Galleries 223-232 Drawn largely from The Met’s renowned collection of Japanese art, this exhibition explores the twin themes of anxiety and hope, with a focus on the human stories in and around art and art making. The exhibition begins with sacred images from early Japan that speak to concerns about death, dying, and the afterlife or that were created in response to other uncertainties, such as war and natural disaster. The presentation then proceeds chronologically, highlighting medieval Buddhist images of paradises and hells, Zen responses to life and death, depictions of war and pilgrimage, and the role of protective and hopeful images in everyday life. In the final galleries, the exhibition’s underlying themes are explored through a selection of modern woodblock prints, garments, and photographs. Rotation 1: April 8–August 13, 2023 Rotation 2: August 26–November 26, 2023 Rotation 3: December 16, 2023–April 14, 2024 Rotation 4: April 27–July 14, 2024
]]>at The Met Fifth Avenue, 746 North Pueblo Indian pottery embodies four main natural elements: earth, water, air, and fire. It is an art form literally of land and place, and is one of America’s ancient Indigenous creative expressions. Foregrounding Pueblo voices and aesthetics, Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery is the first community-curated Native American exhibition in the history of The Met. The effort features more than one hundred historical, modern, and contemporary clay works and offers a critical understanding of Pueblo pottery as community-based knowledge and personal experience. Dating from the eleventh century to the present day, the featured artworks represent the aesthetic lineages of New Mexico’s nineteen Río Grande Pueblos as well as the West Texas community of Ysleta del Sur and the Hopi tribe of Arizona—sovereign Indigenous nations where pots and other ceramic works have been made and used for millennia. Visual and material languages of pottery and intergenerational narratives are highlighted throughout the exhibition. Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery was curated by the Pueblo Pottery Collective, a group that includes sixty individual members of diverse ages, backgrounds, and professions, who represent twenty-one source communities. Selected works are from two significant Pueblo pottery collections—the Indian Arts Research Center of the School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Vilcek Foundation, New York, New York. Grounded in Clay will be on view during regular hours at The Met and by appointment at the Vilcek Foundation from July 13, 2023 to June 4, 2024. Click here to schedule a tour at the Vilcek Foundation. Grounded in Clay is a collaborative exhibition curated by the Pueblo Pottery Collective, organized by the School for Advanced Research and the Vilcek Foundation in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
]]>MoMA, Floor 1, 1 South Any act of good design must also be an act of empathy, respect, and responsibility toward all living organisms and ecosystems––as well as future generations. By translating scientific, technological, and social revolutions into objects and behaviors, design can be an agent of positive change and play a crucial part in restoring the fragile ties between humans and the rest of nature. Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design explores the regenerative power of design as it shifts its focus towards a more collaborative rapport with the natural world. The objects in this exhibition highlight the entire life cycle of the materials they are made of. From extraction to reuse or disposal, designers are exploring new ways––sometimes drawn from old traditions––to enlist materials in their efforts to bring ecosystems into balance. Cow manure collected from the streets of Indonesia is transformed into casings for loudspeakers and lamps. Bricks made from crop waste and fungi mycelium are used as a carbon-neutral building material. Bees fabricate honeycomb vases over human-made forms. These objects demonstrate that design can be elegant, innovative, and compelling, while at the same time offering new strategies for repairing our planet. Organized by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, and Maya Ellerkmann, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design.
]]>Americas Society presents the first part of El Dorado: Myths of Gold, a two-part group exhibition exploring the legend of El Dorado as a foundational myth of the Americas. The exhibition presents artworks by more than sixty artists, from the pre-Hispanic period to the contemporary era, that challenge, reinforce, and question the continuity and effects of the myth in the Americas into the present. El Dorado is a tale of searches and quests, delirium, and violence. During the colonization of the Americas, rumors of an Indigenous kingdom replete with gold and precious stones quickly permeated the European imagination, galvanizing the invasion of the continent without regard for Indigenous lives, ancestral territories, or environmental concerns. Despite never being found, the mythical El Dorado functioned as a foundational ethos for the colonization of the Americas that persists until today. The city of gold has transformed into more intangible, though equally powerful, personal and collective values—such as individualism, greed, and consumerism—that are central to contemporary capitalist societies. As we grapple with the enormous long-term sociopolitical and environmental effects of this operating dynamic, there is a pressing need to reevaluate its influence on our identification as human beings and members of a globalized society. Presenting artworks from the precolonial period to today, this exhibition complicates and reevaluates the idea of El Dorado, employing the myth as a framework for understanding the Americas. By placing historical and contemporary artworks together, the exhibition facilitates dialogues between past and present to investigate how the myth has shaped the value of gold, as well as that of territories, peoples, religious beliefs, and nature. Part I of the exhibition will be on display from September 6 through December 16, 2023 and part II will take place from January 24 through May 18, 2024. The exhibition is accompanied by two publications: an exhibition catalog featuring a curatorial text along with the exhibition checklist, to be published in September 2023; and a reader on El Dorado featuring essays by more than fourteen scholars as well as primary sources. This new anthology will be published in early 2024. Artists in the show include: Olga de Amaral, Denilson Baniwa, Bruno Baptistelli, Andrés Bedoya, Charles Bentley, Juan Brenner, Fernando Bryce, Wendy Cabrera Rubio, Leda Catunda, Chiriquí artist, Coclé artists, william cordova, Juan Covelli, Covens & Mortier, Theodor De Bry, Dario Escobar, Scherezade Garcia, Anna Bella Geiger, Mathias Goeritz, Joaquín Gutiérrez, Thomas Hariot, John Harris, Pablo Helguera, Ana Mercedes Hoyos, Alfredo Jaar, Nancy La Rosa & Juan Salas Carreño, Lambayeque artist, Jaime Lauriano, Mariano León, Hew Locke, Karen Lofgren, Juan Pedro López, Liliana Maresca, Esperanza Mayobre, Sara Mejia Kriendler, Ana María Millán, Marta Minujín, Herman Moll, Priscilla Monge, Santiago Montoya, Carlos Motta, Eamon Ore-Giron, Rubén Ortiz Torres, Ebony G. Patterson, Rolando Peña, José Antonio Peñaloza, Armando Queiroz, Ronny Quevedo, Mazenett Quiroga, Quimbaya style artist, Freddy Rodríguez, Carlos Rojas, Miguel Ángel Rojas, Luis Romero, Harmonia Rosales, Johann Moritz Rugendas, Tiago Sant’Ana, Julia Santos Solomon, Vicente Telles, Pedro Terán, Ernest Charton de Treville, Moara Tupinambá, Veraguas artist, Laura Vinci, and Alberta Whittle Curated by Aimé Iglesias Lukin, Tie Jojima, and Edward J. Sullivan.
]]>For over three decades, Chus Burés has been collaborating with artists, filmmakers, fashion designers, and others on the creation of wearable artworks. In these works, Burés brings to life, in physical form, the dialogues and the encounters of different aesthetic ideas. Trained in interior design in Spain, Burés has always understood body language and body ornaments as a means of cultural expression. In his work, Burés embraces unconventional materials and experimental designs that translate each individual collaboration. This exhibition is focused on his work created with major Latin American artists, revealing different aspects of their practices. Chus Burés collaberators include Antonio Asís, Tony Bechara, Carlos Cruz-Díez, Sérvulo Esmeraldo, Horacio García Rossi, Carmen Herrera, Alexis Leyva Machado o Kcho, Julio Le Parc, Macaparana, Marie Orensanz, César Paternosto, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Luis Tomasello. About the artist Chus Burés is a Spanish designer who is passionate about body language and clothing as a means of cultural expression. He learned about the jewelry trade in workshops based in Barcelona and Madrid, where he subsequently established a studio where he could collaborate with fashion designers, photographers, and artists. These artists include Pedro Almodóvar, Bigas Luna, and Adolfo Arrieta, as well as international brands like Agnés b. in Paris and Akris in Switzerland. Burés has also worked with the Whitney Museum of American Art, for whom he designed an exclusive collection. Art as Ornament will be presented in Americas Society Library and Archives exhibition space from September 6, 2023 through May 18, 2024.
]]>New Museum Lobby Gallery For her first New York museum solo exhibition, Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo, widely known as Puppies Puppies, transforms the New Museum’s Lobby Gallery into a mise-en-scène for her daily activities, with a portion of the space functioning as a duplicate of the artist’s actual bedroom. Using a fogging glass mechanism, Puppies Puppies will alternately obscure and reveal her activities in the gallery to visitors, foregrounding themes of visibility, representation, and cultural consumption. By allowing a spectacularized view into her daily existence, Kuriki-Olivo celebrates the nuanced layers of her own identity, eliding tokenization and reductive narratives of racial and trans identities. Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): Nothing New is curated by Vivian Crockett, Curator, with Ian Wallace, Curatorial Assistant.
]]>Es Devlin, a white woman with dark hair wearing a vibrant red jumpsuit, appears miniscule in the center of a gray and white sphere with swooping gray arches and city skylines. The images on the sphere are mirrored, as is Es herself; a reflection of her extends upside down from beneath her feet. An Atlas of Es Devlin is the first monographic museum exhibition dedicated to British artist and stage designer Es Devlin (born 1971), who is renowned for work that transforms audiences. Since beginning in small theaters in 1995, she has charted a course from kinetic stage designs at the National Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera to installations at major institutions, including the World Expo, Lincoln Center, and the United Nations headquarters. Her sculptures for Olympic Ceremonies, NFL Super Bowl halftime shows, and stadium tours for Beyoncé, The Weeknd, and U2 frame narratives that feel personal at a monumental scale. Over the past decade, she has adapted her craft to address climate and civilizational crises. Her public installations on endangered species and languages have inspired audiences to reimagine their connections to each other and to the planet. She shapes stories in ways that stay with us and reframe our thinking. These stories often begin in the margins of texts. Devlin’s work is rooted in a lifelong practice of reading and drawing. Sketches and small cardboard models form the seeds of her large-scale architectures. Until now, these drawings, paintings, and sculptures have remained unseen. For this first monographic exhibition of her work, Devlin and the curators dug through her 30-year archive, mapping throughlines that connect her teenage paintings to her stage designs to her contemporary installations. Devlin calls the result an atlas—a collection of maps.
]]>Chambers Fine Art presents “The Cutting Edge” of Lu Shengzhong. In the history of Chambers Fine Art, Lu Shengzhong (1952-2022) played a role of particular importance, both chronologically and as an indication of the guiding principles of the gallery after It was established in New York in 2000. This display of selected works is a tribute to Lu’s singular vision as an artist and as an influence on several generations of younger artists at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing where he taught for many years. When Christophe Mao made the decision to open a gallery devoted to contemporary Chinese art in the years immedIately before the millennium, there was an urgent need to identify a group of artists who did not conform to what had already become a stereotype in the West, the flashy oil paintings associated with Political Pop and Gaudy Art. When he was introduced to Lu in Beijing, he immediately felt that he would be an ideal candidate for his first exhibition of contemporary art as at that time the plan was to have alternate exhibitions of contemporary art and Classical Chinese art and scholar’s objects. Born in Shandong Province China in 1952, Lu graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1957, where he had been associated with the Department of Folk Arts. Continuing his research, he made numerous trips in Shanxi Province and other areas where he developed considerable expertise in the tradition of paper-cuts pasted on walls, windows etc., particularly for Chinese New Year. He was the author of numerous books on the subject. Simultaneously, he was establishing a reputation with his own remarkable paper cuts in which he said, he “walked away from the cultural confusion of the time and turned back to the villages, to traditional Chinese folk art.” He began working on a very large scale, as in the 1990 installation Hall of Calling the Soul filled with thousands of the “little red figures ” that were to become his signature as a paper cut artist. The title of Lu Shengzhong’s first exhibition at Chambers Fine Arts, First Encounter (November 11, 2001 – January 2, 2002) refers not only to the first meeting between Christophe Mao and Lu Shengzhong but also to the introduction of Lu’s art to the United States. In the large vertical panels of Poetry of Harmony, lines of what appear to be Chinese characters are in fact left-over scraps of paper from the intricately cut circular forms at the top. The relationship between positive and negative forms is of crucial importance in Lu’s art. Favorably reviewed by Holland Cotter in the New York Times (January 5, 2001), he noted that Lu “used this fragile medium , notable for its lacey, intricate patterns, to create a temple-like installation.” Two more exhibitions followed at Chambers Fine Art, Lu Shengzhong’s The Book of Humanity (November 6, 2003 – January 4, 2004) and Square Earth, Round Heaven Lu Shenzhong Works 2007. In the former, there were two series of works, sets of books in which red on black or black on red collages were gathered in book form, some with Western style bindings, some with traditional Chinese sewn bindings, and Human Bricks in which the hundreds of sheets of red paper from which“little red figures “ had been cut were assembled in multi-layered collages. In the latter, Lu moved into three dimensions, assembling multiple layers of paper into cubes and spheres, described by Robert E. Harriet, Jr., as the “visual and spatial correlates of round/heaven and square/earth that permeates Chinese art and architecture. In his role as an educator, Lu became the director of the department of experimental art at CAFA in 2004 and retained that position until his retirement. Lu Shengzhong’s achievement as an artist was to develop the traditional Chinese craft of papercut in such a way that it was possible to use it not only for small scale individual works but also for installations of great complexity. For those who had the privilege to watch Lu Shengzhong at work, using his scissors with unerring skill so that complex designs in which positive and negative forms emerged effortlessly without any preliminary drawings, it was no suppose that the same gift could be used in the creation of three-dimensional versions of his “little red men.”
]]>In the mid-1960s, Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) began embracing joyously transgressive modes of performance, film, and installation that championed marginalized persons and their culture. Created while Oiticica was self-exiled to New York in the 1970s, the immersive 1973 installation series of Bloco-Experiências in Cosmococa–Programa in Progress, or Cosmococas, operate on multiple levels to transform pop and underground culture into a psychedelic experience. Made in collaboration with the Brazilian filmmaker Neville D’Almeida (b. 1941), for each of the five original Cosmococas the artists crafted two sets of instructions: one for public institutional presentations and, in an anti-elitist effort, another for display in private homes. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Cosmococas, the artist’s nonprofit foundation, the Projeto Hélio Oiticica, has organized a year-long celebration for 2023, during which the series has been installed in cities around the world. The Hunter College Art Galleries have joined the initiative to present Cosmic Shelter: Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s Private Cosmococas at the Leubsdorf Gallery from October 12, 2023–March 30, 2024. This exhibition features the United States premiere of two private Cosmococas and includes archival material to provide historical context for the layers of political commentary embedded in the subversive, psychedelic series. Curated by Daniela Mayer. The exhibition was developed in conjunction with a two-semester independent study by Hunter College MA Art History students Thais Bignardi, Rowan Diaz-Toth, and Angelica Pomar. Support for this exhibition is provided by the Hunter College Foundation with additional support from Lisson Gallery, Leon Tovar Gallery, and Sokoloff + Associates.
]]>MINUS SPACE is delighted to present the exhibition Sharon Brant: Change and Recurrence. This is the Beacon, New York-based artist’s third solo show at the gallery and it will present a selection of recent abstract paintings. For more than five decades, artist Sharon Brant has produced conceptually and aesthetically rigorous hard-edged paintings, works on paper, drawings, and reliefs. In the works on view in her new exhibition Change and Recurrence, Brant continues to mine, question, challenge, and further her enduring investigation into the reductive elements of color, shape, and line, and their inexhaustible arrangement on a two-dimensional surface. Brant’s new paintings concisely present two primary visual elements – a dominant, smoothly-painted field of a single color (e.g., pink, blue, orange, or black) which is topped by a dynamic, often impastoed set of concentric lines forming the shape of hovering energy. Her works pair passive and active, gestural and reductive, vibrant and subdued, dominant and recessive, and textured and flat elements in animated opposition. About her ongoing studio practice, Brant reflects, “Many times I wonder what a painting is; it mystifies me. Usually, I have to silence all other voices in my head when entering the studio. It’s when I have been painting for a while that I hear another voice, not mine, that speaks to me about the painting. Then I know I’m in the emotional space of the painting — a pause from the outside world that is the source of it all.” The artist will give a free, online public talk via Zoom on Thursday, January 25, 7-8pm EST. (Register here) She will also lead an in-person exhibition walk-through on Saturday, March 2, 3pm. Masks are suggested for the health of all guests. ABOUT THE ARTIST Sharon Brant (b. 1944) has exhibited her work internationally for the past five decades, including in Europe, Australasia, Mexico, and the United States. She has previously mounted two well-received solo exhibitions here at the gallery — Plenty (2018) and Sideswiped (2012). She was also included in our recent group exhibitions Twenty (2023), Untitled (Summer) (2019), Subvert City (2018), Brant / Brennan / Zinsser (2016), MINUS SPACE en Oaxaca: Panorama de 31 artistas internacionales at the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca Alcalá in Oaxaca, Mexico (2012), and MINUS SPACE at MoMA PS1 (2008-2009). Brant has also exhibited her work at museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Rochester Museum, Everson Museum of Art, and Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, among many others. Brant studied at the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri from 1962-1965 and moved permanently to New York City in 1966. Her work was included several years later in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Painting Annual in 1972. She exhibited regularly with OK Harris (solo exhibitions 1970, 1972), A.I.R. Gallery (solo exhibitions 1989, 1991, 1994, 1996), and Elizabeth Moore Fine Art (solo exhibitions 2007, 2011). In 1968, Brant was one of the founding members, along with Jon Bauch, Bruce Brown, Olga Ephron, Claire Frank, Bob Harris, Arthur Hughes, Ray Kelly, Robert Resnick, Arleen Schloss, and Gary Smith, of MUSEUM, A Project of Living Artists, an artist-run exhibition and meeting space located at 729 Broadway in New York City. MUSEUM was intended as a politically-progressive community center for artists with the goal of supporting “a more alive connection between art and society, without the dissipation of force and quality occurring so frequently in the current art establishment.” MUSEUM’s membership grew to more than 300 individuals before it closed in 1971. Brant was a member of A.I.R. Gallery from 1989-1996, the first artist-run gallery for women in the United States founded in 1972. She has been a member of American Abstract Artists since 2004. In 2012, Brant was awarded a grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, ARTnews, Art International, Arts Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and The New York Times, among many other publications.
]]>Lifelong partners in art and life, Takesada Matsutani and Kate Van Houten first met in 1967 while working at Atelier 17, the celebrated print studio established in Paris by Stanley William Hayter. Beginning 25 January 2024, Hauser & Wirth New York will present a two-part exhibition exploring the couple’s overlapping oeuvres and deep involvement with printmaking over the years through a selection of etchings, screenprints, photography, painting, sculpture and various ephemera on view at the gallery’s 18th Street location in New York City. The first installment of this presentation will focus on works made using intaglio techniques, while the second will foreground hard-edge silkscreens in vibrant color. Through these works and related public programs, ‘Paris Prints 1967-1978’ will draw visitors into the intimate creative dialogue that has unfolded over half a century between two remarkable individuals in love with both artistic innovation and one another. One of the youngest members of the radical Japanese avant-garde art collective Gutai, Matsutani left Japan for Paris in November of 1966 after receiving first prize at the First Mainichi Art Competition and a six-month scholarship from the French government to study abroad. Having never left Japan before, his journey to France would ultimately transform both his artistic career and personal life: while the teachings and ethos of Gutai have exerted an enduring influence upon him, nearly 50 years later Matsutani still calls Paris home. Shortly after arriving in Paris, Matsutani began to work at Atelier 17 print studio, where the guiding principle was to challenge the medium’s reputation as a ‘reproductive’ art. Stanley William Hayter’s workshop was a nexus of creative exchange and collaboration, both in Paris and New York, and exerted profound influence upon such artists as Louise Bourgeois, Salvador DalÍ, Max Ernst, Joan Miró and Joan Mitchell. Through the exceptional capabilities of Atelier 17, American abstraction and the New York School collided and mingled with the European avant garde; it was there that Matsutani devoted himself to the techniques of printmaking. Atelier 17 and its cohort of artists inspired him to explore new forms of artistic experimentation and move away from the three-dimensional paintings he had been making in Japan to investigate flatness through engraving. Atelier 17 is also where Matsutani would meet the woman who would become his lifelong artistic compatriot and romantic partner: Kate Van Houten. Van Houten arrived in Paris and began working at Atelier 17 shortly before Matustani. Having recently studied sculpture and painting in Italy, she was unfamiliar with the print world but devoted to becoming a working artist. ‘The only stipulation Bill [Hayter] had for involvement was that you had to have the serious intention of being a professional artist,’ Van Houten has said. ‘And the only other rule he had, probably because this was the late 1960s in Paris and we all know what came along by 1968, was: No politics. The internationality of the studio was really extraordinary and there were many women involved, which you couldn’t say about other parts of the art world in those days, especially the United States.’ Matustani’s unique way of working immediately impressed Van Houten, particularly his intense concentration. And while many artists working at the studio were focused upon experimenting with the color viscosity method pioneered by Hayter, Matustani wanted to do something totally different by exploring the potential of using only black. Eventually, Van Houten turned her attention away from etching and toward screen printing. She was so enchanted by the rich quality of silkscreen colors that she decided to leave Atelier 17 and open her own studio space with a friend in the 14th arrondissement. At the same time, her relationship with Matsutani was evolving and he would join her at her studio while remaining engaged with Atelier 17, where he had become Hayter’s assistant. Having access to these two very different workspaces inspired Matsutani to begin mixing mediums on the same sheet, making etchings on top of screen prints and using both studios to create a single work of art. For silkscreen, the paper had to be dry, for etching it had to be humid. So, Matsutani would make a screen print at Van Houten’s, then soak it and do the etching on top at Hayter’s––a radical and highly experimental technique for that time. Matsutani and Van Houten continued to work with Hayter until the late 1970s, when the nature of their projects organically shifted to other mediums. To this day, these two artists continue to collaborate with each other, making books of poetry and various works of art together, drawing on their shared experiences and affinities as well as their many differences for inspiration. In a recent interview Matsutani said, ‘You know, we’re very different. American and Japanese, from very different backgrounds, sometimes like oil and water. That’s why it’s always been so interesting with this lady. I’ve learned a lot from her. I don’t know if she’s learned a lot from me. But maybe she has. We’ve been together a lot of years.’ Takesada Matsutani was born in Osaka in 1937. He began exhibiting with the Gutai Group in 1960, along with Shūji Mukai and Tsuyoshi Maekawa, and officially joined the group in 1963. In 1966, he received a grant from the French government after winning first prize in the 1st Mainichi Art Competition, and subsequently moved to Paris where he continues to live and work today. His work can be found in many public institutions including Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan and the City Museum of Art and History, Ashiya city, Japan. Matsutani was most recently the subject of a major retrospective spanning 60 years of his career at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In the fall of 2024 he will be the subject of a retrospective exhibition at Tokyo Opera City Gallery. Van Houten studied at Western College for Women in Ohio and at the Art Students League in New York before moving to Milan and later Paris. In 1967, she joined the Paris-based Atelier 17 printmaking workshop. With friends, she later set up a silkscreen studio. Her prints were first shown at the Galerie Zunini in 1968 and later alongside her paintings at the Galerie Haut-Pave. Van Houten has participated in printmaking biennales in Kraków, Poland; Brooklyn, New York; Conde-Bonsecours, Belgium; Bradford, England; Bhopal, India and Chamaliere, France, along with solo exhibitions in France, Japan and the U.S. Her work is represented in public and private collections throughout the world.
]]>Dual exhibitions at kaufmann repetto and Anton Kern Gallery survey the different aspects of Georgian artist Elene Chantladze’s practice. At kaufmann repetto, a span of works that include landscapes, portraiture, and still life exemplify her sensitive registers of mark-making and uses of unconventional materiality. The singular point of view in these drawings and paintings possess a diaristic intimacy while conjuring a rich image-repertoire of shared associations. While at Anton Kern, her different modes of world-building draw on art historical and literary traditions of the pastoral and the folk tale to explore the everyday and the speculative characteristics that buttress her portrayals of people and animals within the landscapes they inhabit. From washes of color to finer renderings evoking mood and atmosphere, these works elaborate narrative potential through figures, relations, and mise-en-scène that are both familiar and fanciful. Born by the sea in Supsa, Georgia, a town named after the river running by her home, Elene Chantladze gathered stones, wrote stories and plays, kept diaries, and read voraciously from a young age. For much of her life, she has lived in Tskaltubo, where warm radon-carbonate mineral springs coursing under the earth here brought fame to the region in the form of spas popular with the Soviets. While working in the area’s various sanatoriums and diagnostic centers to support her family, she would collect the empty chocolate boxes discarded by doctors, the old calendar pages the nurses gave her, or any thrown-out items with surfaces suitable to make drawings and paintings. As proper paper was expensive and too scarce for her to procure, Chantladze embraced these obscure materials to create visual corollaries for the fables that still contour her imaginary. Her drawings and paintings inhabit a dual space, grounded in ordinary stuff of everyday life as well as reflecting a highly subjective representation of lived experience. Her approach to image-making is layered, accreted with meaning through both the materials she uses and how she synthesizes personal history, literature, local custom, and global events into her fantastic tableaux. The range of media she employs—from traditional paint and charcoal to more unconventional materials like kerosene and berry juice, as well as natural elements such as stone and man-made detritus including paper plates and plastic lids—not only speaks to the primary relationship of Chantladze’s being in the world, but also to the deep compulsion of the artist to create something from anything. Equally inspired by the surface differentiations on a rock found by the riverbank as in the stains and marks on the discarded scraps on which she draws and paints, her quasi-fairy-tale compositions engage with vertiginous simultaneity, idiosyncratic figuration, and surreal narrativity. In her work, there is a porosity of being, children roam fields of flowers in which their own faces peer back at them, animals approach as friends and hover as protecting spirits over landscapes rife with foliage, lovers can be star-crossed and bridegrooms monstrous. However, any perception of faux-naif sensibility belies a complex reparative impulse for portraying worlds in whose making Chantladze recenters her vision and subject position within a culture that has traditionally allowed for this kind of creative labor and self-taught practice to remain invisible. Like a folklorist attending to local myth and legends that bind community beliefs or an astrologer scrying the night sky for patterns in the sky congruent to our most human hopes and fears, Chantladze’s work, evokes the potential for the otherworldly to elucidate or reimagine the everyday. As Annina Zimmermann writes, “Elene Chantladze is not creating new worlds, but tracing life and arranging it into meaning.”[1] In this tracing and rearranging, she discovers not only a sense of selfhood located within the psycho-aesthetic experience, but remakes a world in which her perspectives—shifting and idiomatic—enliven her surroundings through both wonder and critique. Elene Chantladze lives and works Tskaltubo, Georgia. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zurich; Gallery Nectar, Tbilisi; LC Queisser, Tbilisi; Modern Art, London, and Fierman Gallery, New York. With artist Ser Serpas, she had an exhibition at Conceptual Fine Arts, Milan, and has been included the group exhibitions “girls, girls, girls,” curated by Simone Rocha at Lismore Castle Arts in Lismore Ireland, and more recently with Rooms Studio at M HKA in Antwerp Belgium. A publication The Gift to Irma with essays by Ser Serpas and Miciah Hussey is forthcoming. —Miciah Hussey [1] Zimmermann, Annina, and Thomas Heimann, “Encounter with the Forest People: Introduction to the universe of the artist Elene Chantladze” in Elene Chantladze. Tbilisi: Posta Press, 2019. 97.
]]>Gallery Floors 1 & 2 Anton Kern Gallery presents Onwards, Brian Calvin’s eighth solo exhibition in New York. Spanning the first and second floor galleries, the artist presents 17 new paintings in a variety of scales, and 50 framed pencil drawings extracted from a 2022 sketchbook that he filled by making one drawing each day.
]]>Curated by Ebony L. Haynes A two part solo exhibition: Andrew Kreps Gallery 22 Cortlandt Alley and 394 Broadway David Zwirner 519 W 19th St and 525 W 19th St On view through April 6, 2024 Andrew Kreps presents a two-part solo exhibition curated by Ebony L. Haynes at 22 Cortlandt Alley & 394 Broadway in Tribeca and at David Zwirner’s galleries, 519 and 525 West 19th Street in Chelsea. Titled Post No Bills, this expansive presentation will span four decades of the artist’s work, including paintings and works on paper, many of which have never before been seen. This exhibition offers visitors insight into Saunders’s singular and influential practice, and coincides with the recent announcement that the artist will now be co-represented by David Zwirner and Andrew Kreps. In his works, Saunders brings together his extensive formal training with his own observations and lived experience. His assemblage-style paintings frequently begin with a monochromatic black ground elaborated with white chalk—both a pointed reversal of the traditional figure-ground relationship and a nod to Saunders’s decades spent as a teacher. He subsequently adds a range of other markings, materials, and talismans. Expressionistic swaths of paint, minimalist motifs, line drawings, and passages of vibrant color tangle with found objects, signs, and doors collected from his urban environment, creating unexpected visual rhymes and resonances that reward careful and sustained looking. At once deliberately constructed and improvisatory, didactic and deeply felt, these richly built surfaces conjure the full-ness of life, and its complications, allowing for a vast and nuanced multiplicity of meanings.
]]>Benjamin Butler’s sixth solo show at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery centers around a body of work that began taking shape shortly after his 2022 exhibition at the gallery’s Ludlow Street space. In that show, Butler had included a single painting of a pinecone, presented alongside paintings of flowers, mountain landscapes, a pine tree, and pixelated forests. It was in this pinecone motif that he discovered a new focus. Over the next two years, Butler developed twelve paintings, each the same scale, using the image and structure of a pinecone as starting points. His new paintings, based on the geometrically organized, often triangular ‘meta’ patterns inherent to the forms of pinecones, lend themselves to frameworks as varied as minimalism, folk art, Cubism, still life, and kitsch. This repetition of motif, combined with shifting levels of abstraction, allows Butler to create paintings that are both constrained by and liberated from concerns about ‘subject matter’. The rigor of Butler’s studio practice is unveiled through his working process, revealing ideas that visibly progress from one painting to the next. For most of the past two decades, Benjamin Butler has painted, in varying manifestations, the regularly spaced verticals and diagonals of forests and lyrically curved branches of single trees. Whether reducing landscapes to single color canvases or grouping vertical green monochromes, his works have come to signify natural objects and/or the space around them. Consistency can be found in Butler’s subjects as well as his deadpan handling of painting’s histories. Variety in the work comes by way of his ever-shifting approaches to his recurring subjects and painting processes. Benjamin Butler was born in Kansas (1975). He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2000). After more than a decade in New York City, Butler relocated to Vienna, Austria, where he’s lived since 2012. His work has been exhibited internationally, and is represented in institutional collections including the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas and the Glenbow Collection, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York and Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo.
]]>David Zwirner presents concurrent exhibitions of work by Huma Bhabha (b. 1962) at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street and 34 East 69th Street locations in New York. These are the gallery’s first presentations of Bhabha’s work since the announcement of her representation in 2022, and they follow the artist’s 2023 solo exhibition at M Leuven, Belgium, which recently traveled to MO.CO., Montpellier, France. In March 2024, three sculptures by Bhabha will be specially featured in the retrospective exhibition Julie Mehretu: Ensemble at Palazzo Grassi, Venice. In April 2024, a large-scale installation by Bhabha, commissioned by Public Art Fund, will be unveiled at Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York. Bhabha creates layered and nuanced sculptures and drawings that center on a reinvention of the figure and its expressive possibilities. Her formally innovative practice pulls from a wide range of references, from those that span the history of art to quotidian influences such as science fiction and horror films and the makeshift structures and detritus of urban life. Instinctive and rigorous, her work brings diverse aesthetic, cultural, and psychological touchstones into contact with matters of surface, materiality, and formal construction. Featured at West 20th Street are new sculptures, varying in size from small to monumental; on view at East 69th Street are new works on paper and smaller-scale sculptures. Together, the exhibitions highlight Bhabha’s ability to move between a wide range of media and forms, creating deeply resonant hybrid figures that seem to simultaneously dwell in the past, present, and future. The exhibition in Chelsea comprises a grouping of figures in patinated and painted bronze or cast in iron. The works are sculpted from materials including styrofoam, cork, and clay, which the artist then carves, gouges, paints over, and otherwise marks up before casting. While distinct in appearance and size, all the sculptures in the exhibition seem to be connected by a kind of genetic thread, forming an emotional hive that resides in a shared landscape of destruction, displacement, and rebirth. A lone diminutive figure cast in bronze and painted from the neck down in styrofoam pink, What Should it Be (2024) stands like a ringmaster or liminal guide poised at the threshold of distinct physical or psychic terrains as it leads visitors into a charged zone, recalling the titular character from Andrei Tarkovsky’s science-fiction cinematic masterpiece Stalker (1979). Beyond lies a group of three cast-iron sculptures—Bhabha’s first foray into the medium—of disembodied heads and torsos laid out on concrete plinths, glowing fiery orange as they rust, as if caught in a radioactive wasteland or left for dead on the scorched surface of Mars. The cast-iron works will continue to oxidize and evolve in appearance, affirming the notion of time as a primordial sculptor’s tool—a concept that Bhabha has repeatedly returned to in her oeuvre. Further inside are two upright figures, Maybe Nothing Maybe Everything (2024) and Nothing Falls (2024), both cast in bronze. The former presents a multiheaded creature whose arms are pressed to its chest in prayer or panic. The latter takes the form of a rectangular earthen body that surges upward from the ground—reminiscent of the unshakable monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)—and pushes its bone-white skeletal head toward the open sky as if it is a holy relic or ritual sacrifice on a dais. As Bhabha evocatively describes, the work’s contrasting geometric and organic forms resemble “earth sculpted by wind and fire touching a cloud made of bone.”1 These two sculptures flank the largest figure in the show, Even Stones Have Eyes (2023), which stands more than twelve feet tall. With its shadowy Januslike faces that have been etched, scarred, and seemingly charred, this peg-legged behemoth exudes a thrilling stillness and horror as it towers over its companions like a watchful parent surrounded by its brood. At once monstrous, animal, alien, and deeply human, Bhabha’s totemic figures recall cycles of growth and decay, destruction and restoration, thereby challenging our understandings of permanence, monumentality, and personal and collective histories. At the East 69th Street gallery, the cast-iron sculpture Waddah (2024) takes the form of a lone petrified human figure—devoid of a face or identifying features—that rests on a pedestal reminiscent of black earth. As with many of her recent sculptures, Bhabha considers the plinth to be an intrinsic part of the work, lending the overall arrangement the feeling of a mortal relic or an artifact from another world. The other sculpture on view, My Ancestor (2023), comprises a pair of amputated legs that have been sculpted out of porous cork and inscribed with lines of white chalk to resemble stump feet or cloven hooves. Hovering between states of ruin and repair, these sculptures appear either as bearers of the collective casualties forced on nature, or as signs of fresh life emerging from the earth. Juxtaposed with Waddah and My Ancestor is a suite of new works on paper, each one depicting a different head constructed from vibrant swaths and strokes of ink, acrylic, gouache, and pastel, as well as elements of collage. An enduring and crucial aspect of her practice, Bhabha’s large-format multimedia drawings beckon the viewer with their exaggerated, ghoulish visages and unabashedly confrontational gazes. Together, Bhabha’s sculptures and works on paper are visibly marked by the human hand. With their rough-hewn surfaces, they appear to have emerged from a blasted landscape—like survivors of war, or perhaps prisoners returning home, acutely aware of those left behind. As curator Shanay Jhaveri writes, “The artist’s roving eye speaks volumes to a particular sensibility, one in which various aesthetic practices are in dialogue with one another.… There is a convergence of form and content in her work, coming from different places and histories, that seeks to question rather than affirm extant cultural dynamics.”2 Born in Karachi, Pakistan, Huma Bhabha came to the United States in 1981 to attend the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, from which she received her BFA in 1985. She later studied at the School of the Arts at Columbia University, New York, from which she received her MFA in 1989. The artist presently lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York. In March 2024, three sculptures by Bhabha will be specially featured in the retrospective exhibition Julie Mehretu: Ensemble at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice. In April 2024, a large-scale installation by Bhabha, commissioned by Public Art Fund, will be unveiled at Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York. In 2023, M Leuven, Belgium, presented the solo exhibition Huma Bhabha: LIVIN’ THINGS. The show traveled to MO.CO., Montpellier, France, in November 2023 as Huma Bhabha: A fly appeared, and disappeared. A solo presentation of Bhabha’s work curated by Nicholas Baume was on view at Fundación Casa Wabi, Puerto Escondido, Mexico, from 2022 to 2023. In 2020, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom, presented Huma Bhabha: Against Time. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, organized Huma Bhabha: They Live, on view in 2019, and published an accompanying catalogue. The installation Huma Bhabha: We Come in Peace, was commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2018 for the museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. Previous solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have taken place at prominent institutions such as The Contemporary Austin, Texas (2018); MoMA PS1, New York (2012); Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2012); Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2011); and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2008), among others. Bhabha’s work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions internationally, including Summer Exhibition 2023, Royal Academy of Art, London; Reclaim the Earth, Palais De Tokyo, Paris (2022); Traces, Portland Art Museum, Oregon (2022); Hi Woman (curated by Francesco Bonami), Museo di Palazzo Pretorio, Prato, Italy (2021); NIRIN, 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020); 2019 Yorkshire Sculpture International, Wakefield, United Kingdom; All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale (2015); and the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Bhabha has been the recipient of notable awards, such as the Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship, Berlin Prize, awarded by The American Academy in Berlin (2013); and the Emerging Artist Award, awarded by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2008). In 2022, Bhabha was elected as a National Academician by the The National Academy of Design, New York. In 2023, the artist was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. Work by the artist is held in significant collections worldwide, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Dallas Museum of Art; Des Moines Art Center & Pappajohn Sculpture Park, Des Moines, Iowa; Ekebergparken, Oslo; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi; Long Museum, Shanghai; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Mountain Art Foundation + Frank Lin Art Center, Beijing; Museum of Art, University of New Hampshire, Durham; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; The New York Public Library; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; The Roberts Institute of Art, London; Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates; Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln; Tate, United Kingdom; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; and the Zhuzhong Art Museum, Beijing, among others. 1 Huma Bhabha, in correspondence with the gallery, 2024. 2 Shanay Jhaveri, “Acknowledging Pain: Huma Bhabha’s We Come in Peace,” in Ed Halter, Shanay Jhaveri, and Sheena Wagstaff, eds., Huma Bhabha: We Come in Peace. Exh. bro. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018), p. 45.
]]>David Zwirner presents concurrent exhibitions of work by Huma Bhabha (b. 1962) at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street and 34 East 69th Street locations in New York. These are the gallery’s first presentations of Bhabha’s work since the announcement of her representation in 2022, and they follow the artist’s 2023 solo exhibition at M Leuven, Belgium, which recently traveled to MO.CO., Montpellier, France. In March 2024, three sculptures by Bhabha will be specially featured in the retrospective exhibition Julie Mehretu: Ensemble at Palazzo Grassi, Venice. In April 2024, a large-scale installation by Bhabha, commissioned by Public Art Fund, will be unveiled at Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York. Bhabha creates layered and nuanced sculptures and drawings that center on a reinvention of the figure and its expressive possibilities. Her formally innovative practice pulls from a wide range of references, from those that span the history of art to quotidian influences such as science fiction and horror films and the makeshift structures and detritus of urban life. Instinctive and rigorous, her work brings diverse aesthetic, cultural, and psychological touchstones into contact with matters of surface, materiality, and formal construction. Featured at West 20th Street are new sculptures, varying in size from small to monumental; on view at East 69th Street are new works on paper and smaller-scale sculptures. Together, the exhibitions highlight Bhabha’s ability to move between a wide range of media and forms, creating deeply resonant hybrid figures that seem to simultaneously dwell in the past, present, and future. The exhibition in Chelsea comprises a grouping of figures in patinated and painted bronze or cast in iron. The works are sculpted from materials including styrofoam, cork, and clay, which the artist then carves, gouges, paints over, and otherwise marks up before casting. While distinct in appearance and size, all the sculptures in the exhibition seem to be connected by a kind of genetic thread, forming an emotional hive that resides in a shared landscape of destruction, displacement, and rebirth. A lone diminutive figure cast in bronze and painted from the neck down in styrofoam pink, What Should it Be (2024) stands like a ringmaster or liminal guide poised at the threshold of distinct physical or psychic terrains as it leads visitors into a charged zone, recalling the titular character from Andrei Tarkovsky’s science-fiction cinematic masterpiece Stalker (1979). Beyond lies a group of three cast-iron sculptures—Bhabha’s first foray into the medium—of disembodied heads and torsos laid out on concrete plinths, glowing fiery orange as they rust, as if caught in a radioactive wasteland or left for dead on the scorched surface of Mars. The cast-iron works will continue to oxidize and evolve in appearance, affirming the notion of time as a primordial sculptor’s tool—a concept that Bhabha has repeatedly returned to in her oeuvre. Further inside are two upright figures, Maybe Nothing Maybe Everything (2024) and Nothing Falls (2024), both cast in bronze. The former presents a multiheaded creature whose arms are pressed to its chest in prayer or panic. The latter takes the form of a rectangular earthen body that surges upward from the ground—reminiscent of the unshakable monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)—and pushes its bone-white skeletal head toward the open sky as if it is a holy relic or ritual sacrifice on a dais. As Bhabha evocatively describes, the work’s contrasting geometric and organic forms resemble “earth sculpted by wind and fire touching a cloud made of bone.”1 These two sculptures flank the largest figure in the show, Even Stones Have Eyes (2023), which stands more than twelve feet tall. With its shadowy Januslike faces that have been etched, scarred, and seemingly charred, this peg-legged behemoth exudes a thrilling stillness and horror as it towers over its companions like a watchful parent surrounded by its brood. At once monstrous, animal, alien, and deeply human, Bhabha’s totemic figures recall cycles of growth and decay, destruction and restoration, thereby challenging our understandings of permanence, monumentality, and personal and collective histories. At the East 69th Street gallery, the cast-iron sculpture Waddah (2024) takes the form of a lone petrified human figure—devoid of a face or identifying features—that rests on a pedestal reminiscent of black earth. As with many of her recent sculptures, Bhabha considers the plinth to be an intrinsic part of the work, lending the overall arrangement the feeling of a mortal relic or an artifact from another world. The other sculpture on view, My Ancestor (2023), comprises a pair of amputated legs that have been sculpted out of porous cork and inscribed with lines of white chalk to resemble stump feet or cloven hooves. Hovering between states of ruin and repair, these sculptures appear either as bearers of the collective casualties forced on nature, or as signs of fresh life emerging from the earth. Juxtaposed with Waddah and My Ancestor is a suite of new works on paper, each one depicting a different head constructed from vibrant swaths and strokes of ink, acrylic, gouache, and pastel, as well as elements of collage. An enduring and crucial aspect of her practice, Bhabha’s large-format multimedia drawings beckon the viewer with their exaggerated, ghoulish visages and unabashedly confrontational gazes. Together, Bhabha’s sculptures and works on paper are visibly marked by the human hand. With their rough-hewn surfaces, they appear to have emerged from a blasted landscape—like survivors of war, or perhaps prisoners returning home, acutely aware of those left behind. As curator Shanay Jhaveri writes, “The artist’s roving eye speaks volumes to a particular sensibility, one in which various aesthetic practices are in dialogue with one another.… There is a convergence of form and content in her work, coming from different places and histories, that seeks to question rather than affirm extant cultural dynamics.”2 Born in Karachi, Pakistan, Huma Bhabha came to the United States in 1981 to attend the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, from which she received her BFA in 1985. She later studied at the School of the Arts at Columbia University, New York, from which she received her MFA in 1989. The artist presently lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York. In March 2024, three sculptures by Bhabha will be specially featured in the retrospective exhibition Julie Mehretu: Ensemble at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice. In April 2024, a large-scale installation by Bhabha, commissioned by Public Art Fund, will be unveiled at Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York. In 2023, M Leuven, Belgium, presented the solo exhibition Huma Bhabha: LIVIN’ THINGS. The show traveled to MO.CO., Montpellier, France, in November 2023 as Huma Bhabha: A fly appeared, and disappeared. A solo presentation of Bhabha’s work curated by Nicholas Baume was on view at Fundación Casa Wabi, Puerto Escondido, Mexico, from 2022 to 2023. In 2020, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom, presented Huma Bhabha: Against Time. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, organized Huma Bhabha: They Live, on view in 2019, and published an accompanying catalogue. The installation Huma Bhabha: We Come in Peace, was commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2018 for the museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. Previous solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have taken place at prominent institutions such as The Contemporary Austin, Texas (2018); MoMA PS1, New York (2012); Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2012); Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2011); and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2008), among others. Bhabha’s work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions internationally, including Summer Exhibition 2023, Royal Academy of Art, London; Reclaim the Earth, Palais De Tokyo, Paris (2022); Traces, Portland Art Museum, Oregon (2022); Hi Woman (curated by Francesco Bonami), Museo di Palazzo Pretorio, Prato, Italy (2021); NIRIN, 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020); 2019 Yorkshire Sculpture International, Wakefield, United Kingdom; All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale (2015); and the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Bhabha has been the recipient of notable awards, such as the Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship, Berlin Prize, awarded by The American Academy in Berlin (2013); and the Emerging Artist Award, awarded by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2008). In 2022, Bhabha was elected as a National Academician by the The National Academy of Design, New York. In 2023, the artist was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. Work by the artist is held in significant collections worldwide, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Dallas Museum of Art; Des Moines Art Center & Pappajohn Sculpture Park, Des Moines, Iowa; Ekebergparken, Oslo; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi; Long Museum, Shanghai; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Mountain Art Foundation + Frank Lin Art Center, Beijing; Museum of Art, University of New Hampshire, Durham; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; The New York Public Library; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; The Roberts Institute of Art, London; Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates; Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln; Tate, United Kingdom; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; and the Zhuzhong Art Museum, Beijing, among others. 1 Huma Bhabha, in correspondence with the gallery, 2024. 2 Shanay Jhaveri, “Acknowledging Pain: Huma Bhabha’s We Come in Peace,” in Ed Halter, Shanay Jhaveri, and Sheena Wagstaff, eds., Huma Bhabha: We Come in Peace. Exh. bro. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018), p. 45.
]]>David Zwirner presents an exhibition of works by Bill Traylor (c. 1853–1949) at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York. Marking Traylor’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, this presentation is organized in collaboration with The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation and is composed of works from the Foundation collection. As part of the Foundation’s broader philanthropic mission, proceeds from the sales of works in the exhibition will benefit Harlem Children’s Zone. Born enslaved, Traylor spent much of his life after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation working as a farm laborer in rural Alabama and, later, as a shoemaker and factory worker in Montgomery. In 1939, at the age of approximately eighty-five, having never previously trained or studied art in any formal way, Traylor began making drawings and works on paper using gouache and other media. Though he continued to make art for the remainder of his life, Traylor was most prolific between 1939 and 1942, creating a body of work that offers a unique and rich registry of his life, experience, and insights. The works on view in this exhibition will loosely focus on three general themes that are central to the self-taught American artist’s oeuvre: animals, figures, and dynamic narrative scenes that have become classified within Traylor’s body of work as “exciting events.” Rendered in pencil and black charcoal as well as in poster paints that range in color from burnt sienna reds to rich lapis blues, Traylor’s distinctive imagery mixes subjects and iconography from the American South with a strong formalistic treatment of color, shape, and surface. These compositions abstract and distill the world as Traylor experienced it into evocative displays of daily life that are at times filled with joy and exuberance and at others with tension and terror—visually enlivening an era defined by Jim Crow laws and post-Reconstruction racial violence and inequality. As art historian Richard J. Powell notes, “The reason why [Traylor’s] works are so exciting and so vital for us is that they erupt, and they erupt with a kind of passion and a verve and an insistence on telling the story.”1 Together, these works embody the central elements of Traylor’s practice: in their simplified yet lively compositions, focused palettes, and use of vernacular materials such as supports from found cardboard, they exemplify the subtle complexity and nuanced subversiveness of the artist’s oeuvre. It is through the directness of their depictions that Traylor’s subjects possess their vitality and contemporary relevance; against his deliberately blank backgrounds, the figures, animals, and visual narratives ask to be considered apart from much historical or geographical context. More than just chronicling his observations of a specific time and place, Traylor witnessed—and captured through his art—a world that feels absolutely contemporary. As esteemed art collector William Louis-Dreyfus has noted, “Traylor’s approach to the page, to the old cardboard surfaces he found and his incorporation of scratches, discoloration, tears and irregular shapes of his boards reveal a compositional master at work. From the age of eighty-four to eighty-seven, Bill Traylor produced a body of work which is as American and as important to America’s artistic contribution as are the scrupulously exquisite watercolors of Winslow Homer or the structured paint drippings of Jackson Pollock.”2 Julia Louis-Dreyfus states: “My father was never shy about what he believed in, and, more than anything, he believed in art and justice. That he has found this way to marry those two beliefs is a sweet miracle for him.” “It is an honor to present a second exhibition dedicated to the work of Bill Traylor and to be doing so with The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation, which has championed the artist’s legacy for over fifty years. As a former teacher, I am particularly excited that proceeds from this exhibition will support Harlem Children’s Zone, which has made such an immense contribution to students in New York City and continues to do so under the incredible leadership of CEO, Kwame Owusu-Kesse, and president, Geoffrey Canada,“ states Lucas Zwirner, who organized the exhibition alongside David Zwirner gallery senior director Jonathan Laib. Kwame Owusu-Kesse, the chief executive officer of Harlem Children’s Zone, states, “While art is a useful tool for teaching our scholars about our history, it also serves as an invaluable mechanism for teaching our scholars about the importance of creativity and innovation. We are thrilled to continue our partnership with WLDF as we both work toward ending intergenerational poverty.” Established in 2013, The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation is dedicated to the mission of educating the public about the importance of art and increasing public awareness of self-taught and emerging artists. The Foundation houses the art collection of its eponymous benefactor, the late William Louis-Dreyfus who amassed more than 3,500 works by contemporary, emerging, and self-taught artists over a span of fifty years. The collection is viewable online at https://www.wldfoundation.org/ and is open to the public by appointment. In 2015, the Foundation announced its intention to donate proceeds to Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) when it sells works from its collection. HCZ is a pioneering nonprofit that aims to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty through on-the-ground, all-around programming that provides and enhances opportunities for children, families, and communities to thrive in school, work, and life. HCZ serves more than 22,500 children and families annually within the ninety-seven-block area of the Zone’s Harlem-based programming, opening pathways to mobility and prosperity with childhood, education, and career programs, community outreach, and wellness initiatives. Serving as a model for other low-income communities, HCZ is transforming the way we fight poverty across the nation and around the world. Bill Traylor was born around 1853 on a plantation in rural Alabama. In the late 1920s, after seventy years of plantation and farm life, he moved, on his own, to Montgomery. Roughly 1,200 works of Traylor’s are extant, many of which came from Charles Shannon, a prominent white Montgomery artist, who met Traylor in 1939 and began to collect and save his work. During the last decade of his life, Traylor’s art was featured in a handful of exhibitions in Montgomery and other locations, but it was not until the late 1970s that he began to achieve widespread recognition. Thirty-six of his works were included in Black Folk Art in America 1930–1980, a traveling exhibition that debuted in 1982 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and traveled to seven additional venues through 1984. Since then, Traylor’s art has been featured in solo exhibitions and significant thematic group shows at prominent museums including the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (1982 and 1994–1995); High Museum of Art, Atlanta (1983 and 2012); Randolph Gallery of the Chicago Public Library Cultural Center (1988); Ginza Art Space Tokyo (1991; traveled to Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1992); Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland (1998; traveled to Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 1999); Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois (2004–2005); and the American Folk Art Museum, New York (2013), among others. In 2018, the Smithsonian American Art Museum organized Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, an overarching retrospective of the artist’s life and work. From 2019 to 2023, works by Traylor were on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the “Masters of Popular Painting” gallery as part of Collection 1880s–1940s, one of the inaugural exhibitions in the museum’s new spaces following its multi-year renovation. In addition, Traylor’s works are included in the collections of notable museums and public institutions including the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Menil Collection, Houston; Milwaukee Art Museum; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. 1 Richard J. Powell in Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts (2018), directed by Jeffrey Wolf and produced by Breakaway Films. 2 William Louis-Dreyfus quoted in The Artist’s Hand: Selections from the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation. Exh. cat. (Naples, Florida: The Watson Gallery at Naples Art, 2022), p. 65.
]]>519 & 525 West 19th Street, New York David Zwirner presents co-representation of American artist Raymond Saunders (b. 1934) with Andrew Kreps Gallery. A two-part solo exhibition curated by Ebony L. Haynes will open on February 22 at David Zwirner’s 519 and 525 West 19th Street galleries in Chelsea and Andrew Kreps’s gallery at 22 Cortlandt Alley in Tribeca. Titled Post no Bills, this expansive presentation will span four decades of the artist’s work. Including paintings and works on paper, many of which have never before been seen, this exhibition offers visitors insight into Saunders’s singular and influential practice. In his works, Saunders brings together his extensive formal training with his own observations and lived experience. His assemblage-style paintings frequently begin with a monochromatic black ground elaborated with white chalk—both a pointed reversal of the traditional figure-ground relationship and a nod to Saunders’s decades spent as a teacher. He subsequently adds a range of other markings, materials, and talismans. Expressionistic swaths of paint, minimalist motifs, line drawings, and passages of vibrant color tangle with found objects, signs, and doors collected from his urban environment, creating unexpected visual rhymes and resonances that reward careful and sustained looking. At once deliberately constructed and improvisatory, didactic and deeply felt, these richly built surfaces conjure the fullness of life, and its complications, allowing for a vast and nuanced multiplicity of meanings. Saunders’s singular aesthetic finds echoes in the work of artists ranging from Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg to Joseph Beuys and Jean-Michel Basquiat—all roughly working in parallel—but remains unmistakably his own. As curator Connie H. Choi of The Studio Museum in Harlem describes, “Sights and sounds pass by as one moves along a city street, encountering the world, making decisions, and changing one’s mind as one goes. Such is the beauty of Saunders’s paintings. They are about life and all of its battles and victories, dirtiness and splendor.”1 David Zwirner states, “Andrew reached out to me late last year to introduce me to the work of Raymond Saunders, and I was mesmerized immediately. Seeing the work in Andrew’s gallery I felt I was in the presence of a major American voice in painting, who has not received his proper due. Saunders’s work connects some of the most important American schools, such as expressionism, minimalism, and assemblage, all the while effortlessly blurring boundaries between abstraction and figuration with great poetic energy. I’m thankful to Andrew for reaching out, and I am grateful to Ebony L. Haynes for having such interest in the work and her excitement in curating this major two-gallery show. I feel strongly that his work deserves a much wider audience” Andrew Kreps states,”I’m thrilled to be able to collaborate with David to share Raymond Saunders’s extraordinary contributions to art history. There’s no question that Raymond has yet to have his proper due, and I believe these concurrent exhibitions, one of the most expansive presentations of his work to date, will make it clear how profound and rich his practice is. I can’t think of another artist who is able to so effortlessly pull together such a wide range of mark-making and materiality, with each work becoming its own world.” On view at David Zwirner’s 519 and 525 West 19th Street galleries in Chelsea and Andrew Kreps’s gallery at 22 Cortlandt Alley (with a second entrance at 394 Broadway) in Tribeca, the exhibition takes its title—Post No Bills—from a 1968 painting by Saunders that features a small rectangular patch of expressionistic brushstrokes collaged onto a vast red monochromatic background. This refrain, which recurs in later works, can be seen to encapsulate the artist’s incisive views on such wide-ranging themes as community, public space, art making, and visibility. In appropriating signage deliberately designed to keep communal surfaces bare and make way for paid advertisements and re-presenting it in the context of a work of art destined to be hung in a white cube, Saunders questions the inbuilt structures that dictate inclusion and exclusion, both in the public sphere and the art institution. On view will be a range of paintings and works on paper that embody this ethos, showcasing Saunders’s nuanced visual vocabulary that seamlessly traverses both high and low points of reference. Ebony L. Haynes, the curator of this exhibition, states,”The opportunity to present the work of Raymond Saunders across two spaces has been extremely rewarding. Saunders’s singular practice spans decades and yet so much of the work has never been documented or exhibited widely. Post No Bills highlights Saunders’s intentional and effective formal style that blends painting, drawing and collage, and focuses on his consistent observations and questioning around belonging and visibility, and the quieted dissent of a formidable painter.” Born in 1934 in Pittsburgh, Raymond Saunders first studied art in the city’s public schools, participating in a program for artistically gifted students. His mentor, Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, the director of art for Pittsburgh public schools, also taught artists including Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, and Mel Bochner. Through Fitzpatrick’s support and encouragement, Saunders earned a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, also taking courses at the Barnes Foundation organized through the University of Pennsylvania, before returning to Pittsburgh and earning his BFA from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1960. He subsequently earned an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1961. In 1968, he accepted a teaching position at California State University, Hayward, eventually joining the faculty of his alma mater (now California College of the Arts), where he remains professor emeritus. In 1967, Saunders achieved wide recognition when he published the pamphlet Black Is a Color as a rebuttal to an article by the writer Ishmael Reed about the Black Arts Movement. In this text, Saunders argues powerfully that Reed fails to capture the vastness of Black expression and in doing so siloes Black artists and their work as delimited by the category of race alone. He concludes with the imperative that we necessarily separate identity from artistic output, that “we get clear of these degrading limitations, and recognize the wider reality of art, where color is the means, not the end.”2 The first solo exhibitions of Saunders’s works were held at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery in New York (1966; 1969; 1970; 1972). In 1971, the artist was the subject of his first West Coast exhibition and first major museum presentation, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which was also shown at Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York. Saunders exhibited widely across the United States and in Europe, with solo exhibitions at the Providence Museum of Art, Rhode Island (1972); Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia (1974; 1990); University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley (1976); Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco (1979, traveled to Baum/Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles), and Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York; 1980; 1982; 1985; 1987; 1989; 1991; 1993; 1996; 1999); Seattle Art Museum (1981); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (1984); Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts (1987; 1989); Galerie Resche, Paris (1990; 1993); Tampa Museum of Art, Florida (1992); Oakland Museum (1994); Phoenix Art Museum (1994); Giorgio de Chirico Art Centre, Voros, Greece (1995); M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco (1995); the American Embassy in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (1996); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1996); Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, Ohio (1996); and the Hunter College Gallery / Times Square, City University of New York (1998). The artist also participated in the 1972 Whitney Biennial. Over the last two decades, Saunders has continued to be the subject of solo exhibitions globally, in addition to appearing in several notable group exhibitions. In 2011, Saunders was included in Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, curated by Kellie Jones at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, which traveled to MoMA PS1, New York, and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts. In 2017, the artist was included in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate, London, which traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, and The Broad, Los Angeles; and in 2022, his work appeared in the exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2021, Andrew Kreps Gallery and Casemore Gallery organized the two-part solo exhibition 40 Years: Paris/Oakland in San Francisco, which spanned four decades of the artist’s career. The following year, Andrew Kreps Gallery presented the first exhibition of Saunders’ work in New York since 1998. Saunders has been the recipient of honors such as a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1963), a Ford Foundation Award (1964), a Rome Prize Fellowship (1964), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1976), and two National Endowment for the Arts Awards (1977, 1984). Work by the artist is held in numerous public collections, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley; California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; M. H. de Young and Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Phoenix Art Museum; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Saint Louis Museum of Fine Arts; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. He lives and works in Oakland. 1 Connie H. Choi, “Raymond Saunders,” in Kellie Jones, ed., Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980. Exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, 2011), p. 317. 2 Raymond Saunders, Black Is a Color (self-published pamphlet, 1967), n.p.
]]>David Zwirner presents Profaned Travelers, its first exhibition with Canadian artist Steven Shearer since the announcement of his representation by the gallery in 2021. Across the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location, the artist will present a new body of works on canvas that engage with the subject of sleep—a motif prominent in the history of art, broaching themes of mortality, vulnerability, and ecstasy. Shearer has developed a practice that weds canonical art history to the contemporary moment, specifically its more plebeian or subterranean expressions. His work, which includes painting, drawing, assemblage, sculpture, and installation, deploys a wide range of references as well as a vast archive of historical and contemporary found images. His compositions engage classical subjects such as the artist in their studio or the Rückenfigur, and they also incorporate his interest in the lo-fi iconography of underground music and the allure and alienation of participatory youth cultures grounded in these musical netherworlds. Shearer’s sources range from metalheads and teen idols, the proto-modernist archetypes of Edvard Munch and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and the ambiguously gendered figures of symbolist Gustave Moreau to Renaissance masters such as Pieter Bruegel and Domenico Ghirlandaio. The archival impulse that unites these disparate referential systems is rooted in a rigorous, quasi-forensic interest in how images are made, and how the world is constituted by images, in both a symbolic and literal, bodily sense. Shearer’s abiding interest is in making artworks that explore how we remember and idealize each other—in the romance of retrospection. In this ongoing body of work, which Shearer began in 2020, the artist sources digital images, largely dating from the late 1990s and early 2000s, found online. The eleven exhibited UV prints on canvas are the result of Shearer processing the images and altering compositions to further enhance attributes that he deems sympathetic to each photograph’s inherent qualities and perceived origin—such as the blue and pink hues of early digital imaging or the brightness seen in overexposed captures, as evident in Blue Shroud or Terrestrial (both 2024). The manipulated images are enlarged to spread across the expanse of the wall, as if filling the apse of a cathedral; they appear hallowed, almost ecclesiastical—monumental to a degree that they might inspire awe or facilitate encounters with the divine—but likewise radiate the cool flush of contemporary digital imaging. In Teresa’s Trip (2024), the head of someone asleep is covered in a kind of shroud. Their face tilts upward almost ecstatically, like a pietà catching rays of celestial light. The name of the exhibition is derived from the title of a featured work, Profaned Traveler (2024), which pictures the head of a sleeping man being crudely prodded by hands that enter from outside of the frame. Harnessing multiple symbolic meanings while alluding to the image’s content and religious iconography, the title evokes the disturbance of the sacred, the passage of life and death, and disembodiment and the dream world. The theme of sleep has been a throughline in Shearer’s work since he began collecting relevant images in the early 2000s. Using various search terms in numerous languages and configurations, the artist amassed thousands of sleep-related images for figure studies and elements for larger groupings in works like Sleep II (2015; National Gallery of Canada). The resulting works in this exhibition are therefore a constellation of self-referential gestures that hark back to Shearer’s extensive archive and his own exhibition history. A number of the images in Profaned Travelers were first shown in Vancouver’s Capture Photography Festival in 2021 as public-facing billboards; however, the project was censored shortly after its debut, taken down after complaints emerged from members of the public who were unnerved by the nuanced boundaries between sleep and death explored in the series of outdoor images. Profaned Travelers continues to develop and diversify the subject of sleep and its other associations—death among them—and likewise ponders the power of photographic images and their circulation to unsettle established notions of presentation and propriety. Steven Shearer (b. 1968) was born in New Westminster, Canada, and earned his BFA in 1992 from the Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver, where he continues to live and work. The artist’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide. A solo presentation of Shearer’s work, Sleep, Death’s Own Brother, is on view at The George Economou Collection, Athens, until March 15, 2024. The exhibition coincides with the release of a major monograph on the artist’s work, Steven Shearer: Working from Life, which was published by DCV in 2023 with an essay by Dieter Roelstraete. In 2016, the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, hosted a retrospective that included paintings, drawings, collages, and poems by the artist. A comprehensive monograph, which includes a fictional interview with the artist by author Jim Lewis, accompanied the exhibition. In 2011, Shearer represented Canada at the 54th Venice Biennale with the exhibition Exhume to Consume, the title of which was taken from the 1989 song by British metal band Carcass. The presentation included a mural-sized work from his Poems series set upon a multi-story façade that fully obscured the Canadian Pavilion. Double Album: Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer, a two-person exhibition, was on view at the New Museum, New York, in 2008, before traveling to MUCA Gallery at the University Museum of Arts and Sciences, Mexico City. Earlier solo presentations of Shearer’s work were held at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2007); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, United Kingdom (2007); and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2004). Shearer’s work is included in prominent museum and public collections worldwide, among them the Kunsthaus Zürich; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; M HKA – Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Rubell Museum, Miami; and the Vancouver Art Gallery.
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