Domenico Gnoli @ Lévy Gorvy Dayan, NYC - "The Adventure of Domenico Gnoli" Survey Exhibition

The Adventure of Domenico Gnoli

Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York

March 18 – May 23, 2026

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents The Adventure of Domenico Gnoli, the largest exhibition of works by the artist in the United States in more than five decades, following his celebrated 1969 solo presentation at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. Featuring paintings, drawings, etchings, notebooks, and letters, the survey represents a critical continuation of Gnoli’s legacy in America, subsequent to his major 2021–22 retrospective at the Fondazione Prada, Milan. This exhibition is organized in collaboration with Gnoli’s widow, Yannick Vu, and the artist’s estate—as well as to present works from the artist’s sister, Mimì Gnoli, and major private collections.  

 

In his brief yet prolific life, Domenico Gnoli (1933–1970) established himself as a master of perception, creating a body of paintings unparalleled in their composition and meticulous detail. Born in Rome, he began his career as an illustrator and set and costume designer, working and traveling across the world while arriving to his mature style as a painter in 1964. His late paintings picture everyday objects— including clothing, hair, beds, and sofas—enlarged, fragmented, and suspended. The canvases are at once absorbing and uncanny, revealing secrets of contemporary life yet unconsidered.

Through the isolation of his subjects, Domenico Gnoli elevates and explores reality through detail, yielding figurative works that stand, in the words of Germano Celant, “at the limits of sensory perception.” Domenico Gnoli himself wrote of his method, “Would you call it surrealistic? Or abstract? I don’t know… All I know is that it’s a completely new theory about art, a new approach that makes the pictures appear just like life does…” While focused on what can be seen—as Domenico Gnoli described, “common objects, isolated from their usual context”—his paintings possess an aura that reaches beyond reality—exuding “a sense of order that approaches serenity, an almost monastic orderliness,” explains his partner and widow Yannick Vu. Domenico Gnoli in part achieves this atmosphere through the framing, magnification, and stillness of his subject matter, evoking the photographic. At the same time, he imbues his works with a distinguished materiality by incorporating sand into his pigments, creating encrusted surfaces that recall the frescoes of the Italian Renaissance.

Of his practice, Domenico Gnoli stated “I am metaphysical inasmuch as I search for a still and atmospheric, noneloquent painting, one that takes static situations as its starting point. I am not metaphysical insofar as I have never sought to elaborate or fabricate an image. I always employ simple, given elements, I Don't want either to add or take anything away. I have never even wanted to deform; I isolate and represent. My themes come from the world around me, familiar situations, everyday life; because I never actively mediate against the object, I experience the magic of its presence.” Of his legacy, Yannick Vu writes, “With the appearances of reality.”

ARTIST DOMENICO GNOLI

Born in Rome to a ceramicist and an art historian, Domenico Gnoli (1933–1970) spent his early years between the capital and Spoleto. At 16, he began studying drawing and etching under painter and printmaker Carlo Alberto Petrucci, and two years later he was exhibiting his work alongside such established artists as Giacomo Manzù and Giorgio Morandi. At 19, he enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Rome, but soon left to travel in Paris and London. In his twenties, he spent time in New York; he authored a children’s book that was published by Simon & Schuster, designed scenography for the Old Vic Theatre in London and the Schauspielhaus in Zürich, and worked as an illustrator for such publications as Sports Illustrated, Life, and Horizons. He married sculptor Yannick Vu in 1965, and they lived between Majorca and Rome. In 1968, Gnoli’s work was included in Documenta IV in Kassel, Germany, as well as featured in solo exhibitions at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hannover, Germany. Two years later he died of cancer at the age of 36, just four months after his enthusiastically received first exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. He developed his signature style of painting in the decade before his 1969 New York presentation and created a limited number of works during this mature period. Posthumously, he garnered widespread acclaim. In 2021, Fondazione Prada in Milan organized a major retrospective dedicated to Gnoli’s work. 

LÉVY GORVY DAYAN

19 East 64th Street, New York

www.levygorvydayan.com

Carolyn Mazloomi and Sharon Kerry-Harlan @ Claire Oliver Gallery, New York - A landmark two-person textile exhibition

Carolyn Mazloomi and Sharon Kerry-Harlan

Certain Restrictions Do Apply

Claire Oliver Gallery, New York

January 9 - March 7, 2026

Carolyn Mazloomi 

Madam C. J. Walker, 2025 

76 x 77.5 inches 

Cotton fabric, cotton batt, poly-cotton thread, India ink; 

printed, stenciled, hand painting, machine quilted

© Carolyn Mazloomi, courtesy Claire Oliver Gallery

Sharon Kerry-Harlan 

African American Gothic, 2025 

20 x 16 x 1.5 inches 

Acrylic paint and silk screens on rusted fabric, 

incorporating found objects, 

mounted on a black canvas-wrapped wood frame

© Sharon Kerry-Harlan, courtesy Claire Oliver Gallery

Claire Oliver Gallery presents Certain Restrictions Do Apply, a landmark two-person textile exhibition featuring new works by artists Carolyn Mazloomi and Sharon Kerry-Harlan. The exhibition presents 9 new artworks and celebrates decades of friendship and collaboration between the two artists; both Mazloomi and Kerry-Harlan mine the history of Black American pioneers and expand the narrative and formal possibilities of quiltmaking and textile art.

Though distinct in approach, Carolyn Mazloomi and Sharon Kerry-Harlan share a commitment to storytelling through fiber, exploring race, culture, memory, and belonging. Their works reposition quilting not as domestic craft or woman’s work but as a powerful conceptual and political practice. The two artists have also been close friends for decades, sharing conversations, critiques, and creative support that have shaped their respective journeys — making their first New York presentation together both professionally significant and personally meaningful.

“Textiles have an inherent humanity,” said Carolyn Mazloomi. “A quilt holds touch, time, labor, and story — it holds lives. The histories of the people I depict are sewn into the fabric itself. Quilts speak on behalf of those whose voices might otherwise go unheard.”

“Memory is layered,” said Sharon Kerry-Harlan. “In fabric, I find the ability to embed echoes — of family, of the past, of cultural inheritance. My work is about carrying forward what must not be forgotten, but also making space for reinterpretation.”

Mazloomi’s artistic practice is deeply rooted in textile history, social documentation and activism. She is the founder of the African American Quilt Guild of Los Angeles and the Women of Color Quilters Network, has authored numerous significant publications, and is shaping the national discourse around quilting as a respected contemporary art form. Likewise, Kerry-Harlan brings a unique material sensibility: her rust-dyed surfaces, pattern language, and incorporation of found fabrics create visual fields where ancestry and cosmopolitan rhythm coexist.

“Carolyn and Sharon are among the most important narrative textile artists working today,” said Claire Oliver, founder of Claire Oliver Gallery. “This exhibition honors not only their individual legacies, but the creative dialogue and mutual trust between them. Their friendship and artistic respect for one another amplify the power of the work, and we are proud to present this historic first joint exhibition in New York.”

Together, their works form a visual conversation, not only between artwork and viewer, but between two women who have influenced one another’s practices, celebrated each other’s achievements, and remain connected by a shared purpose: to preserve histories and affirm identity through the language of stitched and constructed cloth.

ARTIST CAROLYN MAZLOOMI

Based in West Chester, Ohio, Carolyn Mazloomi is an artist, curator, and writer. Her practice is rooted in the quilting tradition, using textiles—a personal and metaphorical material—to communicate the stories of individuals who have made significant contributions to social justice and landmark events that have shaped American history. She is the founder of the African American Quilt Guild of Los Angeles and the Women of Color Quilters Network, and a former board member of the Studio Art Quilt Associates and Alliance for American Quilters. Over the course of her career, Mazloomi has had solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries across the country including the Los Angeles Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Kenyon College, Gambier, OH; Kent State University, Kent, OH; Malcom Brown Gallery, Shaker Heights, OH; University of Michigan, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Ann Arbor, MI; and Quilters Hall of Fame, Marion, IN.

Mazloomi’s work is in the public collections of the American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY; Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Birmingham, AL; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH; Cleveland Public Library, Cleveland, OH; Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN; Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY; National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TN; National Endowment for the Arts Washington, D.C.; Quilters Hall of Fame Museum, Madison, IN; The Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Smithsonian Museum of African American Culture and History, Washington, D.C., among others. Mazloomi is the author of several books, and has most recently published Visioning Human Rights in the New Millennium (2019), Yours for Race and Country: Reflections on the Life of Colonel Charles Young (2019), We Who Believe in Freedom (2020), We Are the Story: A Visual Response to Racism (2021), and Black Pioneers: Legacy in the American West (2022).

ARTIST SHARON KERRY-HARLAN

Sharon Kerry-Harlan (b. 1951, Miami, FL) is a visual artist living and working between Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, and Hollywood, Florida. Raised in a family of artists, Harlan learned quilting from her mother and elements of design and abstraction from her uncle, an artist and designer. She integrates traditional quilting techniques with contemporary approaches to fabric manipulation to create her signature ‘rust-dyed’, monochromatic large-scale textile works for which she is celebrated.

Kerry-Harlan’s textile work, mixed-media collages, paintings, and figurative objects—such as the Black Eyed Pea dolls—are deeply informed by race, history, and the socio-political landscape. Her artistic practice centers on designing her own textile patterns and fabrics, sometimes incorporating found and inherited materials into her compositions that balance geometric forms, figurative elements, and intricate patterns. Inspired by her African diasporic heritage, the rhythm of modern metropolitan life, and the interplay between historical narratives and contemporary events, Kerry-Harlan positions herself as a keeper and translator of information and histories, crafting visual narratives that convey multifaceted perspectives. Her work transcends temporal boundaries, fostering a dialogue that bridges the past and present.

Sharon Kerry-Harlan holds a BA from Marquette University and studied art at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, both located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her work is part of the permanent collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and she has exhibited at numerous national and international institutions, including the Harn Museum (Gainesville, FL), the Racine Art Museum (Racine, WI), the Erie Art Museum (Erie, PA), the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center (Wilberforce, OH), and the California State Museum (Sacramento, CA), among others.

CLAIRE OLIVER GALLERY 

2288 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, New York, NY 10030

www.claireoliver.com

Catherine Goodman @ Hauser & Wirth, NYC - 'Island' Exhibition

Catherine Goodman. Island 

Hauser & Wirth, New York

13 November – 20 December 2025 

Catherine Goodman

The ULAE Series, 2024

Monotype on Somerset paper

64.8 x 73.7 cm / 25 1/2 x 29 in

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

© Catherine Goodman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Catherine Goodman at the ULAE Studio, November 2024

Photo: Jin Young Kim

© Catherine Goodman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Hauser & Wirth presents its first exhibition dedicated to the prints of noted British artist Catherine Goodman. This body of monotypes named ‘The ULAE Series’ emerged from Goodman’s 2024 residency at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) on Long Island, marking both her first major exploration of printmaking and an expansion of her aesthetic vocabulary. ‘Much of the new language that was evolving in the prints followed me home to the studio in London and was translated into paint,’ she wrote in reflection of the experience—a cross-pollination made visible in a new painting developed from this period, also on view in this exhibition.

Catherine Goodman joins a distinguished lineage of modern and contemporary artists who have expanded their practices through printmaking at ULAE. Among them, Grace Hartigan and Helen Frankenthaler stand out in particular as kindred spirits—artists who, like Goodman, were devoted passionately to daily drawing and guided by instinct. At ULAE, Catherine Goodman immersed herself in the unpredictable process of painting on and printing from copper plates. Working intuitively, she built up highly expressive, densely layered compositions, often laying down a black or grey calligraphic mark as starting point. Catherine Goodman sometimes carried works in progress home in the evening to adjust with an oil stick, forging an unorthodox dialogue between mediums. 

‘Almost everyone I knew in the world was asleep because of the time difference to London, so I spent the evenings alone, drawing into the prints that hadn’t worked out for me that day. It was an extraordinarily intense time navigating my inner landscape, having an opportunity to review my life back home. It seems a time of innocence now.’ — Catherine Goodman

Catherine Goodman

The ULAE Series, 2024

Monotype on En Tout Cas paper

64.8 x 73.7 cm / 25 1/2 x 29 in

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

© Catherine Goodman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Catherine Goodman

The ULAE Series, 2024

Monotype on En Tout Cas paper

81.3 x 91.4 cm / 32 x 36 in

Photo: Thomas Barratt

© Catherine Goodman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Catherine Goodman has long centered her practice on portraiture. Religious icons from her childhood left an early mark, and she often mentions seeing portraits even within her abstractions. This oscillation between figuration and abstraction—a constant in ‘The ULAE Series’—relies in part on the artist’s longstanding daily drawing practice, which she cites as the initial means of harnessing her sources of inspiration, which range from natural phenomena to film. One work on view in the exhibition depicts the titular boy from Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie ‘Ivan’s Childhood,’ gazing through a telescope, a dramatic yet intimate image. 

Each work, Catherine Goodman writes, whether figurative or abstract, is ‘layered with those memories of my time there, the light, urgency and sense of isolation—being cut off from the mainland of our lives while exploring the inner landscape.’ 

Artist Catherine Goodman

Born in London in 1961, Catherine Goodman CBE lives and works in London. Goodman studied at Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts, London, and the Royal Academy Schools, London, where she won the Royal Academy Gold Medal in 1987. Goodman’s lifelong commitment to social justice through education forms a critical aspect of her artistic identity and approach to making. In 2000, Goodman established The Royal Drawing School with HM King Charles III to deliver subsidized and free education to thousands of young and disadvantaged people in the UK. Today, she continues in her role as Founding Artistic Director and Academic Board Member. For many years, Catherine Goodman organized drawing classes for individuals dealing with homelessness and disabilities, and she continues to offer refuge classes to young people with mental health issues on a weekly basis. She is also the primary caregiver of her sister, Sophie, who was born with multiple health conditions and has always been a subject of Goodman’s practice. In 2014, Goodman was awarded Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order (LVO) for services to The Royal Drawing School, and Commander of the Order of British Empire (CBE) in 2024 for her services to art in the UK. Goodman has served as the Artist Trustee at The National Gallery, London since 2019. Her paintings are held in significant private and public collections including the National Portrait Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, The Rothschild Foundation, and the Royal Collection Trust.

HAUSER & WIRTH

443 West 18th Street, New York City

www.hauserwirth.com

Val Lee @ Hayward Gallery, London - 'The Presence of Solitude' Exhibition

Val Lee

The Presence of Solitude

Hayward Gallery, London

Through 11 January 2026

Val Lee 

Buenos días mujeres (2019) 

Photo by Yollotl Alvarado, courtesy the artist 

Val Lee 

Charting the Contours of Time (2023) 

Photo by Takuya Matsumi, courtesy the artist 

The Hayward Gallery, in partnership with the RC Foundation, Taiwan (R.O.C.) [*], presents Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude. This is the first solo exhibition in the UK by Taiwanese artist Val Lee and the fourth exhibition in the RC Foundation Project Space Exhibition Series, which showcases the next generation of emerging international artists.

Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude takes place in the HENI Project Space in the Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery – a space that offers the opportunity for audiences to see exhibitions from emerging international artists for free.

Val Lee

The Landless Events (2022)

Photo by Chen Etang, courtesy the artist

Val Lee

The Landless Events (2022)

Photo by Chen Etang, courtesy the artist

Bringing together film, photography and costume, the exhibition highlights Lee’s longstanding exploration of isolation and solitude. By creating disjointed and ambiguous narratives with unidentifiable figures, her work makes viewers feel as though time and meaning have been displaced. This feeling of alienation encourages us to think about how our personal experiences and collective memories are shaped by state and political systems.

The exhibition features new iterations of two existing works: Valley in the Minibus (2024) and The Sorrowful Football Team (2025). Valley in the Minibus explores the concept of ‘non-places’, defined by French anthropologist Marc Augé as transitory spaces that people pass through (such as airports, motorways, shopping centres) and become anonymous. Building on the original work and live event that took place over several weekends, a group of strangers travel through a winding landscape in a van with a creature-like masked and costumed figure. A new video commission introduces the same masked figure DJing completely alone in an anonymous space. Three full body, long haired costumes and veiled masks used in the work are on display as part of the installation. Present but disconnected from the audience, the presentation highlights the artist's interest in creating connections and intimacies through isolated experiences.

Val Lee

Valley of the Minibus (2025)

Photo by Pitzu Liu, courtesy the artist 

Val Lee

Valley of the Minibus (2025)

Photo by Pitzu Liu, courtesy the artist 

Val Lee

Valley of the Minibus (2025)

Photo by Pitzu Liu, courtesy the artist 

Reimagined for the exhibition as a slide projection, The Sorrowful Football Team (2025) depicts a blind football team playing a match in the snow in Northern Japan. Blind football is an organised sport designed for players who are blind or visually impaired. Here, Lee utilises it as a metaphor to reflect on the impact of political repression experienced under the White Terror rule in Taiwan between 1947-1987 as well as the possibility of finding light in solitary darkness.

Val Lee

The Sorrowful Football Team (2025) 

Courtesy the artist 

Val Lee

Valley of the Minibus (2025) 

Photo by Pitzu Liu, courtesy the artist 

Val Lee

Valley of the Minibus (2025) 

Photo by Pitzu Liu, courtesy the artist 

Val Lee

The Sorrowful Football Team (2025) 

Courtesy the artist 

Yung Ma, Senior Curator of the Hayward Gallery, says: “Straddling visual and live art, Val Lee has embraced different principles to forge an artistic language that invokes various experiences, past and present. While the exhibition explores the deeply felt presence of solitude in her recent works, it is ultimately a hopeful gesture about finding connections in the most unexpected places.”

Val Lee says: "Presenting this work at Hayward Gallery allows me to further explore ambiguous fields—where collectivity is not given, but quietly rehearsed in the blank spaces of perception. I’m glad to share this piece in London at Hayward Gallery - where form, time, and relation can stay in flux."

Previous artists who have exhibited in the HENI Project Space include Huang Po-Chih, Heecheon Kim, Amol K Patil, Thabiso Sekgala and Hicham Berrada. The exhibition marks the fourth iteration of The RC Foundation Project Space Exhibition Series and makes up an important part of the Southbank Centre’s vast array of free programming for all to enjoy.

Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude is curated by Hayward Gallery Senior Curator, Yung Ma, and Curatorial Assistant, Felix Choong. Additional support provided by the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan (R.O.C.).

Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude is presented alongside Gilbert & George 21ST CENTURY PICTURES at the Hayward Gallery, as well as Teresa Solar Abboud’s Mother Tongue: a monumental new public art commission, outside the gallery.

Artist Val Lee

Val Lee (b. 1981, Taipei) is a director and visual artist working across expanded cinema, performance, and moving image. Trained in Filmmaking and Sociology at SUNY, Lee founded the art collective Ghost Mountain Ghost Shovel in 2008. Their work constructs temporal scenarios that reframe space, spectatorship, and perception, often exploring systemic violence, war, and affective states through nonlinear, disorienting environments. Lee’s works have been shown internationally including the 13th Gwangju Biennale, Grand Palais, HKW Berlin, MEP, MOCA Taipei, and others, with performances at TFAM, Kyoto Art Center, and the Taiwan National Theater. Honours include the Taishin Arts Award in 2017 and support from the Asian Cultural Council and C-LAB.

RC Foundation, Taiwan (R.O.C.)

Founded in 1995 by Rong Chuan Chen, RC Foundation has been a visionary force in promoting Taiwanese contemporary art on the global stage. An active champion in fostering cultural and artistic exchanges, RC Foundation has been supporting artists, curators and independent art spaces from Taiwan through grants and partnerships, both locally and internationally. These long-term relationships have nurtured and enriched numerous artistic projects from different perspectives, generating invaluable connections between Taiwan's contemporary art practitioners and their global counterparts.

HAYWARD GALLERY

Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London

www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude

Hayward Gallery, London, 7 October 2025 - 11 January 2026

Lee Friedlander: Christmas @ Deborah Bell Photographs, New York - Exhibition + Book published by the Eakins Press Foundation

Lee Friedlander: Christmas

Deborah Bell Photographs, New York

November 6, 2025 - January 10, 2026

Deborah Bell Photographs presents Lee Friedlander: Christmas, an exhibition of photographs by Lee Friedlander dating from 1958 to 2015, in collaboration with Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York. 

This exhibition also celebrates the release of Friedlander's most recent book, LEE FRIEDLANDER: CHRISTMAS, published by the Eakins Press Foundation, New York. Although many of the photographs on view are well known from their inclusion in Friedlander's previous books and numerous exhibition catalogues, and have appeared on the walls of museum and gallery exhibitions internationally, this publication features Friedlander's personal edit of photographs related to the theme of Christmas. As indicated by the Eakins Press Foundation, the book presents 106 beautifully reproduced photographs that span the artist's life, cover most of the United States, and give us a sweeping view of American culture by this renowned photographer of the social landscape. The exhibition features some 30 photographs selected from the book.

Lee Friedlander: Christmas

Afterword by Peter Kayafas

Eakins Press Foundation, 2025

Clth, 11.75 x 12.5 in. / 112 pgs / 106 b&w / 106 tritone

ISBN 9780871301055

Cover Photograph: Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)  

San Angelo, Texas, 1997  

Gelatin silver print  sheet 20 x 16'“ (50.8 x 40.6 cm)  

© Lee Friedlander, Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco 

and Luhring Augustine, New York

Peter Kayafas, Director and President of Eakins Press Foundation, writes in the Afterword to the sumptuously illustrated book:

Whether or not you've celebrated Christmas at any point over the past seventy years--roughly the period covered by these photographs--you have no doubt encountered some of the things Friedlander shows us here....Is Christmas in America a religious holiday? A commercial precept? An ironic commentary? A misunderstanding? An indulgent blasphemy? All or none of the above? In these pictures, the only thing certain is that Christmas has provided an opportunity for the people's photographer to hold up a mirror--and make no mistake, it is Friedlander's mirror--to a diverse, flawed, inventive, preoccupied, and spectacular society.

DEBORAH BELL PHOTOGRAPHS

526 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.deborahbellphotographs.com

Related Post:

Lee Friedlander: MARIA

Deborah Bell Photographs, New York , November 1, 2018 – January 19, 2019 

Friedrich Kunath @ Pace Gallery, NYC - 'Aimless Love' Exhibition

Friedrich Kunath: Aimless Love

Pace Gallery, New York

Through December 20, 2025

Friedrich Kunath 

You Told That Joke Twice, 2024-2025 

© Friedrich Kunath, courtesy Pace Gallery

Photography by Evan Walsh

Pace presents an exhibition of new paintings by Friedrich Kunath at its 510 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This is the artist’s first solo show in the city since 2019 and his debut presentation with the gallery, which began representing him in May 2025. The exhibition coincides with the release of a new monograph from Monacelli tracing Kunath’s work from the last 30 years. This publication features a new essay by Naomi Fry, staff writer at The New Yorker.

Known for his layered, lyrical work across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video, the German-born, Los Angeles-based artist reimagines rich and diverse source material in cathartic images and objects. Many of Kunath’s paintings depict vibrant landscapes of worldly beauty, often incorporating poetic phrases and quotations from music, film, and literature. Drawing inspiration from Romanticism, popular culture, and his own personal history, he imbues his art with a myriad of seemingly disparate references and resonances, navigating the murky spaces between irony and sincerity, tragedy and comedy. Thereby, Kunath sees himself as a composer of ideas and images across mediums, working fragments into artworks that become worlds unto themselves.

His first presentation at Pace in New York, Aimless Love, meditates on coming and going, free from intent, with aimless momentum. The works are inspired by the artist’s memories of listening to music while traveling by train or car as a child, looking out the window and watching the world pass by. With his new paintings, Friedrich Kunath aims to immortalize the sense of total presence in those memories and experiences, while acknowledging the paradox of trying to hold onto an inherently fleeting, ephemeral feeling.

Installed in ascending and descending orientations that evoke an airplane’s trajectories during takeoff and landing, Kunath’s latest paintings lean more heavily into a meditative, contemplative space than his past bodies of work. These filmic, deeply personal compositions depict expansive seas and crashing waves, rugged cliffsides, scenic roads, and sweeping vistas, exploring moments of connection and loneliness, love and longing, absurdity and wonder. Seen through the windshield or mirrors of a car, the outside world takes on new resonances in the new works. In I Hope Future Me Is Happy (2024–25), a car rounds the bend of a mountain highway, about to disappear but still in sight. In another, a plane glides through a golden sky with the setting sun blazing through its windows. With Have Love, Will Travel (2025), Friedrich Kunath situates the viewer on the passenger side of a car, a decision that reflects his view of his artistic role.

Kunath’s process for these paintings brings forth a dialogue between the unconscious and the representational image. At the start, he embeds abstractions and writings into wet impasto on his canvases. These underside paintings are made in isolation of the image that is created on top, but, in the end, there is a miraculous synchronicity between the two layers— his writings in the dried, textural impasto are legible in his finished paintings, bringing new meanings and juxtapositions to his compositions. With this “voice coming from behind the image,” Kunath says, he invites the viewer to make their own readings of the work.

In addition to paintings, Aimless Love includes a new sculpture titled Following the Feeling (2025), comprised of one pair of dress shoes, shoelaces, wire, and nylon string. This work is a more somber, existential take on Kunath’s 2009 installation LA Trainer (Permanent Reminder Of A Temporary Feeling)—a new iteration of an artwork that he produced early in his career.

Beyond his exhibition at Pace in New York, Kunath’s work can be found in the collections of the city’s Museum of Modern Art and the Marieluise Hessel Collection at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson.

Artist Friedrich Kunath

Friedrich Kunath (b. 1974, Chemnitz, Germany) works across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video to create resonant, evocative, and often melancholy compositions. Based in Los Angeles since 2007, Friedrich Kunath creates work grounded in his experiences on the West Coast of the United States and his enduring relationship with Europe. His art combines references to German Romanticism and American popular culture, and it is informed, in part, by his interests in music, tennis, cars, and the practice of collecting. Kunath's paintings depict vibrant landscapes of otherworldly beauty, and he often incorporates poetic phrases and quotations from music or film into his canvases, forging a visual language distinguished by interplays of wit, emotional depth, and cultural memory. The artist graduated from Braunschweig University of Arts, Germany, in 1998.

Recent solo exhibitions of his work include Friedrich Kunath: Coming Home Was as Beautiful as Going Away, KINDLCentre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2023); Friedrich Kunath: I Remain Exhausted, Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium (2024); Friedrich Kunath: I Need Solitude, But I Also Need You, Nassima Landau, Tel Aviv, Israel (2024); Friedrich Kunath: AT THIS POINT IN MY LIFE (I'LL HAVE THE CALAMARI), G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig, Germany (2024); and Friedrich Kunath: One Day I’ll Follow the Byrds (Tutto Pasta), Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2024). 

Friedrich Kunath’s work is held in prominent public collections worldwide, including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, among others. 

PACE GALLERY NEW YORK

510 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Friedrich Kunath: Aimless Love

Pace Gallery, New York, November 7 – December 20, 2025

Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Seeing Silence: The Paintings of 

Helene Schjerfbeck

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 

December 5, 2025 – April 5, 2026

Helene Schjerfbeck (Finnish, 1862‒1946)

Self-Portrait, 1912 

Oil on canvas, 17 1/8 × 16 1/2 in. (43.5 × 42 cm) 

Finnish National Gallery Collection, 

Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki (A-2016-51) 

Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Yehia Eweis

Beloved in Nordic countries for her highly original style, Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946) is relatively unknown to the rest of the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck is the first major exhibition in the United States dedicated to the artist’s work. Featuring nearly 60 works on canvas—including generous loans from the Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum, other Finnish museums, and private collections in Finland and Sweden—the exhibition will be on view December 5, 2025, through April 5, 2026.

Born in Helsinki, Helene Schjerfbeck witnessed civil war and two World Wars as well as the burgeoning of Finland’s national identity following independence from Russian rule in 1917. Despite many personal hardships, Helene Schjerfbeck never wavered in her determination to pursue her passion, painting for most of her life in a remote Nordic country, far removed from Europe’s centers of cultural upheaval and renewal. She once said resolutely, “All that I desire to do is to paint… there is always something to conquer.”

“Seeing Silence highlights the work of an extraordinary artist who, though long celebrated in Norway and Sweden as the most outstanding female painter of her time, has not yet achieved well-deserved visibility on this side of the Atlantic,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “The exhibition invites audiences here to experience Helene Schjerfbeck’s mesmerizing works and distinctive vision for the first time at a major U.S. museum, showcasing the remarkable perspective and introspection of an artist wholly dedicated to her craft over the course of eight decades.”

Dita Amory, Robert Lehman Curator in Charge of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Met, said, “Painting in remote Finland without recourse to broader culture and the exchange of contemporary ideas, Schjerfbeck created her own language every day at her easel by sheer force of will. Seeing Silence looks beyond art history’s cultural mainstream to one woman who overcame immense struggles to produce a powerful body of work, highlighting her rightful place in the story of modernism.”

Seeing Silence traces Schjerfbeck’s artistic development from her early years in Helsinki to the end of her life in Sweden, illuminating the artist’s evolving style from traditional subjects in a naturalist vein to a painterly language of spare, often densely worked imagery. Schjerfbeck sanded and scratched through layers of paint, sometimes exposing the rough weave of her canvases as she experimented with her materials. As a valuable voice among the many strands of modernism at play throughout the world in the early 20th century, Schjerfbeck expressed a unique visual language that deserves recognition in the codified narratives of art history.

The exhibition unfolds thematically, beginning with an exploration of Schjerfbeck’s early years. Recognized as a prodigy at a young age, she won several grants to study in Paris and from there she took excursions to Concarneau in Brittany and later St Ives in Cornwall. Many of her early figure studies were painted in the art schools of Paris, while her more sentimental genre subjects reflect her rural travels. Schooled among artists working in naturalism, she created figure painting and landscapes that followed in step. Within a few years, she was showing paintings at the Salon, Paris’s annual art exhibition, and testing the boundaries of conservative painting.

In the next section, several large-scale canvases commemorate Finnish heritage. After centuries of Swedish occupation, followed by Russian rule, Finland was affirming its cultural identity. A history painting won Schjerfbeck a grant to study in Paris. Later, her compelling allusion to the Jewish festival of Sukkot earned her entrée to the annual state-sponsored Salon in 1883.

In 1902, Helene Schjerfbeck moved to Hyvinkää, a small railroad town several hours north of Helsinki, to care for her aging mother. The isolation of a rural setting enabled her to paint without the disruptions of city life. In modest accommodations and without access to professional models, she painted some of her most affecting canvases, often single figures dressed in black with little color to interrupt their dark silhouettes. Her mother, despite having no interest in her daughter’s vocation, was co-opted to model on several occasions. By this point in her career, Helene Schjerfbeck had radically redefined her aesthetic language. Soft brushwork characterizes these quiet paintings. Whether sitting or standing, reading or sewing, her subjects fill the picture plane and avert their gaze. Often bathed in raking light, her figures appear lost in thought and lost in time. Helene Schjerfbeck investigates formal language—light, space, volume—not the soul of the sitter. She told her models to look away as she painted them, demanded their silence, and refused to show them the end result. Essential to her practice at the start of a painting, the models were dismissed when Schjerfbeck’s inventive powers took charge.

A subsequent section presents a sequence of portraits from the 1920s and 1930s. Helene Schjerfbeck rarely noted a sitter’s name in her titles, and it is very likely that she suppressed her sitters’ identities for the same reasons she eschewed mimetic portraiture: in the few instances when she strove to transfer a likeness to canvas, her efforts often frustrated her until she got it right. Many of her sitters sport modish dress, evidence of Schjerfbeck’s lifelong interest in French fashion. After reading a 1912 article in an art magazine, she fell for the paintings of El Greco (1541–1614). Though she had no access to the originals, she worked up rather stylized transcriptions of his Madonnas and other sacred subjects, a preoccupation that intensified during World War II.

In 1894, the Finnish Art Society sent Schjerfbeck to Vienna and Florence to copy works by the painters Holbein, Velázquez, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, and Giorgione. While in Italy, she painted several ethereal landscapes of Fiesole, perched on a hill above Florence. There, no doubt, she studied the beautiful yet degraded frescoes decorating the city’s churches.

Spanning 50 years of Schjerfbeck’s career, still-life paintings illustrate the artist’s shifting creative language. The Red Apples (1915), unique in her career for its glowing palette, demonstrates the artist’s distinctive technique of layering and removing paint to achieve complex structures. By the 1930s, the artist had reduced her still-life palette to more somber tones, exploiting her fruits to further her surface experiments. In her final still life, painted in 1944, blackening apples metaphorically reference the devastation of World War II and the chaos of upheaval.

Helene Schjerfbeck interrogated her likeness in 40 self-portraits across her lifetime. Her canvases trace the arc of her artistic development as they materialize her physical growth and decline. From youthful expressions in a naturalistic language to facial distortions that anticipate the haunting finale of this series, Schjerfbeck captures her self-image with increasing idiosyncrasy and self-confidence.

In Schjerfbeck’s final years, as war raged throughout Finland, her art dealer persuaded her to relocate to Sweden. From 1944 to her death in 1946, she resided in a hotel in Stockholm. There she painted 20 of her 40 self-portraits. Few other series in the history of modern art articulate mortality with such candor, as the artist used thin, glazed color to produce monochrome representations that are at once haunting and magnificent meditations on the effects of age and illness.

Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck is curated by Dita Amory, Robert Lehman Curator in Charge of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Met. Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff, director of the Ateneum Art Museum, is the consulting curator.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

This exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with the Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum. The exhibition is made possible by Elsa A. Brule.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 964

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028

www.metmuseum.org

Ana Mendieta @ Marian Goodman Gallery, NYC - 'Back to the Source' Exhibition

Ana Mendieta 

Back to the Source 

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Through 17 January 2026

Ana Mendieta 

Untitled: Silueta Series, 1977

© The Estate of Ana Mendieta 

Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery

Plugging into Mexico was like going back to the source, being able to get some magic just by being there. – Ana Mendieta

Marian Goodman Gallery presents Back to the Source, the gallery inaugural exhibition of the work of Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) which is on view in their Tribeca space through 17 January 2026.

Back to the Source presents seminal works from 1972-1985, a prolific period of Mendieta’s work, spanning stages of time spent in Iowa, Mexico, and Cuba, including ten digitally remastered films, photographic works, newly available photographic prints and drawings, and ephemeral sculpture.

Ana Mendieta was a pioneer and innovator whose oeuvre spanned painting, drawing, photography, film/video, sculpture, and site-specific works. Her singular interventions in the landscape embraced nature and disrupted societal conventions. Exiled from her homeland of Cuba where she was born in 1948, Ana Mendieta spent her childhood and formative years in Iowa, in the 1960s. She later studied art at the University of Iowa, first as a painter, then later in performative art, a move which would ultimately change her approach as an artist. Her body of work testifies to a passionate engagement with themes of exile and displacement, reconnecting with the earth, and the search for belonging and origin, through power, magic and the universal.

Creating a rich and diverse body of work that included ephemeral sculptures, Ana Mendieta, in her film and photographic works, captures time and process through direct actions which transport her beyond conventional materials to the realm of the intangible and impermanent, using nature as a collaborator. With her body as material, and driven by nature’s symbolic meaning, she sought to integrate power, magic and knowledge into her work, using natural materials as well as the four elements –earth, air, fire, and water. Feathers, flowers, branches, moss, fireworks and gunpowder were easily accessible and were often part of ritual practices to return her to the land and connect her to the universal. These obsessive acts of reasserting my ties with the earth is really a manifestation of my thirst for being. In essence my works are the reactivation of primeval beliefs. The photographs become the afterimage of primordial remembrances at work within the human psyche. – Ana Mendieta, Proposal for Rome Prize Fellowship, 1983

Using the earth as a sculptural medium – which she molded, impressed, and burned – Ana Mendieta conveyed notions of existence, resurgence and renewal through site-inclusive works that were exquisitely ethereal and transitory. Contemplative and existential meditations on mortality and the natural world, these works were part of living processes.

An interest in themes of transformation – birth, life, death, regeneration – is evident throughout her oeuvre, and can be seen in Ñañigo Burial, 1976, installed in the first floor gallery. Comprised of black candles which originally outlined the contours of the artist’s body, its title points to the influence of the Abakuá society of Cuba, also known as Ñañiguismo, which offers spiritual protection to its members. Drawn to this and Afro Cuban Santeria traditions, which blend the Yoruba religion of West Africa, Roman Catholicism, and Spiritism, Ana Mendieta sought magic and the divine to regenerate life within her work and through nature.

Ana Mendieta developed the Silueta Series from 1973-1980, first inspired by a visit to Mexico, in a signature period of expression in which she utilizes her own body, prior to removing herself from it. Moving away from traditional notions of sculpture as object, and towards the experience of living process and geological time as a medium, Ana Mendieta rendered silhouettes through hieroglyphs of imprints, outlines, and absences within the earth, which were left to erode and return to it.

Their timeless memory is preserved through related photographic works, such as Silueta Sangrienta, 1975, a new print. Other silueta works followed in 1976-79, such as Silueta Series (Tree of Life), 1978, and a selection which are presented here. A color print, Incantation to Olokun-Yemaya Encantación a Olokún-Yemayá (Incantation to Olokun-Yemaya), 1977, depicts a silueta in the earth, invoking two identities of the West African Yoruba goddess known as a river mother and fertility deity. A work from 1978 shows a spiral impression in the earth, creating a metaphorical association with land-based work- in this case with a human scale silueta at its center. In other works, figures are carved into the earth, such as in Black Venus, 1980, a black and white photograph which features an earthen imprint of a female form. Its title refers to a legendary symbol against slavery, an affirmation, as Ana Mendieta writes, of those who are free and refuse to be colonized. This work is in dialogue with La Venus Negra, 1981, which also features a detailed imprint resembling the human form, created on a rock surface — its deliberate placement on stone suggesting a connection between the human form, nature and the earth. Black and white photographs of two Sandwoman works from 1983 document outlines of organic female forms hand carved in the sand, reiterating temporality and impermanence. A newly framed and never before seen small-scale drawing of the hand with heart — imparts the artist’s fascination with ancient Egypt, hieroglyphs, and cave drawings, reiterating her journey “back to the source.” These works are accompanied by an additional selection of Untitled works on paper from 1978-79 and 1983-1985, depicting organic forms.

I have thrown myself into the very elements that produced me, using the earth as my canvas and my soul as my tools. - Ana Mendieta, Proposal for the New York State Council on the Arts, 17 March 1982

On view are ten films created between Iowa and Mexico which span from 1972 to 1978, and in which we see a representation of the various elements – from fire, water, and air, to gunpowder, and blood. The earliest of these, Chicken Movie, Chicken Piece, 1972, originally filmed in Super 8, documents a primitive action in which Ana Mendieta holds a decapitated chicken, a familiar form of sacrifice in Santería resulting in a splattering of blood, which thematically connects to universal and spiritual power. The theme of self-transformation is introduced in Blood + Feathers, captured in a recently discovered 1974 color photo in which Ana Mendieta initiates a transfer of energy, covering her body in feathers and blood, as if to divine herself as an unearthly avian spirit, becoming a bird or, as she had said, “the white cock.” Silueta del Laberinto (Laberinth Blood Imprint), 1974, shot the same year, begins with a silueta outline on a ceremonial site near Oaxaca, Mexico, the contours of which are flooded beyond their recessed lines, spilling beyond the corporeal outline to resemble an organic shape. In Silueta del Laberinto, one of the first films in which Ana Mendieta uses a silhouette to stand in for her own body, she also circumnavigates the site's labyrinthian architecture with a handheld camera, anticipating later works.

Energy Charge, a silent 16 mm film from 1975, evokes an avatar of Laberinth Blood Imprint, by featuring a figure with upraised arms emerging from a dark landscape which transforms into a bright red silueta shape before vanishing, the polarizing color recalling its memory. Two more films, each from the Silueta Series, are additionally sanguine in nature. Silueta Sangrienta, made in Iowa City in 1975, shows the artist naked and face up with uplifted arms in the excavated earth, which is later emptied, then re-filled with red pigmented liquid, in which she lies face down and partially submerged. Untitled: Silueta Series, 1978, filmed at Old Man’s Creek, Iowa, introduces the element of fire, showing hands created from clay emerging from a tree trunk which then becomes engulfed with rising flames. Silueta de Arena, 1978, depicts a silueta emerging from the shallow waters of a riverbank, forming an island unto itself.

On the second floor, the suite of color photographs, Body Tracks, 1974, traces an early action documented in Iowa prior to Mendieta’s move into nature. Here Ana Mendieta uses tempera to create imprints of her hands, repeated through a performative gesture of kneeling and dragging her red hands down to create markings in two parallel tracks on pink fabric.

In Grass Breathing, made in Iowa in 1975, Ana Mendieta becomes one with the earth, positioning herself beneath a mound of earthen sod in a meadow, inhaling and exhaling, the movement of her body causing the grassy verdant mound to rise and fall, then rest.

Upcoming solo exhibitions include a significant retrospective at the Tate Modern opening in July 2026 that will feature many important works, along with newly remastered films, early paintings, and late sculptural pieces, many of which will make their U.K. debut.

Ana Mendieta’s work has been exhibited in important solo exhibitions and museum retrospectives; exhibitions include those at MUSAC, León, Spain (2024); SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, Brazil (2023); Baltimore Museum Of Art, Baltimore, Maryland (2020); Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2019); Middleheim Museum, Antwerp, Belgium (2019); Institute for Contemporary Art, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (2018); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany (2018); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California (2016) The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel (2014); Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, United Kingdom (2013); Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (2013); Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (2011); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2004); Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2004); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California (1998); Helsinki City Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland (1996); Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (1996); New Museum, New York, New York (1987).

Ana Mendieta received many prestigious awards in her lifetime, including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1977 and 1980) and Fellowship (1982); Creative Arts Program Services Grant, New York Foundation for the Arts (1979); John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1980); New York State Council on the Arts Grant (1982); Rome Prize, American Academy in Rome (1983); Award in the Visual Arts, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Salem, North Carolina (1984). A Visual Arts Lifetime Achievement Award was posthumously bestowed by The Cintas Foundation, New York in 2009.

A catalogue will be published on occasion of the exhibition and released in early 2026. Pre-orders will be available online and in the gallery.

MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY

385 Broadway, New York, NY 10013 

www.mariangoodman.com

Ana Mendieta: Back to the Source 

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 7 November 2025 - 17 January 2026

Joan Mitchell @ David Zwirner, NYC - 'To define a feeling: Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965' Exhibition Curated by Sarah Roberts

To define a feeling 

Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965 

Curated by Sarah Roberts 

David Zwirner, New York 

November 6 — December 13, 2025 

Joan Mitchell 

Untitled, c. 1963 

© Estate of Joan Mitchell

I’m trying for something more specific than movies of my everyday life: To define a feeling.

—Joan Mitchell in ARTnews, April 1965

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) that focuses on the years 1960 to 1965, a brief but critical juncture in the artist’s development. Capping off a yearlong celebration of the centennial of the artist’s birth, this presentation is curated by Sarah Roberts, senior director of curatorial affairs at the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and brings together a significant group of works from public and private collections, as well as that of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. 

During these years, Joan Mitchell spent many weeks each summer and fall living on a sailboat and exploring the Mediterranean from a home base along France’s Côte d’Azur with her companion, painter Jean Paul Riopelle, and her works from this period are inflected by these voyages and the sites of the Mediterranean. Back in her Parisian studio, Mitchell drew on the experience of looking out at the water, horizon, and rocky coasts, resulting in paintings that depart radically from those of the preceding years, and are distinct from those that would follow. Characterized by dark, central masses of swirling brushstrokes in deep greens and blues partially obscuring rich tonal colors embedded beneath, these turbulent canvases exchange the grounding armature that had structured much of her previous landscape-inspired work for more experimental compositional strategies. Constituting, as the poet John Ashbery described, “an unhurried meditation on bits of landscape and air,” the profound, dramatic works on view offer insight into Mitchell’s distinctive process in evolving the structural and chromatic composition of her paintings, while dynamically engaging many of the key themes and motifs that extend throughout her oeuvre.

As Sarah Roberts notes of the exhibition:

For Joan Mitchell, abstract painting had a singular capacity to capture and communicate multiple layers of human experience—things seen, touched, felt, and remembered—in a single visual field. From 1960 to 1965, her days and nights included frequent Mediterranean sailing trips to Corsica and Italy with her partner Jean Paul Riopelle, time spent reading and discussing poetry with friends, deep thinking about painting, and keenly felt losses of loved ones, as well the assassination of John F. Kennedy and growing social unrest in both the US and France. Reflecting on this tumultuous period later in life, Mitchell named all these events as impacting the direction of her work. Never seeking to create direct representations of particular moments or to simply channel a single emotion or thought, she sought instead to render in paint something new that articulated the sum of experiences in all their complexity and ambiguity—to define a feeling.

The selection of paintings and drawings gathered here shows Mitchell at work from 1960 to 1965, responding to the sea’s expanse and surrounding landscapes, and generating fresh ideas about painting itself. Central masses of densely applied paint in somber tones began to emerge in her canvases in 1960. By 1962, she had narrowed the range of hues to the darkest greens, browns, and blues, colors so deep that this group of works has frequently been referred to as the “black paintings,” though true black was rarely included. Mitchell concentrated her swirling central masses into floating islands of color within subtly varied, off-white fields. Within just two years, she would shift again, opening the concentrations into constellations of loose, squared forms and tangled brushwork as she continually experimented.

Reflecting on recent work in her 1965 oral history with art historian Dorothy Seckler, Mitchell noted, “Clement Greenberg said there never should be a central image, so I decided to make one.” With this body of work, Mitchell also patently challenged prevailing conventions of balanced composition and harmonious color, choosing an enigmatic palette with flashes of sharp contrast, shifting her “central” forms slightly off axis, and playing with backgrounds and corners. Echoes of Mediterranean light and rocky, shrub-studded coastlines were met with the turbulence and toughness in her painting technique, giving rise to one of Mitchell’s most daring, moody, and probing bodies of work.

Highlights from the exhibition include Mandres, c. 1962 (Private Collection, courtesy of McClain Gallery), an important transitional work that shows Mitchell beginning to experiment with central forms; Untitled, 1963 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), an expansive triptych characteristic of Mitchell’s growing engagement with multi-panel works during this period; as well as a selection of small-scale paintings that were inspired by stations on the Paris Metro and debuted in her 1965 solo exhibition at Stable Gallery, New York, including one on loan from the Hofstra University Museum of Art. Also on view are several large-scale paintings from the collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation that span these years, as well as a grouping of rarely seen works on paper made using charcoal and crayon—sometimes in combination with watercolor—that extend Mitchell’s exploration of form and color in a different medium.

The exhibition is supplemented by a selection of primary materials from the archives of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. A fully illustrated catalogue with new scholarship on this period by Sarah Roberts and other authors is forthcoming from David Zwirner Books.

Artist Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) established a singular visual vocabulary over the course of her more than four decade career. While rooted in the conventions of abstraction, Mitchell’s inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately conjure individuals, observations, places, and points in time. Her prodigious oeuvre encompasses not only the large-scale abstract canvases for which she is best known, but also smaller paintings, drawings, and prints.

Born in Chicago and educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which she received a BFA (1947) and an MFA (1950), Joan Mitchell moved to New York in 1949 and was an active participant in the downtown arts scene. She began splitting her time between Paris and New York in 1955, before moving permanently to France in 1959. In 1968, Joan Mitchell settled in Vétheuil, a small village northwest of Paris, while continuing to exhibit her work throughout the United States and Europe. It was in Vétheuil that she began regularly hosting artists at various stages of their careers, providing space and support to help them develop their art. When Mitchell passed away in 1992, her will specified that a portion of her estate should be used to establish a foundation to directly support visual artists.

In 1951, Joan Mitchell became one of the few female members of the exclusive Eighth Street Club, and, that spring, her work was included in The Ninth Street Exhibition, organized by charter members of The Club with the assistance of Leo Castelli, which helped to codify what became known as the New York School of primarily abstract painters. During her lifetime, Mitchell’s work was exhibited in solo presentations at numerous influential galleries in the United States and Europe, including Stable Gallery, New York (1953, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1961, 1965); Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles (1961); Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris (1967, 1969, 1971, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1992); Martha Jackson Gallery, New York (1968, 1972); Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York (1976, 1977, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1985, 1986); and Robert Miller Gallery, New York (1989, 1991). The Joan Mitchell Foundation was previously represented by Cheim & Read, New York, where the artist’s work was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, in 1997, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2014, 2016, and 2018.

Her first institutional solo exhibition, My Five Years in the Country, was held in 1972 at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York. Subsequent museum presentations during Mitchell’s lifetime were held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1974, 1992); Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1982); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (traveled to Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; and La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, California; 1988–1989).

In 2002, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized a posthumous retrospective of Mitchell’s work, which traveled to Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; and Des Moines Art Center, Iowa. In 2010, the Joan Mitchell Foundation organized Joan Mitchell in New Orleans, which included a symposium on her life and work, and three concurrent exhibitions held at Tulane University’s Newcomb Art Gallery, New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans. In 2015, Joan Mitchell Retrospective: Her Life and Paintings was presented at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, and subsequently traveled to Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Additional recent museum solo presentations include those at Kunsthalle Emden, Germany (2008; traveled to Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy and Musée des Impressionnismes, Giverny, France, 2009); Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (2010); and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, France (2014). In 2017, Mitchell / Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation opened at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2018); and Fonds Hélène et Édouard Leclerc, Landerneau, France (2018–2019).

A comprehensive Joan Mitchell traveling retrospective was co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The retrospective was first on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2021, before traveling to the Baltimore Museum of Art the following year. The exhibition was subsequently presented at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, through 2023, where the complementary exhibition, Monet – Mitchell, was also on view. The Saint Louis Art Museum presented an adaptation of Monet – Mitchell in 2023, featuring eight works by Mitchell and two by Monet.

Mitchell’s work can be found in prominent institutional collections worldwide, including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Anderson Collection at Stanford University, California; Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nakanoshima Museum of Modern Art, Osaka, Japan; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

DAVID ZWIRNER

537 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.davidzwirner.com