Brett Murray @ Everard Read Gallery, London - "Brood" Exhibition

Brett Murray: Brood

Everard Read Gallery, London

15 October – 6 November 2025

Brett Murray 

Artist portrait with sculptures 

Photo © Mike Hall 

Everard Read London presents an exhibition of bronze and marble sculptures by acclaimed South African artist, BRETT MURRAY, on the eve of major survey of his sculpture at the Norval Foundation, Cape Town, opening December 2025.

This body of work traces its origins to the start of this decade and the artist’s experience of the global pandemic. It marks what writer, Noah Swinney, describes as “an idiomatic shift in Murray’s work from polemics to elegy; a transition from what the artist has called, an accusatory position to one that is more compassionate and empathetic.” *

The sculptural forms that Brett Murray created while at home with his family during lockdown, became two deeply personal exhibitions called Limbo, which opened in 2021 and 2022, in London and Cape Town respectively. Murray’s sculptures in these shows embodied the value of family and friendship and the lived experience that, in fraught and frightening moments, our brood and brethren take precedence.

This theme extended into a related body of sculptures and reliefs for Murray’s 2024 Johannesburg exhibition, aptly titled, Brood - a reference to both family and the posture of fretting. In a world mired in conflict, uncertainty and political tumult, Brett Murray continues to reflect and express our collective need to seek solace and safety and find sanctuary in the humans to whom we are closest. “These works are not argumentative, they’re meditative,” observed art critic Graham Wood**. “They’re not subversive, they’re introspective. They’re not about intellect, they’re about emotion. They’re not about politics, they’re about relationships.”

For his London exhibition, Brett Murray continues this intimate exploration through the creatures that emerged during the bewildering time of the global pandemic, and which continue to feel acutely relevant in a time of war and global turmoil. For some of his silent, animal avatars, the world seems to weigh heavily as they gaze heavenwards with trepidation, searching for answers. Others are brooding and subdued.

Huddled together or clinging to one another, many of Murray’s sculptures convey a poignant tenderness and vulnerability. These symbols of the family unit - together, touching, protected, and protecting - strike a universal chord. While some works evoke pathos, others stoke unease and allude to an inherent violence. The hopeful is countered with gaping holes that speak to the loss and hurt that are an integral part of all human experience.

* Noah Swinney, Brett Murray, Brood: The Lost Object & The Animal Series, to be published in 2026

** Graham Wood, Financial Mail (South Africa), 15-21 February 2024

EVERARD READ LONDON

80 Fulham Road London, SW3 6HR

www.everardlondon.com

Stephan Balkenhol @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

Stephan Balkenhol

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki 

August 22 – September 21, 2025

The minimalist sculptures of German artist Stephan Balkenhol radiate a quiet, archaic power. Though his figures often assume formal poses and wear expressionless faces, they are anything but detached. Instead, they convey a restrained yet compelling intensity. Balkenhol’s primary focus is the human condition—whether his subjects are actual people or animals dressed in human clothing, they serve as reflections of humanity. He deliberately preserves the visible marks of his carving tools, giving each figure a tactile roughness that underscores its vulnerability. Sculpted from a single block of wood—typically soft poplar or Douglas fir—each work embraces natural cracks and coarse textures, foregrounding the imperfections that define what it means to be human.

Stephan Balkenhol is widely recognized as one of today’s foremost contemporary sculptors. In the early 1980s, he broke away from the dominant abstract and conceptual art movements of the time, turning instead toward figurative expression. Since then, the human form—and the existential questions it evokes—has remained central to his practice. While clearly representational, Balkenhol’s works resist literal interpretation, inviting viewers into open-ended encounters.

Stephan Balkenhol (b. 1957) studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg and has served as a professor at the Akademie für Bildende Künste in Karlsruhe since 1992. His sculptures are held in major international collections, including the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, Kunsthalle Hamburg, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Karlsruhe, Kassel, and Berlin, as well as in Meisenthal, France.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

Guy Du Toit @ Everard Read, Johannesburg - "Hare Necessities" Exhibition of Bronze Sculptures

Guy Du Toit: Hare Necessities

Everard Read, Johannesburg

August 14 – September 27, 2025

Everard Read presents Hare Necessities, a new body of work by celebrated South African sculptor Guy du Toit. In this latest collection of bronze sculptures, Du Toit’s long-eared companions return not just to delight but to reflect—on love, connection, solitude, and the rituals of everyday life.

The hare, under Du Toit’s subtle and humorous hand, has long served as a mirror for our humanity. Whether curled over in thought, slow-dancing under the stars, jogging with purpose, or simply sipping wine, each figure distils a moment of presence—anchored in bronze, yet light in spirit. These hares don’t simply move through the world, they inhabit it, fully.

Some embrace, others recline in silence, one checks its phone, and another gazes at the moon. What links them is not narrative but mood, a shared sense of introspection, tenderness, and quiet joy. In a time when attention is scarce and stillness rare, Guy Du Toit offers an invitation to notice the small gestures, the pauses between actions, the beauty in simply being.

The works echo the artist’s signature style — expressive, tactile, and full of character — while offering something new: an intimacy that feels both personal and universal. As always, Du Toit’s hares are not merely animals; they are surrogates, stand-ins, and story-holders, inviting us to see ourselves in them.

Hare Necessities continues Du Toit’s longstanding exploration of form, play, and the liminal spaces of life, presenting a cast of bronze characters who, in their stillness, speak volumes.

EVERARD READ JOHANNESBURG 

6 Jellicoe Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg, 2196

www.everard-read.co.za

Claudette Schreuders: Genesis @ Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Claudette Schreuders: Genesis

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Through August 1, 2025

Jack Shainman Gallery presents Genesis, an exhibition of new work by Claudette Schreuders, the artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together figurative sculptures made in both wood and bronze, Genesis reimagines scenes and characters from the suburban landscape of Cape Town that Schreuders calls home. Using the raw material of her own life as the foundation to create portraits that are equally archetypal and idiosyncratic, Claudette Schreuders explores how specific forms can convey universal truths and how personal history remains fundamentally connected to social reality. 

For over thirty years, Claudette Schreuders has made sculptures about the human figure that express a deep understanding of human psychology. Working slowly and gradually, Schreuders carefully shapes her material to create uncannily familiar subjects that invite association and comparison while at the same time resisting any single link or reference. Though the poses and arrangements of her figures are often static, straightforward and direct, Claudette Schreuders pays great attention to the subtleties of each face, where slight inflections of shape and contour, or line and color, can provide viewers with the necessary detail to see humanity in figures that might otherwise appear impersonal. Looking at the historical examples of West African and Medieval sculpture, American folk and outsider art as well, Claudette Schreuders borrows the simplicity of form and composition found in those traditions as a way of sparking interpretation and emotional investment.

The works in Genesis were made after the conclusion of Claudette Schreuders’ previous exhibition with the gallery, Doubles, in 2022. In that exhibition, Schreuders investigated the universal experience of isolation that resulted from the lockdown during COVID-19 pandemic. Her sculptural figures were rendered in joined pairs in which each seemed to hauntingly, if not exactly, mirror the other. In Genesis Claudette Schreuders returned to the confines of her own home or studio and looked at the larger world of the suburbs as a kind of idyll in itself, one that can provide the time and space to contemplate the essential structures and forms of life around us.

Like its biblical reference, the exhibition title reflects Schreuders’ sustained emphasis on creating simplistic yet original forms as a way of pursuing profound truths. In the titular sculpture in the exhibition, her partner is shown supine while reading Robert Crumb’s The Book of Genesis. The muted and relatively restrained palette that Claudette Schreuders uses to describe the scene ultimately belies its subtlety of detail and psychological implication. This dynamic is present throughout the exhibition in works that are disarmingly approachable before revealing themselves to be materially complex and narratively open-ended. In School (Emil) (2024), made in bronze, Claudette Schreuders depicts her son sitting pensively in a chair too small for his body. Though it appears to depict an exaggerated yet familiar scene, the richly detailed texture and surface of the figure suggest depths of meaning. Like Genesis (2024), Work (2024) considers the act of creation itself, as Claudette Schreuders herself is shown fixed in a moment of contemplation while she holds a newly made sculpture in her hands.

The relationship between personal experience and collective history is explored in Crucible (2025), a work originally commissioned by the University of Stellenbosch, Schreuders’ alma mater. A park bench cast in bronze is home to a whole host of indigenous birds that create a delicate balance and equilibrium between them. Schreuders uses the park bench as a formal and conceptual foundation for the work because its history remains charged by the legacy of apartheid, which saw it function as a symbol of exclusion. Claudette Schreuders allows the bench to be a site of transformation and possible harmony—it can produce something new out of an original period of trial and tribulation.

Throughout Genesis, Schreuders’ sculptures return to the commonplace and the quotidian, as they ask for a heightened attention to the world of experience that might otherwise be overlooked. With these familiar characters, scenes and moments as her subject matter, she pursues what is universal in them and relevant to all.

ARTIST CLAUDETTE SCHREUDERS

Claudette Schreuders (b. 1973 in Pretoria, South Africa) lives and works in Cape Town, where she graduated with a Master’s degree from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 1998. She was part of the Liberated Voices exhibition at the Museum for African Art in New York in 1999. From 2004-2005 her first solo museum exhibition toured the United States and in 2011 she had a solo exhibition at the LUX Art Institute in California. Claudette Schreuders has shown extensively in group exhibitions, including Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011), Since 2000: Printmaking Now, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2006) and Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art at the Museum for African Art and the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York (2004). Claudette Schreuders’ work is included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa and the Pretoria Art Museum, South Africa, among others.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

513 West 20th Street, New York, NY

jackshainman.com

Claudette Schreuders: Genesis

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, June 5 – August 1, 2025

Keith Tyson: Universal Symphony @ Serlachius Museum, Mäntä

Keith Tyson: Universal Symphony

Serlachius Museum, Mäntä

Through 26 October 2025

KEITH TYSON

Installation view from the exhibition

Universal Symphony

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

KEITH TYSON

Installation view from the exhibition

Universal Symphony

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

KEITH TYSON

Installation view from the exhibition

Universal Symphony

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

In the art of British artist Keith Tyson, everything is surprisingly interconnected and without hierarchy. This is also indicated by the name of his exhibition, Universal Symphony.

Defining KEITH TYSON (b. 1969) as an artist is challenging, as he is not interested in recognisable style or self-expression. He has always been fascinated by the interstices between art, science and technology, how things are connected and how one thing leads to another. 

In his works, Tyson examines the different forces, relationships and processes we use to understand the world and through which things and phenomena gain meaning. These include, for example, various physical and chemical chains of events, language models and algorithms used by artificial intelligence, and the latest achievements in quantum physics, but also poetry and mythology.

KEITH TYSON

Installation view from the exhibition

Universal Symphony

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

KEITH TYSON

16m3 of Ocean (Atlantic), 2024

Courtesy the artist

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

KEITH TYSON

16m3 of Ocean (Atlantic), 2024 (detail)

Courtesy the artist

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

According to the exhibition’s curator, Timo Valjakka, Keith Tyson sees art as an attempt to express what cannot be conveyed in other ways. His works are based on knowledge and emotion as well as on the viewer’s experience in front of them. One example of this is the monumental 16m3 of Ocean (Atlantic), 2024. The bronze sculpture is an accurate representation not only of the surface of the ocean, but also of its mass.

Majority of the works in the exhibition are new and on display for the first time. They are placed in context by a number of earlier works. Four of them were implemented with the help of the Art Machine, developed by Keith Tyson in the 1990s, and challenge us to consider the relationship between humans and machines. 

Art Machine is a set of algorithms programmed into a computer. When the Art Machine processes the material fed to it according to the given conditions, it produces a set of instructions for Tyson to implement the artwork. The instructions include the subject of the work, dimensions, materials and other parameters required at any given time. 

KEITH TYSON

Installation view from the exhibition

Universal Symphony

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

KEITH TYSON

Nature Painting (Deep Impact), 2010

Courtesy of the artist

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

The large-scale Nature Painting (Deep Impact), 2010, on the other hand, was created as a result of the combined effects of gravity, fluid dynamics and chemical reactions. In doing so, Keith Tyson relinquished almost all control of the process and let the chemicals carve out their own paths. He calls the work a nature painting because it is not an image of nature, but a manifestation of the forces that shape nature.

KEITH TYSON

Scholar's Stonei, 2023

Patined bronze

Courtesy of the artist

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

KEITH TYSON

Dark Sundial, 2024

Bronze, stainless steel, electronic guidance,

motor, stone plinth

Courtesy of the artist

Photograph: Serlachius, Sampo Linkoneva

On display in the Serlachius Manor’s Park is the kinetic sculpture Dark Sundial (2024), where Keith Tyson has replaced the traditional worldview represented by a sundial with an incomparably larger one. The long index finger of the stylised human figure shows us at every moment where the massive black hole Sagittarius A* is in the centre of the Milky Way. It is 27,000 light-years from Mänttä.

ARTIST KEITH TYSON

After his early studies in engineering, Keith Tyson pursued art at Carlisle College of Art in 1989 and at the University of Brighton from 1990 to 1993. He held his first solo exhibitions in London and New York in 1996.

Keith Tyson has held numerous solo exhibitions and participated in group shows in museums and galleries across various countries in Europe, Asia, Australia, North and South America, and South Africa. He has also taken part in the Berlin and Venice Biennale in 2001 and the São Paulo Biennale in 2002. In 2002, he was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize. He was named an Honorary Doctor of the University of Brighton in 2005.

Curator of the exhibition: Timo Valjakka

SERLACHIUS MUSEUM

Serlachius Manor, Joenniementie 47, Mäntä

serlachius.fi

Keith Tyson: Universal Symphony 

Serlachius Museum, Mäntä, 24 May – 26 October 2025

Toshiko Takaezu: Bronzes @ James Cohan, NYC

Toshiko Takaezu: Bronzes

James Cohan, New York

May 16 - July 25, 2025

Toshiko Takaezu

Three Graces, ca. 2000s

Cast bronze, left: 78 x 22 in.,

middle: 74 x 21 in., right: 76 x 23 in.

Courtesy the Estate of Toshiko Takaezu

and James Cohan

James Cohan presents an exhibition of monumental sculptures by the late artist Toshiko Takaezu (b. 1922, Pepeekeo, Hawaii - d. 2011, Honolulu, Hawaii) on view at the gallery’s 48 Walker Street location. Toshiko Takaezu was celebrated for her experimental approach to abstraction and form over a lengthy career, which spanned the 1950s into the 2000s. While she is widely known for her painterly ceramics, Takaezu spent three decades mastering the possibilities of bronze. Toshiko Takaezu: Bronzes foregrounds her series of outdoor sculptures in the medium. 

Toshiko Takaezu’s initial foray into bronze was tied to her strong interest in the natural world. Starting in the 1980s, she worked closely with a team of artists and apprentices at the Johnson Atelier in New Jersey to render her creations using the lost-wax casting process. Takaezu’s soaring Stack Forms, ca. 1982-4, were directly inspired by her series of ceramic River Stones: convex circular forms glazed in tones akin to a riverbed of pebbles, such as earthy ochres and soft whites. In the main gallery, tall tree trunks in rich blue and green patinas are cradled by white pebbles and flanked by otherworldly globes. Tree-Man Forest, 1989, is a reverential meditation on both the precarity and resilience of natural life. Takaezu was deeply moved by a trip she took in 1973 to “Devastation Trail” on the Big Island of Hawaii, where she encountered a forest laid bare by the volcanic eruption of Kīlauea Iki in 1959. Toshiko Takaezu paid homage to this transformational event first in clay, and then in bronze, giving permanence to these majestic forms and embedding them into the land. 

The epic Three Graces, ca. 2000s, emits a powerful anthropomorphic presence; one that visitors can engage with as they circumnavigate each form. Takaezu’s first iteration of Three Graces was cast in 1994 and is installed at Grounds For Sculpture in New Jersey. These sculptures echo Takaezu’s classical tall ‘closed forms’ and showcase the artist’s mastery of gesture, visible in her application of dripping chemical patinas in deep blues, blacks and greens. In Greek mythology, the Three Graces were the daughters of Zeus–goddesses of beauty, charm and grace, often depicted together, interlaced in mid-dance The martyred saints Faith, Hope, and Charity, represent three similar theological virtues in Christian theology. These overlapping concepts are embodied in these monumental and undulating bronzes, forever linked as a trio. 

The singular resonant Untitled (Bell), 2004, perfectly concretizes Takaezu’s interest in sound and materiality. It is one of several forms that were inspired by the ceremonial bells of Japanese temples, and is similarly reliant on the strike of a mallet to produce a deep vibrational ring. This imposing bronze bell hangs from a custom interlocking wooden frame designed by the artist. Its dimensional surface resulted from Takaezu pouring hot wax in linear motions over the domed mold prior to its casting; an action that harkens back to her dynamic glazing process. 

Toshiko Takaezu’s achievements in bronze are a testament to her boundless exploration across mediums. Takaezu’s sculptures are monuments that reflect the natural world; fusing gesture and form through material permanence. Toshiko Takaezu: Bronzes unites carefully considered groupings which serve as sites for contemplation that engage the senses.

Born in Pepeekeo, Hawaii in 1922 to Japanese immigrant parents, Toshiko Takaezu first studied at the University of Hawaii, and later at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Toshiko Takaezu was a devoted maker and art educator, having taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art and Princeton University, until her retirement in 1992. She lived and worked in rural New Jersey through the 2000s. Toshiko Takaezu passed away in Honolulu on March 9, 2011. Throughout the artist’s lifetime, her work was exhibited widely in the United States and Japan, including a solo exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2004) and a retrospective at the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan (1995). Toshiko Takaezu was the recipient of the Tiffany Foundation Grant (1964) and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1980), among others. Her work is represented in many notable collections including the DeYoung/Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Honolulu Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Recent exhibitions include the 2022 edition of the Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams curated by Cecilia Alemani and presentations at the MFA Boston (2023) and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2024). In March 2024, The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum hosted Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within, the first touring retrospective in twenty years. It has traveled to the Cranbrook Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and will open at the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison (September 8–December 23, 2025) and the Honolulu Museum of Art (February 13–July 26, 2026)

JAMES COHAN

48 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.jamescohan.com

Tulio Pinto with Eduardo Rezende @ Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami - "Gravitas Act I & II" Exhibition Curated by Jennifer Inacio

Tulio Pinto with Eduardo Rezende

Gravitas Act I & II

Curated by Jennifer Inacio

Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami

Through May 17, 2025

Tulio Pinto 

Gravitas #03, 2025 

© Tulio Pinto, courtesy Piero Atchugarry Gallery

Tulio Pinto & Eduardo Rezende 

Gravitas Act I #01, 2025

© Tulio Pinto & Eduardo Rezende, 

courtesy Piero Atchugarry Gallery

Piero Atchugarry Gallery presents Gravitas Act I & II by brazilian artist Tulio Pinto in collaboration with brazilian photographer Eduardo Rezende. The exhibition takes its title from the Latin gravitas, which simultaneously refers to physical weight and a sense of ethical seriousness. Tulio Pinto’s sculptural practice has long been rooted in the poetic tensions of material weight, balance, and resistance— forces that, while omnipresent, often go unnoticed. In Gravitas, Tulio Pinto expands upon these core investigations by introducing a new element into his visual and conceptual lexicon: the human body. Across two distinct yet interrelated bodies of work introduced in separate gallery spaces— monumental black-and- white photographic portraits and gravity- defying sculptural installations—Gravitas makes the intangible force of weight and equilibrium visible, pushing the limits of perception and material expectations.

For the gallery space titled Act I, Tulio Pinto collaborates with photographer Eduardo Rezende to present a series of striking photographic works that engage with the body’s capacity to bear, resist, and yield to mass. Departing from the classical sculptural tradition in which the artist carves or molds inert material into form, the artists invert the equation: in these images, the raw, unaltered stone becomes the sculptor, pressing its weight upon the human figure. The models— selected for their diverse body types—interact with these stones not as passive subjects but as active participants in a performance of force and endurance. Hands grip, arms strain, and torsos bend; the body is sculpted not through artistry but through its negotiation with resistance.

If the photographic works and the interactive element in Act I reveal gravity’s impact through bodily exertion, Pinto’s sculptural installations in Act II—the second gallery space—manifest it through material contradiction. Long engaged with industrial materials such as steel and stone, Tulio Pinto now introduces glass as a structural component in the shape of chains—an intervention that challenges conventional notions of fragility. Glass, traditionally perceived as brittle and breakable, is here rendered in the form of chains, a material typically associated with strength, endurance, and the ability to bear weight. By suspending stones using these links made out of glass, Tulio Pinto forces a reconsideration of assumed material properties: what appears weak becomes a carrier of mass, and what seems unmovable is, in fact, held in delicate suspension.

In bringing together these two distinct yet conceptually intertwined series, Gravitas underscores an ongoing exploration of balance as both a formal and existential condition. The photographs reveal the human body’s negotiation with this force, while the sculptures dramatize the unseen but omnipresent force of gravity through improbable material unions. In both cases, the act of holding, suspending, and enduring becomes a way of making gravity—an otherwise invisible phenomenon—tangible, present, and, ultimately, deeply human.

TULIO PINTO 

Photo courtesy the artist and Piero Atchugarry Gallery

TULIO PINTO (b. 1974, Brazil) lives and works in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Playing with gravity, Tulio Pinto explores the subtle balance of weight and matter through installations and sculptures. Using materials of opposing nature and behavior, he translates the pulse of the physical world to be reflected in the world of human relations. Having only graduated from UFRGS with a degree in visual arts specializing in sculpture in 2009, Tulio Pinto is incredibly focused and prolific; He is also a co-founder and member of the Atelier Subterrânea.

EDUARDO REZENDE 

Photo courtesy the artist and Piero Atchugarry Gallery

EDUARDO REZENDE (b. 1977, Brazil) lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. Eduardo Rezende has an award-winning career in the fashion world specializing in outdoor photoshoot. And he has always lent his sensitivity to the body-landscape relationship to these photographic essays. Since his first solo show in 2006 at Galeria Valu Oria, he has been holding solo exhibitions such as THE NOMAD ANO THE HOUSES, Urban Flow, and Art In Progress.

PIERO ATCHUGARRY GALLERY, MIAMI

5520 NE 4th Avenue, Miami, FL 33137

pieroatchugarry.com

Tulio Pinto with Eduardo Rezende: Gravitas Act I & II, Curated by Jennifer Inacio

Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami, March 15 - May 17, 2025

Leilah Babirye @ Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin - Ekimyula Ekijjankunene (The Gorgeous Grotesque / Die prächtige Groteske) Exhibition

Leilah Babirye 

Ekimyula Ekijjankunene

(The Gorgeous Grotesque / 

Die prächtige Groteske)

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

1 May – 28 June 2025

LEILAH BABIRYE 

Nakakeeto from the Kuchu Mutima (Heart) Clan, 2023–2024

© Leilah Babirye, courtesy of Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

Photo © Jonty Wilde

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin presents Ekimyula Ekijjankunene (The Gorgeous  Grotesque / Die prächtige Groteske), a solo exhibition of new works by LEILAH BABIRYE at Goethestrasse 2/3 and Bleibtreustrasse 15/16. This is the artist’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery.

Language and history form the basis of Leilah Babirye's work. Her sculptures and works on paper are characterised by the appropriation and reassignment of terms and categorisations. Her practice is influenced by her own biography, her experiences of homophobia around the world, and the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Uganda that forced her to flee to the USA. In her multidisciplinary practice, she uses metal, ceramics, found objects, and hand-carved or chain-sawed wood, incorporating elements of traditional West and Central African iconography into a contemporary context. Her sculptures present real or imagined portraits of the Queer community from the African continent as well as her new homeland, representing an ever-growing LGBTQ+ elective family. While she previously worked on her wooden sculptures using burning as a tool of manipulation, she now uses a variety of other techniques including nailing, assembling, weaving and polishing to focus on the materiality of the works, before adorning them with found materials.

The current exhibition presents new sculptures made from wood, glazed ceramic and bronze, as well as a set of drawings on paper. The title both refers to the ostracisation experienced by members of the LGBTQ+ community and highlights the beauty of this community and Babirye's work. The concept of the grotesque is of particular interest to the artist, not only for its art historical significance, but for the dualism it sets up between the repulsive and the beautiful. This juxtaposition is reflected in many details within the exhibition, from vibrant dripping glazes paired with used tyres, to smooth burnished wood paired with rusty found objects. Combined with larger-than-life organic forms which simultaneously intimidate and invite the viewer, all of these elements come together in what Leilah Babirye calls Ekimyula Ekijjankunene (The Gorgeous Grotesque / Die prächtige Groteske).

The sculptures range from a small group of figures to mask-like heads and faces, and monumental totems. The scale and presence of the works, which symbolically occupy the space around them, is an essential aspect of Babirye's artistic practice. Some of the heads are encircled by voluptuous collars, while other figures sport body or hair ornaments made from discarded bicycle parts, such as chains or tyres – a symbol for the artist of progress and movement. As a motif, the mask simultaneously references West African handicrafts, the style of which Leilah Babirye appropriates, and how LGBTQ+ people in Uganda must conceal their identity. For Babirye, transforming discarded objects into something beautiful is an expression of the resilience of the Queer community. Its members are referred to in the Luganda language by the derogatory term ebisiyaga, which describes the husk of the sugarcane which is usually thrown away. By deliberately repurposing neglected materials, Leilah Babirye reveals the beauty in the supposedly worthless. The set of works on paper in vibrant colours, entitled Kuchu Ndagamuntu (Queer Identity Card), shows individuals from Queer and Trans communities or drag artists who Babirye has noticed in everyday life, on the street or while travelling. She paints them from memory. The portraits function as alternative passport photos, in which freedom of expression and true identity can exist unprovoked.

In the gallery space at Bleibtreustrasse 15/16, the sculptures which form Abambowa (Royal Guard Who Protects the King), 2025, are lined up, side by side, on a plinth. Abambowa is the name for the highest guard in the traditional kingdom of Buganda. The titles of Babirye's works often refer to names from the Ugandan clan system of pre-colonial history, which are based on plants or animals. In this way, the artist creates a sense of belonging which celebrates the members of the Queer community. The coded term kuchu (‘queer’), which can be found in some of the titles, is here afforded a dignified meaning.

Leilah Babirye's oeuvre unites tradition, history and personal experience into a universal connection. Her work gives visibility and dignity to marginalised communities, celebrating resilience and diversity. Past and progress are not in opposition: ‘I always say that if you forget your history, you don't know who you are and where you're going,’ the artist states. ‘I can't live in the present or look to the future without also looking back, and this back and forth is evident in my work.’ Grounded in her heritage, Leilah Babirye incorporates references into her practice and uses their artistic transformation as a means not just to survive, but to thrive and flourish.

[1] L. Babirye, in ‘Artist Leilah Babirye: “I want to help people feel a sense of belonging”’, Art Basel, 7 March 2024.

LEILAH BARBIRYE (b. 1985, Kampala, Uganda) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. The artist’s work has been the subject of institutional solo exhibitions at the de Young Museum, San Francisco (2024–2025); and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton (2024). Babirye's work has also been presented in group exhibitions, including the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia; Sainsbury's Centre, Norwich (both 2024); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Whitworth, The University of Manchester (both 2023); mumok, Vienna; The Africa Centre, London (both 2022); Coventry Biennial (2021); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Bric, Brooklyn (all 2019); Trapholt Museum, Kolding (2016); and Kampala Art Biennale (2014).

Leilah Babirye's work is held in the collections of the Columbus Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson; mumok, Vienna; RISD Museum, Providence; Sainsbury Centre, Norwich; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Shandong, among others. 

GALERIE MAX HETZLER

Goethestrasse 2/3 & Bleibtreustrasse 15/16, Berlin

www.maxhetzler.com

Emma Helle @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - "Dress Codes for Rivers" Exhibition

Emma Helle: Dress Codes for Rivers

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

March 28 – May 4, 2025

Emma Helle has drawn inspiration for the reclining figures in her new sculptures from personified river deities she has encountered on her travels, most recently in Roman fountains. Like many cities, Rome was founded on a river, for flowing water is literally the source of all life, but also a symbolic fount of fertility and prosperity. Throughout history, rivers have transported not only people and goods, but also thoughts and new ideas. Rome’s fountains pay tribute to the river running through the city and to the life-sustaining power of water.

In ancient Greek mythology, the father of all rivers was Oceanus, a bearded man with bull horns. Oceanus lost one horn in battle, which became the mythical horn of plenty, symbol of fertility and abundance. In Helle’s sculptures, the horn of plenty has emptied its contents all over the voluptuous, hedonistic figures, which are decked in flowers, vines, fruit, gilding and all manner of lavish details. The figures defy categorization, blending inseparably with their surroundings. Shaped from clay transported by flowing water, they are raw, imperfect, and coarsely textured, yet their surfaces shimmer in vibrant colors. They proclaim freedom and the right to revel in their inherent materiality.

Throughout art history, exotic fruits and plants have symbolized abundance, but also wealth and power. Helle’s sculptures seem to question what these symbols mean today, as they are are available to everyone on supermarket shelves. How have visual symbols of wealth and abundance changed in modern times, and who ultimately has the right to wield them?

Emma Helle (b.1979) is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts. Her work is held in collections including HAM Helsinki Art Museum Ham, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, the State Art Deposit Collection, Sara Hildén Art Museum, Saastamoinen Foundation and Wihuri Foundation. She recently held a solo exhibition at Turku Art Museum, and she has participated in group exhibitions at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the National Museum in Stockholm, Mänttä Art Festival, Helsinki Art Hall and EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

Danielle Orchard and Aristide Maillol @ Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York

Danielle Orchard and Aristide Maillol

Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York

March 14 – April 26, 2025

Danielle Orchard 

Moon Garden, 2025

Oil on canvas, 80¼ × 68½ inches (203.8 × 174 cm)

Photo Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan

Aristide Maillol 

La Nuit, conceived 1908 / cast during the artist’s lifetime

Patinated bronze, 6¹⁵⁄₁₆ × 4¹³⁄₁₆ × 4½ inches (17.6 × 12.2 × 11.5 cm). 

Edition 3 of 4

Photo Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents an exhibition of sculptures by Aristide Maillol (1861–1944) in conversation with new paintings by Danielle Orchard (b. 1985), created on the occasion of the exhibition. Staging a dialogue between painting and sculpture that is beyond time, the exhibition represents visions of form, volume, and line, explored through the female figure.

Central to the practices of both artists is the woman as muse. Here, in scenes domestic and natural, Danielle Orchard depicts physical and psychological insights gained in her experiences as a new mother—an infant shares each composition with her female protagonists. Aristide Maillol often said, “I invent nothing, no more than the apple tree can pretend to have invented its apples.” His works and those of Danielle Orchard are both marked by the impulse towards, in the words of art historian John Rewald, “the expression of truth and the balance of forms.”

For Aristide Maillol, the pursuit of the female figure became the artist’s sole occupation upon his turn to sculpture in1898, after his work in tapestry threatened him with blindness. Embracing this change with joy and vigor, Maillol developed a harmonious oeuvre that married experimentation, classical Greek influences, and the pastoral. Danielle Orchard notes, “I am looking at how [Maillol] is pulling from antiquity, with a deference for abstraction in ways that I have thought about in painting—and inhabiting these forms as a female body.” 

Navigating solidity and delicacy, Maillol and Orchard’s compositions represent densely sculptural beings, rendered by hand in clay or by brush in oil. Yet, through symbolism, rounded curves, diffuse light, softened shadows, or washes of color, their works possess an intimacy, quietude, and stillness. In Moon Garden (2025), Danielle Orchard portrays the silhouettes of three La Nuit (Night) casts by Aristide Maillol in the background. Two dandelions appear undisturbed in the grass near a totemic mother and child, while a woman reposes in the foreground with an owl on her head, an emblem of the barred owl that resides in Orchard’s backyard in Pelham, Massachusetts. 

Among Maillol’s most significant works, La Nuit depicts a seated female figure whose arms and legs are drawn inwards in a self-contained pose that conveys mystery, serenity, and universality. Upon viewing La Nuit in Paris at the 1909 Salon d’Automne, Auguste Rodin declared, “One forgets too often that the human body is an architecture—a living architecture.” 

Bridging two and three dimensions, Aristide Maillol was a committed draftsman, who insisted, according to John Rewald, “that it was possible to make a statuette from a good drawing.” He continues, “[Maillol’s] drawings nearly always reveal the preoccupations of a modeler: their curves are projected into space, their static poses being akin to sculptured forms.” Danielle Orchard relatedly harnesses the sculptural qualities of her medium, building thin layered applications of oil paint, while negotiating color and form. Representing a timeless exchange across disciplines, the exhibited works capture, in the elder sculptor’s words, “poems of life.” 

LÉVY GORVY DAYAN, NEW YORK

19 East 64th Street, New York City

www.levygorvydayan.com

Lucas Samaras: Chalk and Bronze @ 125 Newbury Gallery, New York

Lucas Samaras: Chalk and Bronze

125 Newbury Gallery, New York

January 24 - April 12, 2025

Lucas Samaras 

Untitled, July 17, 1962 

© Lucas Samaras, courtesy Pace Gallery

125 Newbury presents Lucas Samaras: Chalk and Bronze, an exhibition of two distinct yet related bodies of work by the Greek-born American artist, a pivotal figure in the New York avant-garde. This presentation brings a selection of more than two dozen vibrant, never-before-seen pastels from the 1960s into dialogue with a suite of figurative bronze sculptures that Samaras created in the early 1980s. 

Lucas Samaras began employing pastels at a young age, partly as a means of communication. After his family emigrated from Greece to the United States during the 1940s to escape the country’s brutal civil war, Samaras, who spoke no English upon his arrival in America, saw pastels as an outlet for his inner world. “Art was the only thing I could do without speaking,” the artist explained in an interview, “They just gave me paper and pastels, and I drew.” He carried this interest through high school and college, studying under the influential artists Allan Kaprow and George and Helen Segal at Rutgers University.

Known for his critical role in the Happenings movement of the late 1950s, his enigmatic sculptural boxes and chairs, and his expansive and protean photographic practice, Samaras’s comparatively lesser known work in pastel was nevertheless integral to his practice. “One might say that the pastels are the foundation of Samaras’s work,” explains Arne Glimcher, curator of the exhibition and the artist’s friend and dealer for over 50 years, “It was in pastel that he invented not only his palette but himself.” Samaras first exhibited his pastels at New York’s Green Gallery in the early 1960s. More recently, these works were the subject of a major 2016 exhibition at The Morgan Library.

The selection of pastels included in this exhibition reflects Samaras’s deep interest in the lurid, almost vulgarly chromatic possibilities—and the powdery materiality—of the medium. Many of the works consist of self-portraits, where faces or body parts appear fragmented or contorted, rendered in stark contrast against monochromatic backgrounds. Elsewhere, the face merges with its prismatic surroundings, threatening the solidity of the body’s border with the world.

Relentless and constantly shapeshifting in his pursuit of formal evolution, Lucas Samaras turned towards the medium of bronze on only a few occasions throughout his long career. In this suite of works created during the early 1980s, he explored concerns of flesh and figure through an almost alchemical treatment of metal. Like his early pastels, the bronzes evoke the softness of the body, improbably transmuting the hardness of metal into the tenderness of flesh. The resulting sculptures are among the only figurative images that Lucas Samaras created which are not self-portraits. Instead, they seem to speak to a more generalized notion of the human condition––what it might look or feel like to inhabit a body from the inside out, externalizing an otherwise inaccessible interiority. If the pastels embody meditations on a vibrant mode of life-turned-art, the bronzes represent their contorted doubles.

Small in scale but capacious in their emotional depth, Samaras’s bronze figures offer visions of twisting or perhaps melting bodies. Often plated with silver or gold, they fold over and into themselves as flesh might. Figures recline alone or appear intertwined with one another. Moments of embrace reveal themselves in the murky shimmer of the metal. The boundaries between agony and ecstasy, between self and other, begin to dissolve.

Presented together for the first time since a 1982 exhibition at Pace Gallery, these two bodies of work feed into and inform one another. Together, they reflect the artist’s unflinching exploration of what it felt like to inhabit his own body, both in the physical and psychic registers. As a pastel face dissolves into polychrome rays of light, a bronze body takes shape from its primordial ground, producing a sense of struggle that distills Samaras’s lifelong investigation of the nature of selfhood and embodiment.

Eluding historical categorization, Lucas Samaras’s (b. 1936, Kastoria, Macedonia, Greece; d. 2024, New York) oeuvre is united through its consistent focus on the body and psyche, often emphasizing autobiography. The themes of self-depiction, self-investigation, and identity were a driving force behind his practice, which, at its onset in the early 1960s, advanced the Surrealist idiom while proposing a radical departure from the presiding themes of Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. Samaras emigrated with his family from Greece to the United States in 1948 and attended Rutgers University, New Jersey, studying under Allan Kaprow and George Segal, and then at Columbia University, New York, where he studied art history under Meyer Schapiro. During this time, he initiated painting self-portraits and gravitated toward the use of pastels, which enabled him to work quickly, exploring figurative and geometrical forms in rich colors and with luxuriant texture, characteristics that would reoccur throughout his practice. He soon shifted toward objects, producing assemblage reliefs and boxes comprised of elements culled from his immediate surroundings and five-and-dime stores—cutlery, nails, mirrors, brightly colored yarn, and feathers—affixed with liquid aluminum or plaster. Gesturing toward a larger investigation of (self) reflection in his work found in his early mirror rooms, self-portraiture, and more recent use of digital mirror-imaging, Samaras’s oeuvre acts as an extension of his body while underscoring the transformative possibilities of the everyday—a true blurring of art and life.

In 1969, Lucas Samaras began to expand upon his use of photography, experimenting with a Polaroid 360 camera, which appealed to his sense of immediacy. His innovation further materialized with his use of the Polaroid SX-70 in 1973 in a melding of self-portraiture and abstraction, created by manipulating the wet-dye emulsions with a stylus or fingertip before the chemicals set. This process progressed with digital art in 1996 when he obtained his first computer and began to experiment with printed texts on typewriter paper. By 2002, he had acquired a digital camera, and the use of Photoshop became an integral component of his practice. These technologies gave way to Photofictions (2003), a series characterized by distorted self-portraits and psychedelic compositions.

125 NEWBURY

395 Broadway, New York, NY 10013

www.125newbury.com

Paloma Varga Weisz @ Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover - "Multiface" Exhibition

Paloma Varga Weisz: Multiface

Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover

December 7, 2024 - March 2, 2025

Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover

© Photographer: Ulrich Prigge

The exhibition Multiface is one of the most extensive presentations of works by Paloma Varga Weisz. It brings together her recent series of works with key pieces from over three decades, offering insight into her poetic and simultaneously subversive artistic practice. Her works—sculptures, watercolors, drawings, and installations—delve into existential questions about identity, memory, vulnerability, and transformation. Figures and forms oscillate between the familiar and the foreign, the corporeal and the narrative.

Trained as a wood sculptor, Paloma Varga Weisz deliberately breaks with the tradition of the craft. By mastering traditional techniques while simultaneously subverting them, she creates works that challenge classical notions of materiality and form. Her sculptures combine historical references with surreal elements, humorous disruptions, and subtle irony, impressively exploring the boundaries between artisanal precision and contemporary reflection.

A central focus of the exhibition is Wild People (1998—2024), a series of works ranging from small ceramic figures to monumental bronze sculptures. These hybrid beings, which combine human and animal traits, embody a deconstruction of gender roles and family ideals. They raise questions about isolation, community, and transitions from humans to nature. The sculpture Rug People (2011) plays a special role in this exhibition: Inspired by the story of the former railway station in Folkstone in England from which soldiers departed for battle during World War I, this work reflects on themes such as migration, loss, and the fragility of human stories. For Varga Weisz, this also becomes a quiet homage to her father, who had to flee from National Socialists-occupied Paris during World War II as a Jewish refugee. Rug People (2011) functions as a monument to the resilience and vulnerability of human experiences.

Multiface (2019), a multi-faced silver head that looks in all directions, symbolizes the fluid boundaries of the self and the constant changes of life. The multiheaded nature of her works invites viewers to understand identity not as a selfcontained unit, but as an open, evolving structure that sees breaks and transitions as essential components of being. Multiface reveals the complexity of the human—not as an ambivalence to be overcome, but as its essential strength.

Paloma Varga Weisz (b. 1966 in Mannheim) is a sculptor, graphic artist, and painter. After training as a wood sculptor from 1987 to 1990 in Garmisch- Partenkirchen, she studied under Tony Cragg and Gerhard Merz at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1990 to 1998. Her works poetically and subversively engage with themes such as identity, memory, and transformation. Varga Weisz lives and works in Düsseldorf.

Curator: Alexander Wilmschen

KESTNER GASELLSCHAFT

Goseriede 11, 30159 Hannover

www.kestnergesellschaft.de

Serge Alain Nitegeka @ Marianne Boesky Gallery, NYC - "Configurations in Black" Exhibition

Serge Alain Nitegeka 

Configurations in Black

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

January 30 - March 8, 2025

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents Configurations in Black, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by South Africa-based artist Serge Alain Nitegeka (b. 1983; Rwanda). For his fifth solo exhibition in more than ten years with the gallery, Nitegeka imbues his newest body of work with symbolically and politically charged colors and forms.

Deploying the visual language of minimalism and geometric abstraction, Serge Alain Nitegeka reappropriates modernism’s formal preoccupations with color, line, and space to examine the lingering effects—both personal and political—of forced migration. Drawing on his own history as a refugee, Nitegeka erects—at times quite literally—barriers, obstacles, and borders both visual and physical for the viewer to traverse. Conjuring unsettling abstracted, obstruction-laden landscapes—in both two dimensions and three—Nitegeka evokes the psychological experience of political displacement and statelessness.

For Configurations in Black, Serge Alain Nitegeka debuts a new suite of paintings and sculptures—which he began working on more than two years ago, in a season of experimentation following a global pandemic. In the resulting paintings on plywood, Nitegeka conjures abstract landscapes defined by loose, organic planes of color—dark gray, bright orange, sunny yellow, vibrant teal. Heavy black lines run across the compositions at various angles while silhouetted figures—borrowed from the artist’s 2012 film Black Subjects—tumble through space, many of them balancing bundles on their backs or shoulders. On canvas, a material Nitegeka returns to for the first time since university, the heavy black lines that appear on plywood—and throughout the artist’s oeuvre—vanish, leaving the figures to float through the landscape with no sense of a horizon line, no sense of which way is up or down, no sense of where they’re coming from or where they’re going. With the painted wood sculptures, Serge Alain Nitegeka evokes the unnamed parcels that the figures in the paintings carry on their backs and shoulders, representing, perhaps the personal effects—and psychological burdens—that migrants carry along their journeys.

Serge Alain Nitegeka’s work has long been characterized by a stark, limited color palette. In early work, the artist exclusively used black, white, red, on the golden grain of exposed plywood. In the mid-2010s—on the heels of working on a pair of outdoor sculptures—sky blues and sunny yellows began to appear in his work, as if the open sky under which he was working found its way onto the surface itself. With Configurations in Black, Serge Alain Nitegeka incorporates new hues into his work: greens, blues, grays—and a startling neon orange laden with symbolic and metaphorical potential. Nitegeka borrows his new orange shade from the life vests commonly worn by migrants and refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea en route to Europe. Piled high on the shores of the Greek island of Lesbos, the life vests represent mass migration as a crisis of human rights and global politics; they also represent each individual who has made the treacherous journey in search of safety. Throughout these works, Serge Alain Nitegeka once again incorporates a series of motifs associated with movement—the raw plywood of shipping crates, bright red “fragile” stamps, and handling mark arrows—appear once again in these newest works. 

Serge Alain Nitegeka’s paintings embody a liminal space—one both physical and psychological. With his work, Nitegeka creates space—and a sense of a landscape that must be traversed. Then—having created a space to enter, be it visually or physically—Nitegeka blocks the entrance with heavy black lines or renders the landscapes too dense to navigate. Silhouetted figures and viewers alike are left to move through space without any indication of where they are going—there is no up or down, no gravity or horizon line, no clear path. Instead, there is only searching, an endless journey with no origin and no destination, weighed down by the ever-growing bundles they carry. 

With Configurations in Black, Serge Alain Nitegeka pushes his practice forward—both formally and conceptually. Nitegeka’s work speaks to his personal history and to the political, to crises of ceaseless war and famine, and to those who have no choice but to leave their homes in pursuit of another. “His art,” Allie Biswas wrote in 2015 “urges us to make connections with this global sphere of personal and collective disjuncture and trauma, where life is ruled by uncertainty and enforced readjustment. In doing so, his work becomes representative of a fundamental part of the present-day human condition. What Serge Alain Nitegeka ultimately reminds us is that the significance of a journey, whatever form it may take, lies in the process of allowing ourselves to enter into that which we cannot always control.” A decade later, as Nitegeka deepens his formal exploration of abstraction, expands his color palette, and further complicates his landscapes, Configurations in Black offers a stark reminder that migration is a journey begun but perhaps never ended, that the foreigner lives, perhaps, within, and that the burdens—physical and psychological—remain with us as the journey continues.

A sense of suspended movement permeates the journey alluded to throughout Configurations in Black—perhaps related to the artist’s own status: for nearly 10 years, Nitegeka has been stuck in South Africa, unable to travel outside the country as his citizenship proceedings continue. The artist exists, at present, in a state of limbo, suspended within his own liminal landscape, with no real sense of when it will be resolved. Unable to attend the opening of the exhibition, the artist’s absence is a presence all its own, felt deeply within the work on view.

ABOUT SERGE ALAIN NITEGEKA

Serge Alain Nitegeka’s work was the subject of a 2015 solo exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland’ Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; the Perez Art Museum Miami, FL; and the Jewish Museum, New York, NY. Nitegeka’s work was included in the South African Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and at the Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Gothenburg, Sweden the same year. In 2019, Nitegeka received the Grant-Award from the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation, New York, NY and the Villa Extraordinary Award for Sculpture from the Claire & Edoardo Villa Will Trust, Johannesburg, South Africa in 2018. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; the Newark Museum, NJ; the Jewish Museum, New York, NY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL, among others. The artist lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. 

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY

507 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

marianneboeskygallery.com

Kim Yun Shin @ Lehmann Maupin, London - "Add Two Add One" Exhibition

Kim Yun Shin

Add Two Add One

Lehmann Maupin, London

February 27 – March 15, 2025

Lehmann Maupin presents a two-part solo exhibition of work by pioneering Korean artist Kim Yun Shin, which will span the gallery’s London and New York locations. Surveying the artist’s oeuvre and including both paintings and sculptures from the 1990s to the present, the London component—which marks the artist's debut exhibition in the United Kingdom—will be on view at Lehmann Maupin’s temporary space at No.9 Cork Street.

Growing up amidst the backdrop of Korea’s tumultuous history in the 20th century, Kim Yun Shin has established herself as a formative figure in the post-war South Korean art scene, overcoming societal norms to carve out a space for herself as a first-generation woman sculptor. Despite facing challenges in a male-dominated field, she ventured to Paris to pursue her artistic aspirations, taught at various universities, and co-founded the Korean Sculptress Association in 1974 to support emerging artists. Partly influenced by her nomadic early life, her work reflects a fearless exploration of diasporic cultures—from France, Mexico, and Brazil, to her adoptive home of Argentina, where she established Museo Kim Yun Shin, the first Korean immigrant art museum. Now, at 90 years of age, the artist resides in Seoul, South Korea, where she continues to produce work in her studio. 

Her artistic practice, which encompasses sculpture and painting, is also deeply rooted in encounters with the natural world. Kim’s sculptural work engages with the fundamental qualities of materials and nature, navigating themes of confrontation, introspection, and coexistence. Using solid wood as her primary medium, she visualizes the intersection between nature, time, and history, reconsidering the very essence of human existence. Her early sculptures from the 1970s are deeply rooted in traditional Korean hanok architecture, which uses a distinctive technique that joins wooden blocks without nails. Her colorful paintings, meanwhile, are marked by distinctive surface fragmentation; across her compositions, large sections gradually divide into smaller shapes. The resulting artworks evoke a primordial energy, at once expansive and concise, concentrated and diffused. For Kim, painting offers the opportunity to explore sculptural concepts in a two-dimensional format. 

LEHMANN MAUPIN

No.9 Cork Street, London

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Tatsuo Miyajima: Many Lives @ Lisson Gallery, NYC

Tatsuo Miyajima: Many Lives

Lisson Gallery, New York

13 February – 19 April, 2025

Lisson Gallery presents the first U.S. solo exhibition in over five years by TATSUO MIYAJIMA, one of Japan’s most celebrated sculptors and installation artists. Known for his innovative use of LED technology to explore Buddhist philosophy, Miyajima’s work investigates themes of time, existence, and the cycles of life and death. The exhibition introduces four new series – Many Lives, Changing Life with Changing Circumstance, MUL.APIN, and Hundred Changes in Life – which build on explorations of ‘Seimei’, a Japanese concept encompassing life, being and consciousness.

These new works continue Tatsuo Miyajima’s signature use of LED countdowns that omit 0, positioning death not as an endpoint but as a moment of transformation. In Many Lives, Tatsuo Miyajima employs full-color LEDs that count down from 9 to 1 before resetting to 9 in evolving colors and speeds. Each LED represents an individual ‘Seimei’ with its own rhythm and identity, symbolizing the cycle of life and death as an endless process of rebirth. Together, these elements form a larger interconnected world, evoking the Buddhist concept of samsara and reinforcing the idea that every life, visible or invisible, has value.

Tatsuo Miyajima understands his Changing Life with Changing Circumstance works as representations of quantum theory. This theory suggests that on the minute sub-atomic scale of the quantum, computational predications cannot hold, and instead, chance and probability dominate. This embrace of unpredictability, change and flux is integral to Miyajima’s practice, and represented in the Changing Life with Changing Circumstance works by the colours of the LEDs which are in constant shift, and the timings of the LEDs, which differ from unit to unit, ungoverned by the whole. As in quantum physics, it is impossible to predict when and where the different colours will occur and how they will appear in relation to the whole.

MUL.APIN, named after ancient Babylonian clay tablets used for astronomy, links Buddhist philosophy with ancient cosmological systems. This series reflects the cycles of life and death through the sexagesimal (base-60) system of Babylonian timekeeping, using LEDs arranged to evoke celestial movements. As the LEDs reset from 0, their random color changes symbolize the dispersion and renewal of life across the cosmos. Through this synthesis of ancient and modern, earthly and universal, the MUL.APIN works situate human existence within the vast, interconnected framework of time and space.

In the Hundred Changes in Life series, Tatsuo Miyajima draws on the ‘Ten Worlds of Buddhism’ states of existence, ranging from Hell to Buddhahood, to represent life’s constant transformations. Encased within mirrored cylinders, the LED numbers continuously shift in color, speed and sequence, creating an interplay between the viewer’s reflection and the artwork. This interaction embodies En, the Buddhist concept of causality and interconnectedness, illustrating how individual states of existence influence and are influenced by external forces. The work’s dynamic configurations suggest the endless potential for evolution and renewal, both within the self and the larger world.

While these new series reflect a bold evolution in Tatsuo Miyajima’s practice, they are rooted in his foundational principles: Keep Changing, Connect with Everything, and Continue Forever. By merging cutting-edge technology with spiritual inquiry, Miyajima’s work invites contemplation of life’s impermanence and interconnectedness, offering a vision of continuity that transcends the boundaries of time, space and individuality.

TATSUO MIYAJIMA

Tatsuo Miyajima is one of Japan’s foremost sculptors and installation artists. Employing contemporary materials such as electric circuits, video, and computers, Miyajima’s supremely technological works have centered on his use of digital light-emitting diode (LED) counters, or ‘gadgets’ as he calls them, since the late 1980s. These numbers, flashing in continual and repetitious—though not necessarily sequential—cycles from 1 to 9, represent the journey from life to death, the finality of which is symbolized by ‘0’ or the void, which consequently never appears in his work. This theory derives partially from humanist ideas, the teachings of Buddhism, as well as from his core artistic concepts: ‘Keep Changing’, ‘Connect with Everything’, and ‘Continue Forever’. Miyajima’s LED numerals have been presented in grids, towers, complex integrated groupings or circuits and as simple digital counters, but are all aligned with his interests in continuity, connection and eternity, as well as with the flow and span of time and space. “Time connects everything”, says Miyajima. “I want people to think about the universe and the human spirit.”

Tatsuo Miyajima was born in 1957 and lives and works in Ibaraki, Japan. He finished undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1986, after which he began experimenting with performance art before moving on to light-based installations. In addition to participating in numerous international biennales and important group shows, he has held solo exhibitions at The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, Japan (2021): Chiba City Museum of Art, Chiba, Japan (2020); SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo, Japan (2020); Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland (2020); Minsheng Museum, Shanghai, China (2019); Buchmann Galerie, Lugano, Switzerland (2019); Lisson Gallery, New York, NY, USA (2018); William Morris Gallery, London, UK (2018); Fosun Foundation, Shanghai, China (2017); SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo, Japan (2017); MCA, Sydney, Australia (2016); The Met Breuer, New York, NY, USA (2016); Capsule Gallery, Tokyo (2014); Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland (2012); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2011); Miyanomori Art Museum, Hokkaido, Japan (2010); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, USA (1997); Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, France (1996); and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX, USA (1996). He has participated in the Venice Biennale (1988, 1999) and in numerous group exhibitions, including ‘Change Connect Continue’, Galleria Lorcan O’neill Roma, Italy (2019); ‘The Life of Buddha, the way to now’, Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2018); ‘Catastrophe and the Power of Art’, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2018); ‘Everything at Once’, The Store, London, UK (2017); ‘Relight Days’, Counter Void, Tokyo, Japan (2017); ‘Kumamoto Admirable’, Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, Japan (2016); ‘Order and Reorder: Curate Your Own Exhibition’, National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto (MOMAK), Japan (2016); ‘Eppur Si Muove’, Mudam Luxembourg (2015); ‘Boolean Expressions’, Lewis Gluckman Gallery, Ireland (2015); ‘Logical Emotion, Contemporary Art from Japan’, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland (2014); ‘Asia Code ZERO’, Seoul Olympic Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea (2013); ‘Marking Time’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2012); and ‘Dome’, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2008). In 2006, Tatsuo Miyajima was selected to serve as Vice President of Tohoku University of Art and Design. His work is featured in numerous public collections including British Museum, London, UK; Tate, London, UK; La Caixa, Barcelona, Spain; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan.

LISSON GALLERY

508 West 24th Street, New York City

www.lissongallery.com

RELATED POSTS ON WANAFOTO

In English

Tatsuo Miyajima: Innumerable Life / Buddha, Lisson Gallery, New York (2019)

Tatsuo Miyajima: Drawings, Buchmann Galerie, Berlin (2018)

Tatsuo Miyajima, Time Waterfall, Art Basel Hong Kong 2016

Tatsuo Miyajima, Lisson Gallery, London (2005)

Tatsuo Miyajima: Totality of Life, Luhring Augustine, New York (2000)

In French

Tenir compte de l'an 2000 - Gerald Ferguson et Tatsuo Miyajima, Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa (1999-2000)