Daniel Arsham @ Perrotin Dubai - 'What Remains' Inaugural Exhibition of the New Gallery

Daniel Arsham

What Remains

Perrotin Dubai

October 30, 2025 – January 10, 2026

Daniel Arsham

Members of the Future, Cenote Exploration, 2024 

Acrylic on canvas panel 

Unframed: 121.9 × 147.3 × 5.7 cm | 48 × 58 × 2.25 in. 

Framed: 110.5 × 134.6 × 5.7 cm | 43 1/2 × 53 1/2 × 2.25 in. 

Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli 

© Daniel Arsham. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Daniel Arsham

Audio Bonsai 003, 2025

Copper wire, wood, speakers

153 × 132.1 × 101.6 cm | 60 1/4 × 52 × 40 in

© Daniel Arsham. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Perrotin Dubai presents a debut solo exhibition What Remains by American artist Daniel Arsham. This exhibition marks the first solo show since the opening of the Perrotin Dubai gallery. What Remains features several new series from Arsham's extensive practice, including sculpture, painting and drawing, and a new sound installation, focusing on themes of cultural memory, and the passage of time.

Daniel Arsham transforms the gallery into a sonic installation with his latest sculptural series of copper wrapped bonsai tree sculptures. Doubling as functional stereo speakers, these works will play ambient music throughout the exhibition. This new series pays homage to Japanese Zen Buddhist culture and Arsham’s past presentations of sand zen gardens, which he has exhibited around the world at the Lotte Museum, South Korea and the Musée Guimet, France, among others.

Daniel Arsham

Stairs in the Labyrinth, 2025

Sand. 72 × 44.5 × 45.7 cm | 28 3/8 × 17 1/2 × 18 in.

© Daniel Arsham. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Daniel Arsham also unveils a new suite of works relating to his recent Labyrinth series. Composed in cast sand, Arsham’s Stairs in a Labyrinth draws influence from artists like M.C. Escher and Renee Magritte’s maze-like works to create a sculptural double portrait. From head-on the work appears as a portrait bust of a sitter, transforming in the profile view into a maze of architectural levels and stairwells. Alongside the sculpture, Daniel Arsham presents a stilllife painting of another labyrinth bust and a selection of charcoal prepatory drawings. In this series, Daniel Arsham beckons viewers to navigate intricate compositions, suggesting an interplay of layers and pathways reminiscent of archeological sites where the past reveals itself in unexpected ways.

Alongside these new series, Daniel Arsham expands his decades-long project of “Fictional Archaeology,” where the artist examines objects from the twentieth century that are containers for collective cultural memory. Cast in his signature materials of geologic crystals and pigmented hydrostone, patinated bronze, and fiberglass, Daniel Arsham presents objects like a Rolling Stone magazine eroded with pink quartz crystals, a NY Yankees hat that appears to be emerging out of the architecture of the wall, and a bronze scaled replica of a 1985 DMC Delorean car - immortalized in the film Back to the Future.

Daniel Arsham has spent over twenty years cultivating an artistic universe that challenges conventional perceptions of time and reality. His works often evoke a sense of nostalgia and imaginative exploration, encouraging viewers to reflect on our collective history and the artifacts that shape our cultural identity. 

Artist Daniel Arsham Biography

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1980, New York based artist Daniel Arsham’s work explores the fields of fine art, architecture, performance, design and film. Raised in Miami, Daniel Arsham attended the Cooper Union in New York City where he received the Gelman Trust Fellowship Award in 2003. Soon thereafter Daniel Arsham toured worldwide with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as the company’s stage designer. The experience led to an ongoing collaborative practice which continues as Arsham works with world renowned artists, musicians, designers, and brands including Moët & Chandon, Tiffany’s, Porsche and Dior, among others. In 2021 Arsham was appoint ed the role of creative director of the Cleveland Cavaliers, becoming the first ever fine artist to hold a position of this nature.

Arsham’s uchronic aesthetics revolves around his concept of fictional archaeology. Working in a multitude of disciplines he creates and crystallizes ambiguous in-between spaces and situations, and stages what he refers to as future relics of the present. Always iconic, most of the objects that he turns into stone refer to the late 20th century or millennial era, when technological obsolescence unprecedentedly accelerated along with the digital dematerialization of our world. While the present, the future and the past poetically collide in his haunted yet playful visions between romanticism and pop art, Arsham also experiments with the timelessness of certain symbols and gestures across cultures.

Daniel Arsham has presented solo exhibitions at the Lotte Art Museum in Seoul, South Korea; Sculpture Center, Cleveland, Ohio; Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa and the Petersen Automobile Museum, Los Angeles, California; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Leeds, U.K.; Musée Guimet, Paris and MAMO Cité Radieuse Arts Center, Marseille, France; UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Dune, Beidaihe, and HOW Museum, Shanghai, China; MOCO Museum London and Amsterdam; Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, Ohio; and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, among others.His work has been presented at MoMA PS1, The New Museum and LongHouse Reserve in New York, Norton Museum in Palm Beach, The Athens Biennale in Athens; Musée Fenaille in Rodez, La Defense in Paris, and Carré d’Art de Nîmes in France, and SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, among others.

Arsham’s works are in the public collections of Blanton Museum of Art, Texas; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens; ICA Miami, Florida; Musée Guimet, Paris; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; National Museum of Qatar, Doha; Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Florida; Rhode Island School of Design (RISD); and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

PERROTIN DUBAI

DIFC, Gate Village, Building 5, Unit 1, Podium Level, Dubai

www.perrotin.com

Michael Armitage @ David Zwirner, NYC - "Crucible" Exhibition

Michael Armitage

Crucible

David Zwirner, New York

May 8 – June 27, 2025

MICHAEL ARMITAGE 

Don’t Worry There Will Be More, 2024. 

© Michael Armitage 

Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of new work by Kenyan-British artist MICHAEL ARMITAGE, which inaugurates the gallery’s new Chelsea building at 533 West 19th Street. This is Armitage’s first solo show with David Zwirner since the announcement of his representation in 2022 and his first solo presentation in New York since Projects 110: Michael Ermitatge, organized by The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and held at The Museum of Modern Art in 2019. The exhibition includes new paintings and bronze reliefs by the artist.

In Crucible, Michael Armitage reflects on the theme of migration. Painted on Lubugo bark cloth—a traditional Ugandan textile used in funerary rituals, which the artist has used as a support for more than a decade—these works are marked by a visceral directness that implicates the viewer in the migrant’s journey and the representation of migrants in wider society. The works in the exhibition incorporate elements of real-life imagery to present narratives that are imbued with a profound sense of humanity and pathos.

While some of the paintings evoke vignettes from a migration route that traverses the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe, other works consider aspects of migration in a broader sense.

Michael Armitage was born in Nairobi in 1984. He received his BFA from Slade School of Art, London, in 2007, and a postgraduate diploma from the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 2010. The artist was the recipient of the Ruth Baumgarte Art Award in 2020, and in 2021, he was elected a Royal Academician of Painting by the Royal Academy of Art, London.

The artist’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide. In 2023, Michael Armitage: Pathos and the Twilight of the Idle, a solo presentation of the artist’s work, was on view at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria. Michael Armitage: You, Who Are Still Alive, was on view at Kunsthalle Basel in 2022. In the same year, a solo presentation of the artist’s work curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist was on view at Calcografía Nacional, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. In 2021, Michael Armitage: Account of an Illiterate Man was presented by Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. The solo exhibition Michael Armitage: Paradise Edict debuted in 2020 at Haus der Kunst, Munich, and traveled to the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2021. 

Other monographic exhibitions have taken place at prominent venues internationally, such as the Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2020); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2019); The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2019); South London Gallery (2017); Turner Contemporary, Margate, England (2017); and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California (2016). 

Work by Michael Armitage has also been featured in significant group exhibitions. In 2024, Armitage was included in The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure, a traveling group presentation, which originated at the National Portrait Gallery, London, then traveled to The Box, Plymouth, England, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, through 2025. Works by the artist were included in Drawing in the Continuous Present, a 2022 group exhibition at The Drawing Center, New York. Armitage’s work was included in the 2021 group exhibition British Art Show 9, organized by Hayward Gallery Touring, London, which traveled to numerous venues in the United Kingdom through 2022. In 2019, the artist participated in the 58th Venice Biennale.

In 2020, Michael Armitage founded the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI) to promote art by practitioners in East Africa. The groundbreaking nonprofit arts venue hosts exhibitions, curatorial research residencies, libraries, and archives, as well as other educational initiatives that enrich the discourse on contemporary creative practices in the region. In the future, NCAI has plans to develop a postgraduate fi ne arts program, among other wide-reaching resources. 

NCAI also collaborates with writers and artists from East Africa to publish original commissioned essays, interviews, articles, and reports. NCAI’s robust publications and artists books offer insight, research, and thought leadership that underscores its commitment to documentation of the artists’ creativity. David Zwirner Books proudly supports and distributes the NCAI titles Mwili, Akili Na Roho/Body, Mind, and Spirit and I Hope So: Sane Wadu internationally. 

Michael Armitage’s works are represented in distinguished institutional collections worldwide, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Institute of Chicago; Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacifi c Film Archive, California; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Dallas Museum of Art; Fondation Beyeler, Basel/Riehen, Switzerland; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Government Art Collection, London; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway; Kunstmuseum Basel; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; National Gallery of Australia, Parkes; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; National Portrait Gallery, London; Norval Foundation Collection, Cape Town; Pinault Collection, Paris; The Roberts Institute of Art, London; Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; Victor Pinchuk Contemporary Art Foundation, Kyiv; and Yuz Foundation Collection, Shanghai. 

Michael Armitage has been represented by David Zwirner since 2022. He lives and works in Indonesia and Nairobi.

DAVID ZWIRNER

533 West 19th Street, New York City

www.davidzwirner.com

Vilhelm Hammershoi: Silence @ Hauser & Wirth Basel - Inaugural Exhibition

Vilhelm Hammershøi: Silence 

Hauser & Wirth Basel 

1 June - 13 July 2024

Vilhelm Hammershøi

Double Portrait of the Artist and His Wife, Seen

through a Mirror. The Cottage Spurveskjul, 1911

Oil on canvas, 55 x 76 cm / 21 5/8 x 29 7/8 in

© Vilhelm Hammershøi, courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Vilhelm Hammershøi

Interior in London, Brunswick Square, 1912

Oil on canvas, 53 x 76 cm / 20 7/8 x 29 7/8 in

Photo: Annik Wetter Photographie

© Vilhelm Hammershøi, courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Hauser & Wirth inaugurates its new gallery in Basel at Luftgässlein 4 with the exhibition ‘Vilhelm Hammershøi. Silence’. Curated by art historian Felix Krämer, a leading expert on Vilhelm Hammershøi, it is the first ever solo exhibition of the celebrated 19th- and early 20th-century Danish artist in Switzerland, bringing together 16 works from private collections dating between 1883 and 1914, some of which have rarely been exhibited before. Characterized by their mesmerizing composure and omnipresent minimal color palette, ‘Vilhelm Hammershøi. Silence’ devotes its attention to these genre paintings without narratives and is accompanied by a catalog by Hauser & Wirth Publishers, featuring essays from the curator Felix Krämer and art historian and writer Florian Illies (author of ‘Love in a Time of Hate’ and ‘1913: The Year Before the Storm’).

Alongside the interior paintings for which Vilhelm Hammershøi is highly renowned, including nine works featuring a figure, the exhibition features several of the artist’s early farmstead paintings and cityscapes of Copenhagen and London, as well as a rare self-portrait of the artist with his wife. The quiet but radical originality that emanates from these works situates Hammershøi as a precursor to the modern masters who were to follow, including Giorgio Morandi, Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. Highlighting Hammershøi’s powerfully prescient vision, Florian Illies writes, ‘The future already spoke through him. More than a hundred years in advance, he intuited the spaces in which our souls now wish to reside.’

Vilhelm Hammershøi’s timeless paintings defy categorization, visually bridging the art of the Old Masters with that of the modern era. Drawing from both the past and his present, Hammershøi created a highly individual artistic language that has captured the imaginations of contemporary audiences from beyond his native Denmark. Major international retrospectives and exhibitions of his work over the last 20 years have been held at The Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (2008), Kunsthalle München, Germany (2012) and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, Japan (2020), among others.

Vilhelm Hammershøi

Interior with the Artist’s Wife, Seen from Behind, 1901

Oil on canvas, 45 x 39 cm / 17 3/4 x 15 3/8 in

Photo: Annik Wetter Photographie

© Vilhelm Hammershøi, courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Vilhelm Hammershøi

Morning Toilette, 1914

Oil on canvas, 87 x 73 cm / 34 1/4 x 28 3/4 in

© Vilhelm Hammershøi, courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Born in Copenhagen in 1864, the son of a merchant, Vilhelm Hammershøi remained loyal to his hometown of Copenhagen where he lived until his death in 1916. Through early travels to the European centers of Paris and London with his wife, Ida Hammershøi, née Ilsted, whom he married in 1891, he familiarized himself with the rapidly evolving international art of his time. Yet, it was Dutch 17th-century genre painting, particularly the enigmatic domestic interiors of Johannes Vermeer, and the early 19th-century Danish Golden Age, that became a wellspring of inspiration for the artist. Following their travels, the couple settled in their 17th-century apartment, Strandgade 30, in the Christianshavn district of Copenhagen, where they would reside from 1898 to 1909. Described by his contemporaries as a recluse, the artist preferred to paint at home rather than in a studio, resisting the influences and distractions of the outside world. Hammershøi’s interior paintings, each depiction imbued with a contemplative stillness, were to remain the artist’s enduring fascination and most renowned motif.

Among the works in the exhibition are major paintings of interiors with a singular female figure, most noticeably depicting Vilhelm Hammershøi’s wife, Ida. Within the interiors that Hammershøi created, Ida repeatedly appears as an isolated figure with her back turned towards the viewer, giving these paintings a timeless quality by denying any sort of emotional or narrative reading. Certain motifs reappear in different configurations alongside his wife, often in an artificial and dream-like manner, creating an inherent tension between the figure and its environment. The uncanny placement of household objects, such as candlesticks, chairs, desks and mirrors, can be seen as evocative of the still life compositions that Giorgio Morandi painted decades later. In the painting ‘Interior with the Artist’s Wife, Seen from Behind’ (1901), Ida stands ambivalently next to a pianoforte; however, there is no interaction between two. The presence of a musical instrument emphasizes the absence of sound, adding to the profound feeling of stillness. These ephemeral interior paintings conjure a voyeuristic intimacy which anticipates the atmosphere of works by 20th-century artists such as Edward Hopper or René Magritte.

Vilhelm Hammershøi

Interior with a Standing Woman, 1898

Oil on canvas, 48.5 x 42.4 cm / 19 1/8 x 16 3/4 in

© Vilhelm Hammershøi, courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Vilhelm Hammershøi

Woman before a Mirror, 1906

Oil on canvas, 46 x 38.5 cm / 18 1/8 x 15 1/8 in

© Vilhelm Hammershøi, courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Vilhelm Hammershøi’s reductive color palette and masterful use of diffused light give the interiors a contemplative, melancholic quality and stand in stark contrast to the bold expressionists and fauvists of his time. In one of the earliest interiors on view, ‘Interior with a Standing Woman’ (1898), the artist experiments with brown and ochre tones seen in his early farmstead paintings. In later paintings, Vilhelm Hammershøi began to employ the grey toned color palette that would come to define his minimal aesthetic, as seen in the work ‘Woman Before a Mirror’ (1906). Although evocative of black and white or sepia photography, his palette was radical since it ultimately alienated his images from realism. Asked about his color use in 1907, the artist replied: ‘Why do I use so few and muted colors? Frankly, I don’t know. It’s quite impossible for me to say anything on the matter. It feels natural to me. In purely coloristic terms I absolutely believe that a painting works best the fewer colors are used in it.’ The seriality of the isolated figure, setting and disconnection from verisimilitude are traits that arguably characterize Hammershøi’s works as precursors to conceptual and modernist approaches.

Many of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s later paintings utilize an experimental approach to perspective, with several works reminiscent of photographic compositions and viewpoints. A rare example of a self-portrait of the artist with his wife, ‘Double Portrait of the Artist and His Wife, Seen through a Mirror. The Cottage Spurveskjul’ (1911) features the artist’s own reflection within the confines of an elliptical shaped mirror, allowing the viewer’s gaze to merge with the artist’s, whilst Ida is distanced from the viewer in the background. ‘Morning Toilette’ (1914) is one of the latest paintings on view featuring the artist’s wife and is in stark contrast to earlier examples; here, Vilhelm Hammershøi crops the figure from the waist upwards. These angular compositions and perspectives imbue the artist’s work with a striking contemporary relevance which, alongside Hammershøi’s use of the figure and color, reveal a remarkably modernist sensibility that continues to garner new generations of followers who join those steeped in the history of art of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. 

HAUSER & WIRTH BASEL

Luftgässlein 4, 4051 Basel

www.hauserwirth.com

Artist N. Dash @ Lévy Gorvy Dayan, London

N. Dash

Lévy Gorvy Dayan, London

April 25 – June 15, 2024

N. Dash 

GP_24, 2024 

Earth, acrylic, cardboard corners, graphite, 

hardware, string, and jute, 

84 × 64½ inches (213.4 × 163.8 cm)

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist N. Dash, inaugurating the gallery’s new location in London’s Mayfair district. The artist’s debut exhibition with the gallery features multi-panel paintings that explore ecologies of resonance among disparate materials. N. Dash’s practice is grounded in and distinguished by bringing together organic substances, manufactured readymade objects, and images resulting from embodied processes. The tactile surfaces of these restrained, luminous works emphasize haptic experience, drawing attention to the subtle yet seismic effects of touch.

N. Dash 

H_24, 2024 

Earth, oil, silkscreen ink, and jute 

66½ × 48 inches (168.9 × 121.9 cm)

N. Dash’s paintings draw on the building blocks of our natural and constructed worlds, including earth and water, jute and cotton, graphite and oil, along with oft-overlooked fabricated items such as architectural insulation and factory-produced cardboard. Across the works in the exhibition, these elements are recombined to elevate the structural, textural, and energetic synergies and tensions among them. A work whose hue resembles patinated copper might comprise Styrofoam insulation, or an image might be silkscreened onto a panel on which earth has been troweled and dried into a cracked, furrowed plane. There are slippages among the many materials, processes, and signifiers that are evoked in these paintings—each held together by careful, spare decisions.

At the core of N. Dash’s work is a daily ritual wherein the artist rubs a small piece of white cotton between finger and thumb until the machine-loomed fibers fray and lose their gridded structure, decomposing into an abject tangle. For the artist, the fabric serves as a recording device on which actions are imprinted, energy is captured, and immaterial forces are stored. The resulting sculptures are colored by a patina of dirt and oils, transformed by the spontaneous movement of the artist’s body. The grid, one of modernism’s paradigmatic forms, is undone again and again in the artist’s hand—by the body, the weather, and the environment. The artist photographs iterations of these sculptures and silkscreens the images onto panels prepared with earth, such that the images undulate according to the earth’s topography. In addition, planes of color are silkscreened, leaving fields of rosette patterns that result from the halftone printing process.

The works’ beveled edges reveal their earthen substrates, allowing them to breathe. In these carved-out margins, the layers of earth, gesso, and jute are rendered visible, exposing the quasi-geologic structure of each panel. This strategy appears differently in a series of works in which strings are embedded in, or excavated from, the earthen grounds, the latter creating fine trenches of negative space, where the materiality of the work is exposed and raw. Ecological concerns course through these paintings with references to human and nonhuman interconnection and intervention. They examine, on an intimate scale, the impact of touch on natural resources, and reckon with the ways in which synthetic materials contain, shape, and merge with the environment. Here, Photoshop can imitate a field of flowers with an algorithmic printing pattern, but a rosette is still a field of ones and zeros. These questions of mimesis, artificiality, and exploitation are at play in these paintings, but subtly so. Through the works on view, nature and byproducts of manufacture are counterposed on vertical stages of earth, uplifting this most fundamental material and source.

LÉVY GORVY DAYAN 

35 Dover Street, London 

www.levygorvydayan.com

Inaugural Exhibition at Phillips Los Angeles - Featured Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ernie Barnes, Amy Sherald, Julie Mehretu, Tom Wesselman, Willem de Kooning, Claude Lalanne...

Inaugural Exhibition at Phillips Los Angeles

25 – 27 October 2022

Phillips Los Angeles, 9041 Nemo Street, West Hollywood

Credit: Eric Staudenmaier

Courtesy of Phillips 

Phillips announces details surrounding the opening of its new Los Angeles outpost, the launch of which underscores the company’s commitment to the West Coast amid its continued global expansion. Open to the public from 25-27 October, the exhibition will feature works from the upcoming auctions of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Watches, and Design, including Jean-Michel Basquiat’s To Repel Ghosts, estimated at $7-10 million. Also on view will be two works by Ernie Barnes from the collection of Golden Globe-Nominated actor Richard Roundtree, in addition to paintings by Amy Sherald and Julie Mehretu. Timepieces on view in Los Angeles include watches by Rolex, Patek Philippe, and Audemars Piguet, and Claude Lalanne’s Pair of “crococurule” stools from the December Design auction will also be featured in the exhibition.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

To Repel Ghosts, 1985

Courtesy of Phillips

Estimate: $7,000,000 - 10,000,000

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s To Repel Ghosts is among the highlights of the exhibition and will be a star lot in the November Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art. The monumental work, measuring seven feet tall, is a nearly double-life-sized portrait of Basquiat’s friend and fellow artist Jack Walls. Well known in 1980s downtown circles as Robert Mapplethorpe’s muse and romantic partner, Walls is rendered in Jean Michel Basquiat’s distinctive visual idiom—unmistakable by the gestural swathes of black, white, and yellow pigment—against a surface of affixed wooden boards. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s penchant for incorporating doors and other found media into his practice first led him to experiment with timber slats for his 1984 masterwork Flexible, which employed the fencing that surrounded his Los Angeles studio. Exceedingly pleased with the resulting aesthetic effect, Jean-Michel Basquiat soon returned to the idiosyncratic material, which he purchased from a Soho lumber yard to comprise the support of more than 17 paintings in the mid 1980s. Epitomizing his guiding principle to—quite literally—bring the urban environment into his studio, this major work from 1985 nods to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s past as a street artist while anticipating the hallmarks of his mature style. The work belongs to a series of portraits Jean-Michel Basquiat undertook in 1985 of Black subjects in the downtown art scene. The work’s title, To Repel Ghosts, is one of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s most iconic phrases which has become synonymous with the artist’s declaration of his own identity.  

Ernie Barnes

Untitled (Basketball Players), circa late 1970s-early 1980s

Courtesy of Phillips

Estimate: $300,000 - 400,000

Ernie Barnes

My Man, circa 1980

Courtesy of Phillips

Estimate: $150,000 - 200,000

Phillips also presents two works by Ernie Barnes, owned by Golden Globe-nominated actor Richard Roundtree, an icon of American cinema, most notable for his role as SHAFT. Despite being neighbors in 1970s Los Angeles, Roundtree discovered Barnes’ artistic endeavors after Sammy Davis Jr. and Charlton Heston purchased his artworks. When Roundtree learned that Ernie Barnes lived just four blocks away, he walked to his home and met with him. As an actor who desired to explore Black experiences on screen, it was important for Rountree to see these artworks. They visually captured life, people, and places he had experienced. The hues used in both works are reflective of primary colors often found in Black American films during the 1970s. Deep browns, yellows, tans and hints of “blue-black,” were cultural markers that signified the wide range of skin color and complexion found in Black America. Evidenced in both Untitled (Basketball Players) and My Man, Ernie Barnes’ unique ability to elevate the everyday to the extraordinary have captivated collectors across the world, with the market for his work having reached new heights

Amy Sherald

Pilgrimage of the Chameleon, 2016

Courtesy of Phillips

Estimate: $1,800,000 - 2,500,000

Phillips continues to lead the market for Amy Sherald, holding the world record and all top four prices at auction. We are thrilled to be offering Amy Sherald’s Pilgrimage of the Chameleon, 2016, this fall. At 72 x 51 inches, the work is notably larger than her standard 54 x 43 inch format, making this a rare opportunity to acquire a large-scale masterpiece by the artist.

Julie Mehretu

Tsunemasa (next to Kaija), 2014

Courtesy of Phillips

Estimate: $4,000,000 - 6,000,000

Julie Mehretu’s Tsunemasa (next to Kaija) will also be on view in Los Angeles. Inspired by the popular Japanese Noh drama Tsunemasa, the work evokes the mystical realm of the ceremony in the theatrical narrative as well as the Noh tradition of a tree as a background. Her use of sumi ink echoes these ancient traditions, with the medium used in East Asian calligraphy and meant to recall the essential nature of mark-making. A superb example from one of Julie Mehretu's most acclaimed bodies of work, Tsunemasa (next to Kaija) coalesces her signature layered approach with a softer, more gestural idiom that evokes both cave drawings and urban graffiti. An enlarged reproduction of the work was used as the set for Peter Sellars’ staging of Kaija Saariaho’s opera Only the Sound Remains, which was performed across Europe and Canada beginning in 2016.

Tom Wesselmann

Mouth #14 (Marilyn), 1967

Courtesy of Phillips

Estimate: $3,500,000 - 4,500,000

Coming to auction for the first time since its creation, Tom Wesselmann’s Mouth #14 (Marilyn) is an iconic iteration of the artist’s series of Mouth paintings. Executed in November 1967, a watershed year for the artist, the work is among the early pivotal works in the series that were conceived in tandem with Wesselmann’s first Smoker paintings. Immersing the viewer into a hypnotic erotism and graphic intensity that characterizes the best of Tom Wesselmann’s works, here the mouth of Marilyn Monroe is transformed into a pair of sultry scarlet lips, her blonde strands of hair evoking sensual flames. Immediately recalling Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe’s Lips, 1962, the present work is at once an homage to Marilyn’s iconic smile and an embodiment of the relationship between advertising and celebrity. Exhibited at Sidney Janis Gallery the year of its creation, Mouth #14 (Marilyn) marks the apex of Tom Wesselmann’s mid-career painterly investigations that established him at the forefront of the Pop art vanguard.

Audemars Piguet

Reference 26585CE, Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar Openworked

Courtesy of Phillips

Estimate: $150,000 - 300,000

Also included in the opening exhibition are highlights from The New York Watch Auction: SEVEN and Design, with both auctions being held in December 2022 in New York.

Designed by Formation Association, Phillips Los Angeles marks the first brick and mortar space on the West Coast for the auction house, alongside an extensive network of specialists in the region, with representatives having long been in place in Seattle and San Francisco. 

Phillips Los Angeles will look to engage the vibrant collecting community on the West Coast through a robust calendar of events. A new partnership with the design influencer website Sight Unseen will activate the space from the launch of the gallery onward, with works by locally based contemporary designers on view alongside the auction highlights of 20th Century & Contemporary Art and Watches. Further details of the partnership are forthcoming.

Other hightlights include Willem de Kooning's painting Untitled (Lady in Red), circa 1977; Yayoi Kusama's painting Nets Blue, 1960; Helen Frankenthaler's painting Saturday Night, 1985; Claude Lalanne's Pair of "Crococurule" stools, designed 1992, produced 2009 and 2012; Amoako Boafo's painting White on White, 2019, among others.

Willem de Kooning

Untitled (Lady in Red), circa 1977

Courtesy of Phillips

Estimate: $4,000,000 - 6,000,000

Yayoi Kusama

Nets Blue, 1960

Courtesy of Phillips

Estimate: $2,500,000 - 3,500,000

Helen Frankenthaler

Saturday Night, 1985

Courtesy of Phillips

Estimate: $800,000 - 1,200,000

Claude Lalanne

Pair of "Crococurule" stools, designed 1992, produced 2009 and 2012

Courtesy of Phillips

Estimate Upon Request

Amoako Boafo

White on White, 2019

Courtesy of Phillips

Estimate: $100,000 - 150,000

Estimates do not include buyer’s premium; prices achieved include the hammer price plus buyer’s premium.

PHILLIPS LOS ANGELES

9041 Nemo Street, West Hollywood, Los Angeles

www.phillips.com

Wild Strawberries - Inaugural Exhibition @ 125 Newbury Gallery, New York - Featuring 17 artists

Wild Strawberries 

Inaugural Exhibition

125 Newbury, New York

September 30 – November 19, 2022

Paul Thek

Untitled (Hand with Ring), 1967 

Photo: Richard Gary 

© The Estate of George Paul Thek 

Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York 

Deana Lawson 

Portal, 2017 

Courtesy of the artist, 

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles and New York, 

and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York 

Lucas Samaras 

Untitled, 1964 

© Lucas Samaras, courtesy Pace Gallery  

Kiki Smith 

Virgin Mary, 1992 

© Kiki Smith, courtesy Pace Gallery

125 Newbury, the new project space spearheaded by Arne Glimcher, opens to the public with Wild Strawberries, an intergenerational show featuring 17 artists whose work traffics in the dreamlike exchange between threat and seduction. Inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 cinematic masterpiece, Wild Strawberries, the exhibition brings together sculpture, painting, photography, and film by a wide range of artists, including Lynda Benglis, Lee Bontecou, Julie Curtiss, Alex Da Corte, Doreen Lynette Garner, Robert Gober, David Hammons, Deana Lawson, Shahryar Nashat, Brandon Ndife, Kathleen Ryan, Lucas Samaras, Max Hooper Schneider, Kiki Smith, Paul Thek, Hannah Wilke, and Zhang Huan. The exhibition also includes excerpts from narrative and experimental films that reflect a similar sensibility, which have been selected in collaboration with filmmaker and scholar Vito Adriaensens.

Wild Strawberries cultivates a garden of widely divergent practices, which germinate and transform the body. Probing the power of sensation, the works investigate art’s capacity to stimulate pleasure and incite horror in the same gesture. The exhibition is grounded in the work of key figures of the post- 1960s generation who mobilized the aesthetics of bodily abjection toward fascinating, disturbing, and political ends. The nightmarish forms of Bontecou are juxtaposed with the exquisite formlessness of Benglis, and the corporeal poetry of Wilke contrasts with the cruel delights of Samaras and Thek. Engaging the viewer on a visceral level, these works are brought into dialogue with sculpture and photography from the 1980s and ’90s by Hammons, Smith, Gober, and Zhang in which the language of abjection has become infused with struggles of power, politics, race, and gender.

Oscillating between feelings of repulsion and attraction, Wild Strawberries traces this dialogue further in the work of an emerging cohort of contemporary artists, including Da Corte, Curtiss, Garner, Nashat, Ndife, Ryan, and Schneider. Their practices draw on earlier precedents while forging new cross-pollination between painting, sculpture, film, photography, and installation. 

Wild Strawberries Artist List:

Lynda Benglis (b. 1941)

Lee Bontecou (b. 1931)

Julie Curtiss (b. 1982)

Alex Da Corte (b. 1980)

Doreen Lynette Garner (b. 1986)

Robert Gober (b. 1954)

David Hammons (b. 1943)

Deana Lawson (b. 1979)

Shahryar Nashat (b. 1975)

Brandon Ndife (b. 1991)

Kathleen Ryan (b. 1984)

Lucas Samaras (b. 1936)

Max Hooper Schneider (b. 1982)

Kiki Smith (b. 1954)

Paul Thek (1933 – 1988)

Hannah Wilke (1940 – 1993)

Zhang Huan (b. 1966)

About 125 Newburry

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

125 NEWBURY

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

www.125newbury.com

Bruce Davidson and Khalik Allah @ Magnum Gallery, Paris - NEW YORK - Inaugural Exhibition

Bruce Davidson and Khalik Allah 

NEW YORK 

Magnum Gallery, Paris 

21 October - 18 December 2021 

Bruce Davidson

USA. New York City. 1980. Subway

© Bruce Davidson/ Magnum Photos

Khalik Allah

USA. Harlem, New York City. 2014 

© Khalik Allah/ Magnum Photos

The Magnum Gallery presents Bruce Davidson and Khalik Allah: NEW YORK. The exhibition inaugurates Paris’ new gallery located in the 11th district and for the first time, brings together the work of two Magnum photographers who, generations apart, explored New York City’s energy through their lenses.

Bruce Davidson and Khalik Allah offer two visions of urban life, above and underground, captured at different time periods, through two distinctive yet parallel viewpoints. The exhibition, which predominantly features Bruce Davidson’s vintage prints, explores themes of humanity, street life and perception, while highlighting the effects of transmission.

In 1980, Buce Davidson found a new source of inspiration in the New York subway. It was a challenging and dangerous location, but the photographer managed to retrieve striking and colorful images of passengers from this dark underworld. “Color in the subway was different. I found that the strobe light reflecting off the metallic surfaces of the  defaced subway cars created an iridescence I had seen in photographs of deep-sea fish thousands of fathoms below the ocean surface, glowing under electronic flash, never having been exposed to light before.” His underground expeditions eventually culminated in the publication of Subway in 1986, a seminal, epoch-defining series that served as both a captivating study of light and color as well as a historical document of an elemental part of New York.

Bruce Davidson paved the way for new generations of photographers including Khalik Allah who, more than 40 years after the publication of East 100th Street, shed light on a community in distress, riddled with poverty and addiction. Khalik Allah cites Bruce Davidson as one of his major influences and specifically focused his lens on the black community frequenting the corner of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue. Beginning in 2012, Khalik Allah would return to this corner, shooting only at night. Through the flash of his camera and vibrant colors, he sought to restore the dignity of the dehumanized inhabitants of this area of the city. The resulting pieces are vibrant depictions of humanity. In Souls Against the Concrete, published in 2017, Allah comments: “This body of work is about redemption, strength, and resilience amid addiction, poverty, and street life.”

When considered together, the work in these series are characterized by the same degree of directness and proximity with their subjects. There is neither judgment nor sentimentalism. These works do not impose any moralist vision; on the contrary, they convey honest empathy and rely on genuine immersion, placing the author on the side of his subjects. Highlights in the exhibition include both color and black and white prints including striking portraits from the late 1960s and Subway views from 1980 depicting individual statuesque poses in the streets and casual scenes featuring people inside the cars.

Bruce Davidson and Khalik Allah offered a testimony of their time, respective places and moments in New York. If the gathering of their photographs shows the mutations and changes experienced by the city over time, it also attests to the immutability of many things, the city’s energy and, notably, the precarity experienced by certain communities of the city. Above all, these works are an ode to New York: the quintessential ‘melting pot,’ a city in whose history and posterity the grains of possibility are engraved.

BRUCE DAVIDSON

Bruce Davidson began taking photographs at the age of ten in Oak Park, Illinois. While attending Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University, he continued to further his knowledge and develop his passion. He was later drafted into the army and stationed near Paris. There he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the founders of the Magnum Photos. When he left military service in 1957, Bruce Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for LIFE magazine and in 1958 became a full member of Magnum. From 1958 to 1961 he created such seminal bodies of work as Circus, Brooklyn Gang, and Freedom Rides.

He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 and created a profound documentation of the civil rights movement in America. In 1963, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented his early work in a solo show. In 1967, he received the first grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts, having spent two years witnessing the dire social conditions on one block in East Harlem. This work was published by Harvard University Press in 1970 under the title East 100th Street and was later republished and expanded by St. Ann’s Press. The work became an exhibition that same year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 1980, he captured the vitality of the New York Metro’s underworld that was later published in a book, Subway, and exhibited at the International Center of Photography in 1982. From 1991-95, he photographed the landscape and layers of life in Central Park. In 2006, he completed a series of photographs titled “The Nature of Paris,” many of which have been shown and acquired by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

Bruce Davidson received an Open Society Institute Individual Fellowship in 1998 to return to East 100th Street His awards include the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Photography in 2004 and a Gold Medal Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Arts Club in 2007. Classic bodies of work from his 50-year career have been extensively published in monographs and are included in many major public and private fine art collections around the world. He continues to photograph and produce new bodies of work. Bruce Davidson was inducted into both the Leica Hall of Fame in 2018 and the International Photography Hall of Fame in 2019.

Khalik Allah

Souls Against the Concrete

University of Texas Press, 2017

208 pages | 12 x 7.75 | 105 color photos 

ISBN: 978-1-4773-1314-5

© Khalik Allah/University of Texas Press

KHALIK ALLAH

Khalik Allah is a New York-based photographer and filmmaker who practices Camera Ministry with an eye as open as his heart. The resulting work has been described as “street opera” and noted for its beautifully visceral humanity. 

After a number of short films that reflect relationships formed through portraiture, Khalik Allah advanced his artistry with the feature length documentary Field Niggas (2015), shot at nighttime on the corner of Harlem’s 125th St. and Lexington Avenue. This corner also served as the basis for his first photography book Souls Against the Concrete, published by University of Texas Press in 2017. Khalik Allah continued with Black Mother (2018), an ecstatic expression of reverence and realities across Jamaica. This award winning film has been seen in festivals, museums and schools around the world; further released in the UK and the US through distributors Dogwoof and Grasshopper Film. Khalil Allah’s films are available on the Criterion Channel. 

Khalik Allah is currently at work on his second photo book from 125th and Lexington. He became a Magnum Nominee member in 2020.

MAGNUM GALLERY PARIS

68 rue Léon Frot, 75011 Paris

www.magnumphotos.com

Nut Art Movement @ Parker Gallery, Los Angeles - Inaugural Exhibition

Nut Art

Parker Gallery, Los Angeles

May 28 – August 5, 2017

Parker Gallery presents its inaugural exhibition, Nut Art, featuring works by Robert Arneson, Betty Bailey, Clayton Bailey, Roy De Forest, David Gilhooly, Hannah Greely, Calvin Marcus, Maija Peeples-Bright, Benjamin Reiss, Peter Saul, Sally Saul, Harold Schlotzhauer, Richard Shaw, Irvin Tepper, Chris Unterseher and Franklin Williams.

Nut Art is a movement founded in the late 1960s by five Northern California artists: Clayton Bailey, Roy De Forest, David Gilhooly, Maija Peeples-Bright (then Maija Zack, aka Maija Woof) and David Zack. Legend has it, the group was at Roy De Forest’s “purple house under the golden hills of Port Costa, California…looking out the window at some horses and drinking Swan Lager beer.” David Zack, an arts writer and correspondence artist, was searching for a new movement; something that might be an artists’ answer to the Funk moniker adopted by curator Peter Selz. “Roy’s mother Oma came up with a round tray full of open brown bottles of Swan Lager, plus some vegetarian bacon crisps. Everyone said Nut Art at once. Nut Art was born.”(1)

A few Nut Art exhibitions shortly followed, including one organized by Clayton Bailey in 1972 at California State University Hayward. For the exhibition’s staple-bound catalog, De Forest wrote what is commonly referred to as the Nut Art manifesto. The manifesto declares, in all caps:

“THE WORK OF A PECULIAR AND ECCENTRIC NUT CAN TRULY BE CALLED ‘NUT ART’… THE NUT ARTIFICER TRAVELS IN A PHANTASMAGORIC MICRO-WORLD, SMALL AND EXTREMELY COMPACT, AS IS THE LIGHT OF A DWARF STAR IMPLODING INWARD AND IN PASSAGE COLLAPSING PARADISE AND HELL TO ONE AS IT VANISHES FOREVER WITH OUR JOYS, SORROWS AND UNREQUITED LOVE.”(2)

Nut Art at Parker Gallery brings artists from Clayton Bailey’s 1972 exhibition together with contemporary artists who help reveal that the spirit of Nut Art is alive and well. Nut Art includes 10 works from the original exhibition, many of which have not been publicly exhibited since 1972.

(1) David Zack, “Basic Art,” unpublished manuscript, c.1971, 120–21.

(2) Nut Art (Hayward, Calif.: California State University, Hayward, Art Gallery, 1972), n.p.

PARKER GALLERY

2441 Glendower Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90027

www.parkergallery.com

Dimitru Gorzo, SLAG Gallery, New York - In the Corner of My Eye - Inaugural Exhibition

Gorzo: In the Corner of My Eye

SLAG Gallery, New York

June 12 – July 19 2008

SLAG announces the opening of their new gallery at 548 West 28th Street, New York City.

SLAG will open on June 12th with the first New York exhibition of works by the Romanian artist DUMITRU GORZO.

The exhibition will include 34 of the artist’s recent paintings on carved wooden reliefs. In these works the artist has painted realistically rendered portraits of relatives and neighbors from his native village over relief sculptures of primitive characters and archetypes carved by the artist into panels of linden and fir. Two contrasting worlds are superimposed: the beautifully rendered pedestrian life of the modest, rural villagers contrasting with the wild and libidinal figures underneath. Dumitru Gorzo has returned repeatedly to the members of his village of Ieud as a subject. It is his goal to paint a portrait of every resident of his village, which is populated by more than 1,000 people.

In the Corner of My Eye evokes images created by the mind at the periphery of the visual field, images and forms that appear free from the oppression of logic and convention.

DIMITRU GORZO was born in 1975 in Ieud, Maramures, Romania. In 2006 he was the subject of a major, one-person exhibition at the Romanian National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest (Oct.-Dec. 2006). The exhibition then traveled to the Brukenthal Art Museum, Sibiu, Romania (Dec. 2006–Jan. 2007). He received a degree from the University of Fine Arts in Bucharest. Since 1999 he has shown extensively in Romania where his work has garnered extensive press coverage and a growing audience. His exhibitions have frequently generated controversy for their political and sexual subject matter and the artist’s unusually bold treatment of issues that are still considered quite controversial in Romania. In addition to numerous solo exhibitions in Romania, Germany, Austria and Luxembourg, his work has been included in group shows in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and Romania. The artist lives and works in Bucharest.

An illustrated catalog including an essay by Marek Bartelik, art historian and critic, will be published in conjunction with the exhibition.

SLAG Gallery specializes in contemporary Eastern European art and is operated by owner/director Irina Protopopescu.

SLAG GALLERY

548 West 28th Street, New York

www.slaggallery.com

Updated Post

Abakanowicz, Bourgeois, Caro - Marlborough Chelsea, New York - Inaugural Exhibition

Abakanowicz, Bourgeois, Caro

Marlborough Chelsea, New York

September 18 - October 25, 1997

For its inaugural exhibition, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, presents sculptures by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Louise Bourgeois and Sir Anthony Caro. 

The gallery's inaugural exhibition presents one work each by Abakanowicz, Bourgeois and Caro. Each of these works through their physical and conceptual presence, commands and defines the gallery's architectural spaces, creating three interrelated but markedly different environments. These sculptures are of such independent and forceful character that they dominate their environments through the drama of a physical discourse that captures the viewer as if he or she had stumbled into a theater and onto a stage occupied by giants.

Magdalena Abakanowicz channels her deeply personal feelings about loss, isolation, displacement and regeneration as experienced throughout her childhood in Poland into her sculpture. Gouged and smooth bronze surfaces display the marks of the artist's fingers and nails; her work becomes an expressionist rendering in three-dimensional form of angst, aggression and strength. Rather than representing a single historical moment, group or tragedy, Magdalena Abakanowicz says that her work "is about the human condition in general". Backward Seated Figures (1992-93), comprised of 20 bronze forms, suggests a crowd of people seated on the floor, hunched over slightly. The air between each sculpture is heavy and fraught with tension; the installation creates a mood which fills the gallery and pushes at the walls, enveloping the viewer. The installation at Marlborough Chelsea will be the first showing of this piece in the United States.

A native of France, American sculptor Louise Bourgeois' work developed initially in the 1940s through her exposure to the Surrealists. Her later works reflect a continuing interest in feminism and forms related to the body. While many of her recent projects have explored and represented personal recollections of childhood memories and experiences through seemingly fragile and delicate forms, Eyes (1995), included in this exhibition, is monumentally forceful in both its physical and conceptual presence. The pair of massive granite spherical eyes with hemispherical irises captures everything that falls within their gaze. At the direction of  Louise Bourgeois, the eyes have been positioned at a distance apart to reflect the proportions of a monolithic face. The eyes are positioned to create a field of vision and depth of focus that extends beyond the walls of the gallery into the city - the sculpture is both a corporeal anchor and conceptual window.

British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, who recently joined Marlborough for his North American representation, shapes mass and the spaces which his forms inhabit in a powerful yet carefully constructed way. His new work created specifically for this exhibition, Wareham Ziggurat (1997), rises over 12 feet high with its towering stepped shape. Ascending from floor to ceiling, the work forces one's attention upwards into the spaces that most sculpture does not reach. Because of the internal architectural "rooms" within the sculpture, the spectator is drawn inside and therefore deals with both external and internal notions of architectural form and space. The giant railroad sleepers from which the sculpture is made are stacked high like a vast pyramid, giving the work a physicality that is primal, ancient and mysteriously ritualistic in character.

Abakanowicz, Bourgeois, Caro will be followed by a group show curated by Raymond Foye, on view from November 1 through November 29, 1997. An exhibition of work by Spanish sculptor Francisco Leiro opens December 3, and will remain on view through January 3, 1998.

Marlborough Chelsea

211 West 19th Street, New York, NY

www.malgoroughgallery.com