The Extraordinary, Ordinary Nature of Interabled Love

Award-winning, self-taught acrylic painter, Athena Cooper, was born with the rare genetic disorder Osteogenesis Imperfecta, (aka “brittle bone disease”) and has been a wheelchair user since the age of six. Growing up, she struggled with society’s ill-fitting narrative that made her feel like finding a romantic partner as a disabled woman was destined to be an impossible task.

In the exhibit, she tells the love story between herself and her able-bodied husband. The paintings highlight the little moments that make up their lives together—from the mundane to the life-changing.

July 30 - August 24, 2024

1st Floor Gallery, cSPACE Marda Loop, 1721 29th Avenue SW, Calgary, AB T2T 6T7 Canada

More Information here

Tatjana Danneberg: Something Happened, MEP - Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris

In the second half of the Season, the MEP Studio presents the first solo exhibition in France of Austrian artist Tatjana Danneberg, whose work combines photography and painting.

By experimenting with materials and processes for transferring images to canvas, Tatjana Danneberg transforms her candid analogue photographs into expressive paintings. Using point-and-shoot cameras, the artist seeks to prolong occasional memories by depicting relatives, acquaintances, and everyday objects in familiar and often intimate shots. Her technique for making the transition from photography to painting is fairly complex.

The images are first enlarged and printed by inkjet onto sheets of plastic foil. They are then painted with gesso, left to dry and wetted again, before finally being separated from the foil and transferred to canvas. The final result is only known once the sheet is removed from the canvas. Revealing fragments of objects, everyday actions, or even a total absence of action, these images akin to amateur snapshots are transformed into a powerful pictorial gesture. The brushstrokes applied by the artist intuitively follow the composition of the photograph, adding movement while obscuring part of the image.

Tatjana Danneberg’s floor-to-ceiling works in the Studio are reminiscent of the torn posters found in urban space. Enlarged and superimposed on solid blocks of colour, the artist achieves a distancing effect from these intimate images. They become autonomous, creating a kind of paradox between two modes of vision—the meticulous and prolonged observation of the things that surround us and the passing curiosity provoked by advertising images that impose themselves on our gaze despite ourselves. By manipulating and deconstructing images, the artist questions the nature and status of photography, the way it is distributed and the value we attribute to it.

Tatjana Danneberg was born in 1991 and lives and works in Vienna. She is a graduate of the Technical University in Vienna, the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Salzburger Kunstverein (2021) and La Maison de Rendez-Vous, Brussels (2020), as well as the galleries LambdaLambdaLambda, Prishtina and Galeria Dawid Radziszewski, Warsaw.

Fri 19 Jul 2024 to Sun 29 Sep 2024

5-7 Rue de Fourcy, 75004

Wed-Fri 11am-8pm, Sat-Sun 10am-8pm

Learn More Here

Heather Horton: Naiad, Pontone Gallery, London

Heather Horton takes us into a submerged water-world of refracted light through which a young woman swims, floats and glides. Our viewpoint is also underwater; we too inhabit this amniotic space. We are invited to experience and witness the sensory perceptions of this contemporary iteration of a naiad – the water nymph so familiar from classical tales.

The painter sets herself a daunting task in expressing the multiple reflections and modifications of form brought about by immersion. She paints with great subtlety, paying painstaking attention to the optical effects of the medium; describing the variegated shimmer of pattern made by sunlight shining through the rippling surface of the water. Lacy, filigree networks enhance and, in turn, obscure the contour and shape of the suspended figure. Horton depicts the pale and delicate flesh of her subject with a deft and analytical working of cool tones, deliberately evoking a sensuous appeal. Her palette is also necessarily cool, with occasional small flashes of warmer reds and earths deployed as accents amongst the dominant cerulean blues, turquoises and aqueous blue-greens. Horton demonstrates an accomplished mastery of technique in her evocation of saturated, luminous colour and her nuanced response to painting the human body.

The woman is clothed, which sets up some small tension in our reading of the images. Why swim clothed? Why not naked or in a swimsuit? Our heroine wears diaphanous dresses. This anomaly implies a story, something mysterious. There is an implied context outside the water, possibly something dramatic and cinematic. Also, the setting is a swimming pool, not the sea, a river or lake. These pictures can be compared to the narrative of ‘The Swimmer’ the 1968 film starring Burt Lancaster in the eponymous role who is adrift in the sybaritic world of suburban pools and his own existential crisis. Is there something here that Horton’s female protagonist is echoing?

Wed 5 Jun 2024 to Sat 10 Aug 2024

74 Newman Street, W1T 3DB

Mon-Sat 10am-6pm

Learn More Here

Rosemary Laing: A Tribute: Selected Works Galerie Lelong & Co., New York

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, presents a tribute exhibition to Australian artist Rosemary Laing (b. 1959 – d. 2024).

In 2002, we presented her first solo exhibition in the United States, bulletproofglass, which inaugurated a close relationship that would lead to solo exhibitions one dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape (2004), weather (2007), a dozen useless actions for grieving blondes (2009), leak (2012) and The Paper (2014). In a career spanning over four decades, Laing created photo-based works that are cinematic in vision and large in scale and scope. Instead of using digital manipulation, Laing photographed real-time performance and physical installations, meticulously staging scenes that interrogate the socio-cultural issues of her native Australia and in the process echo a global awareness of climate change, indigenous rights, and migration. Her work demonstrates not only her distinct and rigorous artistic vision, but also her keen understanding of the issues facing both society and the environment. Writing in the artist’s definitive monograph, rosemary laing, published by Prestel in 2012, art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau noted that Laing’s “artwork is not only of the highest quality, but her ethical and political convictions and ideas are a model of what it means to be a ‘responsible’ image maker.”

Laing primarily worked in series, creating thematic bodies of work that accumulatively form a narrative of events that have impacted cultural consciousness. Most recently, Laing’s work was on view in the solo exhibition swansongs at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, Australia, from March 1 – April 6, 2024, which featured sculptural “shellworks” alongside photographs that featured a selection of these works; Laing described this body of work as being about “a love of, an attachment to, homeland or places of belonging…all the memories and histories that have stemmed from that place, and the making of a kind of ‘song’ that combines the enigma of this attachment with a sadness for what has happened in this place.” In Galerie Lelong & Co., New York’s special tribute presentation, works from some of Laing’s best-known series, many of which feature the vast landscape of Australia as a metaphor for cultural memory interrupted by Laing’s dramatic interventions, will be on view, showcasing the breadth of Laing’s artistic contributions as the gallery celebrates her life’s work.

Rosemary Laing participated in several international biennials including the Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2008); Venice Biennale, Italy (2007); Busan Biennale, South Korea (2004); and Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (1995). Solo exhibitions of Laing’s work have been held at numerous museums, including Domus Artium 2002, Spain; Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Tennessee; Kunsthallen Brandts Klædefabrik, Denmark; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; National Museum of Art Osaka, Japan; and TarraWarra Museum of Art, Australia. Her work can also be found in many public collections worldwide, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia; George Eastman Museum, New York, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland; Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Harvard Art Museum, Massachusetts; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; National Gallery of Australia; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; North Carolina Museum of Art; and Wadsworth Athenaeum, Connecticut. Laing was honored at the 35th Higashikawa International Photography Festival in 2019, Hokkaido, receiving the Overseas Photographer Award for photographic achievements.

Laing was born in 1959 in Brisbane, Australia, and died in 2024.

Tue 16 Jul 2024 to Fri 16 Aug 2024

528 West 26th Street, NY 10001

Mon-Fri 10am-5pm

Learn More Here

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, The Broad

Debuting at The Broad with over 90 works made by the artist over the last 20 years, Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is the first major international tour of this pioneering artist’s work. The exhibition highlights how Mickalene Thomas has mastered and innovated within several disciplines, from mixed-media painting and collage to installation and photography. The exhibition shares its title and several of its themes with the pivotal text by feminist author bell hooks, in which love is an active process rooted in healing, carving a path away from domination and towards collective liberation. Through her queries into pop culture and mass media, Thomas offers a reverberating demand for Black women to be seen and understood, and for viewers to become what hooks calls “practitioners of love.” 

Born in 1971 in Camden, New Jersey, Thomas completed her MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2002 and a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2003. Soon after, she became well known for her large-scale acrylic paintings of Black women in states of leisure and repose using rhinestones, a central material in her practice that symbolizes the complexities of femininity. Depicting women with confident and assured expressions, the subjects of her works are often seen in domestic interiors from Black America, claiming the agency of womanhood while deconstructing the art historical canon. Similarly, Thomas’s photographs, collages, and figurative paintings often re-stage scenes from 19th-century French painters such as Henri Matisse and Édouard Manet, pushing back against the subjugation and oppressive narratives upheld by Western archives, cultural institutions, and representation systems. 

The Broad’s debut of Mickalene Thomas: All About Love reflects some of the artist’s earliest inquiries into visual culture, sexuality, and memory, and move into the present. On view is the early photographic triptych, Lounging, Standing, Looking (2003), a piece which depicts the artist’s own mother, exploring kinship and care. These modes of intimate relations come to inform work such as Portrait of Maya No. 10 (2017) from the Broad collection. This acrylic and rhinestone work embodies Thomas’s signature ability to apply several layers of material and symbolic meaning into a single surface. At eight feet tall, the subject is empowered, sparkled, and poised, commanding her outward gaze. Unifying these larger-than-life subjects together in the museum’s galleries, the show envelops viewers into the bold and dynamic universe the artist has created, where steadfast love overcomes political strife. 

The themes of the exhibition extend into a full slate of associated programming developed in collaboration with the artist, including a summer concert series featuring Flo Milli and a tribute to J Dilla, a comedy night under the stars co-curated and hosted by Chaunté Wayans, wellness and healing events with Tai Beauchamp and Angela Manuel Davis, and additional programs and workshops centering women and Black and queer communities.

Learn More Here

Athena LaTocha / Sarah M. Rodriguez, Babst Gallery, Los Angeles

Sat 8 Jun 2024 to Sat 3 Aug 2024

413 South Fairfax Avenue, CA 90036

Tue-Sat 12-5pm & by appointment

Babst Gallery presents the exhibition Athena LaTocha / Sarah M. Rodriguez, a two-person exhibition featuring a large-scale work on paper by Athena LaTocha and three new sculptures by Sarah M. Rodriguez.

Athena LaTocha creates works on paper exploring the relationship between human-made and natural worlds. Her work is situated in the stories and histories of the land. She notes, "I unfurl large rolls of paper on the floor and immerse myself in the painting. Surrounded on all sides by the expanse of paper, I move through the work as if I am traversing the terrain.” LaTocha uses found objects such as rocks, bricks, and tire-shreds as tools to make abrasions on the surface of the photographic paper among pools of dried ink, sediment, and soil.

For Ozark (Shelter in Place), 2018, LaTocha spent three days at the Pea Ridge National Military Park in Arkansas, where she collected soil and made lead impressions of the rock formations. The work draws from Pea Ridge’s history as the site of the 1862 Civil War battle as well as its geographical significance as part of a forced displacement route for thousands of Indigenous people from 1837 to 1840 in what is known as the “Trail of Tears.” In both cases, the scars on the landscape remain.

LaTocha says, “it was difficult to be out there and to not think about the atrocities of history all taking place within this terrain. It was really powerful and, times, quite overwhelming because look who we are today… these things don’t end.”

Sarah M. Rodriguez’s aluminum sculptures are made of individual casts of organic materials like branches, seed pods, bones, and shells. She sources these objects from her immediate surroundings in Northern New Mexico. She also uses objects sent to her by her family in Hawai'i.

Rodriguez considers the formal qualities of each individual object before tack-welding them together to create each sculptural composition. For her, the forms emerge intuitively. She remarks, “I’m committed to the experience of art as nonverbal, as an exercise in knowing that the current order of things is not necessary or preordained. We are always becoming done and redone.

Rodriguez uses wax molds and sand impressions to create aluminum cast forms. She recognizes these forms as “approximations” rather than exact translations and embraces the sculptural “gesture” that each process imparts on the form.

As an artist and animal trainer, Rodriguez’ practice is informed through the study of interspecies communication and non-hierarchical structures. She notes, “just because we can train an animal to do something, doesn’t mean we should.” Rodriguez doesn’t coerce and control the materials she uses. Instead, she interprets her sculptures as a collaboration with the non-human elements from which they are made.

Athena LaTocha's (b. Anchorage, Alaska) work is in the collections of institutions such as the Dallas Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, Plains Art Museum, Fargo, ND, amongst others. LaTocha is the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Visual Arts Grant (2024), Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2023), Rockefeller Brothers Fund Pocantico Art Prize in Visual Arts (2022), the National Academy Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2021), Joan Mitchell Foundation (2019, 2016), Wave Hill (2018), and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (2013). The artist lives and works in New York.

Sarah M. Rodriguez (b. Honolulu, Hawai'i) lives and works in Ojo Caliente, New Mexico. She earned her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in New Genres (2014) and a BFA From California College of the Arts (2008). She was a participant in the Shandaken Residency (2016) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2010). Her works have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art, The Valley, Taos, Tara Downs, New York, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, Paul Soto, Los Angeles, Depart Foundation, Los Angeles; La Maison Rendez-Vous, Brussels, Folsom Projects, San Francisco, among many others.

Georgina Maxim: Telling Moments,Goodman Gallery, London

Tue 9 Jul 2024 to Sat 14 Sep 2024

26 Cork Street, W1S 3ND

Tue-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat 11am-4pm

Goodman Gallery presents mixed media textile artist Georgina Maxim’s first solo exhibition in London. Titled Telling Moments, this follows her inclusion in the group show Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican which will travel to the Stedelijk Museum in September.

Maxim’s practice is grounded in the style of sewing and mending referred to as dhunge mutunge in Shona. This is a stitch used for putting things together quickly so that they hold. It has been used for generations to create a temporary hold on torn items, often using a thread that did not match the colour or texture of the garment. It is also seen as a stitch for closing scars. Coupled with weaving, crocheting and knitting, Maxim builds her mixed media pieces through this contextually rich gesture of bringing textiles, kinship, and temporality together.

Telling Moments focuses on time and recollection, reflecting the significance of how time it is used, accumulated and valued. Maxim considers the labour of cutting and sewing as an act consumes the clock. However, it is also an act of construction and memory-making, one that enables the search for herself and her mother.

It’s a constant in and out feeling much like how the needle and thread seem to create that very motion - in and out. The works are varied, each representing a time of search within the material and a chance to copy myself out onto the material. It’s as if sewing over and over again is a good deed to the heart. With the hope that the heart will reward me with the clear vision of this woman, my mother.

Georgina Maxim (b. 1980, Harare, Zimbabwe) is both artist and curator. She works with mixed media textiles engaging in sewing, stitching, knitting and weaving to produce her works. In 2012 she co-founded Village Unhu, an artist-run space in Harare that provides studio spaces, exhibitions, workshops and residency programs for young and professional artists.

In 2019, Georgina Maxim presented an installation for the Zimbabwean pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. In 2024, she was invited by the Barbican and the Stedelijk Museum to take part in the group exhibition Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art. Maxim has also shown at institutions including Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin (2023); Somerset House in London (2022); Musée des Cultures Contemporaines Adama Toungara (MuCAT) in Abidjan (2022); the Bargoin Museum, France (2020); FRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, France (2021); MuCAT, Côte d’Ivoire (2022); and Somerset House (2022).

In 2018, Maxim was nominated for the Henrike Grohs Award through the Goethe Institute, Abidjan.
Maxim studied at the University of Chinhoyi. In 2019 she undertook a master’s degree at the University of Bayreuth, Germany (AVVA) to deepen her curatorial practice.

Pacita Abad: Underwater Wilderness, Tina Kim Gallery, New York

“I always see the world through color, although my vision, perspective, and paintings are constantly influenced by new ideas and changing environments.”
— Pacita Abad (1946–2004)

Tina Kim Gallery presents “Underwater Wilderness,” the gallery’s second solo show dedicated to the late Filipina-American artist Pacita Abad. Featuring eight monumental trapuntos, a form of textile-painting that Pacita pioneered, this exhibition offers a focused selection of significant work created between 1985 and 1989 from a small series inspired by the artist’s fantastical experiences scuba diving in the Philippines. The whimsical paintings originally debuted as an immersive installation in 1986 at the Ayala Museum in Manila, and will be reunited in New York for the first time since their 1987 display at the Philippine Center. On view at the gallery from June 27th to August 16th, this stirring presentation runs concurrently with Pacita’s major retrospective at MoMA PS1, which closes on September 2nd before traveling to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

Thu 27 Jun 2024 to Fri 16 Aug 2024

525 West 21st Street, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Learn More Here

The Selves, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York

Nicola Vassell presents The Selves, a group exhibition featuring work by Julia Chiang, Sally J. Han, Sheree Hovsepian, Na Kim, Anina Major, Nickola Pottinger, Elizabeth Schwaiger, Uman, and Alberta Whittle.

The Selves considers the ways in which the assembled artists are uniquely attuned to notions of memory, growth, transience, illumination, and self-awareness—forces that shape consciousness—and are thus individually equipped to translate the psychic into the physical. Armed with the power of articulation, they invite consideration and response beyond their own experiences. In the work on view, anima is molded into forms corporeal, elemental, architectural, and otherworldly—objects from which viewers can excavate the artist’s compounding conditions, conventions, and compulsions.

Thu 27 Jun 2024 to Fri 9 Aug 2024

138 Tenth Avenue, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Learn More Here

Athena LaTocha / Sarah M. Rodriguez, Babst Gallery, Los Angeles

Babst Gallery presents the exhibition Athena LaTocha / Sarah M. Rodriguez, a two-person exhibition featuring a large-scale work on paper by Athena LaTocha and three new sculptures by Sarah M. Rodriguez.

Athena LaTocha creates works on paper exploring the relationship between human-made and natural worlds. Her work is situated in the stories and histories of the land. She notes, "I unfurl large rolls of paper on the floor and immerse myself in the painting. Surrounded on all sides by the expanse of paper, I move through the work as if I am traversing the terrain.” LaTocha uses found objects such as rocks, bricks, and tire-shreds as tools to make abrasions on the surface of the photographic paper among pools of dried ink, sediment, and soil.

For Ozark (Shelter in Place), 2018, LaTocha spent three days at the Pea Ridge National Military Park in Arkansas, where she collected soil and made lead impressions of the rock formations. The work draws from Pea Ridge’s history as the site of the 1862 Civil War battle as well as its geographical significance as part of a forced displacement route for thousands of Indigenous people from 1837 to 1840 in what is known as the “Trail of Tears.” In both cases, the scars on the landscape remain.

LaTocha says, “it was difficult to be out there and to not think about the atrocities of history all taking place within this terrain. It was really powerful and, times, quite overwhelming because look who we are today… these things don’t end.”

Sarah M. Rodriguez’s aluminum sculptures are made of individual casts of organic materials like branches, seed pods, bones, and shells. She sources these objects from her immediate surroundings in Northern New Mexico. She also uses objects sent to her by her family in Hawai'i.

Rodriguez considers the formal qualities of each individual object before tack-welding them together to create each sculptural composition. For her, the forms emerge intuitively. She remarks, “I’m committed to the experience of art as nonverbal, as an exercise in knowing that the current order of things is not necessary or preordained. We are always becoming done and redone.

Rodriguez uses wax molds and sand impressions to create aluminum cast forms. She recognizes these forms as “approximations” rather than exact translations and embraces the sculptural “gesture” that each process imparts on the form.

As an artist and animal trainer, Rodriguez’ practice is informed through the study of interspecies communication and non-hierarchical structures. She notes, “just because we can train an animal to do something, doesn’t mean we should.” Rodriguez doesn’t coerce and control the materials she uses. Instead, she interprets her sculptures as a collaboration with the non-human elements from which they are made.

Athena LaTocha's (b. Anchorage, Alaska) work is in the collections of institutions such as the Dallas Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, Plains Art Museum, Fargo, ND, amongst others. LaTocha is the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Visual Arts Grant (2024), Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2023), Rockefeller Brothers Fund Pocantico Art Prize in Visual Arts (2022), the National Academy Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2021), Joan Mitchell Foundation (2019, 2016), Wave Hill (2018), and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (2013). The artist lives and works in New York.

Sarah M. Rodriguez (b. Honolulu, Hawai'i) lives and works in Ojo Caliente, New Mexico. She earned her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in New Genres (2014) and a BFA From California College of the Arts (2008). She was a participant in the Shandaken Residency (2016) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2010). Her works have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art, The Valley, Taos, Tara Downs, New York, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, Paul Soto, Los Angeles, Depart Foundation, Los Angeles; La Maison Rendez-Vous, Brussels, Folsom Projects, San Francisco, among many others.

Sat 8 Jun 2024 to Sat 3 Aug 2024

413 South Fairfax Avenue, CA 90036

Tue-Sat 12-5pm & by appointment

Learn More Here

C. Rose Smith: Talking Back to Power Autograph, London

Focused on the intricate dynamics of visibility and authority, Talking Back to Power proposes a reclamation of black visibility. C. Rose Smith’s evocative black and white self-portraits revolve around the white cotton shirt, staged at locations affiliated with the wealth generated from cotton plantations in the Southern United States of America.

During the 19th century, cotton was one of the most lucrative global commodities. Built on the forced labour of millions of enslaved Africans, plantation complexes that grew, cultivated and sold this crop formed the basis of monumental economic advancement and progress.

Throughout her photographs, Smith fashions a crisp white button-up shirt, a potent emblem of both exploitation and respectability. She poses in opulently decorated antebellum homes in Tennessee, South Carolina and Louisiana, by-products of the wealth amassed by the owners of cotton plantations. Entrenched throughout these buildings is the lingering spectre of the magnitude of violence and anguish that is inextricably linked to chattel slavery. Despite many undergoing meticulous restorations and now serving as tourist destinations, these buildings bear witness to the enduring legacy of human suffering.

Emulating the formal compositions of 19th century oil paintings, Smith’s portraits powerfully reflect on the black body as a former commodity. Her unwavering gaze commands attention within the gallery space, underscored by the echoing sound of the bell chiming at Belmont Mansion in Tennessee. Smith’s confronting presence demands visibility as an act of resistance. In the artist’s own words: “it is unexplainable and almost unimaginable to take up the freedom of expression as a maker of images…there is an unsettling consolation in confronting, addressing and contesting structures that have and continue to exist as archives of anti-blackness."

Thu 13 Jun 2024 to Sat 12 Oct 2024

Rivington Place, EC2A 3BA

Wed & Fri 11am-6pm, Thu 11am-9pm, Sat 12.30-6pm

Learn More Here

Sarah Cunningham: Flight Paths, Lisson Gallery, Los Angeles

For her first solo show with Lisson Gallery in Los Angeles, the British artist Sarah Cunningham presents a new body of work entitled Flight Paths. Named after a diptych that seemingly defies gravity, the gallery presentation captures this young painter’s soaring, spontaneous gestures in full flow. In the two panels of Flight Path (all works 2024) and throughout this exhibition, Cunningham explores aerial and bodily movements, flipping directions and orientations until reaching that moment when verticality and horizontality shift or tilt beyond recognition – when up becomes down, or left suddenly turns right.

Thu 20 Jun 2024 to Sat 24 Aug 2024

1037 N. Sycamore Avenue, CA 90038

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Learn More Here

Farah Al Qasimi: Blue Desert Online Barakat Contemporary, Seoul

The exhibition features Al Qasimi's representative body of work from the past five years (2018 - 2023), characterized by her multifaceted observation of cultural hybridity. It consists of 19 still and moving images that portray themes of reality, escapism, illusion, and anxiety as experienced in our digitalized world. Through her photography, video, and performance projects, Al Qasimi has conducted a social critique of post-colonial power structures, gender (norms), and preferences in Arab Gulf states. Fluidly navigating personal and public spaces, she has explored unspoken social norms and values instilled in places, moments, and objects.

Letters for Occasions, showcased at the 2023 Gwangju Biennale, is a collage of still and moving images on a large wallpaper, which demonstrates Al Qasimi's unique approach. She zooms in on the meaning of personal archives and family records in an old family album style while reflecting on her life in diverse cultural spheres. Characterized by detail-oriented elements like flashing frames, reflective surfaces, and broken perspectives, Al Qasimi's photographic images serve as a new medium to portray our complex and chaotic reality.

Wed 12 Jun 2024 to Sun 11 Aug 2024

58-4 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu,

Tue-Sun 10am-6pm

Learn More Here

Zineb Sedira: Let the drums beat! Goodman Gallery, New York

Goodman Gallery presents Let the drums beat!, a solo presentation by Zineb Sedira.

This marks the US debut of the British Franco-Algerian artist’s For A Brief Moment the Whole World Was on Fire...and We Have Come Back - a series of colorful photomontages seen in Sedira’s 2019 mid-career survey at Jeu De Paume, Paris. The presentation is also Sedira’s first in our New York office.

Following her critically acclaimed solo at Whitechapel Gallery earlier this year, Let the drums beat! presents new and existing work in which Sedira expands on her exploration of cinema as a tool for joyful resistance and draws on the archive as a device to expose, reconsider and challenge history.

04 June - 20 July 2024

Tuesday to Friday 10h00 to 18h00
Saturday 10h00 to 16h00

23 East 67th Street, Second Floor
New York, NY 10065

Learn More Here

Valerie Hird: The Secret Garden, Gulliver’s Travels and Other Boxes

The Nohra Haime Gallery presents The Secret Garden, Gulliver’s Travels and Other Boxes, a solo exhibition by Valerie Hird that beckons viewers into a captivating realm where time, narrative, and imagination converge. Through mesmerizing book sculptures, both wall-mounted and free-standing, alongside video animations, Hird transcends traditional storytelling, offering a contemporary reimagining of familiar tales.

Valerie Hird's artistic practice spans diverse media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, animation installation, and performance. Her work, characterized by meticulous craftsmanship and boundless imagination, draws inspiration from travel and collaboration. Exploring the history of narrative, cultural mythologies, analog technologies, and craft forms, Hird creates symbol-based artworks that are uniquely evocative.

Wed 5 Jun 2024 to Mon 15 Jul 2024

500A West 21st Street, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Learn More Here

Belynda Henry: Harvesting the Valley II, Findlay Galleries, New York

Belynda Henry was born in New South Wales, Australia, and studied sculpture and painting at Sydney College of the Arts. She first gained recognition as a leading landscape painter in Australia after being named a finalist for the Wynne Prize. Henry is now a multiple finalist of both the Wynne and Archibald Prizes, among other prestigious awards and more than 30 solo exhibitions. Her work has been shown alongside some of Australia’s most prominent and influential artists, including Fred Williams, Arthur Boyd, Jeffrey Smart, and Brett Whiteley.

Henry lives and works deep within a long, lush valley with wild escarpments north of Sydney. Here, she is embedded in the landscape and exposed to its ways, witnessing the transitions of ever-changing light, texture, and soundscape. She absorbs all of this, along with her infinite fascination with the land, into her paintings. Henry’s works bring forth the internal meditative quality evoked by the landscape, illuminating these impressions in wondrous, imaginative paintings.

Wed 12 Jun 2024 to Fri 2 Aug 2024

32 East 57th, 2nd Floor, NY 10022

Mon-Fri 10am-6pm

Learn More Here

Francesca Mollett: Corso

GRIMM presents Corso, a solo exhibition of new works by London-based artist Francesca Mollett. This is the artist’s second exhibition with GRIMM since joining the gallery in 2022 and her debut solo exhibition in New York. A new publication with an introduction by Bryony Bodimeade will be published to accompany the exhibition.

Mollett’s recent work is an exploration of the permeability of the painted image; the nature of her abstraction is porous, whereby representation of her subject seeps through membranous surfaces. Each canvas appears in flux, like a chemical reaction still unfolding, with the underlying image itself variously willed into or out of reach.

Language, textual and visual, is fundamental to decoding Mollett’s surfaces. The exhibition’s title Corso hints at the multiplicity of overlapping concepts with which the artist engages. With much of the work on view gathered from recent residencies - including one in 2023 in Turin, Italy - the title Corso is taken from the Italian word that can mean either ‘street’ or ‘stream,’ highlighting the intertwining of the architectural and natural. The artist arrived in Turin not long after a flood caused sections of the river Po to overflow its banks. The often overlooked minutiae of the town were thrown into sharp relief, as tree roots, cracks in the road, fluorescent fencing and peeling barks were cast in new, reflective detail. Following her time in Italy, Mollett was later in residence in Cortachy, Scotland, looking at iridescence and lichens. Exploring the connections and disparities in each environment led to an openness when translating her observations back in her London studio, as time and space became compressed and reintegrated in her layered, painterly forms.

Phrases such as ‘in corso,’ however, can also mean ‘in progress,’ ‘happening’ or ‘current’, denoting the passage of time and finding parallels in the movement and vitality of Mollett’s handling of paint, a feeling that there is growth and change occurring as her images unfold. This sensation of growth in an organic or biological sense, too, is vital to this body of work.

Though derived from multiple, often literal sources - the observation of a landscape, city, insect or plant - the act of painting gives life to new forms that are generative, reproducing like spores and formed by (the movement of) color. A description or translation discovered in one painting engenders another painting. These are images constantly in pursuit of further forms to grow, stretch, record and bear witness.

This necessarily then implies experience as embodied. For both artist and viewer, there is a process of destabilising and re-situating or reconstituting a sense of place and time. Mollett’s work is a consideration of space through slow looking, slow feeling, of scrutinising an environment not at a distance but as a personal relationship. To view these works is to view the act of interpreting memory as recalled over a period of months, the storing and revisiting of space in the mind’s eye, making explicit the pliability and fallibility of perception. The nature of painting space and time, as with the nature of perceiving it first hand, is ultimately elusive and fragile.

Francesca Mollett (b. 1991, Bristol, UK) received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (UK) in 2020, having previously studied at the Royal Drawing School and Wimbledon College of Art, London (UK). Recent solo exhibitions include Noon at Pond Society, Shanghai (CN); Halves at GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL) and Low Sun at Micki Meng, San Francisco, CA (US), 2023; The Moth in the Moss at Taymour Grahne Projects, London (UK), 2022; Spiral Walking at Baert Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (US), 2022 and Wild Shade at Informality Gallery, London (UK), 2021. She was included in the group exhibition The Kingfisher’s Wing, curated by Tom Morton at GRIMM, New York, NY (US), 2022. Her work has also been featured in numerous group shows including New British Abstraction, CICA, Vancouver (CA), Considering Female Abstractions, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX (US), 2023; Sabrina, curated by Russell Tovey, Sim Smith, London (UK); New Romantics, The Artist Room at Lee Eugean Gallery, Seoul (KR); Down in Albion at L.U.P.O. Lorenzelli Projects, Milan, (IT) in 2022; Le coeur encore, The approach, London (UK), 2021; Diaries of a Climate, Baert Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (US), 2021; and London Grads Now, Saatchi Gallery, London (UK), 2020.

Mollett’s work can be found in the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX (US); He Art Museum, Foshan (CN); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL (US); K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong (HK); Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo (NL); Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL); Pond Society, Shanghai (CN); the Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX (US); The David and Indrė Roberts Collection, London (UK); Sainsbury Centre, Norwich (UK) and The University of Oxford, St Hilda’s College Art Collection, Oxford (UK), among others.

Fri 10 May 2024 to Sat 22 Jun 2024

54 White Street, NY 10013

Tue-Sat 11am-6pm

Learn More Here

Dorothy Dehner: A Retrospective, Berry Campbell Gallery, New York

Berry Campbell presents a retrospective of paintings, drawings, and sculptures by Dorothy Dehner (1901-1994). Dorothy Dehner: A Retrospective weaves together the story of Dehner’s seventy-year artistic career starting in the 1930s and culminating with several large-scale monumental sculptures from the 1980s and 1990s. This is the first exhibition of this scope and depth on Dehner since a retrospective at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, in 1995.

The exhibition begins with a 1936 still life oil painting and continues with a series of iconic ink and watercolor abstract drawings from the 1940s and 1950s using a “wet on wet” technique.

Dorothy Dehner was married to the noted sculptor, David Smith, until their divorce in 1950. While in the marriage, she felt there could only be one sculptor, and so it was not until 1952 that she gained the success, freedom, and confidence to dare to experiment in new media and her focus shifted entirely to sculpture. This exhibition will feature several early sculptures from the 1950s and 1960s, mostly created with the lost-wax process.

An entire gallery will be devoted to her rarely known series of assemblages from the 1970s called I Ching. Louise Nevelson introduced Dehner to John Cage, whose sounds and theories influenced this body of work. Untitled (I Ching) is totemic in feel, made from thin wood pieces placed together in rhythmic patterns. Towards the end of her career, Dehner started working with fabricators to fulfill her dream of making large-scale sculpture. The centerpiece to the exhibition is one the largest she ever created called Prelude and Fugue from 1989, standing over eight feet tall and eight feet wide made from painted black steel. Demeter’s Harrow (1990) is a large-scale playful sculpture created by connecting geometric forms made from Corten Steel.

Joan Marter, Ph.D., President of the Dorothy Dehner Foundation, through her research and writing has placed Dehner in the context of other Abstract Expressionists resulting in many recent accolades. In 2023, Dehner was the feature article in the Woman’s Art Journal, “Dorothy Dehner and the Women Sculptors Among the Abstract Expressionists,” which discusses Dehner’s close friendship with Louise Nevelson. Dehner has been included in numerous group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, most recently in Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction (2017). Dehner’s totemic sculpture Encounter is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Dehner is situated in the canon of Abstract Expressionist sculptors alongside Nevelson, Louise Bourgeois, Herbert Ferber, Ibram Lassaw, David Hare, and David Smith. Her work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Storm King Art Center, The British Museum, and Dresden Museum, among many others. Berry Campbell represents the Dorothy Dehner Foundation.

Thu 23 May 2024 to Sat 22 Jun 2024

524 W 26th Street, NY 10001

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Learn More Here

The Whole World Smiles With You, Opera Gallery, London

Opera Gallery London presents ‘The Whole World Smiles with You’. Curated by Alayo Akinkugbe, the exhibition features works by Aboudia, Derrick Adams, Noel Anderson, Amoako Boafo, Gerald Chukwuma, Bouvy Enkobo, Jazz Grant, John Madu, Kimathi Mafafo, Simphiwe Ndzube, Chris Ofili, Anya Paintsil, Deborah Roberts; Collin Sekajugo, Thelonious Stokes, Adjei Tawiah, Awodiya Toluwani and Kehinde Wiley.

‘The Whole World Smiles with You’ interrogates various modes of figuration by contemporary Black artists. The exhibited artists challenge the Western canon by overtly reconfiguring renowned paintings to include Black protagonists or, more covertly, portraying figures in poses reminiscent of pre-twentieth-century European portraiture. Certain works also demonstrate a tendency among Black artists to distort, simplify, or caricature the image of a Black person – either to draw attention to negative stereotypes or to imagine Black bodies extending beyond imposed limitations.

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2020, the exhibition places importance on voices that have historically been disregarded. Although figuration has been constant throughout art history, figurative work by Black artists only recently rose to prominence. Such work contributes to the understanding of racialised experiences and the diverse self-perceptions of Black people.

This exhibition contributes to the ongoing conversations around the position of figuration by Black artists. Curator, Alayo Akinkugbe, states that “it is crucial to acknowledge that this exhibition doesn’t exist in isolation but is, in part, a response to events leading up to and since 2020 which have opened up more space for dialogues around Blackness.” Opera Gallery invites you to take part in this critical conversation with ‘The Whole World Smiles with You.’

Wed 29 May 2024 to Wed 26 Jun 2024

65-66 New Bond Street, W1S 1RW

Mon-Sat 10am-6.30pm

Learn More Here

Domestic Goddess - Worship at her Throne, Solo show, Jenny McIlhatton

A textile temple, this body of work is infused with the divine and powerful Greek Goddesses who were also deeply flawed as lovers, mothers and sisters. The textiles are recycled alteration remnants of some of the great fashion houses, places of modern worship. Dedicated to those who have little time for magic, tired parents and those dealing with the politics of everyday life. A mirror of the three fates who spin, weave and cut the lives of us mere mortals tirelessly, where repetitive labour is sanctified.

June 29 - Sep 30, 2024

Heckmann Design & Circle of Trust Gallery,

44C Mildmay Grove North,

London, London N1 4PR United Kingdom