Jeffrey Gibson @ The Met Facade, NYC - The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am

The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

September 12, 2025 – June 9, 2026

Portrait of Jeffrey Gibson: Eileen Travell

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of The Genesis Facade Commission:

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

The acclaimed interdisciplinary artist JEFFREY GIBSON has transformed the iconic niches of the Museum’s Fifth Avenue facade with a series of four large-scale sculptures that explore the metamorphic relationships between all living beings and the environment. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Jeffrey Gibson draws from his distinctive style fusing worldviews and imagery with abstraction, text, and color to create these new figurative works cast in bronze. On view through June 9, 2026, The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am marks Gibson’s first major exploration of this material at a monumental scale.

"Jeffrey Gibson is one of the most remarkable artists of his generation and a pioneering figure within the field of native and Indigenous art," said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. "These new works are based on his signature use of unconventional materials and reimagined forms, employing them to explore often-overlooked histories and the natural world. We’re thrilled to have his monumental sculptures installed on The Met’s iconic Fifth Avenue facade."

David Breslin, Leonard A. Lauder Curator in Charge, Modern and Contemporary Art, said, "Jeffrey Gibson is an artist brilliantly attuned to the varieties of life that our world holds—the human, the animal, the land itself. His art vibrates and bristles with that life, the histories that never leave us, and the futures that his vision makes possible."

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of they carry messages between 

light and dark spaces biakak / dawodv / hawk,

for The Genesis Facade Commission: 

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Silicon bronze with patina finish

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of they plan and prepare for 

the future fvni / sa lo li / squirrel,

for The Genesis Facade Commission: 

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Silicon bronze with patina finish

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

Titled The Animal That Therefore I Am, the installation transforms the Museum’s neoclassical facade into a dynamic stage for Gibson’s ambitious vision of figural presence and ecological kinship. Each 10-foot bronze sculpture takes the form of a regional animal: a hawk, a squirrel, a coyote, and a deer. Using cast elements such as wood, beads, and cloth to build texture, Jeffrey Gibson embraces a new process that expands his sculptural vocabulary. From these reproduced wood supports emerge referential animal forms, with each sculpture formally fusing the animate and the inanimate. Intricately bold, patinated abstract patterning evokes beadwork and textiles drawn from a range of Indigenous visual languages—motifs that are seamlessly integrated into the sculptures’ surfaces.

The works are inspired by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s book The Animal That Therefore I Am, which examines the violence inherent in the human domination of animals—a theme Gibson connects to broader cycles of conflict. By selecting species native to the New York area, he reflects on how these creatures have been forced to adapt to human environments, inviting us to consider what they endure and what they might teach us. The Animal That Therefore I Am flanks the Museum entrance, the zoomorphic forms remaining in dialogue with the surrounding landscape, from the natural environment of the Hudson River Valley, where Jeffrey Gibson lives and works, to the urban ecology of Central Park encircling The Met.

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of they are witty and transform themselves 

in order to guide us nashoba holba / wayaha / coyote, 

for The Genesis Facade Commission: 

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Silicon bronze with patina finish

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of they teach us to be sensitive 

and to trust our instincts issi / awi / deer, 

for The Genesis Facade Commission: 

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Silicon bronze with patina finish

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

This project is the latest in The Met’s series of contemporary commissions in which the Museum invites artists to create new works of art, establishing a dialogue between the artist's practice, The Met collection, the physical Museum, and The Met's audiences.

Artist Jeffrey Gibson

Jeffry Gibson is an interdisciplinary artist who grew up in the United States, Germany, and Korea. His expansive body of work ranges from hard-edged abstract paintings to a rich practice of performance and filmmaking to significant work as artist convener and curator. Since the 2000s, Gibson’s work—which often incorporates Indigenous aesthetic and material traditions—has consistently revealed new modalities for abstraction, the use of text, and color, with the artist applying his formal mastery to concepts such as human connection and collective identity. Notably, Gibson’s work has introduced a broad range of recurring sources, material elements, and imagery while offering a critique of the reductive ways in which Indigenous culture has been historically flattened and misappropriated.

Recent solo exhibitions include Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me (The Broad, 2025); Jeffrey Gibson: POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT (MASS MoCA, 2024); This Burning World: Jeffrey Gibson (ICA San Francisco, 2022); Jeffrey Gibson: The Body Electric (SITE Santa Fe, 2022); Jeffrey Gibson: They Come From Fire (Portland Art Museum, 2022); Jeffrey Gibson: INFINITE INDIGENOUS QUEER LOVE (deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, 2022); and Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer (Denver Art Museum, 2018). Jeffrey Gibson was selected to represent the United States at La Biennale di Venezia, the 60th International Art Exhibition, in 2024. Jeffrey Gibson also conceived of and co-edited the landmark volume An Indigenous Present (2023), which showcases diverse approaches to Indigenous concepts, forms, and media. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Portland Art Museum; Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Jeffrey Gibson has received many distinguished awards, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award (2019), and is currently an artist in residence at Bard College, in Annandale, New York. He lives and works in Hudson, New York.

The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am is conceived by the artist in consultation with Jane Panetta, the Aaron I. Fleischman Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met. The exhibition is presented by Genesis.

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue Facade

www.metmuseum.org

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

Robert Therrien: This is a Story

The Broad, Los Angeles

November 22, 2025 – April 5, 2026

Robert Therrien

No title (folding table and chairs, dark brown), 2007

Painted steel and aluminum, fabric, and plastic 

Courtesy of Glenstone Museum 

Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

The Broad presents Robert Therrien: This is a Story, the largest museum exhibition of the late artist’s widely-adored work to date. Therrien’s meditations on scale and material are a deeply influential and well-known approach within the field of contemporary sculpture, significant to The Broad’s own identity as a museum, and long admired by visitors of all ages. The installation will showcase Therrien’s personal vocabulary of images and symbols—from enormous tables, chairs, and dishes, to intimate drawings of snowmen, birds, and chapels—as they become a language of continuous creation and transformation for the artist over time. Featuring more than 120 works spanning five decades, the exhibition offers unprecedented access to the artist’s exploration of scale, memory, and perception, just miles from the downtown Los Angeles home and studio space he operated out of for close to thirty years beginning in 1990. Many of the works on view, including those created just before Robert Therrien’s untimely death in 2019, have never been featured in museum exhibitions and will offer new avenues of understanding his practice.

“Robert Therrien has longstanding ties to The Broad and was one of the very first L.A.-based artists to enter the Broad collection decades ago, in its first, formative years. His massive sculpture Under the Table has captivated visitors to our museum’s galleries since the day The Broad opened in 2015, as a surreally enlarged wooden table offering layers of the artist’s intellectual and art historical inquiry within an aura of domestic familiarity,” said Joanne Heyler, Founding Director and President of The Broad. She added, “For our visitors who know and love Under the Table, this ambitious show will reveal a deeper and wide-lens look into the completely unique world Therrien created–a Los-Angeles-based body of work that reshaped contemporary sculpture.”

Robert Therrien

No title (bent cone relief), 1983 

Lacquer and wax on wood 

Courtesy of The Broad Art Foundation

Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

Robert Therrien

No title (black witch hat), 2018 

Carved Delrin plastic

Courtesy of Robert Therrien Estate.

Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

Robert Therrien (1947–2019) was born in Chicago and relocated to Los Angeles in the 1970s to complete an MFA at the University of Southern California. Despite the prominence of conceptual and minimalist practices at the time, he developed his own adjacent artistic vernacular that saw the infinite potential of ordinary objects across basic forms and their three-dimensional counterparts, varying in size, color, and detail. A single Robert Therrien gesture can expand, contract, change materially, or seamlessly transform into other images entirely. A chapel will become an oil can; the oil can will become a pitcher; the pitcher, a cone, then morphing into a witch hat. At the heart of Therrien’s practice is a sense of artistic animation, by turns fun, playful, and serious.

“Los Angeles has been and remains a historically important place to make sculpture and Robert Therrien is vital to that story” said Ed Schad, Curator and Publications Manager at The Broad. “From his handmade and intimate responses to Minimalism in the 1970s, to his early involvement in what would become a golden age of L.A. fabrication, Therrien made important contributions to many of sculpture’s central conversations for over forty years. However, the most important thing to know about Therrien is that he can evoke a sense of wonder. What starts in Therrien’s personal and closely guarded memories and passions, becomes a mysterious place in which a viewer can think about and dwell in one’s own.”

Visitors will be able to walk under and around large tables and chairs, approach enormous hanging beards, and navigate around large, stacked dishes designed to appear to be in motion and alter one’s sense of balance. In addition, a special collaboration with the artist’s estate will expose visitors to partial reconstructions of Therrien’s studio environment, including his project tables, drawings, and tools, to full-sized rooms full of surprises and encounters that are a hallmark of the artist’s practice. Therrien’s living and working space in Downtown L.A. remains pivotal to his understanding of space and size.

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

THE BROAD

221 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012

www.thebroad.org

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

Daniel Richter: Mit elben Birnen

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg

Through 27 September 2025

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

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

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

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

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

Friedrich Hölderlin

‘Half of Life’

With its yellow pears

And wild roses everywhere

The shore hangs into the lake,

O gracious swans,

And drunk with kisses

You dip your heads

In the sobering holy water.

Ah, where will I find

Flowers, come winter,

And where the sunshine

And shade of the earth?

Walls stand cold

And speechless, in the wind

The weathervanes creak.

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

Artist Daniel Richter

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

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

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

THADDAEUS ROPAC SALZBURG

Salzburg Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Salzburg

ropac.net

Related Posts:

In English

Daniel Richter 

Kunsthalle Tübingen (2023)

Daniel Richter: Pink Flag – White Horse 

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2005)

En Français

Daniel Richter. Drapeau rose – Cheval blanc

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

Daniel Richter: Mit elben Birnen

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg, 25 July — 27 September 2025

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

Nicasio Fernandez: Light Whispers

Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

August 21 – October 16, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

BERGGRUEN GALLERY

10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

www.berggruen.com

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

Matt Kleberg: Bless Babel

Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

August 21 – October 16, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

BERGGRUEN GALLERY

10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

www.berggruen.com

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

Alexandre Diop

Run For Your Life !

Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

19 September - 1 November 2025

Alexandre Diop

A Vos marques ! Prêt ! Illegal, 2025

© Alexandre Diop, courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

Artist Alexandre Diop

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

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

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

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

STEPHAN FRIEDMAN GALLERY LONDON

5-6 Cork Street, London W1S 3LQ 

www.stephenfriedman.com

2025 Annual Exhibition @ The Campus, Hudson, NY - A platform for expansive thought and free-ranging artistic expression

2025 Annual Exhibition

The Campus, Hudson, NY

Through October 26, 2025

The Campus presents its second annual exhibition, on view through October 26, 2025. Organized by Timo Kappeller, this exhibition stretches over 35 rooms and the surrounding grounds of the former Ockawamick School in Claverack, NY, newly revived as a dynamic venue for contemporary art. As in the 2024 edition, The Campus seeks to build community and foster dialogue in upstate New York, and many of the included artists have ties to the region. Performances and programming are scheduled throughout the run of the exhibition.

A diverse group of artists has been invited to respond to the spatial rhythm of the site and layer new meaning atop existing associations and touchstones. Thirty solo and duo full-room installations anchor the show alongside focused group presentations of painting, photography and ceramics. These site-responsive activations, recently created artworks, and historical reevaluations were developed through a yearlong process-led and artist-driven curatorial strategy. Rather than situating these works within a thematic framework, The Campus functions as a platform for expansive thought and free-ranging artistic expression.

Selected highlights:

Recent large-scale paintings by Rita Ackermann take earlier work as a starting point to reexamine a scene from multiple angles. Relationships between bodies of work, camera and picture plane, and abstraction and figuration are layered in a state of continual flux.

Corydon Cowansage’s murals and paintings suffuse a former classroom with hypnotic color and sensual shapes, straddling the space between biological and botanical imagery.

Rarely seen sculptures by Ming Fay explore the symbolic resonance, shape, color, and texture of fruits, seeds, seashells, and other nature-inspired hybrid forms—enlarged to invite both encounter with and appreciation of the natural world.

Katharina Grosse, known for large-scale site interventions, has conceived two adjoining silk-draped rooms in visual dialogue with mirrored works by Daniel Buren and improvisational sculptures by Arlene Shechet.

Exploring the unknowability of his own body, Naotaka Hiro presents a bronze sculpture along with a pair of new paintings—maps of a body’s workings as it grapples with the painting’s surface from above and below.

Char Jeré’s layered installation draws on Afro-fractalist theory, her own autobiography, and a background in data analytics to examine the ways in which the built networks of our world enact a complicated relationship between race and technology.

A group of vibrant soft sculptures by Marta Minujín epitomize her ongoing pursuit of a radically dynamic and temporal art, implicating the body of the artist, the viewer, and the body politic.

Drawing sessions hosted by Oscar Murillo Studio took place throughout the opening weekend (end of June), and visitors of all ages were invited to draw freely on canvases in a celebration of collective spirit. The canvases will go on to become part of a collaborative artwork for the 36th São Paulo Biennial.

Naudline Pierre debuts new paintings and works on paper in a large former classroom, inviting viewers to step into her immersive and otherworldly landscapes that situate personal mythology and transcendent intimacy alongside canonical narratives of devotion.

Dana Schutz and Ryan Johnson—partners in life and studio—present an exchange between their practices, combining Schutz’s paintings with Johnson’s sculptural forms in a spirited interplay.

Kiki Smith’s dreamlike photographs, sculptures, and textile works illustrate a multifaceted reflection on how the literal and symbolic meanings of light and sight affect the human condition.

A compelling group of sculptural wooden wall works by Richard Tuttle, recently made in New Mexico and on view for the first time, offer insight into the artist’s ongoing investigation of material and form.

An immersive, museological display by Francis Upritchard features sculpture and works on paper that tread the line between realism and fantasy, fusing her idiosyncratic blend of references from literature, ancient sculptures, burial grounds, science fiction, folklore, miniatures, and frescoes.

Participating artists include: Rita Ackermann, Lisa Alvarado, Jean Arp, Tauba Auerbach, Trisha Baga, Ranti Bam, Ernie Barnes, Huma Bhabha, Blinn & Lambert, Katherine Bradford, Daniel Buren, William Copley, Corydon Cowansage, Sarah Crowner, Carmen D’Apollonio, Michael Dean, Mark Dion, Hadi Falapishi, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Ming Fay, Jason Fox, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Vanessa German, Ann Gillen, Jan Groover, Katharina Grosse, Nicolás Guagnini, Daniel Guzmán, Maren Hassinger, Cynthia Hawkins, Paula Hayes, Lena Henke, Naotaka Hiro, Marcus Jahmal, Xylor Jane, Ann Veronica Janssens, Char Jeré, Ryan Johnson, Allison Katz, Byron Kim, Zak Kitnick, Andrew Kuo, Alicja Kwade, Dr. Lakra, Jim Lambie, Liz Larner, Margaret Lee, Fernand Leger, Richard Long, Liz Magor, Sylvia Mangold, Marta Minujín, Oscar Murillo, Aliza Nisenbaum, Mary Obering, Virginia Overton, Paul Pfeiffer, Naudline Pierre, Charles E. Porter, Nancy Rubins, Dana Schutz, Nancy Shaver with Wolf, Arlene Shechet, Dana Sherwood, Elias Sime, Skuja Braden, Kiki Smith, Monika Sosnowska, Vivian Suter, Toshiko Takaezu, Cynthia Talmadge, Richard Tuttle, Francis Upritchard, Nari Ward, Lawrence Weiner, Jordan Wolfson, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung.

The Campus is owned and operated by a consortium of six galleries: Bortolami, James Cohan, kaufmann repetto, Anton Kern, Andrew Kreps, and kurimanzutto. 

The exhibition is curated by Timo Kappeller, Artistic Director of The Campus. Curatorial team: Jesse Willenbring and Shira Schwarz. Embracing a collaborative model, the galleries have turned an abandoned former school building into a platform for cultural exchange.

THE CAMPUS 

341-217 Hudson, NY

www.thecampusupstate.com

2025 Annual Exhibition @ The Campus, Hudson, NY, June 28 - October 26, 2025

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

Emma Luukkala: Night Wash

HAM Gallery, Helsinki 

20 September - 9 November 2025

Emma Luukkala

Night Wash, 2025 (detail)

Photo: Emma Luukkala

In her HAM gallery exhibition, EMMA LUUKKALA ponders the overlap between the sacred and the everyday. Life flows in endless piles of things and to-do lists, with moments of meaning, intense in their brightness, at the heart of the chaos.

Jobs I’ve done today: swept the floors, folded the laundry, and moved things from place to place. From somewhere, I can hear a blackbird singing.

Not even the grandest and most solemn situations are pure and uncontaminated by the outside world – they are always adorned with everyday chores and annoying dirt. Emma Luukkala asks what sacred could mean in a new materialist context, where the world is not divided dualistically into the superior spiritual and the inferior material, but instead consists of a wide range of intertwined players.

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

HAM GALLERY - HELSINKI ART MUSEUM

Eteläinen Rautatiekatu 8, 00100 Helsinki

www.hamhelsinki.fi

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

Yuan Fang: Spaying

Skarstedt Gallery, New York

September 4 – October 25, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

SKARSTEDT NEW YORK CHELSEA

547 West 25th New York, NY 10001

www.skarstedt.com

Ana Cláudia Almeida @ Stephen Friedman Gallery, NYC - "Over Again" Exhibition

Ana Cláudia Almeida: Over Again

Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York

5 September - 18 October 2025

Ana Cláudia Almeida

Licking, 2025

© Ana Cláudia Almeida, courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery

Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York, presents Over Again, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Brooklyn-based, Brazilian artist ANA CLAUDIA ALMEIDA. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York.

Ana Cláudia Almeida is an artist whose work explores materiality through movement and mark-making, incorporating a range of media including paper, plastic, oil pastels, paint, video, and sculpture. Her practice seeks to disrupt the functional role of objects by examining the dynamic tension between interior and exterior, individual and environment. The fluttering nature of her works on fabric, the shifting quality of her sculptures, and the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of her large-scale paintings transform intangible memories into physical form.

In Over Again, drawing, oil painting, sculpture, and plastic collide in what Ana Cláudia Almeida describes as an “ecosystem of pieces,” where each medium leaks into the next—a monotype that wants to be a drawing, a drawing that yearns to be a painting, and plastic remnants that refuse to be cast aside. Processes coexist and collide across surfaces, embodying the changeability that sustains both life and artistic practice. Her work reflects the cyclical nature and plasticity of life, tracing the ways in which every action leaves an imprint that shapes what comes next.

Ana Cláudia Almeida’s new body of work—and the exhibition’s title—draws inspiration from Brazilian musician Tim Maia’s song Over Again, which she embraces as a mantra urging liberation from rigid patterns in mind, body, and daily life. Literature, music like Maia’s, and the people she’s met have opened her to alternative ways of living, offering a vision of a less harsh existence. “Precisely in the moments when everything felt more urgent than fabulation, allowing myself that exercise was one of the greatest experiences of freedom I could have had… and now my new pleasure is to lean into the place that hope occupies in the lives of us, Black people.”

In works like Cascata II (2025), Ana Cláudia Almeida revisits the notion of freedom—inseparable, for her, from hope. The largest work in the exhibition is composed of vividly painted fabric that cascades from the gallery ceiling. Its free-flowing brushstrokes unfurl in winding swaths of color, a stunning display of the artist’s intuitive process. This sense of unrestrained movement extends throughout the exhibition: in Dew (gripe) and Belly full of liquids (both 2025), Almeida uses expanses of white space to frame and amplify her vibrant, expressive line drawings. 

For Over Again, Ana Cláudia Almeida assembles a constellation of works that speak to difference, resilience, and the radical act of imagining otherwise. Together, they form what she calls “an essay for a world of differences and complexities”—a defiant refusal of the “machine of existence-flattening” and an invitation to inhabit a space where freedom and hope are lived, shared possibilities.

Artist Ana Cláudia Almeida

Ana Cláudia Almeida (b. 1993, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; lives in Brooklyn, New York) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and video. Her work has been exhibited widely in Brazil and internationally. Notable presentations include a two-person exhibition with Tadáskía at the Nevada Museum of Art as part of the Joyner/Giuffrida Visiting Artists Programme; Guandu Paraguaçu Piraquara at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Rio de Janeiro; Buracos, Crateras e Abraços at Quadra, Rio de Janeiro; and Wasapindorama at Fundação de Arte de Niterói, Niterói. Group exhibitions include Ensaios sobre a Paisagem at Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho; Olhe bem as montanhas at Quadra, São Paulo; Essas Pessoas na Sala de Jantar at Casa Museu Eva Klabin, Rio de Janeiro; Crônicas Cariocas at Museu de Arte do Rio; and Casa Carioca at Museu de Arte do Rio.

Ana Cláudia Almeida holds a BFA from Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. 

Her work is held in the public collections of Museu de Arte do Rio, Instituto Inhotim, Sesc Rio de Janeiro, and the Nevada Museum of Art.

STEPHEN FRIEDMAN GALLERY NEW YORK

54 Franklin Street, New York 10013

www.stephenfriedman.com

Jordan Nassar @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - "REVELATION" Exhibition

Jordan Nassar

REVELATION

James Cohan Gallery, New York

September 5 - October 4, 2025

Jordan Nassar

Photo by Takamasa Ota

James Cohan presents REVELATION, an exhibition of new work by JORDAN NASSAR at the gallery’s 48 Walker Street location. This is Nassar’s fourth solo exhibition with James Cohan. 

In REVELATION, Jordan Nassar reimagines traditional craft techniques across expansive multipanel embroideries and transportative mosaics to explore inherited nostalgia, history, and heritage. His recent embroideries are poignant meditations on color, as well as light and darkness; they reveal and conceal brilliantly-hued landscapes. In the front gallery, mosaics echoing Byzantine ruins wrap around the walls, eliciting the past in a contemporary site.

Jordan Nassar’s intricately hand-stitched works were made with the participation of Palestinian craftswomen living and working in Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Hebron. Notably, the geometric motifs extend across the entire plane of the canvases, creating dense walls of patterning that obscure imagined vistas. The shadowy palette of these works reflects a somber reverence, one that is punctuated by moments of brightness. A valley lit by a glowing crimson sun emerges from shades of gray in the aptly named Between Two Hedges of Silence, 2025. The artwork titles, as well as that of the exhibition, were inspired by Etel Adnan’s epic poem, The Arab Apocalypse. Jordan Nassar draws on the close linguistic connection between the Greek etymology of apocalypse with the act of unveiling [from apokaluptein, ’to uncover, to reveal’]. Viewers are granted a window of what lies beyond from multiple vantage points and perspectives. 

Alongside these embroideries, the artist has reconstructed two archaeological antiquities, employing the ancient method of hand-cutting glass. The originals are displayed in the arrivals corridor at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv as a welcome marker. The first is a fragment of a mosaic floor from a 5th-6th century Byzantine structure attributed to BethLehem of the Galilee; in this installation it is intentionally flipped on its side. Jordan Nassar has depicted its flora and fauna, mirroring its design and formal qualities, to vividly bring this ruin to life. He also asserts his own aesthetic choices, filling in eroded areas with exotic animals and curving grape vines that nod to the intricate Shellal mosaic excavated from the Wadi Ghuzze riverbed and now housed in the Australian War Memorial. 

Jordan Nassar describes “the act of remaking them as a tender gesture,” reframing the historical lineage of the craft as he interprets it. Bisan (Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out) (Deuteronomy 28:6), 2025, is the artist’s translation of a square mosaic from the historic city of the same name, decorated heavily with birds with ribbons tied around their napes. Here, Jordan Nassar has unbridled the birds of their ribbons. Ultimately, Jordan Nassar raises questions about the underlying symbolism of ruins, the implicit power that they project and the narratives they can be used to construct and uphold.

Artist Jordan Nassar

Jordan Nassar (b.1985, New York, NY) earned his BA at Middlebury College in 2007. Recent notable solo exhibitions include Jordan Nassar: Fantasy and Truth at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in 2023 and THERE in 2024-2025, which traveled from NCMA Winston-Salem (formerly SECCA) in North Carolina to the Susquehanna Art Museum in Pennsylvania. His work has been featured in exhibitions globally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Asia Society, New York, NY; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY, among others.

Jordan Nassar is represented in numerous permanent collections including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Rollins Museum of Art, Florida; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Florida; Dallas Art Museum, Dallas, TX; The Museum of Contemporary Art, California; and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, in Rhode Island. Nassar is the recipient of several awards including the 2022 Unbound United States Artists Fellowship and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation 2024 Biennial Grant.

JAMES COHAN

48 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.jamescohan.com

Kim Tschang-yeul 김창열 @ MMCA Seoul - National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea - Retrospective Exhibition

Kim Tschang-yeul 김창열

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul

22 August – 21 December 2025

Kim Tschang-yeul

Exhibition Poster 

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Waterdrops SH87030, 1987 

Oil paint and newspaper on hemp, collage, 195×300 cm 

MMCA collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Installation view at MMCA

Photograph by image Joom, Image provided by MMCA

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) presents the first large-scale posthumous retrospective of Kim Tschang-yeul (1929–2021), a seminal figure in Korean contemporary art.

The MMCA has consistently organized exhibitions grounded in research on senior artists and art history to consolidate the foundations of Korean contemporary art and elevate its stature. As part of these efforts, this exhibition provides a comprehensive reappraisal of Kim Tschang-yeul’s oeuvre within the broader contexts of Korea’s modern and contemporary history and art history.

Kim Tschang-yeul was a leading figure of Korea’s art informel movement in the 1950s, pioneering a synthesis of Western contemporary art idiom and Korean sensibilities. Following his time in New York starting in 1965, he settled in Paris in 1969, persistently experimenting to forge an independent artistic language in response to the times. The motif of the water drop, which emerged in the early 1970s and remained central to Kim’s practice for the rest of his life, became a symbol synonymous with the artist himself.

This retrospective closely examines Kim’s artistic journey, with particular focus placed on the fundamental aesthetics embedded in his work and the evolution of his water drop paintings. The exhibition also seeks to deepen the relatively scarce research on the artist, offering an opportunity to reassess the identity and contemporary significance of Korean art.

The exhibition unfolds across Galleries 6 and 7 in four sections: “Scar,” “Phenomenon,” “Waterdrops,” and “Recurrence.” Gallery 8, serving as a type of appendix to the exhibition, presents unpublished archival materials and works that allow visitors to encounter the artist’s life and creative process from multiple perspectives.

Kim Tschang-yeul

Installation view at MMCA

Photograph by image Joom, Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul: Scar

The first section, “Scar,” centers on Kim’s early works and traces the historical circumstances and artistic activities that shaped his practice. Born in Maengsan, Pyeongannam-do, Kim Tschang-yeul relocated south alone at the age of 16, leaving his hometown behind. Having lived through Korean liberation, division, and war, he inevitably internalized the realities of life and death—an experience that became a crucial foundation for his art. Driven by a desire for new forms of art, he co-founded the Hyundae Fine Artists Association in the late 1950s, which became a pivotal starting point for visualizing the wounds of the era and led the informel movement. Kim Tschang-yeul also pioneered the internationalization of Korean contemporary art by participating in global platforms such as the Paris Biennale (1961) and São Paulo Biennial (1965), which marked key turning points in his artistic career. Along with works exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial, this section features Kim’s pre-informel works such as Sunflower (1955)—shown publicly for the first time—and his cover illustrations for the Police Academy’s bimonthly magazine Gyeongchal sinjo from his time as a police officer, providing insight into both the artist’s formative period and the social realities he confronted.

Kim Tschang-yeul

Rite, 1965

Oil paint on canvas, 162×130cm 

MMCA collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Rite, 1966 

Oil paint on canvas, 162×137 cm 

MMCA collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Installation view at MMCA

Photograph by image Joom, Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Untitled, 1969 

Oil paint on canvas, 20.5×20.7 cm 

MMCA collection

Image provided by MMCA 

Kim Tschang-yeul

Composition, 1970

Acrylic paint and cellulose lacquer on canvas, 150×150cm

Private collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Procession, 1971 

Acrylic paint and cellulose lacquer on linen, 150×150cm

Private collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul: Phenomenon

The second section, “Phenomenon,” focuses on Kim’s works from the transitional years spent in New York and Paris, surveying the underexamined origins of his abstract paintings and the formal signs that prefigured the water drop motif. Encouraged by artist Kim Whanki (1913–1974), Kim Tschang-yeul moved to New York in 1965 with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. However, his informel paintings failed to garner attention there, and the emotional dissonance he experienced in a capitalist consumer society left him with a profound sense of alienation and doubt. During this period, he sought a departure from the thick impasto of art informel, experimenting with refined surfaces, geometric forms, and illusory spatial effects. After relocating to Paris in 1969, Kim Tschang-yeul produced the Phenomenon series, in which the previously rigid geometric forms seem to dissolve into organic shapes, while condensed masses are rendered with a mucilaginous quality reminiscent of human organs. These experiments serve as an important precursor to the water drop paintings. On view for the first time in Korea are 8 previously unexhibited paintings from Kim’s New York period, and 11 drawing works from that time, and a 2 water drop painting from 1971 that predates Event of Night (1972), long considered his first water drop work.

Kim Tschang-yeul

Waterdrops ABS N°2, 1973

Oil paint on canvas, 195×130 cm 

Wellside Gallery collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Waterdrops, 1979

Oil paint on canvas, 80.5×100cm 

Private collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Waterdrops, 1986

Acrylic paint and oil paint on canvas, 73×50 cm 

Private collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Installation view at MMCA

Photograph by image Joom, Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul: Waterdrops

The third section, “Waterdrops,” illuminates the defining characteristics and development of Kim’s iconic water drop paintings. The mucilaginous, amorphous masses on his canvas finally transform into complete forms—clear water droplets. These droplets aren’t a product of chance but the culmination of sustained formal experimentation and ontological reflection. Even in the austere environment of a converted stable on the outskirts of Paris, Kim remained devoted to his water drop paintings, eventually garnering recognition with his 1973 solo exhibition in Paris. Initially, Kim Tschang-yeul employed an air-spray technique to render hyperrealistic water drops, later expanding the formal possibilities of his work by reconfiguring the physical relationship between paint and canvas, incorporating stains, and adopting collage techniques. More than mere depictions of material form, Kim’s water drops resonate with East Asian philosophical traditions, functioning as vehicles for meditation while simultaneously evoking a surreal sensibility that entrenched the motif as his distinctive artistic language. This section presents key works from the Water Drop series, ranging from early (1973) to late.

Kim Tschang-yeul

Recurrence SNM93001, 1991

Ink and oil paint on hemp, 300×195 (×4) cm

MMCA collection

Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul

Installation view at MMCA

Photograph by image Joom, Image provided by MMCA

Kim Tschang-yeul: Recurrence

The final section, “Recurrence,” probes the source of Kim’s artistic creation and thought through the interplay of language and image in Kim’s Thousand Character Classic paintings. In the mid-1980s, Kim began incorporating text into his compositions, opening a new realm of expression. While painting water drops on newspaper, he became acutely aware of the intimate relationship between text and image, which subsequently led to his Recurrence series using the Thousand Character Classic. For Kim Tschang-yeul, the Thousand Character Classic was not merely a text but a symbolic system through which he grasped the order of nature and the cosmos. The text is also deeply tied to his childhood. Kim Tschang-yeul filled his canvases with the text as if practicing calligraphy on parchment paper, an act that signified both a return to youth and a reaffirmation of East Asian sensibilities, ultimately opening a space for profound philosophical musings. In his later years, the water drop became Kim’s existential companion, bridging life and art, while the Recurrence series evolved into an act of requiem, suturing life’s scars through brushwork. The Recurrence series, in which text and water drops converge, constitutes both a formal achievement reflecting the essence of his art and evidence of his profound reflection on the roots of existence. This gallery features Recurrence SNM93001 (1991), a monumental 7.8-meter-wide painting from the MMCA collection being shown for the first time, along with an abridged version of the film The Man Who Paints Water Drops, in which Kim Tschang-yeul recounts his life and artistic journey.

After leaving the converted stable in the Paris suburb of Palaiseau for an apartment, Kim Tschang-yeul replaced the nameplate on his door with a single water drop. There, he was affectionately known as “Monsieur Gouttes d’eau” (Mr. Water Drop), and his studio became a kind of sarangbang—a convivial space where artists and friends gathered. The archival section prepared in Gallery 8, “Monsieur Gouttes d’eau, Kim Tschang-yeul,” serves as an appendix to the retrospective, revealing alternate facets of Kim’s life and art. Among the works presented is Il pleut (1973), inspired by surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligram of the same title, which long served as a wellspring of inspiration for Kim Tschang-yeul. The work, which translates the structure of the poem into water droplets, holds greater symbolic resonance in that it is exhibited here for the first time in Korea and abroad. Presenting rarely seen works alongside precious archival materials and large-scale photographs of Kim’s studio, this section offers visitors an intimate encounter with the life Kim Tschang-yeul lived in the company of water drops.

The exhibition catalog includes interviews with the artist, academic research on Kim’s New York works that have lacked sufficient study or exhibition, and an essay by his family, offering a thorough overview of his life. The exhibition layout, which reinterprets the oeuvre of this artist whose practice was long based in France from a fresh perspective, was designed in collaboration with Studio Adrien Gardère, known for its work with leading museums including the Louvre-Lens and the Grand Palais in Paris.

Kim Sunghee, director of the MMCA, notes, “This exhibition seeks to supplement the gaps in existing studies on Kim Tschang-yeul and provide a comprehensive view of the artist’s oeuvre, particularly works from underexplored periods. I hope that this retrospective will serve as an opportunity to rediscover and reassess Kim as an artist, while offering a rare occasion to encounter the distinctive aesthetics and sentiments inherent in his life and art.”

MMCA

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART, KOREA

30 Samcheong-ro (Sogyeok-dong), Jongno-gu, Seoul 03062

www.mmca.go.kr

Related Posts:

The Making of Modern Korean Art: The Letters of Kim Tschang-Yeul, Kim Whanki, Lee Ufan, and Park Seo-Bo, 1961–1982

Tina Kim Gallery, New York, May 5 - June 21, 2025

Kim Tschang-Yeul: The Stillness of Water 

Tina Kim Gallery, New York, September 9 - October 16, 2021