden blocks in a cruciform arrangement, cut in silhouette and mounted on Masonite. When viewed head-on, the work gives the illusion of depth. Viewed obliquely, the third dimension disappears. This mutability hints at Bochner’s awareness of art’s power to bridge, as well as widen, the gap between object and representation.

According to exhibition curator Scott Rothkopf, “People often think that Conceptual art is hard to understand, and that it doesn’t offer the viewers a lot visually. Bochner, however, cared very much that his photographs be as interesting to look at as they are to think about.”

The 185-page exhibition catalogue Mel Bochner Photographs, 1966–1969, by Scott Rothkopf, includes an essay by Elisabeth Sussman and 40 color plates, as well as 119 black-and-white illustrations. The catalogue, published by Yale University Press in conjunction with Harvard University Museums, is available in the Carnegie Museum of Art Store.

Mel Bochner Photographs, 1966–69 was organized by Scott Rothkopf for the Harvard University Art Museums.

CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART

4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA

www.cmoa.org