WANAFOTO: installations

Showing posts with label installations. Show all posts

01/11/25

Guan Xiao @ Kunsthalle Wien - 'Teenager' Exhibition

Guan Xiao: Teenager

Kunsthalle Wien

8 October 2025 – 11 January 2026

Guan Xiao

Jeanake, 2025

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Guan Xiao

Midhight Pancake, 2025

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Guan Xiao

Cyclemony, 2025

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager,

Glitea, 2025, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

Kunsthalle Wien presents the first solo exhibition in Austria by Guan Xiao (b. 1983, Chongqing, China). Comprising an entirely new body of sculpture and painting, it takes what Guan Xiao describes as the ‘ambiguous life stage’ of the teenager as a starting point for works that reflect upon the currents, conflicts and absurdities of a society impacted by the values of capitalism and liberalism:

A teenager is typically thought to be impulsive, led by their intuition and open to possibilities, changes and uncertainty. They can be dramatic, riven with self-doubt. I see them as both challenging and conquering reality and these ideas echo through this body of work which has a lot to do with this conflicted state of change and uncertainty. – Guan Xiao

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin/Munich

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager,

Torso, 2025, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager,

Torso, 2025, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

A large, furry A-Frame structure bisects the space, creating a tunnel at the centre of the exhibition. Animated by light, it harbours a collection of cast aluminium objects including scaled-up items of cutlery, a moka pot and a series of enlarged eggs. Outside are a series of gnarled tree roots cast in brass, painted and appended with motorcycle parts and cartoon-like clouds of scribble. These anthropomorphic sculptures with mesh plates or antennae-like wands populate the space like a cast of characters. Two modular columns extend respectively pink and blue arms from aluminium, claw-like bases that resemble oversized bunches of bananas. On the walls, a triptych of panels simulates large, palette-shaped windows covered in a thick layer of paint.

Installation view Guan Xiao: Teenager,

The spent siesta, like a sun-dried memory, 2025; Raining, 2025;

Approaching Dust, 2025, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Photo by Markus Wörgötter

Guan Xiao

Raining, 2025

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Guan Xiao

Raining (detail), 2025

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York

Guan Xiao originally trained as a filmmaker before becoming known for creating sculpture that triggers an impulse for us to create our own narratives and tell stories about what we see. Earlier works resembled museological displays or photography studios that appeared to unite an eclectic selection of objects and images in one scheme. More recent sculpture refers to the Chinese custom of displaying polished tree roots in domestic settings. The practice of root carving dates back to the Warring States Period (474–221 BC), preserving the natural, given form of the wood. Its popularity over the centuries made it a symbol of economic wealth, while becoming a worn-out cultural cliché, denoting a lack of sophistication. In Guan Xiao’s work, the tree root becomes the basis of a singular, mythical creature in an ever-growing multitude of animal or human-like figures. Working with an array of elements – some meticulously hand-crafted, others mass produced – she references a broad range of cultural material that is defamiliarized and uncoupled from its associations to create an ambiguous, semi-fictional space and time.

Teenager returns to fundamental subjects such as food, clothing and shelter to address questions of progress and civilisation, tradition and spirituality that are central to the multi-faceted, playful and poetic work of Guan Xiao. The ‘conflicted state’ of the teenager is used as a metaphor for a society that the artist perceives to be suspended between ‘devotion and restraint’, needs and desires and ancient, philosophical, social and ethical values that are ‘in direct opposition’ to the economic system of capitalism:

China’s imperial history and Confucianism praise restraint suppress individuality. Yets imperial history and Confucianism praise restraint suppress individuality. Yets imperial history and Confucianism praise restraint suppress individuality. Yet subculture, independent cultures throughout history emphasise individuality […]. This contradiction is fundamentally between the philosophical systems of Asia and the economic system of capitalism – a conflict between two modes of thought […]. You might say captitalism is about 'construction', while Asian philosophy is about 'destruction.' – Guan Xiao

Guan Xiao

Photo: Mathilde Agius and Art Basel

Artist Guan Xiao Biography

Guan Xiao (b. 1983, Chongqing, China) has held solo exhibitions at Bonner Kunstverein; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (both 2019); Kunsthalle Winterthur (2018); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2016); K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai and ICA, London (both 2016). Her work has also been exhibited at Start Museum, Shanghai (2024); Mudam Luxembourg (2023 and 2021); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2023); Mercedes-Benz Museum, Stuttgart; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (both 2022); the 34th Bienial de São Paulo; the 58th Belgrade Biennale (both 2021); X Museum Triennial; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Sharjah Art Foundation (all 2020); Triennale Kleinplastik Fellbach; Honolulu Biennial; Migros Museum, Zurich (all 2019); the 57th Venice Biennale; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin; M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (all 2017); 9th Berlin Biennale; ZKM, Karlsruhe (both 2016) and the 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015). Her public art commissions include works for Skulpturenpark Köln (2020); Anyang Public Art Project (2019) and High Line, New York (2017). Guan Xiao lives and works in Beijing.

Publication: Kunsthalle Wien will publish an exhibition catalogue that will also be the first monograph on Guan Xiao. Published in English and German it includes new essays by Chelsea Qianxi Liu, curator at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing and Sarah Johanna Theurer, curator at Haus der Kunst, Munich alongside an extensive interview between the artist and Michelle Cotton, Artistic Director Kunsthalle Wien.

KUNSTHALLE WIEN

Museumsquartier, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna

www.kunsthallewien.at

26/10/25

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

Audio Bonsai 003, 2025

Copper wire, wood, speakers

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

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 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

18/10/25

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective @ MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

October 19, 2025 – February 7, 2026

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

on view at The Museum of Modern Art

from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo by Jonathan Dorado

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

on view at The Museum of Modern Art

from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo by Jonathan Dorado

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

on view at The Museum of Modern Art

from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo by Jonathan Dorado

The Museum of Modern Art presents Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective, the first major museum exhibition to fully consider every aspect of the artist’s expansive, groundbreaking practice, on view in the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions. Coinciding with the centennial of the artist’s birth, the exhibition includes some 300 objects that highlight the core values of experimentation and interconnectedness pervading all dimensions of Asawa’s practice. The retrospective spans the six decades of Asawa’s ambitious career, presenting a range of her work across mediums, including wire sculptures, bronze casts, paper folds, paintings, and a comprehensive body of works on paper. Artworks are accompanied by a rich array of archival materials—photographs, documents, and ephemera—that illuminate her public commissions, art advocacy, and meaningful, lasting relationships with members of her community. The exhibition follows a loose chronological arc, interwoven with thematic sections elaborating on the artist’s inspirations and methods.

“What’s exceptional about Asawa’s practice is the multiplicity of her artistic pursuits and the marvelous ability to turn the simplest things into subjects of lifelong creative contemplation,” said Cara Manes. “The exhibition aims to offer multiple points of entry into her work, reflecting what Asawa described as the ‘total act’ of artmaking.”

Ruth Asawa at Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective View,

San Francisco Museum of Art, 1973

Photograph by Laurence Cuneo

Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) was born in Norwalk, California, and raised on a farm. In the wake of Executive Order 9066 signed in 1942, the teenage Asawa and her family were unlawfully incarcerated in war relocation camps along with thousands of people of Japanese descent. After the end of World War II, Asawa enrolled in the experimental Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, where she explored the artistic possibilities of ordinary materials. There, she developed a technique for looping wire informed by Mexican wire basketry, which she had observed firsthand as a student volunteer in Toluca. This invention would lead to her most consequential contribution to abstract sculpture in the 20th century: a radical body of suspended, intricate looped-wire sculptures. The exhibition begins with a selection of works from her time at Black Mountain College, including explorations of materials, color, and shape in drawings, collages, and prints such as Untitled (BMC.145, BMC Laundry Stamp) (c. 1948–49).

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

on view at The Museum of Modern Art

from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo by Jonathan Dorado

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

on view at The Museum of Modern Art

from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo by Jonathan Dorado

Ruth Asawa continued her material experimentation in wire and paper following her 1949 move to San Francisco, the city that would be the center of her artistic activities for the rest of her life, and where she established a tightly knit family and community. Shortly after her arrival there, she articulated the key motifs and shapes in her looped wire forms in works like Untitled (S.535, Hanging Five-Lobed Continuous Form within a Form with Spheres in the First and Fourth Lobes and a Teardrop Form in the Third Lobe) (1951), on view in the exhibition. She also expanded her range of techniques in drawing, printmaking, and paperfolding, while taking on various commercial design commissions and exhibiting regularly at the Peridot Gallery in New York. In the early 1960s, Ruth Asawa discovered a new method of working with wire by tying and splaying it in ways that evoke organic structures, as seen in works like Untitled (S.390, Hanging Tied-Wire, Double-Sided, Center-Tied, Multi-Branched Form with Curly Ends) (1963).

Ruth Asawa

Untitled (S.390 Hanging Tied-Wire, Double-Sided, Center-Tied,

Multi-Branched Form with Curly Ends), 1963

Copper wire. 20 × 20 × 20 in. (50.8 × 50.8 × 50.8 cm)

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center,

Gift of Rita Newman

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

on view at The Museum of Modern Art

from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo by Jonathan Dorado

Ruth Asawa

Poppy, 1965

Lithograph. 30 1∕16 × 20 9∕16 in. (76.4 × 52.2 cm)

Publisher and printer: Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles

Edition: proof outside the edition of 20

The Museum of Modern Art, New York,

Gift of Kleiner, Bell & Co., 1967

Ruth Asawa continued to experiment with natural forms during a residency at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1965, where she produced a portfolio of diverse, formally rigorous and experimental prints. Drawing from MoMA’s collection, a concentration of works from this portfolio are included in the exhibition, many of which are on view for the first time.

Parallel to her artistic experimentation, Ruth Asawa dedicated herself to her lifelong quest to integrate arts education and practice. One of Asawa’s most transformative projects was the Alvarado Arts Workshop, which started as a grassroots initiative and grew to a momentous movement that embedded vital arts-education programming in San Francisco Bay Area public school systems. Galleries in the exhibition feature archival material related to Asawa’s civic engagement, teaching practice and numerous collaborative public art projects, including Japanese American Internment Memorial (1994) commissioned by the city of San José. Focus on Asawa’s visionary pedagogy extends to the exhibition’s public programming.

Ruth Asawa

Untitled (PF.293, Bouquet from Anni Albers), early 1990s

Ink on paper. 40 × 26 in. (101.6 × 66 cm)

Private collection

A final gallery in the exhibition highlights the last decades of Asawa’s life, which were marked by a renewed dedication to a daily drawing practice. Ruth Asawa tenderly documented her surroundings, paying particular attention to the botanical forms around her, as seen in works such as Untitled (PF.293, Bouquet from Anni Albers) (early 1990s).

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospectiveis an exhibition partnership between the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). The exhibition is organized by Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA and Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture, SFMOMA; with Dominika Tylcz, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA; and Marin Sarvé-Tarr, Assistant Curator, and William Hernández Luege, Curatorial Associate, Painting and Sculpture, SFMOMA.

The exhibition was on view at SFMOMA (April 4 – September 2, 2025). After its presentation at MoMA, it will travel to Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (March 20 – September 13, 2026); and Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland (October 18, 2026 – January 24, 2027).

MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

www.moma.org

11/10/25

Hugh Hayden @ Lisson Gallery, London - "Hughmanity" Exhibition + Biography

Hugh Hayden: Hughmanity

Lisson Gallery, London

26 September – 1 November 2025

A dining table engulfed in flames, a lifeboat lined with thorns, a child’s dress fashioned from tree bark—these are among the striking new works featured in Hughmanity, Hugh Hayden’s first return to London since his 2020 debut with the gallery was abruptly closed just days after opening due to COVID-19 restrictions. Now staging his seventh show with Lisson Gallery, the Texan-born artist expands upon his ongoing investigation of congregation, passage and assimilation through the transformation of familiar cultural symbols into allegories of community, rupture, and belief. These new works, meticulously crafted from trees through a series of techniques like felling, milling, carving, and laminating, extend Hayden’s sculptural language, while the introduction of painted surfaces signals a significant new expanding element within his practice.

At the center of Hughmanity is The Last Supper (2025), a stretched table encircled by flames and rendered unreachable. Dining tables, he reminds us, are not only sites of joy and communion but also of fraught family gatherings, unspoken grief, or absence. The flames that rise from its surface also echo religious and art historical precedents, from Leonardo da Vinci’s composition of the same name to Ed Ruscha’s Burning Gas Station. Suspended nearby, 13 cast-bronze skillets embedded with African masks extends the allegory. First conceived as “melting pots” in his previous London exhibition, American Food, these diasporic skillets now embody Jesus and his disciples. Their specialized forms and polished surfaces suggest both individuality, purpose and collectivity. Together, the fiery table and its floating counterpart form a pairing that questions the conditions under which communion, whether spiritual, social or cultural, can occur.

Tension between refuge and danger shapes The Good Samaritan (2025), a dinghy lined with thorns carved from Christmas-tree branches that point inward toward the boat’s center. Partially navigable with its two oars left clear of protrusions and a small smooth space remaining at its core, the boat hovers between promise and threat. The vessel recalls Hayden’s earlier Gulf Stream (2022), inspired by Winslow Homer’s painting of a lone fisherman adrift at sea. Here, though, the narrative shifts toward an allegory of possible survival despite treacherous conditions.

Elsewhere, painted wooden flags punctured by cigarettes, pencils, snakes or fragment patriotic imagery into narratives of anxiety, erasure, and defiance. One flag adorned with fifty wooden cigarettes in place of stars, presents a portrait of a nation under strain. Another, Gone with the Wind (2025), is studded with erasers seemingly caught in motion. In Medusa (2025), the fifty stars are replaced with carved and painted timber rattlesnakes, their writhing presence casting the banner as both myth and menace. These works collapse the line between patriotism and critique, underscoring how a nation’s or a person’s identity can be rewritten through conflict, erasure, and resistance.

Nearby, a sharply tailored blazer lined with thorns recalls the traditions of English suiting and emphasizes how such markers of status can also torture. Other works, including Pinocchia (2025), a bark-covered child’s dress layered with pink tulle, men’s dress shoes and a set of Mary Jane flats all encased in bark, highlight the tension between blending in and being defined, or even being consumed, by the very structures that promise acceptance.

Taken together, these works lend Hughmanity a spiritual undertone that oscillates between Biblical allegory and contemporary critique. As in earlier public projects—from Brier Patch (2022), a forest of branched school desks in Madison Square Park, to The End (2025), a skeletal form slowly dissolving into the New England woods—Hugh Hayden turns familiar forms into metaphors for entropy, exclusion, and renewal.

Artist Hugh Hayden Biography

Hugh Hayden’s practice considers the anthropomorphization of the natural world as a visceral lens for exploring the human condition. Hugh Hayden transforms familiar objects through a process of selection, carving and juxtaposing to challenge our perceptions of ourselves, others and the environment. Raised in Texas and trained as an architect, his work arises from a deep connection to nature and its organic materials. Hayden utilizes wood as his primary medium, frequently loaded with multi-layered histories in their origin, including objects as varied as discarded trunks, rare indigenous timbers, Christmas trees or souvenir African sculptures. From these he saws, sculpts and sands the wood, often combining disparate species, creating new composite forms that also reflect their complex cultural backgrounds. Crafting metaphors for human existence and past experience, Hayden’s work questions the stasis of social dynamics and asks the viewer to examine their place within an ever-shifting ecosystem.

Hugh Hayden was born in Dallas, Texas in 1983 and lives and works in New York City. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University. Hayden’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Recent solo exhibitions include public art installations, ‘Gulf Stream’ at the Boston Public Art Triennial's Lot Lab, Boston, MA (2024), ‘Huff and a Puff’, at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA (2023), and ‘Brier Patch’, at the Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York, NY, which later traveled to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC, and Dumbarton Oaks Gardens in Washington, DC. Other solo institutional and gallery exhibitions include ‘Hugh Hayden: American Vernacular’ at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; ‘Hugh Hayden: Home Work’ at the Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; ‘Hugh Hayden: Homecoming’ at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX; ‘Hughmans’ at Lisson Gallery, NY; ‘Hugh Hayden: American Vernacular’, Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, MO, USA; ‘Hughman’ at Lisson Gallery, LA; ‘Boogey Men’ at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami, FL, which traveled to the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX; ‘Huey’, Lisson Gallery, New York, NY; ‘Hues’, C L E A R I N G, Brussels, Belgium; ‘Hugh Hayden: American Food’, Lisson Gallery, London, UK; ‘Hugh Hayden: Creation Myths’, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; and ‘Hugh Hayden’, White Columns, New York, NY. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Ground/work 2025’, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (2025); ‘Finding My Blue Sky’, Lisson Gallery, London, UK (2025); ‘resonance’, Anthony Gallery, Chicago, IL, USA (2025); ‘Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry’, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2025); ‘Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial’, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, NY, (2024 - 2025); ‘Flowers of Romance – Act Two’, Lodovico Corsini, Brussels, Belgium (2024); ‘A Garden of Promise and Dissent’, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2024 - 2025); ‘Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture’, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2024 - 2025); ‘Post Human’, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA (2024); ‘Objects: USA 2024’, R & Company, New York, NY (2024), ‘Forest of Dreams: Contemporary Tree Sculpture’, Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI (2023) and ‘NGV Triennial’, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2023).

He is the recipient of residencies at Glenfiddich in Dufftown, Scotland (2014); Abrons Art Center and Socrates Sculpture Park (both 2012), and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2011). Hayden holds positions on advisory councils at Columbia University School of the Arts, Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University and Cornell College of Architecture Art and Planning. His work is part of public collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami, FL, USA; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA; Smart Museum, Chicago, IL; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY, USA; Zuzeum Art Centre, Riga, Latvia; Tank Shanghai, Shanghai, China; X Museum, Beijing, China; Dib Bangkok Museum of Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand; and more.

LISSON GALLERY

27 Bell Street, London NW1 5BY

www.lissongallery.com

07/10/25

Wolfgang Laib @ Kunsthaus Zürich - Exposition "Toucher l'essentiel" - Oeuvres de Wolfgang Laib et de la collection du musée

Wolfgang Laib. Toucher l’essentiel

Kunsthaus Zürich

3 octobre 2025 - . . .

Wolfgang Laib en train de tamiser du pollen de

noisetier, 2013

Installation au Museum of Modern Art, New York

Wolfgang Laib

La montagne inaccessible, 2017

Pollen du noisetier, 600 x 700 cm

Installation au MASI, Lugano

Wolfgang Laib

Pollen du noisetier, 1992

Pollen du noisetier, 400 x 500 cm

Installation au MOCA - The Museum of Contemporary Art,

Los Angeles

Wolfgang Laib

Reishaus (Maison de riz), 1993/1994

Marbre blanc, riz, 32 × 40 × 125 cm

Collection Cristina et Thomas Bechtler

Le Kunsthaus Zürich présente actuellement, dans le cadre de la série «ReCollect!», une exposition organisée en collaboration avec l’artiste allemand Wolfgang Laib (*1950 Metzingen). Elle associe les créations de Wolfgang Laib et une sélection d’oeuvres issues de la collection du Kunsthaus Zürich. Wolfgang Laib, qui compte parmi les artistes majeurs de notre époque, a exposé dans nombre de musées, lieux d’exposition et bâtiments historiques prestigieux d’Europe, des États-Unis et d’Asie.

Depuis la fin des années 1970, Wolfgang Laib développe un langage artistique bien à lui. A partir de matériaux naturels tels que le pollen, la cire, le lait ou la pierre, il crée des oeuvres avec lesquelles il «révèle, par des gestes sculpturaux infimes, des espaces intérieurs infiniment vastes» soulignait Harald Szeemann.

Sur le plan du contenu, son art s’est développé sur fond de diverses traditions littéraires, philosophiques et spirituelles, surtout d’Europe et d’Asie. Sur le plan formel, Wolfgang Laib recourt à une esthétique claire et dépouillée, étroitement liée au développement de l’art moderne, principalement en Europe et aux Etats-Unis.

Ces dernières années, Wolfgang Laib a souvent exposé ses oeuvres dans d’importants édifices religieux d’Italie, où elles ont rencontré de l’architecture et des oeuvres d’art allant du 6e siècle à la Renaissance. Dans le cadre de «ReCollect!», ce type de rencontres «transhistoriques» se produit maintenant dans un contexte muséal: les oeuvres de Wolfgang Laib côtoient des chefs-d’oeuvre de la collection, du Moyen Âge au 20e siècle. Ces confrontations permettent de poser un regard neuf sur les deux volets de l’exposition: l’art de Laib et la collection du Kunsthaus.

Wolfgang Laib

Pierre de lait, 1987–1989

Marbre blanc, lait, 2 × 122 × 130 cm

Atelier de l’artiste, sud de l’Allemagne

Wolfgang Laib

Zikkurat, 2000

Cire d’abeille, structure en bois, 460 × 150 × 130 cm

Installation au Toyota Municipal Museum of Art,

Toyota City, Japon

Wolfgang Laib

Brahmanda, sans date

Granite noir indien, huile de tournesol, suie

Atelier de l’artiste, sud de l’Inde

Wolfgang Laib

Tombe près de Badami, sud de l’Inde, 2001

Gélatine argentique sur papier baryté, 40,6 × 30,4 cm

Collection privée

AVEC WOLFGANG LAIB DANS LA COLLECTION DU KUNSTHAUS ZÜRICH

L’exposition se tient au premier étage du bâtiment Müller, un espace qui sera systématiquement utilisé dans les années à venir pour créer des dialogues entre la collection et l’art contemporain. Wolfgang Laib connaît la collection du Kunsthaus depuis son enfance – ce lieu l’a marqué tout autant que le Musée Rietberg, qu’il a également souvent visité. Conformément au concept de «ReCollect!», Wolfgang Laib est à la fois artiste et commissaire. Il a préparé l’exposition en dialogue avec Philippe Büttner, conservateur senior de la collection, qui dès 2005 avait organisé une grande rétrospective consacrée à Wolfgang Laib à la Fondation Beyeler.

Wolfgang Laib

Blütenstaub von Haselnuss, 2020–2023

Installation view Kunsthaus Zürich, 2025

Photo: Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich

Wolfgang Laib

Schiffe, 2012

with Claude Monet, Le Bassin aux nymphéas, le soir, 1914/1922

Installation view Kunsthaus Zürich, 2025

Photo: Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich

Wolfgang Laib

Für einen anderen Körper, 1988/2025

Beeswax, wood construction

Installation view Kunsthaus Zürich, 2025

Photo: Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich

OEUVRES DE L’EXPOSITION

L’exposition présente une cinquantaine d’oeuvres centrales de Wolfgang Laib. Y figurent des oeuvres de presque tous les ensembles majeurs de son travail, notamment une grande oeuvre de pollen, un «Brahmanda» (grande sculpture ovoïde en pierre), une pierre de lait, une ziggourat (tour pyramidale à étages), une chambre de cire dans laquelle on peut entrer, des maisons de riz, un escalier en laque ainsi que d’autres sculptures, dessins et photographies.

Elles sont complétées par quelque 30 oeuvres de la collection du Kunsthaus Zürich datant du 14e au 20e siècle. Laib a procédé lui-même à leur sélection, et fait dialoguer ses travaux avec des oeuvres importantes de l’histoire de l’art. Parmi les oeuvres sélectionnées figurent des peintures de Fra Angelico (entourage), Matteo di Giovanni, Philippe de Champaigne, Heinrich Freudweiler, Ludwig Hess, Claude Monet, Ferdinand Hodler ainsi que des travaux d’Alberto Giacometti, Constantin Brancusi, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Verena Loewensberg, Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, Sophie Taeuber-Arp et Lee Ufan.

Touching the Essential. Wolfgang Laib and

the Collection of the Kunsthaus Zürich

Installation view Kunsthaus Zürich, 2025

Photo: Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich

Wassily Kandinsky

Schwarzer Fleck, 1921

Huile sur toile, 138 x 120 cm

Kunsthaus Zürich, 1947

Claude Monet

Meule au soleil, 1891

Huile sur toile, 60 x 100 cm

Kunsthaus Zürich, Acquisition du legs Otto Meister

grâce à une contribution du Crédit Suisse, 1969

Artiste inconnu, Jina Rishabha

Inde, Rajasthan, Chandravati, XIe/XIIe siècle

Marbre, dimensions totales: 161 × 57 × 25 cm

Musée Rietberg, collection Eduard von der Heydt

Photo: Rainer Wolfsberger, Musée Rietberg

Par ailleurs, l’exposition présente certaines oeuvres d’art asiatique qui ont également influencé le travail de Laib. Elles proviennent surtout d’Inde. On notera en particulier un important prêt du Musée Rietberg: une statue en marbre issue de la tradition jaïne indienne, dont la philosophie de non-violence a profondément marqué Wolfgang Laib. Elle représente Jina Rishabha, le premier des 24 grands maîtres du jaïnisme, et provient à l’origine d’un contexte architectural religieux et rituel.

WOLFGANG LAIB : UNE RELATION DE LONGUE DATE AVEC LE KUNSTHAUS ZÜRICH

La relation personnelle qu’entretient Laib avec le Kunsthaus Zürich est un élément central de l’exposition – tout comme celle qui le lie au Musée Rietberg. Ces deux institutions ont joué un grand rôle dans son évolution. Le Kunsthaus lui offre donc un cadre idéal pour nouer un dialogue vivant entre ses oeuvres et celles d’autres époques.

C’est aussi au Kunsthaus Zürich qu’a exercé, à partir de 1981, Harald Szeemann (1933-2005), conservateur de renom et compagnon de route de Wolfgang Laib. Harald Szeemann a apporté un soutien décisif à Wolfgang Laib et à son oeuvre. Dans un rapport annuel de la Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft, il écrivait à propos de l’artiste: « Wolfgang Laib n’est pas un Européen aux influences indo-tibétaines qui utilise le contexte de l’art; c’est plutôt un artiste résolument contemporain qui, par de minuscules gestes sculpturaux, révèle des espaces intérieurs immensément vastes. […] Ses oeuvres sont d’une beauté absolue et sans détour qui permet de respirer autrement. »

A l’intérieur du musée, les oeuvres de Wolfgang Laib dégagent une force spirituelle tranquille. Dans leur dépouillement radical, elles nouent un dialogue passionnant avec la collection – non pour la concurrencer, mais pour la compléter de leur présence intemporelle.

Un catalogue en allemand, reproduisant l’intégralité des oeuvres, paraît à l’occasion de l’exposition. Avec des contributions de Wolfgang Laib, Philippe Büttner, Johannes Beltz (directeur adjoint du Musée Rietberg), Mami Kataoka (directrice du Mori Art Museum de Tokyo) et la réimpression d’un texte de Harald Szeemann sur une oeuvre de Wolfgang Laib acquise en 1991 par le Kunsthaus Zurich.

KUNSTHAUS ZURICH

Heimplatz 1/5, 8001 Zurich

www.kunsthaus.ch

11/09/25

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

Robert Therrien: This is a Story

The Broad, Los Angeles

November 22, 2025 – April 5, 2026

Robert Therrien

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

Painted steel and aluminum, fabric, and plastic

Courtesy of Glenstone Museum

Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

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

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

Robert Therrien

No title (bent cone relief), 1983

Lacquer and wax on wood

Courtesy of The Broad Art Foundation

Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

Robert Therrien

No title (black witch hat), 2018

Carved Delrin plastic

Courtesy of Robert Therrien Estate.

Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

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

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

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

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

THE BROAD

221 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012

www.thebroad.org

30/08/25

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

Spencer Finch

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

James Cohan Gallery, New York

September 5 - October 4, 2025

SPENCER FINCH

One Hundred Famous Views of New York City

(After Hiroshige), 2025 (detail)

42 watercolors on paper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ARTIST SPENCER FINCH

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

JAMES COHAN

52 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.jamescohan.com