Elmgreen & Dragset @ Pace Gallery, Los Angeles - "The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome" Exhibition

Elmgreen & Dragset

The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

Pace Gallery, Los Angeles

September 13 – October 25, 2025

Pace presents The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, Elmgreen & Dragset’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles—and their fourth with the gallery. This immersive two-part presentation will occupy the main exhibition space and the adjacent south gallery, exploring themes of scale, perception, and psychological distortion through enactments of doubling and resizing. The show follows Elmgreen & Dragset’s recent solo presentations at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul, and it coincides with the artists’ thirtieth anniversary of working as a duo and the twentieth anniversary of their famed "Prada Marfa" installation, which was unveiled in Texas in 2005.

Renowned for their subversive sculptural interventions, Berlin-based artists Elmgreen & Dragset often examine questions of identity and belonging in their collaborative practice, and they are particularly interested in radical recontextualizations of objects and new modes of representation in sculpture and large-scale installation.

In The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, the artists explore how scale influences our understanding of reality. For this presentation, the duo plays with the physical features of Pace’s Los Angeles gallery, using the architectural division of the gallery as a framework for doubling and resizing. Each artwork is presented in full scale in the main gallery, while exact half-size versions are shown in the adjoining space, which the artists have rescaled into a half-size replica of the main space. This spatial reduplication and resizing is inspired by the neurological condition called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, or Dysmetropsia, in which shifts in perception, often triggered by fatigue, alter one’s experiences of distance and scale.

The first work that visitors will encounter in the exhibition is a hyper realistic sculpture of a female gallery assistant slumped over the reception desk, seemingly asleep. The surreal presentation that follows in the exhibition spaces, where objects appear out of scale, could be a vision or dream playing out in her mind, in which visitors are the protagonists.

The main gallery space will feature new sculptural works and wall pieces—works from the duo’s Sky Target series—that probe the boundaries of the real and the reflected, the seen and the sensed. In their circular Sky Target paintings, fragments of clouds drifting across blue skies are rendered on mirror polished stainless steel disks. The skies are partially obscured by reflective surfaces, allowing viewers to glimpse themselves within illusory “heavens.” Each Sky Target is named after a specific location that the artists have visited. Two circular wall works, which the artists refer to as “stripe paintings,” will also be on view. In these works, vertical bands revealing airplanes and their contrails in the sky alternate with equally sized bands of mirrored strips, creating a rhythm of image and reflection. The tension between transparency and opacity, and representation and self-awareness, is heightened by the viewer’s shifting position within the space.

Two figurative sculptures carved in marble will be presented on the floor of both the main and adjacent galleries. One of these works depicts two young men, both wearing VR goggles, embracing—physically close but mentally elsewhere. The other shows a young man seated with headphones, absorbed in his own auditory reality. These figures embody the contemporary condition of disconnection, amplified by digital mediation. The immateriality of the digital experiences represented in both works is contrasted with their medium, marble, a historically significant and physically durable material that is deeply rooted in the tradition of sculpture.

The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome invites visitors into a mise en abyme of visual and spatial contradictions. While much of our reality has been compressed into the format of an iPhone screen, Elmgreen & Dragset continue their investigations into how physical environments shape our sense of self and how bodily presence still plays an important role in the way we interact with our surroundings.

ARTIST DUO ELMGREEN & DRAGSET

Elmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen, b. 1961, Copenhagen, Denmark; Ingar Dragset, b. 1969, Trondheim, Norway) pursue questions of identity and belonging and investigate social, cultural, and political structures in their artistic practice. They are interested in the discourse that can ensue when objects are radically re-contextualized and traditional modes for the representation of art are altered. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset are based in Berlin and have worked together as an artist duo since 1995. They have presented numerous solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide including Kunsthalle Zürich (2001); Tate Modern, London (2004); Serpentine Gallery, London (2006); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain (2009); ZKM - Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany (2010); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2011); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2013–14); Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2016); Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2016); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2018–19); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas (2019–2020); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2022); and Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2023–24). In 2009, they represented both the Nordic and the Danish Pavilions at the 53rd Venice Biennale. They are renowned for large-scale public installations including Short Cut (2003), an installation comprising a Fiat Uno and a camper trailer, which appear to emerge from the ground; Prada Marfa (2005), a full-scale replica of a Prada boutique installed along U.S. Route 90 in Valentine, Texas; and Van Gogh’s Ear (2016), a gigantic vertical swimming pool placed in front of Rockefeller Center in New York City.

Their work is held in public collections worldwide, including ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj, Denmark; Art Production Fund, New York; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Hamburger Bahnhof, Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin; Kistefos Museet, Jevnaker, Norway; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others.

PACE LOS ANGELES

1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles

www.pacegallery.com

Harri Koskinen @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - "Magnitude" Exhibition

Harri Koskinen: Magnitude

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki 

August 22 – September 21, 2025

 

Harri Koskinen one of Finland’s most renowned designers, presents a new exhibition shaped by compelling, multi-layered themes that navigate borderlands between the mythical and the contemporary. Elements subtly reminiscent of survival gear suggest preparation for an uncertain future, serving as a quiet reminder of today’s volatile global climate. At the same time, the exhibition drifts into the realm of myth and adventure. Rather than creating ominous imagery, Harri Koskinen explores the delicate tension between the material form and conceptual depth of his work.

The exhibition presents a selection of unique glass sculptures, both free-blown and mold-cast. Glass, with its reactive sensitivity, naturally lends itself to the creation of multi-layered forms. As a material born from the transformation of sand through intense heat, then cooled into solid form, glass inherently embodies shifting states of matter. Koskinen’s minimalist visual vocabulary resonates beautifully with the fragility of his medium. Most of the featured sculptures were handcrafted at the historic glassworks in Iittala and Riihimäki, with select pieces produced in Switzerland. This marks Koskinen’s fifth solo exhibition at Galerie Forsblom.

HARRI KOSKINEN (b. 1970), is a highly versatile designer known for his conceptual approach. His practice spans both serial production and one-offs. Over the course of his distinguished career, he has served as design director at Iittala and collaborated with prestigious international brands including Artek, Genelec, Hermès, Issey Miyake, Muu, and Svenskt Tenn. Among his many accolades are the Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize, the Compasso d’Oro Award, and the Pro Finlandia Medal. Harri Koskinen lives and works in Espoo and Helsinki.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.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

Li Hei Di @ Pace Gallery, Hong Kong - "Tongues of Flare" Exhibition

Li Hei Di: Tongues of Flare

Pace Gallery, Hong Kong

May 29 – August 29, 2025

LI HEI DI 

Gapes at the vanity of toil, 2025

© Li Hei Di, courtesy Pace Gallery 

Pace presents Tongues of Flare, an exhibition of new paintings and sculpture by LI HEI DI, at its Hong Kong gallery. This presentation marks Li’s first solo show with Pace since they joined the gallery’s program in 2024. Following its run at Pace in Hong Kong, Tongues of Flare will travel to the Pond Society during Shanghai Art Week in the fall.

Born in Shenyang, China in 1997, Li, who currently lives and works in London, is known for their explorations of human embodiment, displacement, and intimacy in luminous paintings that blend abstraction and figuration. In their vibrant, dreamlike canvases—where ghostly, translucent bodies and body parts pulsate in and out of view amid abstract forms and washes of color—Li embeds latent narratives about gender, repressed and fulfilled desire, and emotional fluidity for viewers to uncover and decipher. Primarily a painter, they also work across sculpture and performance, mediums that complement their otherworldly canvases.

Li’s work has figured in recent group exhibitions at the Hepworth Wakefield in the United Kingdom, The Warehouse in Dallas, Le Consortium in Dijon, France, the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, and Marquez Art Projects in Miami, as well as the 2023 X Museum Triennial in Beijing. They are represented in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the High Museum in Atlanta; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio; the Hepworth Wakefield; the Long Museum in Shanghai; and the Yageo Foundation in Taiwan.

The artist’s exhibition at Pace in Hong Kong spotlights 11 new, never-before-exhibited paintings produced in 2025. Meditating on self-discovery and enactments of physical and spiritual transformation, these works imagine the body as an architecture of energies and feelings—a space where chaos, love, passion, and other phenomena converge and collide. These layered compositions, where spectral figures reveal and obscure themselves at different moments, speak to the complexities of selfhood and the conflicts between our internal selves and forces of the external world.

In this group of paintings, the most vulnerable and diaristic works that Li has created to date, the artist continues to use the natural world—in particular, movements and flows of water—as a metaphor for the evolutionary process of becoming one’s self. Wild abstractions rendered in saturated colors oscillate and undulate across their canvases with an oceanic rhythm, fluctuating with each motion of Li’s brush. As with their past bodies of work, they have also drawn inspiration from various literary sources—including Georges Bataille’s Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby—for their latest paintings. In these books—particularly in The Vegetarian, which tells the story of a woman who becomes increasingly convinced that she is turning into a plant—Li has uncovered new ideas about sexuality, monstrosity, and transfiguration that manifest in their new works. Each painting in this series can be understood as a seed for profound, liberating growth, revealing how change can emerge from the most hidden corners of the self.

A new wood sculpture by the artist is also on view in the exhibition. Depicting an abstracted body at repose within a cradle-like vessel, this work reflects the state of the physical body and the mind at night during sleep—sinking ever deeper into the shifting, unpredictable world of the unconscious. Presented together in Hong Kong, Li’s paintings and sculpture transport viewers to a realm where the boundaries between life and death, beauty and struggle, and imagination and reality are collapsed.

LI HEI DI (b. 1997, Shenyang, China) lives and works in London. The artist attended a one-year student exchange program in Ohio before studying at Idyllwild Arts in southern California. They received a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, London, in 2020, and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2022. Their first one-artist exhibition was held at Linseed Projects, Shanghai (2022), followed by Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2023) and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2024). Recent group exhibitions including their work have been held at Gagosian Gallery, Hong Kong (2023); Centre of International Contemporary Art, Vancouver (2023); X Museum Triennial, Beijing (2023); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2023); Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Philippines (2024); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2024); GRIMM, New York (2024); and The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom (2025–2026). Their work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, including the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Long Museum, Shanghai; Los Angeles County Museum of

Art; and Yageo Foundation, Taipei, among others.

PACE HONG KONG

12/F, H Queen's, 80 Queen's Road Central, Hong Kong

www.pacegallery.com

Akinsanya Kambon @ Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills

Akinsanya Kambon

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills 

April 17 – May 31, 2025

Marc Selwyn Fine Art presents Akinsanya Kambon, the gallery’s first exhibition of work by the artist.

Akinsanya Kambon, born Mark Teemer in Sacramento, California, is a former Marine, Black Panther, and art professor who lives and works in Long Beach. Kambon served in Vietnam as a Marine infantryman and combat illustrator. Upon returning to the U.S., he joined the Sacramento Chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and served as its Lieutenant of Culture. Kambon’s lifetime of service and artistic practice document suppressed histories and express the beauty of African heritage through drawing, painting, and sculpture. In 2023, Kambon won the prestigious Mohn Award given by the Hammer Museum for his participation in “Made in LA 2023: Acts of Living”. His life, work, and mission are also the subject of a documentary film “The Hero Avenges” to be released this year. Akinsanya Kambon will be the subject of an upcoming one-person exhibition at the Sculpture Center, New York, in May of 2026.

Akinsanya Kambon’s rich body of work is influenced by his Pan-Africanist beliefs, developed through his extensive travels through Africa beginning in 1974. Kambon explains, “I’ve looked at African spirituality and I like to incorporate what I’ve learned into my own work. My biggest influences have been my travels to Africa.” The show will include ceramic vessels, figures, and wall plaques that combine American historical narratives with African sculptural traditions.

To create his ceramics, Akinsanya Kambon uses a Western version of the Japanese Raku firing technique which adds a metallic luster to his glazed surfaces. This method of firing, which traps smoke in an enclosed space to interact with the glaze, produces an uncontrollable transformation which Kambon considers a spiritually guided aspect of this practice. He conducts kiln firings with a ceremonial approach, infusing life into figures that often embody African deities, spirits, or figures from American or religious history. His work, deeply rooted in narrative tradition and shaped by his personal experiences, celebrates themes of resilience through adversity, cultural pride, and his talent as a storyteller.

In ‘Black Butterfly,’ 2024, for example, Akinsanya Kambon depicts the figure of the Queen Mother butterfly of the Bobo people, who was sent by God to bring rain. In 'The Edler' Kambon portrays a strong warrior with a turtle on his head, a symbol of longevity and wisdom. Other figures are incorporated into vases and vessels, as in ‘Kemetic Gate Keepers’, 2015, where protectors of the spirit world are represented in the vessel’s handles and base.  ‘The Ancestors,’ 2015, tells the story of the first humans on earth alongside the ‘primordial animals’ that preceded us. 

Solo exhibitions include: Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (2022); Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, (2020); Pan African Art Gallery & Studio, Long Beach, California (1991); and the Oak Park School of Afro-American Thought, Sacramento City College (1969). Recent group exhibitions include those at Rowan University Art Gallery and Museum, Glassboro, NJ, (2025); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Oakland Museum of California (2016) and Joyce Gordon Gallery, Oakland (2016). He is the recipient of awards from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (2022); City of Long Beach (1996, 1994); County of Los Angeles (1994); and California Wellness Foundation, Violence Prevention Initiative (1993).

MARC SELWYN FINE ART

9953 South Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Hills, CA 90212

www.marcselwynfineart.com

Robert Rauschenberg: Sympathy for Abandoned Objects @ Gladstone Gallery, New York - Survey exhibition of Rauschenberg sculptural practice

Robert Rauschenberg 

Sympathy for Abandoned Objects 

Gladstone Gallery, New York 

May 1 - June 14, 2025 

Presented in collaboration with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation on the occasion of the artist’s Centennial, Gladstone presents the first survey of Rauschenberg’s sculptural practice in thirty years, spanning his production from the 1950s through the late 1990s.

Examining Rauschenberg’s sculptures through the lens of scale, the exhibition showcases over 30 sculptures that relate in size to the human body, whether floor-, pedestal-, or wall-based. Drawing from myriad media and disrupting the distinction between abstraction and empirical representation, Rauschenberg's sculptures are rooted in his career-long dedication to artistic experimentation.

Robert Rauschenberg is renowned for blurring the line between artistic genres, painterly gesture, and three-dimensionality. The artist maintained a robust sculptural practice throughout his long and prodigious career. Underscoring the artist’s remarkable use of found and readymade materials, the works on view are assembled from industrial detritus, everyday objects, decorative items, and organic forms. They are the result of improvisatory gestures—gathering, twisting, combining, adhering, tying—that Rauschenberg described as responses to items found in his environment, “treasures” that he would bring back to his studio, seeing in them a potential for new form. Claiming a “sympathy for abandoned objects,” he created a body of strictly sculptural work that is rarely presented as such.

For this exhibition, Gladstone presents key works from various series, including the Scatole Personali (1952–53), Elemental Sculptures (1953/59), Combines (1954-64), Kabal American Zephyrs (1981– 83/1985/1987–88), Gluts (1986–89/1991–94), and the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI; 1984–91) in an installation designed by Selldorf Architects to reveal the continuity of his unique vocabulary within an expansive set of sculptural positions. Given Rauschenberg’s protean imagination, this exhibition also features a number of his sculptures that were not aligned with specific series and exist on their own formal terms. Key loans from institutional and private collections augment the selection of work from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation to further argue for the artist’s keen sculptural sensibility, even if he resisted aligning himself with one medium. This exhibition traces the trajectory of Rauschenberg’s creative output as a whole, with the three-dimensional objects serving as key touchpoints in an expansive and almost uncategorizable oeuvre. The last survey of Rauschenberg’s purely sculptural output prior to this show was in 1995 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

This exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue designed by Chris Svensson with an essay by sculpture expert, Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, entries on each of the individual sculptural series represented, and detailed exhibition histories.

In 2025, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation commemorates Robert Rauschenberg’s 100th birthday with an international celebration of the artist’s expansive creativity, spirit of curiosity, and commitment to change.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

Born on October 22, 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, Robert Rauschenberg worked in what he called the gap between art and life. Over the course of his sixty-year career, Rauschenberg’s art embodied a spirit of experimentation with new materials and techniques. Dubbed an enfant terrible for his assemblages of urban detritus (the Combines of 1954-64), Robert Rauschenberg continued exploring many different mediums and technological advancements in the years following his 1970 decampment to Captiva Island in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Florida coast.

Although he demurred from affiliations with any particular movement, he has been called a forerunner of essentially every postwar artistic development since Abstract Expressionism.

In addition to his own artmaking practice, Robert Rauschenberg became an advocate for artists and the creative community at large. In September 1970, he founded Change, Inc., a non-profit organization that helped artists with emergency expenses. From 1984-91, he personally funded the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI), traveling to ten countries outside of the United States to spark cross-cultural dialogue through art.

Robert Rauschenberg died on May 12, 2008 in his Captiva studio. His artistic legacy and his lifelong commitment to collaboration with artists, performers, writers, artisans, and engineers worldwide was recognized long before his death. His expansive artistic philosophy lives on through his highly innovative and influential work to the present day.

About the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation builds on the legacy of artist Robert Rauschenberg, emphasizing his belief that artists can drive social change. Robert Rauschenberg sought to act in the “gap” between art and life, valuing chance and collaboration across disciplines. As such, the Foundation celebrates new and even untested ways of thinking.

GLADSTONE GALLERY

530 West 21st Street, New York City

www.gladstonegallery.com

Lotus L. Kang @ 52 Walker, New York - "Already" Exhibition

Lotus L. Kang: Already

52 Walker, New York

April 11 – June 7, 2025

LOTUS L. KANG 

Documentation, '49 Echoes', 2025

© Lotus L. Kang, courtesy of the artist; 52 Walker, New York; 

Franz Kaka, Toronto; Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles

52 Walker presents its fifteenth exhibition, Already, featuring work by Canadian-born, New York–based artist LOTUS L. KANG. Kang’s multidisciplinary practice includes sculpture, photography, and installation, often reflecting on ideas of impermanence, inheritance, memory, and time. In her iterative presentations, Lotus L. Kang realizes these thematic concerns by transforming materials like photographic paper and film whose light-sensitive surfaces implicate traces of surrounding architecture and bodies. At 52 Walker, the artist brings together a selection of discrete objects, wall works, and an installation staged within and around two greenhouses.

The exhibition title Already draws from an eponymous poem by Kim Hyesoon—one of forty-nine from her book Autobiography of Death (2019), which considers the Buddhist tradition of after-death rituals performed for forty-nine days during the intermediate period spanning death and rebirth.

Two modified greenhouses, respectively titled Receiver Transmitter (49 Echoes I and II), prominently mirror each other across the infrastructural pillars bisecting the gallery. Regularly utilized by Lotus L. Kang in outdoor environments as a process tool for exposing photographic film from her series Molt, the greenhouses at 52 Walker have been brought indoors, here envisioned as permeable, metabolic environments. Works titled Mesoderm punctuate the gallery walls, serving as abstracted indexes of Kang’s ongoing research and fixations, culled from her archive of found and taken photographs or from memory. To accompany the exhibition, the gallery presents a formative work from Kang’s recent Azaleas series that functions like the underbelly to Already. Azaleas II is titled after a 1925 poem by Korean modernist Kim Sowol (1902–1934). This kinetic sculpture comprises an enlarged rotary film dryer and a diaphanous length of 35 mm film depicting purple orchids that tautly wraps around its metal skeleton; the machine is placed atop a low, tatami-like base strewn with objects that reverberate within the artist’s orbit. The sculpture rotates according to a score that combines the syllabic meter of Sowol’s “Azaleas” alongside Kim Hyesoon’s “Already.”

LOTUS L. KANG was born in Toronto in 1985. She received a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal, in 2008, and an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, New York, in 2015. 

Lotus L. Kang has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. In 2023, she presented In Cascades, a major traveling solo exhibition co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London, and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Further solo presentations have been held at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2024); Franz Kaka, Toronto (2023, 2020, 2017); Helena Anrather, New York (2021); Oakville Galleries, Ontario (2019); Interstate Projects, New York (2018); and Raster Gallery, Warsaw (2015), among others. Kang has also been included in several significant group exhibitions. Her installation In Cascades (2023) was featured in Even Better Than the Real Thing, the 2024 iteration of the Whitney Biennial.

Lotus L. Kang lives and works in New York. She is represented by Franz Kaka, Toronto, and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.

Lotus L. Kang: Already is curated by Ebony L. Haynes and presented by 52 Walker.

52 WALKER GALLERY, NEW YORK

52 Walker Street, New York City

www.52walker.com

Sarah Crowner @ Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris "Tableaux en Laine, Pierres en Bronze" Exhibition

Sarah Crowner 

Tableaux en Laine, Pierres en Bronze 

Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris 

26 April – 21 June 2025

SARAH CROWNER

Black and Blues and Oranges, both 2024 (details) 

© Sarah Crowner

Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris, presents Tableaux en Laine, Pierres en Bronze, a solo exhibition by SARAH CROWNER, uniting a new series of embroideries, bronze sculptures and canvases. This is the artist’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery, and her first presentation in Paris.

Sarah Crowner is renowned for her investigations into colour, materiality and form. Her works, which span painting, sculpture, collage, tile installations and set design, invite a close engagement with the viewer. Subverting expectations of structure, texture and palette, they elicit new ways of slow and deliberate looking. For this exhibition, Sarah Crowner foregrounds abstract colour fields and juxtaposes hard and soft, reflective and absorbent, surfaces.

Five wool embroidered works from 2024 mark a new development in the artist’s practice. At first glance, they appear to be monochromatic canvases, each composed from a vibrating expanse of colour. Contemplated up close, however, they reveal themselves to be handmade objects, created stitch-by-stitch in snaking tendrils, from a varied range of hues. This subtle yet integral plurality is reflected in the titles of the works: Reds, Oranges, Blacks and Blues, Violets, and Whites. Under the changing, dappled light, one almost perceives the individual threads of wool as impasto brushstrokes, which take partial inspiration from Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, 1889, as well as his paintings made in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The textured palette and swirling intensity of his canvases can be traced in the eddying surfaces of Crowner’s embroideries.

Collaboration plays a central role in Crowner’s practice. For the new ‘Tableaux en Laine’, she worked closely with a group of more than twenty embroiderers, based in Maine, USA. Ranging from school age to septuagenarians, they worked together to meticulously stitch each composition by hand over many days, based on ‘stitch map’ drawings created by the artist. These ‘maps’ are used as directional guides to translate colour and line into physical objects and ground the works within a formal painterly language. ‘It always goes back to painting’, the artist states.

While making her recent embroideries, Sarah Crowner was looking closely at the work of Richard Serra, from his early steel slabs to his black, monochrome drawings. Ostensibly simple, the drawings reveal what Sarah Crowner describes as ‘this heavy working, made gesture by gesture’ from thick oil sticks. Similarly, despite first appearances, his weighty and dense sculptures are speckled with patina, embedding within them a sense of passing time. Whether cast, stitched or sewn, this inherent slipperiness between expectation, perception and reality lies at the heart of Crowner’s practice.

In response to the wool paintings, Crowner’s ‘Pierres en Bronze’ sculptures are displayed almost as if they are onlookers, their highly polished surfaces reflecting spills and splashes of colour from the lush wool works. As the viewer moves through the exhibition, the bronze surfaces activate, generating new abstractions which are constantly in flux. Hard, heavy and solid, the sculptures are simultaneously ephemeral, as light, time and transience permeate their shifting surfaces. These Stone sculptures, as their titles insinuate, are based on small stones that Sarah Crowner has collected over the years from Rincon Beach in California, near where she grew up. With their natural holes and pockmarks, the stones resemble small Modernist sculptures, transformed here from their once matte and lightweight forms into enlarged and shiny bronzes.

In her sewn canvases, exhibited in the gallery space in Paris, Sarah Crowner melds order and spontaneity. Working according to a process she describes as ‘slow, fast, slow, fast, instinctual versus methodical’, she draws inspiration from elements of nature as much as art history. In Skyline (Blues) and Seafloor (Greens), both 2025, the shapes echo one another, leaving the viewer with a lingering feeling of déjà vu. First, the paintings appear as familiar fields of drawn lines, forms and colours; it is only from up close that one sees their inherent structure: cut fragments carefully sutured to form a greater whole.

Emphasising the act of transformation in her work, Crowner’s hard sculptures, soft textured embroideries, and cut and sewn canvases each encapsulate something of their opposite, encouraging the viewer to contemplate the yin-yang dualities of the everyday.

SARAH CROWNER (b. 1974, Philadelphia) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. The artist’s work has been presented in institutional solo exhibitions including SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2025); The Chinati Foundation, Marfa (2022–2024); Hill Art Foundation, New York; Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (both 2023–2024); Auroras and Casa de Vidro, Instituto Bardi, São Paulo (2023); Museo Amparo, Puebla (2022–2023); KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville (2018–2019); and MASS MoCA, North Adams (2016–2017). Sarah Crowner’s works are in the collections of major international institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg; The Contemporary Austin; Dallas Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others.

GALERIE MAX HETZLER, PARIS

46 rue du Temple, 75004 Paris

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

Robert Indiana: The Shape of the World @ Pace Gallery, Hong Kong

Robert Indiana

The Shape of the World

Pace Gallery, Hong Kong

Mach 25 - May 9, 2025

Robert Indiana 

Ginkgo, 2000 

© Star of Hope Foundation, Vinalhaven, Maine

Pace presents Robert Indiana: The Shape of the World, an exhibition of work by celebrated American artist ROBERT INDIANA (1928–2018), who first emerged as a key figure in the Pop art movement, at its Hong Kong gallery.

This presentation, coinciding with the 2025 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, includes important sculpture, paintings, and prints from throughout Robert Indiana’s career, showcasing his graphic visual vocabulary that made him one of the most inventive and enduring figures in the history of American art. Robert Indiana: The Shape of the World focuses on Indiana’s deep interest in numerology, literature, geometry, color, and form, and will be Pace’s first exhibition of the artist’s work since it began representing The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative in 2024. 

Following the show in Hong Kong, the gallery will mount a major presentation dedicated to Robert Indiana at its New York flagship, featuring a distinct group of rarely seen paintings and sculpture that speak to the flexibility of Indiana’s practice and one of the most central themes in his work: the triumph and tragedy of the American dream. 

At the vanguard of Pop art and assemblage, Robert Indiana made use of words and numerals in his bold signature style exploring American identity and iconography as well as the universal power of abstraction. Indiana referred to himself as an “American painter of signs,” developing a visual vocabulary that—imbued with literary, political, and spiritual depth—made him one of the most important figures in the history of art. 

Born Robert Clark in the state of Indiana in 1928, he began his career as part of the community of artists—including Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, and Jack Youngerman—working in the Coenties Slip, once a major port on the southeast tip of Manhattan, in the 1950s. The following decade marked a turning point in his career with the success of his famous LOVE image, which debuted at New York’s Stable Gallery and has since become a cultural icon in its own right, remaining as relevant today as when first created 60 years ago. In 1978, Robert Indiana chose to remove himself from the New York art world, settling on the remote island of Vinalhaven in Maine, where he worked until his death in 2018.

“Numbers are ageless, there is no social comment involved, very simply, numbers chart the world’s course,” Robert Indiana once said.

Pace’s exhibition of Indiana’s work in Hong Kong focuses on the artist’s connection to language and numbers, drawing attention to form and symbolism. Bringing together a curated selection of paintings, sculpture, and prints created by the artist between the 1960s and early 2000s, this presentation is organized thematically with an emphasis on numerology and the universality of numbers. Holistically, the show is also shed light on the relationships—in terms of both form and scale—between the artist’s paintings and sculpture.

Among the works on view are three of Indiana’s painted bronzes, translations of works he conceived in the early 1960s. Referred to by the artist as “herms,” after the sculptures that served as boundary markers at crossroads in ancient Greece and Rome, these works feature brightly colored numbers painted using 19th-century brass stencils that Robet Indiana scavenged on the streets of New York. Considering bronze to be one of the most noble of materials in the tradition of sculpture, Indiana selected eight of his herm sculptures to be cast in bronze in 1991. TWO (1960–62, cast 1991), one of the bronze herms in Pace’s Hong Kong show, was presented in Robert Indiana: The Sweet Mystery, an official Collateral Event of the 60th Venice Biennale and one of the most significant exhibitions of his work in Italy to date, in 2024. 

The gallery’s exhibition is also highlight two examples of Indiana’s most admired LOVE sculptures—LOVE (Red Outside Blue Inside) and LOVE (Red Outside Gold Inside), both conceived in 1966 and executed in 1999 in polychrome aluminum. Also included is ONE Through ZERO (The Ten Numbers) (1978–2003), a stainless steel work composed of ten individual numbers that reflects the artist’s enduring interest in the symbolic, allegorical, and formal resonances of numbers. Indiana’s number sculptures illuminate the different meanings and associations that numbers can conjure, the relationship between numbers in his art to events in his own life—such as highway routes or buildings where he lived—and more universal ideas about the cycle of life. 

Paintings created by Robert Indiana between the 1960s and early 2000s are also featured in Pace’s presentation in Hong Kong. Among these works is one of the first LOVE paintings, a small-scale, 12 x 12 inch work from 1965. Several paintings in the exhibition have unique resonances in Hong Kong: Ginkgo (2000), a hard-edge composition depicting a ginkgo leaf design that Indiana, inspired by the leaves on the trees he saw around the Coenties Slip, began exploring in 1957, and Four Diamond Ping (2003), a dynamic, diamond-shaped work containing the Mandarin word for “peace” as well as biblical phrases in English.

These sculptures and paintings complemented by a selection of ten prints, each featuring one number between zero and nine, that Robert Indiana produced in 2001 and 2011. Derived from his Decade Autoportrait series of paintings, which the artist began in 1971, these works were conceived as portraits of Indiana’s life during the 1960s, each named for a different year in the decade and containing references to important names, places, and events in his world of significance within the artist’s life.

Today, Indiana’s work can be found in the permanent collections of museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Menil Collection, Houston; Tate Modern, London; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien), Vienna; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, among many other institutions around the world.

Established in 2022, The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative aims to increase awareness of and appreciation for the depth and breadth of the work of Robert Indiana and is the leading entity dedicated to the advancement of the artist’s work. Represented worldwide by Pace Gallery, The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative also manages the website www.robertindiana.com and is responsible for The Robert Indiana Catalogue Raisonné, which is now available online www.ricatalogueraisonne.org.

PACE GALLERY - HONG KONG

12/F, H Queen's - 80 Queen's Road Central, Hong Kong

www.pacegallery.com

Jacqueline Poncelet @ Richard Saltoun Gallery, London - "this, that and the other" Exhibition

Jacqueline Poncelet

this, that and the other

Richard Saltoun Gallery, London

11 March – 3 May 2025

Jacqueline Poncelet

Untitled, 1985 c.

© Jacqueline Poncelet / Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery

Richard Saltoun Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Belgian-born, London-based artist JACQUELINE PONCELET (b. 1947), whose pioneering approach to colour, material, surface, and space has redefined the boundaries between fine art and craft. Spanning fifty years of work, this, that and the other brings together Poncelet’s early sculptural ceramics, large-scale drawings, and small paintings from the 1970-1980s with recent watercolours and composite paintings, tracing a continuous dialogue between material, process, and pattern across diverse media. This is Poncelet’s first major London presentation in over 20 years, following her major retrospective at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) last year.

Working on the fringes of the American Pattern & Decoration and the French Supports/Surfaces movements, Poncelet’s practice has never been confined to a single medium, moving fluidly between ceramics, painting, drawing, photography, textiles and site-specific design. Unlike many of her male contemporaries in the New British Sculpture movement, her work remained deeply engaged with material instability, ignoring the boundaries between fine art and craft. 

She first gained recognition in the 1970s for her sculptural ceramics, which explored modular variation and repetition. A selection of small vessels on view from this period demonstrates how she transformed decorative objects into works of art through subtle interventions in pattern and form, challenging traditional expectations of ‘craft’ and functional design. 

A major turning point came in 1986, when she participated in the Venice Biennale, presenting sculptural ceramics resembling fragmented, tangled limbs, starkly arranged on a white platform. These works abandoned traditional associations with ceramics, instead evoking disembodied, visceral forms, reflecting both personal and cultural tensions at the time. This approach is echoed in exhibited works such as Handbag (1985) and Object in Four Parts (1986), where Jacqueline Poncelet embraced a more architectural, constructivist sensibility. These pieces feature folded, stacked, and interlocking elements, their surfaces enriched with embossed wallpaper textures and painted finishes, reinforcing her fascination with pattern, repetition, and material complexity. At times resembling fragmented architectural facades, at others recalling the draped quality of textiles, these ceramics redefine the relationship between form and function, marking a pivotal moment in her practice.

Such sculptural works are shown alongside large-scale drawings and small paintings from the 1980s, which reflect her exploration of form, space and structure on a two-dimensional plane. Using interwoven lines, gridded compositions, and layered washes of colour, Poncelet experimented with the optical tension between depth and flatness. Her exhibited Untitled drawings almost recall architectural blueprints, mapping out imagined spaces and objects through multiple shifting perspectives at once. Her small paintings from this period reflect similar ideas, typically juxtaposing rigid geometric structures and definitive blocks of colour with more organic, meandering forms. This playful push and pull between order and fluidity, structure and improvisation, remains central to her work.

The grids and weaves of these works are taken a step further by Poncelet with her composite paintings, such as Kiss c.1995, which literally integrate handwoven elements, digital printing, and painted forms, layering different processes, textures, and imagery within a single surface. Echoing the grid-like structures of her early paintings, these works continue Poncelet’s interest in probing the tension between precision and spontaneity, structure and disruption.

The focus on pattern and movement is central to her more recent works on paper included in the exhibition. A selection of smaller geometric watercolours from 2009–2023 are characterised by fine pencil lines, intricate grid formations, and vivid colour. Inspired by the natural world and the changing seasons, these meticulous works balance precision with fluidity, using carefully constructed frameworks to explore rhythm, optical movement, and spatial depth. 

Her most recent watercolours from 2023 take a more gestural, expansive approach, reflecting an increasing interest in landscape and memory, particularly inspired by her time in Wales. Built up in layered washes of colour, these works move away from the structured geometry of her earlier pieces, embracing a more organic, shifting visual language that evokes horizons, changing light, and atmospheric transformation.

Poncelet’s work is held in major public collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Though historically overlooked in favor of male contemporaries, her contributions to British sculpture, ceramics, textiles, and public art are now receiving overdue recognition. 

this, that and the other showcases Jacqueline Poncelet’s five-decade exploration of colour, material, pattern, and space, highlighting her enduring impact as one of the most important living artists working at the intersection of art and design.

JACQUELINE PONCELET - BIOGRAPHY

Born in Liège, Belgium, Jacqueline Poncelet is a pioneer in ceramics and textiles. Renowned primarily for her simple, bone china ceramics, Poncelet's work shifted after a trip to NYC in 1978/79. Inspired by the urban environment, she started replicating artificial patterns through the use of the incised line or via coloured clays leaving behind industrial techniques to create unique hand built shapes.

Returning to England in the 1980s, Jacqueline Poncelet became loosely associated with the New British Sculpture movement at the time, led by Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor and Bill Woodrow who were reacting to the prevailing ideas of Minimal and Conceptual art. As a woman, and the wife of Richard Deacon, she was overshadowed by her male contemporaries, never achieving the same level of success despite being actively collected by major museums and having two major solo shows during that decade (at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London in 1985 and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge in 1988). The '90s heralded the start of the YBA movement, and her work fell out of favour in the commercial art world. Jacqueline Poncelet focused on large-scale public art commissions and teaching. In 2009, she was commissioned by Art on the Underground to make a permanent work for Edgware Road Tube station; Wrapper was completed in 2012. In 2013, she was commissioned by Tate Enterprises to work with Melin Tregwynt in Pembrokeshire to produce woven textiles, which are now available at Tate Britain and Tate Modern to purchase in the museums' shops.

Jacqueline Poncelet lives and works between London and the South Wales Valleys. She studied at Wolverhampton College of Art and the Royal College of Art from 1966 until 1972. Poncelet is represented in important public collections throughout the world, including Tate Modern and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Stedeljk Museum in Amsterdam; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

RICHARD SALTOUN GALLERY | LONDON

41 Dover Street,, London W1S 4NS

www.richardsaltoun.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