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11/09/25

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

Roger Ballen.! drawing meets photography

Museum Gugging, Maria Gugging, Austria

September 25, 2025 – February 15, 2026

Roger Ballen

Funeral rites, 2004

Roger Ballen

Untitled, 2020

Roger Ballen

Wall shadows, 2003

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

Nina Ansperger and Roger Ballen in museum gugging

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

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

Roger Ballen in museum gugging

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

Curator: Nina Ansperger

MUSEUM GUGGING

Am Campus 2, 3400 Maria Gugging

www.museumgugging.at

29/07/25

British Art Fair 2025: Spotlight on L.S. Lowry by Crane Kalman Gallery

Spotlight on L.S. Lowry

by Crane Kalman Gallery

@ BRITISH ART FAIR 2025

Modern and Contemporary British Art

@ Saatchi Gallery, London

25 - 28 September 2025

Crane Kalman Gallery, a new exhibitor at British Art Fair, reveals personal connections to L.S. Lowry, presenting a series of rare works by one of Britain’s most popular painters for sale.

L.S. LOWRY

Sunday Morning, 1938

Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches / 46 x 61 cms

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

L.S. LOWRY

Farm Buildings, Worsley, 1914

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

L.S. LOWRY

Woman Walking, 1965

Oil on canvas, 28 x 22.9 cms / 11 x 9 inches

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

L.S. LOWRY

A Group of Seven, 1965

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

“In 1949 Andras Kalman opened The Crane Gallery in a basement air-raid shelter in South King Street, Manchester, where the weekly £2 rent was paid by the regular pawning of his typewriter. With persuasion and charm, he managed to obtain for his first exhibition, works by Sir Jacob Epstein, Matthew Smith, Lucien Freud and John Craxton; despite sending invitations to every influential name he could discover, no one came.” Writes Shelley Rodhe in her biography, A Private View of L.S. Lowry (Collins, London 1979). The author takes us to the first meeting between Lowry and Kalman in 1950: “Lowry appeared at the second exhibition, bought a picture and as Kalman recalls ‘it cost him about £20 and I think he bought it only to give my morale a boost’. Visits to the gallery ensued, as did many hours in conversation about artists and the artworld, leading to a lifelong friendship.”

Andras Kalman at the Crane Gallery, Manchester, 1956,

tying a painting by Graham Sutherland to the roof of his Alvis.

That evening, on the trunk road to London, it blew off. After a s

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

Andras Kalman with Sir Ian McKellen below, c. 2000’s

talking to children on their school trip to

Crane Kalman Gallery about Lowry’s work

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

L.S. LOWRY and Lord Richard Attenborough

at the opening of the artists exhibition

A Tribute to L.S. Lowry at Crane Kalman Gallery, London, 1966

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

Kalman first exhibited L.S. Lowry’s work in 1952 and Crane Kalman has continued to exhibit his work ever since, hosting a 70th anniversary exhibition at their Knightsbridge gallery in 2022.

Laurence Stephen Lowry RBA RA (1887 – 1976) is best known for painting the daily lives of Northern British people, often against the background of the modern industrial city. He also painted timeless seascapes and country landscapes that were often empty and even desolate. Collections that hold Lowry’s work include The Tate, London; The Royal Academy of Arts; London; The Hepworth, Wakefield; The Lowry, Salford; Kettles Yard, The University of Cambridge; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Setagaya Museum, Tokyo.

Crane Kalman Gallery will be exhibiting seven works by L.S. Lowry for sale at British Art Fair 2025, including examples of his best known city scenes, landscapes, a portrait and a series of his later, more haunting and comic works. The price range is £25,000 to £1million. You will find them on the ground floor at Saatchi Gallery, 25-28 September 2025.

L.S. LOWRY

Houses and Fencing, c. 1925

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

L.S. LOWRY

Crowded Street Scene, 1933

Pencil on paper, 6.5 x 8.75 inches / 16 x 22 cm

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

L.S. LOWRY

Portrait of a Man, 1920

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

Andrew Kalman, son of Andras Kalman and director of Crane Kalman Gallery said: ”To celebrate our debut participation at the British Art Fair, Crane Kalman Gallery is delighted to present a selection of paintings and works on paper by L.S. Lowry. Arguably, no exhibition of Modern British Art would be complete without featuring Lowry, who remains deeply popular with the general public, feted and collected by lovers of 20th-century British art.”

BRITISH ART FAIR 2025 - Modern and Contemporary British Art

Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York HQ, King’s Road, London SW3 4RY

www.britishartfair.co.uk

CRANE KALMAN GALLERY

178 Brompton Road, London, SW3 1HQ

www.cranekalman.com

04/07/25

Renoir Drawings @ The Morgan, NYC - Exhibition of drawings, watercolors, and pastels of the French Master of Impressionism

Renoir Drawings

Morgan Library & Museum, New York

October 17, 2025 - February 8, 2026

Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)

Portrait of a Girl (Elisabeth Maître), 1879

Pastel on Ingres paper

The Albertina Museum, Vienna – The Batliner Collection, DL535

While the paintings of Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) have become icons of Impressionism, his drawings, watercolors, and pastels are far less widely known. In fact, drawing remained central to his artistic practice even as his interests and ambitions changed over the course of a long career. This exhibition explores the ways in which Auguste Renoir used paper to test ideas, plan compositions, and interpret both landscape and the human figure.

Thematic sections cover the full span of the artist’s career, ranging from academic studies he made as a student, to on-the-spot impressions of contemporary urban and rural life, to finished, formal portraits, to intimate sketches of friends and family completed late in life. In-depth case studies of favored themes and preparatory work for landmark canvases further illuminate Renoir’s practice of drawing.

Inspired by the major gift to the Morgan of a large-scale preparatory sketch for one of Renoir’s most significant paintings, The Great Bathers, this exhibition is the first in a century to explore the artist’s works on paper in depth. Organized by the Morgan Library Museum and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Renoir Drawings brings together nearly one hundred drawings, pastels, watercolors, prints, and a small selection of paintings, enabling visitors to engage with Renoir’s creative process while offering insights into his artistic methods over five decades.

Organized by Colin B. Bailey, Katharine J. Rayner Director, and Sarah Lees, Research Associate.

THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM

225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016

www.themorgan.org

07/06/25

Artist Matthew Bainbridge @ Stellarhighway, Brooklyn, NY - "A Scene on the Lid of a Sleeper’s Eye" Exhibition

Matthew Bainbridge

A Scene on the Lid of a Sleeper’s Eye

Stellarhighway, Brooklyn, NY

June 14 - August 3, 2025

MATTHEW BAINBRIDGE

Sky Dragoon, 2024

Colored pencil on paper, 10 x 7 inches

MATTHEW BAINBRIDGE

Everlasting Love, 2024

Colored pencil on paper, 12 x 16 inches

MATTHEW BAINBRIDGE

Moon Bloom, 2025

Colored pencil on paper, 10 x 7 inches

Stellarhighway presents A Scene on the Lid of a Sleeper’s Eye, MATTHEW BAINBRIDGE’s first presentation of work in New York. Centered on themes of longing and discovery, the ten small drawings in this presentation are displayed unmediated, as raw objects against the wall.

Bainbridge’s non-human characters, abstract fields, and garishly colored landscapes are highly dramatized, aiming to decenter the circumstances they explore. His surfaces themselves are heavy with direct metaphor, where the sheen of waxy colored pencil is casually disrupted by the paper texture or some gesture that calls to the artist’s hand. These tableau of manifested and embodied emotions—longing, despair, joy, terror—have the heightened sense of a stage set into which viewers have entered at the peak of the performance: a pot-bellied flower monarch intently engages a sci-fi orb at the edge of a high coastal prominence, its robes catching a soft breeze as multicolored blooms begin to gently wash around it; later we see this same sovereign having surmounted a whirlwind of flowers, a triumphant fist to its chest. In others the scene is simply set, playerless as though point-of-view: colossal vines infinitely entwine themselves into hearts across a wide landscape; a golden moon rises over a dark sea, shimmering electric green from the coastline; a dark path snakes imploringly through alien wood, begging feet. Works like Sky Dragoon and Pebble Golem are periods of gestation, pure elemental moments echoed in the celestial sky swirling through each drawing.

Otherworldly and sometimes sinister, Bainbridge’s work pokes at our sense of place and purpose, positioning deeply human states in outlandish circumstances supported by comical players. Through theater and fantasy, he grazes our linked mortality. The artist writes, “…collective longing is found within the drooping of a flower, and wistful boredom in the bending of a root; familiar, organic lifeforms, twisted into personhood…”

MATTHEW BAINBRIDGE (b. 1992, UK) graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2014. Group exhibitions include those at Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, WA; Sargent’s Daughters in New York, NY; L'Inconnue in Montreal, Canada; Patriothall in Edinburgh, Scotland; and The Old Hairdressers in Glasgow, Scotland. He has been a resident at i.o.u.a.e, and received awards from the Phoenix Bursary and the Hope Scott Trust. Matthew Bainbridge has been featured in Art Maze Magazine, Elephant Magazine and Here Magazine. The artist lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

STELLARHIGHWAY

Brooklyn, NY 11233

www.stellarhighway.com

10/05/25

Anna Zemankova @ Gladstone Gallery, NYC - An exhibition of drawings by Czech artist Anna Zemánková (1908–1986), spanning her oeuvre from the 1960s-1970s

Anna Zemánková

Gladstone Gallery, New York

May 3 – June 14, 2025

Gladstone Gallery presents an exhibition of drawings by Czech artist Anna Zemánková (1908–1986), spanning her oeuvre from the 1960s-1970s. This exhibition emphasizes the remarkable foresight of Zemánková’s work through an art historical lens, reflecting her trailblazing influence in abstraction and seeks to expand the psychological and spiritual realms of the form. The works in the show comprise rarely seen incandescent botanical drawings and pastel works on paper.

To engage with Zemánková’s art is to enter a realm of fluid metamorphosis. Her compositions pulse with biological urgency, as if each line were a living organism. Untitled (1970s), reminiscent of the zither her father once played at weddings, radiates effervescent yellows laced with electrifying blues, its thorns piercing velvety curves. Fibrous strings extend like tentacles or arpeggios of color. Here, sound becomes substance in a stunning manifestation of synesthesia: a shimmering grid of magnified cork-cells vibrate with Charles Lloyd’s spatial melisma. Zemánková’s visual language thrives on the duality of microscopic precision and cosmic abstraction, a tension mirroring her process—trance-like improvisation guided by innate musicality.

A dentist, mother, and grandmother, Anna Zemánková channeled life’s multiplicities into creations that defy simple categorization. While often compared to mediumistic artists such as Kunz or Klint, Zemánková’s work rarely touches on spirituality directly, instead rooting itself in the subconscious—what the Surrealists termed “pure psychic automatism.” In her quotidian back-and-forth between labor and leisure, Anna Zemánková found a way to forge her cellular patterns into networks of visual information and stimulation, liberating herself from the physical confinement imposed by her diabetes. Her refusal to title works, another deliberate act of liberation, invites viewers to project their own narratives onto her wildly imaginative botany. Cleaving open otherworldly spaces with her art, Zemánková’s legacy lies in her fantastical elsewhere.

Born in Moravia, Anna Zemánková came of age during the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the birth of an independent Czechoslovakia in 1918. This era fostered a fervent patriotism, marked by a devotion to preserving cultural traditions such as folk costumes, songs, fairy tales, and ornamental drawings. These influences ignited Zemánková’s early passion for painting. Though gifted in depicting colorful, realistic landscapes, her parents discouraged her from attending art school, redirecting her toward dentistry. Amid the turmoil of political and social upheaval, Anna Zemánková followed a conventional path: marriage, motherhood, and grandmotherhood—roles that temporarily eclipsed her artistic ambitions.

Zemánková’s artistic rebirth began serendipitously. In the late 1950s, her sons Slavomír and Bohumil discovered a forgotten suitcase filled with her early paintings in the family basement. Recognizing the vitality of these works, they encouraged her to resume painting—a therapeutic act that blossomed into an astonishing late-career surge. Though self-taught, Anna Zemánková was no recluse. Her son Bohumil and daughter-in-law Markét a, both trained sculptors, admired her intuitive genius, as did a circle of cultural figures including artist Jan Reich, filmmaker Vlastimil Venclík, and even First Lady of the Czech Republic, Olga Havlová. Zemánková actively courted public recognition, hosting an open house several times over the years (1964, 1967, 1968 and 1970). Her work was exhibited at Prague’s Theatre on the Balustrade in 1966 and later shown at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1979.

In the quiet hours before dawn, she would rise in her Prague apartment, surrounded by real and artificial flowers, and surrender to the classical music of Beethoven and Janáček or the Jazzy Blues of Charles Lloyd. These solitary sessions, lit by the soft glow of imagination, became her sanctuary. With paper as her stage, she conjured a universe of pulsating tendrils, succulent petals, and coiled organic forms—a paradise of biomorphic flowers that blurred the boundaries of reality. Born from the shadows of personal suffering, her work invites the viewer into a kaleidoscopic garden where beauty and the grotesque intertwine, where music morphs into matter, and where creation itself becomes transcendence.

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Estate of Anna Zemánková and Cavin-Morris Gallery.

“Sure, I’ll draw you something, I’ll draw you one of my fantasies.”
—Anna Zemánková

ANNA ZEMANKOVA is one of the great artists of the twentieth century and a pivotal figure in the Art Brut pantheon, alongside Jeanne Tripier, Madge Gill, Aloise Corbaz, and Emma Kunz. Her work has been featured in international solo and group exhibitions since 1971, preceding appearances at the Venice Biennale (2013 and 2024). Among her most significant exhibitions are Outsiders at London’s Hayward Gallery (1980) and the São Paulo Art Biennial (1981). Posthumous retrospectives include the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (1997); Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava (2007); Museum Montanelli, Prague (2011); Saarland Gallery and European Art Forum, Berlin (2011); Museum of Art, Kobe, and Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2012); and Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne (2017). Her work resides in public collections such as the Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY; Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, NM; Arnulf Rainer Museum, Baden, Austria; and private collections including the abcd collection, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris; LAM, Musée d’art Moderne, d’art Contemporain et d’art Brut de Lille Métropole, Villeneuve-d'Ascq; Boston Fine Arts, Boston,and The Museum of Everything, London.

GLADSTONE GALLERY

130 East 64th Street, New York, NY 10065

www.gladstonegallery.com

05/05/25

In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney @ The Drawing Center, New York

In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney

The Drawing Center, New York

May 30 – September 14, 2025

Beauford Delaney

Self-Portrait, 1964

Watercolor and gouache on paper,

29.75 x 22.25 inches (75.6 x 56.5 cm)

Courtesy Ruth and Joe Fielden, Knoxville

Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art

by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,

Court Appointed Administrator,

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Beauford Delaney

Charcoal of a Black Woman, 1929

Charcoal on laid paper

19 5/8 x 14 3/4 inches / 49.8 x 37.5 cm

19 1/4 x 14 inches / 48.9 x 35.6 cm sight size

Private Collection

by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,

Court Appointed Administrator,

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Beauford Delaney

James Baldwin, 1945

Pastel on paper, 23.5 in. x 18.5 inches

MacDowell, Gift of the Baldwin family to MacDowell (2018)

by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,

Court Appointed Administrator,

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Beauford Delaney

Yaddo, 1950

Pastel on paper, 18 x 24 inches

Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art

Image credit: Knoxville Museum of Art

by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,

Court Appointed Administrator,

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

The Drawing Center presents In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney, featuring works on paper by the American artist BEAUFORD DELANEY (1901–1979). The exhibition is the first comprehensive Delaney exhibition at a New York museum in over three decades, and the first-ever exhibition devoted to drawing—the medium that was central to his oeuvre.

Beauford Delaney holds a place in the history of American art of the postwar period that is challenging to define. Born in 1901 in Knoxville, Tennessee, he grew up in the segregated South and studied fine art at the Massachusetts Normal School in Boston in the late 1920s. By 1929, he had moved to New York, where he continued his artistic practice at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, producing realistic portraits and Cubist-inflected street scenes of the Greenwich Village neighborhood where he lived. In 1953, at the urging of his friend, James Baldwin, Beauford Delaney moved to Paris, the city where he would spend the rest of his life. In Paris, Delaney drew and painted portraits, while at the same time, he developed an all-over calligraphic abstract painting style. For two decades, he painted abstract and figurative works simultaneously, sometimes combining both languages by inserting barely visible figures into abstract compositions, or by working up backgrounds full of abstract incident that often competed with the fully realized portraits embedded within them. Beauford Delaney produced drawings from the beginning of his career in the early 1920s in Knoxville, until his mental illness prevented him from continuing in the early 1970s. Although he rarely drew preparatory sketches, his works on paper closely followed techniques and motifs he used in his paintings.

Beauford Delaney

Central Park, 1950

Pastel on paper, 18 x 24 inches / 45.7 x 61 cm

Private Collection

by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,

Court Appointed Administrator,

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Beauford Delaney

Paris, 1953

Pastel on paper

19 x 24 1/2 inches / 48.3 x 62.2 cm

18 5/8 x 24 1/4 inches / 47.3 x 61.6 cm sight size

Private Collection

by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,

Court Appointed Administrator,

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Beauford Delaney

Self-Portrait, 1962

Oil on canvas, 25 1/2″ x 21 1/4″ x 3/4″

Private Collection

Collection of halley harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld

by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,

Court Appointed Administrator,

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Beauford Delaney

Self-Portrait, 1970

Gouache on paper, 12 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches

Private Collection

by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,

Court Appointed Administrator,

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

For Beauford Delaney, drawing was both a sanctuary and a space for experimentation. Through his works on paper, he could explore ideas with intimacy and spontaneity, yet this vital area of his oeuvre has been largely overlooked. As a Black, queer artist who defied traditional art historical categorization, Beauford Delaney persistently interrogated his place within narratives that often excluded figures like himself. In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney marks New York's first major Beauford Delaney museum exhibition in over 30 years and the first ever focused on his drawings—a medium central to his artistic practice.

The exhibition features about 90 works on paper spanning key periods of his career, as well as works on canvas and an array of ephemera—documentary photographs, correspondence, exhibition brochures, and press clippings—that contextualize his unique artistic trajectory.

In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney is organized by Rebecca DiGiovanna, Assistant Curator and Laura Hoptman, Executive Director at The Drawing Center.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring contributions by the exhibition’s curators, Laura Hoptman, Executive Director and Rebecca DiGiovanni, Assistant Curator at The Drawing Center, as well as an essay by Jessica Lynne, art critic and founding editor of ARTS. Black.

THE DRAWING CENTER

35 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10013

drawingcenter.org

Related Posts on Wanafoto:

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962

Grey Art Museum, New York University, March 2 - July 20, 2024

Beauford Delaney’s Metamorphosis into Freedom

Asheville Art Museum, April 2 - June 21, 2021

Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945 - 1965

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, January 12 - March 23, 1997

04/05/25

William Kentridge @ Hauser & Wirth, NYC - "A Natural History of the Studio" Exhibition - Presentation of "Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot"

William Kentridge

A Natural History of the Studio

Hauser & Wirth, New York

542 West 22nd Street & 443 West 18th Street

1 May - 1 August 2025

William Kentridge

Still from Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot,

Episode 1: A Natural History of the Studio, 2020 - 2024

HD Video, 24 min

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Goodman Gallery

William Kentridge

Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot III, 2012

Hand-woven mohair tapestry

283 x 230 cm / 111 3/8 x 90 1/2 in

Photo: Thys Dullaart

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Goodman Gallery

With ‘A Natural History of the Studio,’ his first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in New York, renowned South African artist WILLIAM KENTDRIDGE presents his acclaimed episodic film series ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee- Pot’ with more than seventy works on paper integral to its creation and an array of sculptures at 542 West 22nd Street. This immersive exhibition is the first ever to present all the drawings from this filmic masterpiece, hailed by critics as a moving, witty and ultimately wondrous synthesis of the personal and the political, the individual and the universal. Spanning two floors of the gallery’s 22nd Street building, ‘A Natural History of the Studio’ also extends to the gallery’s 18th Street location with a concise survey of Kentridge’s printmakingr practice.

To mark this occasion, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will release a new artist’s book that condenses the essence of ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ through written dialogue and still images.

William Kentridge

Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot (Waterfall), 2021

Charcoal, pastel and coloured pencil on paper

128 x 223 cm / 50 3/8 x 87 3/4 in

Photo: William Kentridge Studio

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Goodman Gallery

William Kentridge

Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot

(I Look in the Mirror, I Know What I Need), 2020

Tempera paint, charcoal, pastel, coloured pencil,

dry pigment and collage on paper

250 x 212 cm / 98 3/8 x 83 1/2 in

Photo: Thys Dullaart

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Goodman Gallery

William Kentridge

Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot

(Set A of 16 drawings), 2020

Charcoal and coloured pencil on paper, 16 drawings

Each: 29 x 40 cm / 11 3/8 x 15 3/4 in approx.

Photo: Thys Dullaart

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Goodman Gallery

Conceived by the artist’s longtime collaborator Sabine Theunissen, the installation design for the first floor of ‘A Natural History of the Studio’ at 22nd Street includes the charcoal drawings used in the animation of ‘Self- Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ and evoke the feeling of being in Kentridge’s working environment with him, a place where the walls hum with inspiration and every surface tells a story. Shot in his Johannesburg studio at the outset of the global COVID-19 pandemic and completed in 2024, the series includes nine thirty-minute episodes that bring viewers inside the artist’s mind. Through a blend of Kentridge’s signature stop-motion technique, live action performance and philosophical dialogue, ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ delves into subjects like Greek mythology, the history of mining in Johannesburg, colonialism in Africa and Soviet absurdities. And here, as in his wider body of work, the seemingly mundane and familiar household coffee pot becomes a stand-in for the artist, an avatar of the art-making process in which a steady flow of ideas is akin to the bubbling of coffee brewing. In several episodes of the series, William Kentridge is joined by collaborators and assistants; in others he is seen debating and squabbling with a series of doppelgängers in a playful externalization of his internal creative struggles. Thus, ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ serves as both a celebration of creativity and a snapshot of Kentridge’s pandemic experience.

The presentation at Hauser & Wirth follows special previews of ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ at the Toronto International Film Festival and BFI London Film Festival. The complete series of films was first seen in an installation curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev at the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation in Venice, in conjunction with the 2024 Venice Biennale.

‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ was created and directed by William Kentridge, executive produced by Rachel Chanoff and Noah Bashevkin of The Office Performing Arts + Film, Joslyn Barnes of Louverture Films and the William Kentridge Studio. Walter Murch supervised the editing by South African digital artist Janus Fouché and Kentridge’s regular collaborators Žana Marović and Joshua Trappler.

William Kentridge

Carrier Pigeon, 2019

Bronze

92.2 x 50 x 95 cm / 36 1/4 x 19 5/8 x 37 3/8 in

Photo: Oriol Tarridas Photography

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Goodman Gallery

William Kentridge

Italics Plus, 2024

Bronze, 43 parts

Overall: 100 x 280 x 28.5 cm / 39 3/8 x 110 1/4 x 11 1/4 in

Photo: Anthea Pokroy

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Goodman Gallery

The second floor of the exhibition explores the relationship between drawing and sculpture in Kentridge’s oeuvre. Among works on view here is a selection of ‘Paper Procession’ sculptures. Made from aluminum panels fixed to a steel armature and hand-painted in vibrant oil paint, these works are based on a series of small-scale paper sculptures Kentridge made from pages of a 19th century accounting journal from the Chiesa di San Francesco Saverio in Palermo, Italy. The works feel like moving sketches—ephemeral yet powerful––and extend Kentridge’s exploration of history, memory and transformation using humble materials to challenge grand narratives. The presentation also includes Kentridge’s bronze ‘glyphs’ –– sculptures of both everyday and arcane objects, words and icons that function together as a sort of visual glossary that can be arranged and re-arranged to construct different sculptural ‘sentences.’ The glyphs began as ink drawings and paper cut-outs that subsequently were cast in bronze and finished with a pitch-black patina evoking the hue of both ink and shadows. These glyphs also make an appearance in the single channel animated video on view titled ‘Fugitive Words’ (2024). The film opens with an overhead view of Kentridge’s hands flipping through the pages of one his many notebooks––a vital part of his creative process and an extension of his studio––where sketches, scores, diagrams, lists and phrases appear. The scene quickly develops into a dreamlike, non-narrative journey through the artist’s mind, where fleeting words, shifting images and even his drawing tools come to life to create an evolving landscape of memory and transformation, all set to Beethoven’s ‘Archduke’ piano trio.

A World in Prints at 18th Street

‘A Natural History of the Studio’ extends to Hauser & Wirth’s nearby 18th Street location with a selection of thirty prints made by Kentridge over the last two decades. The artist first began printmaking while a student at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and the medium has been integral to his practice ever since. Kentridge has experimented with a broad range of techniques in this realm, from etching to lithography, aquatint, drypoint, photogravure and woodcut, observing that, ‘Printmaking…became a medium in which I could think, not merely a medium to make a picture... it has not been an adjunct to my other activities, but in many ways, it has been a central thread that has gone through the work I have done in the studio over the last 40 years.’

Many of the works on view at 18th Street revisit familiar personal iconography or directly reference other milestone projects, including the films on view at 22nd Street. The image of a typewriter, for example, dominates four print variations on view and is used as a metaphor for communication, historical record-keeping, and bureaucratic authority. Produced with master printmaker Mark Attwood in 2012 and given such titles as ‘The Full Stop Swallows the Sentence’ and ‘Undo Unsay,’ these works on paper are directly connected to Kentridge’s film ‘The Refusal of Time’ (2012), a thirty-minute meditation on time and space, the complex legacies of colonialism and industry, and the artist’s own intellectual life.

A series of lithographs titled ‘Portraits for Shostakovich’ (2022) was inspired by a 52-minute film made to accompany live performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No.10. Titled ‘Oh To Believe in Another World’ (2022), that project also serves as the subject of episode 8 of ‘Self-Portrait of a Coffee-Pot.’ These colorful prints feature fractured portraits of Soviet intellectuals, members of the cultural avant-garde like the playwright and poet Mayakovsky, and politicians such as Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.

The presentation at 18th Street also includes four self-portraits. Made in collaboration with Jillian Ross Print in 2023, these works employ photogravure, drypoint, and hand-painting techniques with collaged elements of photographs, drawings, and fragments of text – an approach that in its insistent layering evokes the construction of self and identity as a continual work in process, intertwined with and shaped by socio-political forces.

HAUSER & WIRTH

542 West 22nd Street & 443 West 18th Street, New York City

www.hauserwirth.com

25/04/25

Marie Harnett: Were you dreaming? @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Marie Harnett: Were you dreaming?

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

2 May – 8 June 2025

MARIE HARNETT

Half agony, half hope, 2024

Graphite on drafting film

Paper: 23 x 30.6 cm / Image: 5.2 x 16.6 cm

“What could she say, but that too well he lov’d?”
Ovid, Orpheus, Metamorphoses

Cristea Roberts Gallery presents an exhibition of new drawings by MARIE HARNETT (b.1983). Were you dreaming?, the artist’s fourth solo show with the gallery, brings together twenty-five intricate works on paper depicting tender, decadent and dream-like scenes inspired by contemporary film, Greek mythology and Old Master paintings.

Best-known for pencil drawings that are hyper realistic in style, the artist’s practice always begins with film stills sourced from a diverse range of trailers. Films are a conduit for the artist, who sifts through hundreds of trailers, intuitively selecting certain frames that encapsulate a particular atmosphere.

Through this process, Marie Harnett establishes a series of fragmented scenes that allude to classical myth and tragedy; the artist was particularly inspired by the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, lovers separated by death. Although Orpheus persuades Hades, God of the Dead, to allow him to take Eurydice back to the world of the living, he inevitably breaks the terms of their agreement, stealing a final, forbidden glance at Eurydice, causing her to return to the underworld forever.

Harnett’s tableaux of drawings collectively inhabit the same world, forming part of a new narrative, a realm that is not quite our own; a woman is framed in a window, a coin held between her fingers; a man holds the head of a broken statue in his hands; the façade of a building is concealed by thick foliage.

The artist commits these unexpected scenes to paper, imbuing her drawings with drama and suspense. As a result, visitors to the exhibition, become active protagonists, joining into the act of observing and being observed.

Marie Harnett pairs the ancient with the modern, creating what she describes as an “other world, an underworld, a mirror world, that is frozen in time.”

Harnett’s use of graphite collaging in her drawings produces images that are surreal and uncanny; characters from period films are blended and recontextualised with backgrounds sourced from mythological paintings. In for you alone, 2024, a man in modern dress is transposed into the landscape of Orpheus, 1628, by Roelandt Savery.

Drawing inspiration from Baroque and Renaissance sculptors, such as Bernini and Michelangelo, several of the artist’s works, including Half agony, half hope, 2024, depict marble statues that appear in film. Interested by how stone sculptures depict subjects that are seemingly suspended in time, Harnett experiments with the medium of pencil to create the same illusion.

Marie Harnett also presents several drawings that take the form of photographs; in Love has an earlier death, and You’ve cast a spell, 2024, a jelly-like trifle is shown in both positive and negative versions. In these drawings, Harnett experiments with transformation; a film still of a particular object is turned into a photographic negative which, in turn, is made into a drawing. Through this method, Marie Harnett intends to highlight the sculptural quality of drawing, to establish distorted parallels in shades of light and dark.

Harnett’s titles are selected from the audio of the trailers she watches. Through this pairing of image and word Marie Harnett creates a new staging and cast of characters, all connected to pervading themes of loss, love, yearning and grief.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring an interview with the artist.

Marie Harnett: Were you dreaming? takes place during the 2025 edition of London Gallery Weekend (5 - 8 June 2025), when the artist will be giving a public talk and the show will be open for extended hours.

MARIE HARNETT

Marie Harnett was born in 1983 in Hertfordshire, England. She studied drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 2006.

Marie Harnett makes highly detailed, meticulous drawings derived from film stills which capture fleeting moments of drama, beauty and suspense. By removing the stills from their context and reworking them as intricate pencil studies, Harnett focuses on every aspect of pose, light and texture. Harnett also explores these themes in her printmaking, which include large scale linocut prints of images built up from black and white curving lines, which can take up to one month to carve, and a series of mezzotints, which are housed in the permanent collection of the British Museum, London.

Recent solo and group exhibitions include The British Museum, London; Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam (2023); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2022); Cristea Roberts Gallery, London (2021, 2017); BcmA, Berlin (2020); Städtische Galerie, Bietigheim-Bissingen; Haugesund Museum of Fine Art, Haugesund (2019); Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut (2017); Theodore: Art, New York, USA (2017); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2023, 2018, 2016); Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (2016); Bremen Kunsthalle, Bremen (2015) and Galleria Bonomo, Rome (2014). In 2019 Marie Harnett completed a residency at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut.

Harnett’s works are held in international public and private collections including British Museum, London; National Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh; Government Art Collection, London; Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh; Städtische Galerie Bietigheim-Bissingen; Yale Centre for British Art, Connecticut; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Connecticut; and Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Marie Harnett lives and works in London.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

www.cristearoberts.com

10/04/25

Robert Nava @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "Robert Nava: After Hours" Exhibition

Robert Nava: After Hours

Pace Gallery, New York

Through April 26, 2025

ROBERT NAVA

BLISS Daydream Dragon, 2024

Pace presents After Hours, an exhibition of new work by ROBERT NAVA, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. The show spans the gallery’s second and seventh floors, bringing together new paintings of various scales, including three monumental 8 x 13 foot canvases, and a selection of works on paper.

Populated by a cast of hybrid bodies, at once mythic and everyday, Nava’s paintings and drawings navigate the space between the raw and the refined. Often imbued with a sense of philosophical and psychological charge, his figures suggest a dark, contemplative, and existential mood despite their vibrancy, liveliness, and humor. Robert Nava takes inspiration for his distinctive lexicon of characters and forms from a diverse range of sources, from ancient art, mythology, and religion to horror films, science fiction, video games, and cartoons. Bold and lively, his works do not adhere to any kind of linear narrative—they are fantastical scenes of beauty and chaos that invite viewers to reconnect with the unbridled imagination of their childhoods.

“I don’t consciously revisit my fears, but after I paint, I feel a therapeutic sense of getting things out of me subconsciously,” Robert Nava has said of his intuitive process.

The artist’s exhibition with Pace in New York spotlights never-before-seen paintings and drawings he created in the past year. Robet Nava has intensified the action underway in many of these compositions, experimenting with scale, repeating images, and animated abstract elements. Two-headed tigers, birds, sharks, and other creatures proliferate across these maximalist works, which are exhibited alongside several subdued, minimal scenes he produced to balance the show. The artist situates several of his new figurations against dark skies replete with gold, glowing stars to evoke the magic of dreams, nightmares, and the unconscious mind.

A suite of elaborate new works on paper complements the paintings on view in After Hours. Highlighting the relationship between Nava’s drawing and painting practices, these works also shed light on his approach to sketching, an integral part of his work as an artist. In the pages of his notebooks, he works through ideas that come to life in his phantasmagoric paintings of real and imagined creatures. Exuding a sense of play, these small-scale drawings offer a more intimate, focused experience of the artist’s madcap world.

ROBERT NARVA (b. 1985, East Chicago, Indiana) earned a BFA in Fine Art from Indiana University in 2008 as well as an MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2011. His practice centers on large-scale paintings and works on paper that portray whimsical creatures, rendered through gestural markings. Finding inspiration in the art of the distant past, from Medieval Christian imagery to Mayan and Sumerian art, as well as popular contemporary sources such as animation, Robert Nava creates compositions that are carefully considered yet marked by a sense of naivete and spontaneity. His art has been exhibited in various solo exhibitions both domestically and abroad, including Robert Nava, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid (2024); Robert Nava: Mirror Quest, Hall Art Foundation, Germany (2023); Robert Nava, Fondazione Iris, Italy (2023); Robert Nava: STAND, The Watermill Center, New York (2022); Bloodsport, Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Robert Nava: Thunderbolt Disco, Pace Gallery, London (2022); Robert Nava, Pace Palm Beach (2021); Robert Nava: Angels, Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York (2021); and Robert Nava, Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels, Belgium (2020). Robert Nava’s work is held in public collections worldwide including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, California; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; and Perez Art Museum, Miami, Florida, among others.

PACE NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Robert Nava: After Hours @ Pace, New York, March 14 – April 26, 2025

29/03/25

Timothy Wehrle @ Stellarhighway, Brooklyn - "Love Tones and Head Stones" Exhibition - Text by Susan L. Aberth

Timothy Wehrle

Love Tones and Head Stones

Stellarhighway, Brooklyn

March 29 - May 25, 2025

TIMOTHY WEHRLE

End of an Era, 2023

Colored pencil on fabric and paper,

mounted to wood panel, 9 x 6 inches

TIMOTHY WEHRLE

Ödland Sexwuste, 2024

Colored pencil, homemade ink, acrylic, dime

and dried flowers on paper,

mounted to wood panel, 30 x 24 inches

TIMOTHY WEHLRE

Magic Personality, 2025

Colored pencil, homemade ink and acrylic

on paper with found object, wax and human nails,

mounted to wood panel, 30 x 24 inches

TIMOTHY WEHRLE is back with a set of five exquisitely rendered large-scale works on paper that continue his exploration of the psyche. In addition to his signature meticulous line drawings and hallucinogenic pattern-on-pattern layering, the works share certain iconographic elements. As the title of this exhibition suggests, Love Tones and Head Stones, Wehrle is mapping the thorny terrain of emotions with their precipitous highs and lows. Executed between 2024-25 these works reflect inner reckonings with isolation, interpersonal relationships, and political upheaval. A persistent character is a face in profile, shown from the nose up, a distant relative of the smooth-pated Phrenology bust whose head is divided into pseudo-scientific sections like “benevolence, self-esteem, combativeness…” Wehrle replaces words with imagery.

At the bottom of Some Still Say He’s a Good Person/a, such a head anchors the composition, a dizzying and phantasmagoric landscape of disparate parts blended by the artist to represent the vagaries of life. In the lower right corner, a faceless man in a suit (perhaps the ghost of Michael Jackson) operates the lever of a giant rollercoaster. As we follow its ascent it moves past a minimalist screen of embossed dots on white paper, only to dramatically loop around and drop, crashing head on into the center of the face’s forehead—occupied by a rendition of Disney’s Magic Castle—that explodes like a supernova, radiating stars, planets and a string of binocular-yielding heads that call to mind the black-masked faces embedded in Adolf Wolfli’s manic compositions.

Stairway to Seven consists of five paper panels vertically mounted and connected by a multitude of figures ascending a zig-zag escalator. They move through a landscape made up of half-heads, now containing rows of numbers that insinuate the passage of time. These rainbow-colored numerals are echoed on the left by inset rows of dice, propounding the journey of life ruled by chance. At number 7, Seventh Heaven, clouds part to reveal another Michael Jackson, the new Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates, this time dancing. Ödland Sexwuste, an amalgam of recycled and collaged etchings and drawings onto a larger-sized paper, employs colorful repetitive elements of faces, patterns, and starbursts in a diagrammatic manner reminiscent of archaic esoteric illustrations. Filling the right side of the composition is a ladder with climbing nude figures who carry large severed ears on their backs like wings, nightmarish cupids somehow moving upwards and onwards.

Wehrle’s most recent work, Magic Personality, is a witchy incantation, replete with candles, crows and an Yggdrasil-like tree whose roots enter dark subterranean realms. Simultaneously whimsical, bitter and spiritually transcendent, the details in this work merit closer examination. The lower half reveals that an emotional exorcism is at work: mouths whisper into ears; the candles are in different colors like those used in magic; and, a row of magicians holding moon-like mirrors appear to trap entities within them. Enclosed by yellow and purple drops / flames, alchemical transformations are taking place above, while a reclining nude points her binoculars upwards towards a multicolored orbed spiral, hinting at better things to come. Within the embedded children’s toy at the top center, a familiar game whereby metal shavings are moved to form a face and beard, we see the half-head again, the artist’s doppelganger.

This is a rich and complex body of work, so be prepared to spend a long time looking at the details, then stepping back, and looking again. It is the kind of imagery that reveals itself over time and through attention, at once intensely personal and also universal. Like the drawings in Carl Jung’s visionary Red Book, Thimothy Wehrle attempts to express the abstract psychological concepts of emotional evolution, healing, and psychic transmutation in an accessible visual language that all can, on some level, understand.

Text by Susan L. Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History & Visual Culture at Bard College.

TIMOTHY WEHRLE (b. 1978; US) makes obsessive artwork that is a patchwork of scenes both real and imagined. In them, the artist’s emotional labor unfolds: an ongoing quest for a sense of self and belonging. Exploring the dynamics and pitfalls of contemporary culture, Wehrle’s imagery deftly fuses an aura of charm with a complex vision of humanity, posing questions about civilized existence. Executed in graphite, colored pencil and ink that he makes himself from walnuts, Wehrle’s intricate images distill moments of experience like pages from a diary. His conceptual material is wide-ranging, spanning topics of lighthearted homage ( a quirky dog he saw on the street or the festive tendencies of octogenarians), to the poetry of everyday life (the mind-expanding capabilities of music, the intangibility of beauty and the complexities of love), to harsh comments on the ills of society (child abuse, poverty, internet pornography, the divisiveness of technology and the ultimate breakdown of human interaction). Timothy Wehrle held a solo exhibition at the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, WI and has worked with galleries and institutions including Cavin Morris, New York, NY; Shrine, New York, NY; PPOW, New York, NY; and, Dieu Donne, New York, NY.

STELLARHIGHWAY

Brooklyn, NY 11233

stellarhighway.com