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

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva @ Guggenheim Museum Bilbao - "Anatomy of Space" Exhibition

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva

Anatomy of Space

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

October 16, 2025 - February 22, 2026

An in-depth survey of the visual language of Portuguese-born French artist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–1992), this exhibition traces key moments in her career from the 1930s to the late 1980s through eight thematic sections. Particular focus is placed on her exploration of architectural space, where she dissolved the boundaries between real and imaginary urban landscapes, moving beyond formal references to Portuguese visual culture and avant-garde movements such as Cubism and Futurism.

Born in Lisbon, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva trained both there and in Paris. Influenced by her studies in sculpture and anatomy, as well as by the great masters of the past—particularly Paul Cézanne—and the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, she developed a distinctive pictorial idiom in which the physicality of space merges with the dimensions of time and memory.

Her compositions, characterized by labyrinthine structures, chromatic rhythms, and fragmented perspectives, capture the essence of a world in constant transformation.

Curator: Flavia Frigeri

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO | BILBAO, SPAIN

www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus

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

Wayne Ngan @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - "Spirit and Form" Ceramics Exhibition

Wayne Ngan: Spirit and Form

James Cohan Gallery, New York

September 5 — October 4, 2025 

Wayne Ngan 

Yellow Vase with Lugs, 2016, Rust Coloured Vase, 2017 

Yukon Black Jar with Geometric Lugs, c. 2000s, 

Thin Vase with Cast Iron Glaze, 2014, White Vase, 2016 

Photo courtesy of James Cohan Gallery

Wayne Ngan (b. 1937 Guangdong, China - d. 2020 Hornby Island, BC, Canada) is recognized as one of Canada’s premier ceramic artists. Ngan’s lengthy career spanned over six decades. At the age of thirteen, Wayne Ngan moved from Guangdong, China to a vastly different British Columbia, Canada. Wayne Ngan was determined to make a name for himself as an artist despite challenging circumstances. His practice drew influence from traditional Chinese, Korean, and Japanese pottery, as well as Modernist painting, pre-Columbian and ancient Egyptian art. Ngan’s extensive knowledge of these historic precedents and his connection to the natural beauty of Canada’s Hornby Island informed his abstract sculptural forms. This exhibition at James Cohan spotlights a selection of cornerstone works, created in the 1990s and the last decade of the artist’s life.

Inspired by the back-to-the-land movement, popularized in the 1960s and 70s, Wayne Ngan centered his life and artistic practice around a harmonious relationship with the environment anchored in self-sufficiency. Ngan sourced natural materials both to build his home and studio on Hornby Island, and also to fuel his artmaking, experimenting with creating various glazes from clay like Yukon black, a deep noir glaze with high shine. Ngan was committed to exploring process, using the wealth of knowledge he gained from his regular travels to China and Japan as well as independent research to refine techniques such as raku, hakeme (coarse brush decoration), and salt glazing. Waynes Ngan built his forms by throwing and altering pieces of clay, then sculpting them together. He would occasionally fashion elements that extend outwards and generate curvilinear, spouted openings in others. Here, elegantly elongated vessels in earth tones are in dialogue with compact lidded forms, which seem to contain the energy Ngan expended to render them. Their surfaces are varied – ranging from textural and patterned to slick and smooth. According to Wayne Ngan, “There are two ways of looking at pots: one is the actual clay pot, but the real pot to me is all around me—the spirit of the pot.”

Through his work in clay, Wayne Ngan fused East and West, the past and the present, collapsing disparate chronologies and geographies into intimate, evocative objects.

CERAMIC ARTIST WAYNE NGAN

Wayne Ngan studied at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, formerly the Vancouver School of Art. The influential teachings of British potter Bernard Leach and Soetsu Yanagi, founder of the Mingei, a Japanese folk art movement (prioritizing beauty in the everyday) resonated strongly with ceramic artists in British Columbia, including Wayne Ngan. In 1967, Wayne Ngan settled on Hornby Island, where he lived and worked until his passing in 2020.

Wayne Ngan’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions since the 1960s at venues including the Vancouver Art Gallery; the National Gallery of Canada; the Gardiner Museum, Toronto; Hanart Art Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan; Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York; the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; The Apartment in Vancouver; and the American Crafts Museum, Concord, Massachusetts, among others. Ngan’s ceramics are in notable public collections such as the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Montréal Museum of Fine Art, the Gardiner Museum, the National Palace Museum (Taipei, Taiwan), the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia.

JAMES COHAN

48 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.jamescohan.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

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Kim Tschang-Yeul: The Stillness of Water 

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

Spencer Finch @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - "One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige)" Exhibition

Spencer Finch

One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige)

James Cohan Gallery, New York

September 5 - October 4, 2025

SPENCER FINCH

One Hundred Famous Views of New York City 

(After Hiroshige), 2025 (detail)

42 watercolors on paper

9 1/4 x 14 1/4 in (each) / 23.5 x 36.2 cm (each)

© Spencer Finch, courtesy of James Cohan Gallery

James Cohan presents One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige), an exhibition of new work by SPENCER FINCH, on view at the gallery’s 52 Walker Street location. This is Finch’s sixth solo exhibition with James Cohan. 

For this exhibition, Spencer Finch presents four major installations, highlighting the artist’s fluency across media. Using watercolor, LED light tubes, stained glass, and concrete bricks, the artist explores different facets of Japanese aesthetics while furthering his ongoing investigations into color, perception, and close observation of nature. Finch’s engagement with Japan spans nearly fifty years, beginning with his first visit as a teenager. He began his artistic journey working with a potter outside Kyoto as an exchange student in college, and although the influence of Japanese visual culture has always been present in his work, this is the first exhibition fully dedicated to its impact on his practice. 

The title work in the exhibition is a conceptual and technical tour de force, a series of 42 watercolors in which Spencer Finch uses Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo as a palimpsest for exploring the strange beauty of New York City. Spencer Finch began by overlaying a map of Hiroshige’s 19th-century Edo (now Tokyo) locations over a map of New York City and its outskirts at the same scale. Focusing on the first 42 prints, which represent spring, he visited and photographed each of those locations between March and June of this year. The sites documented range from a junkyard in New Jersey to an iconic view of the Statue of Liberty and the Staten Island Ferry.

Spencer Finch next extracted forms from the original Ukiyoe prints—from the famous Sleeping Dragon Plum tree to the classic hanging bolts of fabric—and used these as templates to reveal elements of photographs from the corresponding New York locations. He then painted watercolors of these images in the same format as the original prints. One sees Hiroshige’s historic Edo and Finch’s New York City simultaneously, the images of Gotham peeking through the cut-out shapes of Edo. As a body of work, this installation represents both a love letter to New York and a cross-cultural dialogue spanning centuries, as Finch reimagines the contemporary urban landscape through the lens of Hiroshige’s iconic woodblock prints. 

The exacting verisimilitude of these watercolors is unusual in Finch’s oeuvre, but it recalls the artist’s formative art school venture of copying Monet paintings in extreme detail in the RISD Museum, an experience he later described as “my first brush with the Stockholm syndrome.” The New York City views are fragmented through the Japanese prints but together reveal the wonderful visual variety of the city and form an elliptical tribute to the artist’s adopted hometown. The scrutiny inherent to this laborious process revealed new details about a deeply familiar place. As the artist notes, “Before I worked on this project, I never knew that New York’s bridges were all painted different colors or how graffiti artists achieve a 3-D effect. And the shade of orange of the Staten Island Ferry: very peculiar!”

Alongside this installation of works on paper, Spencer Finch debuts a series of four light-based Haiku works. Like their verse analogs, these wall-hung LED sculptures capture a fleeting seasonal moment, distilling it into a poetic image. Presented vertically in the format of Japanese writing, each work consists of 15 distinct color filters arranged in the 5/7/5 pattern of traditional haiku syllabic structure. These four works, each representing a moment in nature from one of the seasons, are chromatically and spectrally precise, re-creating the specific color of light that the artist measured in situ, and using colored filters to achieve the spectral results. Thus, the first in the group, Haiku (First Snow, Woods, Winter), 2025, emanates cool winter light which is generated by filters of light blue and violet, gray, pale yellow, and dull green. The difference in the seasonal light is palpable as the spring light becomes warmer, the summer light is completely full spectrum, and the autumn light, representing falling oak leaves in the sky, moves again towards cooler blue.

A monumental stained glass installation is displayed in the six tall windows of the front gallery. Moonlight (Reflected in a Pond), 2025, shifts the exterior sunlight to the color of moonlight reflected in a pond in Finch’s native New England, which he measured using a colorimeter. The yellowish green light creates an other-worldly environment which references the Japanese tradition of moon-viewing to honor the autumn moon. By using the sun to create moonlight, Spencer Finch uses the traditional material of hand-blown stained glass to modern conceptual effect. The rectilinear arrangement of panels in the windows contrasts with the watery ripples and imperfections of the glass to create a light and space condition which feels both contemporary and ancient.

Installed in the same gallery is a new site-specific sculptural work, Fourteen Stones, 2025, inspired by Ryoan-ji, the 15th-century Zen garden in Kyoto. Spencer Finch drew upon his visits to the garden, when his quest for quiet contemplation of the fifteen stones was interrupted by hordes of visiting school children counting to fourteen, the number of stones that are visible from any location along the viewing platform. Using this perceptual idiosyncrasy as a jumping off point to explore the subjectivity of vision, Spencer Finch created 26 “stones” out of piles of common concrete bricks, each crudely mimicking one of the Ryoan-ji stones. Spencer Finch has arranged the stones so that from each of the four corners of the gallery only fourteen are visible. Using the vocabulary of minimalism to naturalistic effect, the artist creates an altered meditative environment in which he claims, “if you squint and stand on one leg, they really look like ancient stones bathed in moonlight.” 

One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige) continues Finch’s interest in the limits of perception, and the relativity of human experience. These new works embrace science and poetry in equal measure, communicating experiences of the world that are both universal and intimately subjective.

ARTIST SPENCER FINCH

Spencer Finch was born in 1962 in New Haven, CT, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, Hamilton College, and Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, and has exhibited extensively in the US and internationally since the early 1990s. Recent major projects include Bring me a sunset in a teacup, a two-wall commission for Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2023); Orion, permanently installed at the San Francisco Airport, CA (2020); Moon Dust (Apollo 17), Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2019); Fifteen Stones (Ryoanji), International Pavilion at the Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona, Spain (2018); Lost Man Creek, Public Art Fund, Brooklyn, NY (2016-2018); Trying To Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning, 9/11 Memorial Museum, New York, NY (2014), and A Certain Slant of Light, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY (2014). Significant recent solo exhibitions include the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT (2018-2019); MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2017); Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL (2017); Seattle Art Museum, WA (2017), and Turner Contemporary, Margate, United Kingdom (2014); Spencer Finch was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, the 2008 Turin Triennale and the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). His work can be found in many public collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Kemper Museum of Art, St Louis, MO; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Morgan Library, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

JAMES COHAN

52 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.jamescohan.com

John Zurier @ Peter Blum Gallery, NYC - "Pink Dust" Exhibition

John Zurier: Pink Dust

Peter Blum Gallery, New York

September 2 – November 1, 2025

Peter Blum Gallery presents Pink Dust, an exhibition of new works by Berkeley and Reykjavík -based artist, JOHN ZURIER. This marks the artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery.

John Zurier's exhibition Pink Dust features a body of work created over the past two years predominantly in Iceland. This group of smaller paintings and one large painting emerged from his time at a farmhouse at the base of a mountain with views of fields, the sea, and a glacier in the distance, deeply influencing his artistic practice. The works revisit and expand upon the abstract formal language Zurier developed after his initial visit to Iceland in 2002.

The exhibition title and the largest painting’s title, A History of Pink Dust, are taken from Ron Padgett's book of poems entitled, Pink Dust. They symbolize the tangible residue of the creative process—the erasures, revisions, and diligent effort in both poetry and painting. It speaks to accumulation and condensation, highlighting the complexity and time required to achieve simplicity.

Many of these paintings were created at a farm known for its persistent winds. John Zurier embraces this constant presence, viewing it as a pervasive form of breathing that moves through everything. He aims to cultivate stillness within this dynamic environment, striving for what he calls a silent, moving stillness that moves through the paintings themselves. Over the last two years, his focus has been on achieving greater density in the paintings, imbuing the atmosphere with more weight and making the light feel more substantial.

John Zurier's artistic exploration has led him deeper into the monochrome, which he perceives as a realm of infinite possibility. As color narrows—grays that hold traces of blue or green, whites that carry the memory of yellow— every delicate shift is amplified, encouraging a different mode of perception. Working with colors in lower registers and contrasts demands heightened attention. The paintings encourage viewers to slow down and engage with them over time, resisting quick interpretations and asserting their own temporal rhythms.

While some paintings possess the fluid immediacy of open skies, many surfaces are more distressed and worked. John Zurier employs techniques of scraping, wiping, building up, and tearing down, allowing the paint to accumulate the history of these actions. This creates a quality akin to weathering, mirroring how the Icelandic landscape bears the marks of time. Each surface functions as a field that can be simultaneously disrupted and continued, with marks creating their own logic and rhythm—what Zurier likens to the painting's breathing.

What John Zurier seeks is atmosphere as material itself. The unique, quiet diffusion of Iceland's air inspires him to have the paintings contain this quality. The slow light in Iceland fosters patience, building gradually and shifting imperceptibly with sudden shifts. Working in this light, Zurier has learned to trust the process over deliberate decisions, with paintings emerging from gradual layering.

These recent paintings demand more time to complete due to their layered complexity, requiring periods of dormancy between sessions, and thus holding a temporal density that reflects the desired atmospheric density within the work. Much like air holds moisture or light slows through water, these paintings embody a greater accumulation of time.

This working method has transformed Zurier's perception. His eye has adapted to subtlety, discerning micro-variations within apparent sameness. Stillness, for John Zurier, is not the absence of movement, but movement so concentrated it becomes its own form of rest. In these paintings, he strives to make this paradox visible—surfaces that vibrate with accumulated energy, yet offer profound quiet to those who spend time with them.

JOHN ZURIER (b. 1956, Santa Monica, CA) lives and works in Berkeley, CA and Reykjavík, Iceland. He earned an MFA at the University of California, Berkeley (1984). Instititutional exhibitions include Currier Museum, Manchester, NH (forthcoming 2026); Scheider Art Museum, Ashland, OR (forthcoming 2025); High Museum, Atlanta, GA (2025); The National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavík (2023); Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (2023, 2018, 2014); Stavanger Art Museum, Stavanger, Norway (2023); Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden (2021); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2017); New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM (2016); Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME (2015). He has exhibited at the 30th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2012); California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, CA (2010); 7th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2008); Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, England (2003); and the Whitney Biennial, NY (2002). He received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2010).

PETER BLUM GALLERY

176 Grand Street, New York, NY 10013

www.peterblumgallery.com

Berend Strik @ Hopstreet Gallery, Brussels - "Threads that Echo" Exhibition - Text by Marja Bloem

Berend Strik 

Threads that Echo

Hopstreet Gallery, Brussels

4 September - 25 October 2025

Berend Strik gave this rather enigmatic title to his first exhibition at the Hopstreet Gallery, but looking at his work, the meaning becomes clear.

Upon entering the first room, visitors are immediately struck by a large, colourful piece. A Pollock? No, a Strik! In this uninvited collaboration with Pollock, Strik explains his relationship with art history, with the ‘great’ masters – his icons.

The work is composed of photographic images that have been enhanced with textile techniques including threads, appliqués and different types of stitches. This fusion of photography and textiles is a rare combination.  For Strik, who also creates drawings, ceramics and theatre, the choice of photography was based on one of its essential characteristics. “A photograph shows an image of something that once existed, but is no longer physically visible. It does not exist, yet it can be seen in a photographic image. Memories, references, descriptions, suggestions and spatial indications are all part of it.” And the textile work opens that space up. The Pollock piece is part of an ongoing project Strik has been working on for several years, entitled Deciphering the Artist’s Mind, in which he seeks to position himself in relation to art history and reflect on his role as an artist within society.

The Dutch artist Karel Appel, also one of Strik’s icons, is also featured in Deciphering the Artist’s Mind. Appel became notorious for saying “I just mess around a bit.” In reality, Strik discovered, Appel allowed the unconscious to surface, but he knew exactly what he was doing. It is precisely this kind of hidden meaning that Strik seeks to uncover or highlight. To that end, he chose to cover certain areas with velvet (what is being concealed?) and to add all manner of stitches, holes, and fabric fragments. He didn’t work on a photograph of a work by Appel but on a photo of a work that no longer exists because Appel himself painted over it. The original work was concealed under layers of paint, but was revealed through infrared light.

Strik deliberately avoids the word embroidery as he feels it steers the viewer’s thoughts in a particular direction, which is precisely what he wishes to prevent. He wants the viewer to bring their own context to the work, and in doing so, reach something more universal. For Strik, the artist’s studio is above all the place of genesis; the place where a work comes into being.

The series about mothers, presented in another room, also relates to the idea of origin. By concealing some elements and accentuating others, these works exude a subtle, intimate atmosphere that is universally recognisable. Strik aims to evoke a sense of shared memories, a feeling like ‘oh yes, my mother…’ and ‘we all have a mother’.

In Strik’s work, we can see very clearly how it was made; unlike, say, a painting where one can only guess at the suggestions. We can literally see the stitches, how a shape has been cut from fabric and sewn on, how the stitching varies from rough to precise. Sewing is an ancient technique; it’s instantly recognisable to the brain. Human brains are equipped with mirror neurons that associate results with movements: splatters with a mess, a cut with a knife. Sewing is one of those gestures, deeply rooted in our cognitive process, going back to the beginnings of humanity and the earliest human societies. The combination of these two elements, photography and sewing, has a unique effect on the brain. On the one hand, there is the photograph, which feels deeply personal precisely because of its universality. The image is then pierced by the familiar gestures of sewing. In our minds, these elements do not naturally belong together. It’s precisely this sense of the unexpected that compels the viewer to keep searching for meaning.  Strik’s art is an active event: a process of manipulation, transformation, and reinterpretation of images and materials. It plays with revelation and concealment, with the human desire to understand, and the necessity of leaving space for the unknown. Altering photographs with a needle and textiles is a form of dissection and reconstruction.

“As a photographer I capture,” Strik explains, “and as an editor of the image, I liberate it. Only then does the photograph gain value as an autonomous entity with presence in the here and now.”

Marja Bloem, Director of the Egress Foundation

Artist Berend Strik

Berend Strik (born 26 April 1960, Nijmegen) is a Dutch visual artist who lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam from 1985 to 1988. Between 1998 and 2000, he participated in the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York.

Strik’s work is held in various public collections in The Netherlands, including the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Fries Museum, Leeuwarden; Kunstmuseum, The Hague; Museum Het Valkhof, Nijmegen; Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede; Stedelijk Museum Schiedam; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Schunck Museum, Heerlen; TextielMuseum, Tilburg; and Museum De Domijnen, Sittard.

His work is also represented in numerous corporate collections, such as Stichting Kunst & Historisch Bezit; ABN AMRO; Achmea Art Collection; AkzoNobel Art Foundation; AMC Art Collection; Bouwfonds Kunstcollectie; Kunstcollectie De Nederlandsche Bank; LUMC Art Collection; Ahold Collection; BPD Art Collection; and the Rabo Art Collection.

His work is currently on display in the group exhibition ‘Things I’ve Never Seen Before’ at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. It is a selection from the donation made by gallery owner and collector Fons Welters, who donated a series of exceptional works to the museum in 2022. The exhibition runs until 19 October 2025.

HOPSTREET GALLERY BRUSSELS

Sint-Jorisstraat 109 rue Saint Georges, 1050 Brussels 

www.hopstreet.be