Caroline Jackson: This Place,Sim Smith, London

Thu 12 Sep 2024 to Sat 5 Oct 2024

6 Camberwell Passage, SE5 0AX

Thu-Fri 10am-4pm, Sat 11am-5pm

Sim Smith presents Caroline Jackson’s first UK solo exhibition, This Place. The exhibition is an exploration of the artist’s intuition and investigation of paint, soaking, dripping and blurring through many forms. The nature of the paintings allow for a subject to emerge only to submerge again, in an entrancing connection between surface, colour, scale and instinct.

This Place refers to the sensation of being taken to specific landscapes, soundscapes, places, and memories when experiencing the paintings individually or as a whole. This ambitious exhibition untangles and understands Jacksons painterly language in a place that she invites us to enter.

The making for this exhibition spanned many months, with paintings being worked on simultaneously over a long period of time – this is the first time Jackson has worked in this way. One of the results of this is reflected texturally, with surfaces and consistencies that have not been explored in her practice before, emerging from deep stratums of coloured, course grounds made up of thick oil paint and oil pastel, juxtaposed by agile washes of diaphanous pigment. There are various points at which these paintings could have reached their final destination, but Jackson has pushed each piece more and more asking, what happens if you keep going past a point of comfort and of previous knowledge to one of discovery.

“I have never used so many pastels”, she remarks when talking about this exhibition. ““I have often used pastels to carve out and hold loose spaces of paint together, but in these works, pastel feels as much of a material to build as paint. It’s felt like making a puzzle, deciding which shapes might lock together, some that complement each other and others which don’t.” Unintentional marks and intuition hold these paintings together, with drawing and painting slipping back and forth, entangled over and under each other. Not only are they equal and complimentary but they give life and complexity to each other through an exchange of enigmatic energy. Natural forms start to surface through the making of the works, seemingly excavated geological visions of minerals, craters, butterfly wings or even a whole landscape. But they are also visibly made by the artist’s hand and have a certain quality of the man-made or other, possibly mechanical, possibly alien. Jackson plays with the natural, the artificial and the spatial, unmasking an amalgam of ghosts as she goes.

“I start with the bones of the piece and then build the flesh up, it rolls from there and each mark is informed by the last. Lots of things can go wrong with paintings, you have to detached yourself from wanting a specific finale.”

-Jackson, August 2024

Colour takes a central role in the paintings, it gives life to the habitat of these works. The diversity of pigment in the paintings, similar to their surfaces, is based on the perception and instinct of a painter with as much sensitivity as a desire to explore, there is no pre-determined plan at play, just a feeling. The works are directed by what feels right, particularly at the start of a piece, fluid and unspecified. The painting soon takes over, guiding paths to be composed and carved out to a more intentional ending “…a space where colour, shape and form intersecting often surging and resolving themselves in some moments and then dissolving in others.” The paintings also evoke sensory memories, the feeling of being in and amongst nature and experiencing the world from a sensory standpoint, absorbing and replicating impressions of scent, touch and light.

“With works like Brisk all I could think of when trying to title was the feeling of walking through a harsh landscape- maybe Cornwall where I always holidayed as a kid and always remember the feeling of the wind, the sideways rain, being cold, the smell of the wet shrubbery.”

-Jackson, August 2024

The sensory is explored further in the scale of these works, their extremes and their reactions on the physical body. Jackson has made her largest work to date for this exhibition, Abiogenesies – referencing the origin of life from non-living matter. specifically: a theory in the evolution of early life on earth. This work, due to its scale and layout, feels like a life span, and ecosystem evolving into life form. Made over three panels, each relating to a state of being and stages of time, past, present, future. Each panel was worked on in isolation and then brought together through a canopy of texture, interweaving connecting tendrils and bursts of rays of light. The smallest works also make up a significant part of this exhibition evolving Jacksons investigation and exploration into the extreme. The small works do not form part of the preparatory for the larger, Jackson has not scaled down her mark making. They are much simpler pieces, being informed by the larger works and not visa-versa. By taking away the scale, they are predominantly colour driven. They are very nostalgic to Jackson relating to places she feels she knows or has seen in childhood, they are precious, more intimate memories “there is one that has lots of baby pink and dark green, it reminds me of being in my garden as a kid, having BBQ’s and the smell of suncream”. Nostalgia does not play role when making but is referenced retrospectively when observing the works for Jackson, connecting the present to the past.

There is no denying that this exhibition has surfaced from deep within, with Jackson unconsciously moving, shaping and carving out mysterious spaces that we come to inhabit or feel as though we may have inhabited before. She destroys and rebuilds the works which seem to exist naturally, just like a landscape that has morphed and merged over many years. Paint and pastel are enmeshed, texture and form interwoven and yet paint is kept in its truest form “I want paint to look like paint, fluid, sheer, thick, I want to keep paint as paint, loose, I’m not trying to depict anything when painting”. Jackson’s paintings are animate; moving, metamorphosing, held together only by a structure beckoned from the subterranean.

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Lee ShinJa: Weaving the Dawn, Tina Kim Gallery, New York

Thu 22 Aug 2024 to Sat 28 Sep 2024

525 West 21st Street, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Tina Kim Gallery presents “Weaving the Dawn,” the gallery’s first solo exhibition dedicated to Lee ShinJa - a pioneering artist who is remembered in Korean art history for introducing the “tapestry” genre when the concept of “fiber art” was still unestablished in her native Korea. Marking her New York debut, the show highlights Lee’s expansion of the material characteristics and aesthetic beauty of thread as a medium.

The full breadth of her career, which spans more than half a century, will be represented—from her avant-garde embroidered appliqué work from the 1960s to the more recent “Spirit of Mountain” series that pays homage to her hometown. Featuring preliminary sketches of her early compositional ideas and archival materials that highlight her role as a dedicated educator and researcher, “Weaving the Dawn” will be on view from August 22 to September 28, 2024.

Born in 1930 in Uljin, Korea, while the country was under Japanese colonial rule, Lee first encountered textiles through the women in her life. As a child, she played with her mother’s sewing rings, and watched her grandmother weave cloth for household use. In a 1977 conversation with critic Yoo Keun Joon, she remarked that it was natural for women to gravitate towards embroidery within the limited scope of applied arts at the time. (1) Her innovative spirit can be felt early in her practice when she boldly integrated appliqué and dyeing into her embroidery. In Image of the City (1961), she unraveled the plain weave of the base fabric and twisted subtly colored threads to the loosened ones to create a structural tension previously unseen in traditional textiles. Meanwhile, Portrait of My Daughter (1962), modeled after her second daughter, broke formal embroidery conventions with its semi- abstract representation of a face and hands. Lee’s experimentation with technique and form reaches a crescendo in Screen (1979), which divides space by introducing thick cotton yarn to a deconstructed linen cloth. Lee’s avant-garde approach and subversion of the boundaries between craft and fine art, as well as traditional and modernist technique, received mixed reviews at the time. Some critics claimed that she was destroying the practice of Korean embroidery. Others hailed her as a comet in the craft world. (2)

In the 1970s, Lee fully embraced tapestry techniques, developing new dyeing methods and experimenting with unique materials such as bedding and wool sweaters sourced from secondhand markets. Her works from this period, such as Sun and Moon I (1973), feature geometric motifs, lyrical colors, and harmonious horizontal and vertical compositions, achieving a complete abstraction. In the 1980s, after visiting the 1970 Osaka Expo and the 1983 Lausanne International Tapestry Biennale, Lee gained the confidence to expand her textile forms into sculptural installations. During this decade, she also met and engaged with international artists like Magdalena Abakanowicz and Issey Miyake through textile exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. Reflecting her remarkable dedication, Lee’s large-scale woven works became increasingly experimental, incorporating bold colors and extensive weaves. Despite her prolific output, she faced personal sorrow in 1982 with the passing of her husband, painter Chang Woon Sang.

Amid this loss and the challenges of being a single parent, Lee discovered a profound passion for creation. From 1984 to 1993, she had three solo exhibitions with works expressing a resilient will for renewal stemming from the artist’s deep reverence for nature’s life-sustaining and cyclical forces. Pieces such as Dawn, Legend, and The World is Beautiful transform images of nature through abstraction: Their densely populated and meticulously layered threads evoke the sky, wind, sunlight, and ocean, suggesting a powerful vitality rising from the earth and a sense of coexistence, hope, and expansion. Critic Kim Bok-Young articulated this as themes of “metaphor of light” and “space of memory” in Lee’s oeuvre. (3)

Reflecting on her childhood memories of nature, Lee said, “Growing up in a rural area, I vividly remember the intense sunlight at sunrise and sunset. I have cherished memories of climbing mountains with my father every morning to witness these moments. The sunlight rising from the East Sea left a lasting impression on me. I have always believed in creating nature as I see it. However, I still feel that my work has yet to match the beauty of my hometown.” (4)

After her 1993 solo exhibition, Lee focused on further developing her abstract representations of nature in her “Spirit of Mountain” series. This body of work, which epitomizes her later practice, uses a variety of materials to portray dynamic mountain ranges through intricate diagonal structures. Since the 2000s, Lee’s work has highlighted sculptural abstraction and spatial depth by incorporating new materials such as wood and metal into her tapestries. While maintaining her characteristic color palette of red, yellow, black, and gray hues, she has introduced tonal contrasts, enhancing vertical and horizontal structures to create a more static composition. Her serene landscapes often feature rectangular shapes reminiscent of windows, drawing inspiration from traditional Korean houses, or hanok. Seen through these frames, Lee’s mountainous forms reflect her tranquil and humble vision of simultaneously observing and residing within nature.

Critic Kim Hong-hee, former director of the Seoul Museum of Art, commended Lee’s achievements in challenging gender and genre biases in craft. (5) Furthermore, she observed that Lee’s fiber art subtly reflects autobiographical elements, despite their formally abstract style, offering a foundation for feminist critique. “Weaving the Dawn” seeks to reinvigorate this conversation around historically marginalized artistic practices that have been overlooked due to their associations with women’s domestic labor.

Lee ShinJa (b. 1930) is a pioneering first-generation Korean fiber artist and educator. She has been exhibited widely in major solo exhibitions across Korea and abroad at galleries and institutions such as Press Center (1965), Gallery Hyundai (1983), Seoul Arts Center’s Hangaram Art Museum (1993), the Republic of Korea’s National Academy of Arts (2003) and more. In 2023, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Gwacheon, Korea, presented her retrospective “Threadscapes,” which shed new light on the world of a pioneer who opened up the possibilities of fiber art. She has also participated in a number of group exhibitions including ones at MMCA Deoksugung (1986), Ho-Am Art Museum (1988), and Jakarta Textile Museum (2000), and biennials like the 5th Lausanne- Beijing International Fiber Art Biennale at Tsinghua University Academy of Arts and Design (2008). Lee’s works are housed in the collections of major institutions such as the National Museum of Korea, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Seoul Museum of Craft Art, Sookmyung Women’s University, Duksung Women’s University, and elsewhere.

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MARIGOLD SANTOS,of armour bespoke, of fabric, of skin, of within / binubuo ng pasadyang proteksyon, ng tela, ng balat, at ng kalooban, Norberg Hall Gallery

Exhibition: Sept 13 – Oct 26, 2024

333b – 36 Ave SE
Calgary AB T2G 1W2
Canada

Across cultures and in artistic practices, needle work – that is, any kind of handiwork completed with a needle and thread – has both quotidian utilitarianism and can produce artefacts that ceremonially mark life’s milestones. By extension, tattooing, a practice that also involves the needle – is also a type of needle work that punctures skin with ink and marks the bearer with designs that hold personal significance. Tattooing elevates the skin beyond its biological function, turns it into a surface of ornamentation, and imbues the body with talismanic power. It is a transformation from physical to spiritual protection. A malunggay sprig, hand fans woven from palm leaves, stylized flora, a harlequin asuang, a cross-section of a lanka are whispers of a rich heritage from which many children of the diaspora are estranged. With a needle, the artist sutures these disjunctures and reconnects the bearer of these markings with our collective histories.

In this new exhibition, Manila-born, Calgary-based Marigold Santos re-interprets Philippine traditional material practices of needle work, both textile embroidery and tattooing, into magical moments of transcendent relationality.

Santos takes on a new direction in her practice with this series of large scale studio photographic portraits of people she has tattooed. For the artist, tattooing is a trauma-informed and relational practice in which she prioritises IBPOC bodies, particularly Filipino/a/x. The individuals who are photographed have been marked by Santos; just as she has supported their bodily and aesthetic choices, these people support Santos’ artistic career. Adopting the same artful intimacy that she takes on when tattooing her subjects, Santos engages with the sitters of each portrait, each a member of the Filipinx diasporic community. These photographs not only capture relations of mutual support, but also networks of reciprocated trust.

Reinventing these traditional practices in the diaspora not only physically marks people but marks them as time and space travellers who have traversed oceans, violent colonial encounters, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia to stand in that very moment.

Shrouded in black, Santos’ portraits are enveloped in darkness, but a levity shines through the eyes of her sitters. Brown skin, white grins, and the glints of eyes shine through the darkness. In a world that denies full humanity to Filipinx diasporic subjects who are often seen as labourers and expendable, these portraits celebrate the embodied resistances and joys that have been cultivated by communities that are seeking to reclaim ancestral power and move it into abundant futures. They exude comfort in their own skin – skin that they have willfully chosen to adorn with motifs oftentimes created collaboratively with Santos.

For Filipinos/as/x amid white supremacy, feeling good “in ones’ skin” cannot be taken for granted. Intergenerational trauma, colonial mentality, and toxicity within the Filipinx community amplify lies that proximity to whiteness is desirable as it moves closer to privilege and power. To be joyful in one’s body is radical. To be joyful in one’s brown body is revolutionary.

Santos’ needle work is in fact, needed work for these children of the diaspora – mga anak ng diaspora: Bianca. Darren. Dianne. Gina. Jackie. Jean. Joey. Jules. Mac. Michelle. Ray. Robi. Ruth. Tiffany. Tomi. Aware of these colonial harms, Santos mobilises her art to heal. And like a babaylan, the artist conjures the wisdom and skills of the ancestors, bringing them into conversation with contemporary artistic vocabularies and shows us art as salve for battered, brown bodies.

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If You Want To Be My Lover, A solo exhibition by Annika Earley at Moss Galleries in Falmouth, Maine

September 27 - November 23rd 2024

FALMOUTH GALLERY

251 Route One, Falmouth, ME

Tuesday - Saturday: 10am - 5pm

Annika Earley makes intimate works on paper about her alter-ego/fairy godmother/personal demon named Batshit. Her work considers the demands and joys of motherhood, sensuality and sexuality, gender, and pre-teen nostalgia. She often uses German fairy and folk tales and Spice Girls lyrics as reference points in her work.

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Nan Goldin: You never did anything wrong, Gagosian West 21st St, New York

Thu 12 Sep 2024 to Sat 19 Oct 2024

522 West 21st Street, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Gagosian presents Nan Goldin: You never did anything wrong at 522 West 21st Street, New York. The exhibition consists of two new moving-image works presented in specially designed pavilions and an extensive body of new photographs. This is Goldin’s first exhibition of new work since joining Gagosian in 2023.

Stendhal Syndrome (2024) is a moving-image work that juxtaposes photographs Goldin has taken over the last twenty years of Classical, Renaissance, and Baroque masterpieces with portraits of her own friends, family, and lovers. Photographs of paintings and sculptures from museums around the world including the Galleria Borghese, Louvre, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Prado flow seamlessly with images of Goldin’s community, crossing centuries to resonate in harmony with each other, revealing uncanny resemblances in composition, color, form, and emotional tone. Goldin’s ability to draw such precise visual connections raises profound questions about traditional hierarchies within art, and the enduring human compulsion to memorialize beauty in works fueled by love, and grief.

You never did anything wrong, Part 1 (2024) is a home movie centered around the totality of the solar eclipse, filmed in Super 8 and 16mm. The soundtrack includes a mournful piece by Valerij Fedorenko, a chilling new score composed by Mica Levi, and ambient sounds of nature recorded during the eclipse. It is Goldin’s first abstract work, born from an ancient myth that an eclipse is caused by animals stealing the sun.

The moving-image works are projected within freestanding pavilions designed by Goldin in collaboration with Lebanese-French architect Hala Wardé. Each structure is conceived to echo the corresponding film therein, creating a Gesamtkunstwerk that fuses architecture, image, and sound.

Drawing from the same associative impulse that informed Stendhal Syndrome, Goldin created an expansive body of new grid photographs in which her own autobiographical images are mirrored by photographs taken in museums of artworks spanning millennia. The grid format, which has been a key element of Goldin’s work for three decades, echoes the cinematic structure of her moving-image works, encapsulating her understanding of history and time. These photographs line the walls of the gallery, surrounding the pavilions. Many of the grids explore stories of love and loss from antiquity, as in Orpheus Dying (2024), in which an 1866 Baroque painting by Émile Lévy of Orpheus is paired with a 1977 photograph of Goldin’s lover Tony. The visual parallels are striking, as both figures lie in nearly identical, seductive positions. Their pronounced rib cages create a haunting symmetry, and both bodies are draped against rumpled blue sheets that further unify the images, despite one being a classical nude and the other of a modern man wearing jeans. The shared palette and eerie shadowing of the two scenes blur the lines between past and present, high art and personal narrative, making their connection almost surreal—and evoking the pleasure and terror of the Stendhal Syndrome.

Throughout her storied fifty-year career, Goldin has fearlessly probed the depths of the human condition, capturing raw moments from everyday life that reveal universal experiences of love, loss, and the truths that connect us all.

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Chrissy Angliker: Post Liminal, Massey Klein Gallery, New York

September 7th through October 19th

Massey Klein 124 Forsyth Street

New York, New York

Massey Klein Gallery is pleased to present Post Liminal, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Chrissy Angliker. The

exhibition will be on view from September 7th through October 19th. An opening reception will be held on Saturday,

September 7th from 6-8pm. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

***

Post Liminal

The ripples slice the mirror,

Opening the void of duality.

In still waters it takes one drip to remember.

Whole worlds appear to hold.

Walls as solid as light,

Flickering within its foundation,

The wind carries them like leaves to their future.

Arrival and leaving,

Rubbing like twigs,

Creating that warmth

Found in here.

***

“This being human is a guest house,” Rumi told us centuries ago. “Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a

meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.”

Over the past year and a half, I have encountered many unexpected visitors. The loss of a dear loved one catalyzed

the sale of her building, which housed my sacred art studio for 14 years. In a way that felt synchronized, the building

where I lived sold soon after. During the pandemic’s epilogue, the New York I had known felt as if it was untethering

itself from me; and with so many foundations convulsing below, the fragility of sanctuary and illusion of permanence

became my fixation.

We meet here in the Post Liminal, where much has transpired in rapid succession. The pace was so swift that at times

all that was left to capture from each place was a thing on the cusp of change, a moment heated to its limit by

transition, a flash of stillness amidst turmoil.

Massey Klein 124 Forsyth Street New York, NY 10002 masseyklein.com

My sanctuaries were destinations: my native Switzerland; the homes I’ve moved to and from in Brooklyn; my new

studio; and Casa de Nada, an artist residency in Taos, New Mexico. And as the cut flowers bravely bloom to their

wilt within their temporary homes, I know I am them.

A known mirage is a gift. We swim, confronting our reflections in the waters, bathing inside the fragile mirrors of the

structures we’ve built and cling to still. I grasped at the ripples hoping I could dive beneath the tenuousness of truth.

In my collaborative dialogue with paint, I have always aimed to disentangle the medium from the illusory image. And

here, I endeavor to explore the fallacy of permanence, the fleeting nature of all things, and to pause in that liminal

glow.

-Chrissy Angliker

***

Chrissy Angliker has exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States, with notable recent exhibitions including a

solo exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery, a group exhibition at Stalla Madulain, inclusion at the Dallas Art Fair, and a

group exhibition at Massey Klein Gallery. She presented her first solo exhibition with Massey Klein Gallery, Crazy

Says the Daisy, from January 28th through March 5th, 2022, and was featured on David Zwirner’s PLATFORM in the

fall of 2022. Last year, Angliker exhibited with Massey Klein Gallery in a solo presentation at Future Fair (May 11-13,

2023) and a group presentation alongside artists Bethany Czarnecki and Kate McQuillen at the Dallas Art Fair (April

20-23, 2023).

Her work has been featured in numerous international print and online publications, including Interview,

Platformart.com, Cool Hunting, Creative Boom, In Style, Forbes.com, The Know Culture, The Last Magazine, Bolero

Magazine, and Hyperallergic, to name only a few. In 2016, Neidhard & Schoen AG published an in-depth book,

Chrissy Angliker PAINT/ING/S, examining Angliker’s process and resulting paintings with a focus on her work created

between 2014 and 2016.

Angliker has been awarded the Rowena Reed Kostellow Award (Pratt Institute) and the International Takifuji Art Award

(Tokyo), among other international accolades and nominations, and has had site- and project-specific work

commissioned by AOL America Online, Burton Snowboards, and Wired Magazine, among others. The artist lives and

works in Brooklyn, NY.

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Transforming Karma: Art, Earth and Responsibility,Solo Exhibition by Lisa-Marie Price

Thursday, 19 September 2024

• 18:00 21:00

• Loom ClubUnit 23, The Ivories, 6 Northampton StreetLondon, England, N1 2HYUnited Kingdom (map)

Loom Club is proud to present "Transforming Karma: Art, Earth, and Responsibility," an exhibition featuring the soft and delicate works of artist Lisa-Marie Price. This exhibition, inspired by the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh in Love Letter to the Earth, invites viewers to explore the profound connection between human actions and the environment.

“When we understand the nature of karma, we see that every action we take contributes to our collective future.” - Thich Nhat Hanh in Love Letter to the Earth

The exhibition takes place for one night only on September 19th from 6PM to 9PM at Loom Club, Essex Road, London. Price delves into the concept of karma and its relationship to our treatment of the planet. Central to Price’s practice is the use of natural paints made from earth minerals, grounding her work in the

elements she seeks to honour. This process deepens her exploration of how our actions impact the Earth, reinforcing the need for harmony with nature. Transforming Karma is more than an exhibition; it’s a call to action, urging us to recognise our deep connection with the planet and the responsibility we hold. In the face of climate change, this exhibition reminds us that mindful actions can heal both ourselves and the Earth.

Join us on September 19th to explore the art of transformation and reflection. Witness how art can inspire change and together we can create a more mindful and compassionate world.

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Robin F. Williams, Good Mourning, PPOW Gallery, New York

390 Broadway, 2nd Floor

September 6 - October 26, 2024

P·P·O·W is pleased to present Good Mourning, Robin F. Williams’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring a series of new large-scale paintings and gouaches on paper, this exhibition builds upon Williams’s previous examinations of the constructions of gender in portraiture, advertising, folklore, and social media. An avid cinephile, Williams found themself looking for ‘the paintings’ in horror films and psychological thrillers. These films cultivated a generative space for Williams, revealing transformative moments where both composition and narrative collide. In Good Mourning, Williams blends their filmic references with art historical and cultural events to develop a type of fan fiction that creates space for alternative endings.

Obscuring the line between villain, victim, and savior, each of the female protagonists within Williams’s paintings resist the confines of their prescribed role. Morally complex, they present their dualities to the viewer as they learn to escape cycles of abuse. In Out the Window, 2024, Williams invokes Carl Andre’s infamous words, “she went out the window,” in his 911 call following the murder of Ana Mendieta. Visually referencing the 1973 vampire film, Ganja & Hess, Williams pays homage to the role of the female character, Ganja Meda, as one who will go to any length to protect herself. Throughout the film, Ganja grapples with her sexuality, gender, and morality as it relates to race, class, and her bodily autonomy. In an act of self-preservation, she enters into an unholy union with a male vampire, leaving her further from her autonomy than before. In Williams’s version, the female figure is given the power to preserve her freedom by throwing that union out the window, creating a new horizon for her story.               

Robin F. Williams (b. 1984) received their BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and has presented solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Morán Morán, Mexico City, Mexico; Perrotin, Tokyo; Pace Prints, New York, NY; and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA, among others. Robin F. Williams: We’ve Been Expecting You, Williams’s first solo institutional exhibition, was on view at the Columbus Museum of Art, April 5 - August 18, 2024. Their work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally including Pictures Girls Make: Portraitures, curated by Alison Gingeras, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA; In New York, Thinking of You (Part I), Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY; I’m Not Your Mother, P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Fire Figure Fantasy, ICA Miami, Miami, FL; Present Generations, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; XENIA: Crossroads in Portrait Painting, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY; Nicolas Party: Pastel, Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY; SEED, curated by Yvonne Force, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Collection Majudia, Montreal, Canada; the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; and X Museum, Beijing, China; among others.

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Japan In/Out Brazil, Nara Roesler New York, New York

Wed 4 Sep 2024 to Sat 5 Oct 2024

511 W 21st Street, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Nara Roesler New York presents Japan In/Out Brazil, a group exhibition that brings together the work of three artists from different generations who share Japanese origins and were born in, or have close ties to Brazil: Tomie Ohtake (1913-2015), Lydia Okumura (1948) and Asuka Anastacia Ogawa (1988). Although they are all of Japanese origin and belong to its diaspora in Brazil, these three artists belong to different generations. While Tomie Ohtake was born at the beginning of the 20th century and began her production in the 1950s, Okumura gave impetus to her poetics in the 1970s, a time of great effervescence in conceptual art, and Asuka Anastacia Ogawa is from a new generation of contemporary painters.

Tomie Ohtake is an emblematic example of the Japanese diaspora in Brazilian art, above all because of her pioneering spirit. With work that was initially figurative, the artist quickly moved towards abstraction, in which she combined gestural elements with a formal rigor characteristic of geometric abstraction. From the 1970s onwards, she began to work with large areas of color and frames that suggest the continuation of a composition beyond the space of the canvas. With the use of acrylic paint from the mid-1980s onwards, she began to create tonalities and made the overlapping chromatic layers visible, creating an abstraction with a cosmic aspect. She also developed a body of sculptural work, which is represented in the exhibition by a work from the Tubulares series, developed in the 1990s. Its tubular shape and sinuous aspects, similar to a pictorial gesture, conveys lightness in opposition to the nature of the material it is made of (carbon steel).

Lydia Okumura, on the other hand, is an important representative of Brazilian conceptual art, a trend that gained strength in the country towards the end of the 1960s. Unlike her contemporaries, who gradually shifted their productions towards something more experimental, Okumura’s early creations already demonstrated a high degree of innovation, since she conceived her works not as finished artistic objects, but as visual situations that directly impacted the viewer's perception. Through drawings and interventions in space, the artist created installations and site-specific works that played with the public’s sensoriality, inviting them to interact and be part of the work. From the 1980s onwards, Okumura brought these optical experiments to painting, creating compositions that explored geometric elements and the ambiguity between two and three dimensions.

The relationship between Japanese and Brazilian cultural elements is very visible in the work of Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, a young painter who was born in Japan but spent part of her childhood and adolescence in Brazil, before moving to Europe and the United States, where she completed her training. In her pictorial work, the artist depicts androgynous, childlike characters with large eyes and black skin. The backgrounds are neutral and saturated colors, sometimes intensely luminous. The frontal representation of these characters, as well as the somewhat abstract background, suggests that they carry a strong spiritual content. The titles of the paintings refer both to Ogawa's ancestors and to ancestral elements from the cultures of Japan and Brazil.

The exhibition thus brings together different contributions by three artists from different generations who were part of the Japanese diaspora in Brazil, showing that this diaspora not only played a major role in the history of art in the country, but that it continues to provide avenues for thinking about contemporary production.

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Wangari Mathenge. Bedimmed Boundaries: Between Wakefulness and Sleep, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York

Thu 5 Sep 2024 to Sat 19 Oct 2024

138 Tenth Avenue, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Nicola Vassell presents Bedimmed Boundaries: Between Wakefulness and Sleep, a new series of paintings and video installation by Wangari Mathenge in which she observes her own sleeping body in order to derive profound, personal insights into the nature of altered states of consciousness. This recent work depicts her experience of two particular psychological phenomena: hypnagogia, the transition from wakefulness to sleep, and hypnopompia, the transition from sleep to wakefulness. Amidst semi-lucid dreams, her senses distort, even merge, the physical and fantastical, incurring a heightened sensation of euphoria.

To develop the visual vocabulary of her hypnagogic and hypnopompic journeys, Mathenge began collecting textual and visual records; she arranged cameras in her home to film her late-night movements and kept a notebook to recount the details of her recent and recurring dreams. Through a series of self-portraits, she depicts her body in fluctuating states of repose across multiple, durational panels. She images her fluttering eyes and restless spasms as if windows into her subconscious with the curtains drawn-gestures that imply, rather than illustrate, her vivid hallucinations.

Mathenge is interested in subverting conventional associations with the body at rest, bringing expressive form to scientific research that reframes sleep as an activation of the brain - comparable to the metabolic stimulation the brain produces in consciousness. Citing recent studies by the neuroscientist Rahul Jandial, she considers rest a signifier of nuanced, abstract neural impulses that stimulate creativity, memory and situations unrestrained by the logic required for executive functioning. Through twisting and turning pictorial planes, boundaries between wake and rest are dismantled; in each image, she deftly collapses diametric poles of the same reality.

As the hours pass from panel to panel, her palette drifts from bright shades of yellow and green to deep tones of ochre and moss. While her paintings offer austere scenes of stamina, stillness and sleepwalking, animated brushstrokes infuse her domestic surroundings with enigmatic vibrations-swirling gestures that convey the uncanny experience of perceiving her ecstatic aura from a bird's-eye view. Cloaked in slumber, Mathenge's compositions are mesmerizing and perplexing-portraits of her mind as it pursues equilibrium between empirical and imaginary realms.

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Judy Chicago: Revelations, Serpentine North Gallery, London

Thu 23 May 2024 to Sun 1 Sep 2024

West Carriage Drive, W2 2AR

Tue-Sun 10am-6pm

Serpentine presents Revelations, an exhibition of trailblazing artist, author, educator, cultural historian and feminist Judy Chicago (b. 1939, Chicago, USA). On view at Serpentine North, this is the artist’s largest solo presentation in a London institution.

Chicago came to prominence in the late 1960s when she challenged the male-dominated landscape of the art world by making work that was boldly from a woman’s perspective. An artistic polymath, Chicago’s work is defined by a commitment to craft and experimentation, either through her choice of subject matter or the method and materials she employs.

Throughout her six-decade career, Chicago has contested the absence and erasure of women in the Western cultural canon, developing a distinctive visual language that gives visibility to their experiences. To this aim, Chicago has produced both individual and collaborative projects that grappled with themes of birth and creation, the social construct of masculinity, her Jewish identity, notions of power and powerlessness, extinction, and expressed her longstanding concern for climate justice.

Judy Chicago: Revelations charts the full arc of Chicago’s career with a specific focus on drawing, highlighting rarely seen works. Several immersive, multi-media elements, including an AR app, a video recording booth, and other audio-visual components, set this show apart from previous surveys of Chicago’s work. With never-before-seen sketchbooks, films and slides, video interviews of participants from The Dinner Party (1974–79), audio recordings, and a guided tour of The Dinner Party by Chicago herself, this novel approach to exhibiting Chicago’s work makes the artist’s presence felt throughout the gallery.

The exhibition takes its name from an unknown illuminated manuscript Chicago penned in the early 1970s which will be published for the first time in conjunction with the exhibition by Serpentine and Thames & Hudson. Titled Revelations, this visionary work is a radical retelling of human history recovering some of the stories of women that society sought to erase, and one that Chicago never imagined would be published in her lifetime. Audio excerpts from the book can be heard in each of the galleries through an accompanying audio guide, seamlessly creating a link between visual art and written word that has occupied the artist’s practice since the 1970s.

Firelei Báez: Sueño de la Madrugada (A Midnight’s Dream)South London Gallery, London

Fri 28 Jun 2024 to Sun 8 Sep 2024

65-67 Peckham Road, SE5 8UH

Tue-Sun 11am-6pm, Wed 11am-9pm

Sueño de la Madrugada (A Midnight’s Dream) is Firelei Báez’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Known for her striking paintings, she also makes drawings, installations, and sculptures. Báez takes over the South London Gallery with new immersive installations and large abstract paintings. She uses rich colours, elements from nature, sound and light to reflect on complex colonial histories.

The exhibition is a journey through vibrant spaces where ecology, power, and resistance interact.
Through research and critical engagement with archives, Báez examines the legacies of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. For her, myths and folklore are tools of cultural and spiritual resistance. Sueño de la Madrugada (A Midnight’s Dream) shares stories of the Ciguapa, a mythological figure from Dominican folklore; Atabey, the Taino mother earth spirit; Oshun, the Yoruba god of rivers, love, beauty, and prosperity; and Erzili, a spirit of love from Haitian Vodou.

These mythical figures invite viewers to reconsider what it means to be human, and to imagine freedom from earthly constraints.

“My works are propositions, meant to create alternate pasts and potential futures, questioning history and culture in order to provide a space for reassessing the present.” — Firelei Báez

The exhibition is curated by the 2023-24 New Curators fellows: Carol Bedoy, Courtney Brown, Felix Choong, Lemeeze Davids, Rosie Fitter, Lucia Jurikova, Aditi Kapoor, Makella Ama Ketedzi, Rey Londres, Nikita Sena Quarshie and Amandine Vabre Chau. New Curators offers aspiring curators from lower socio-economic backgrounds a paid, 12-month intensive curatorial training from its base at the South London Gallery.

ABOUT FIRELEI BAEZ

Firelei Báez (b. 1981, Dominican Republic) received an M.F.A. from Hunter College, a B.F.A. from the Cooper Union’s School of Art, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2024, Báez will be the subject of her first major US survey at the I.C.A. Boston, curated by Eva Respini. Her work has been presented in many significant international exhibitions, including the inaugural installation of the I.C.A. Watershed, Boston (2021), curated by Eva Respini, now on view at The Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas, and The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), curated by Cecilia Alemani. Recent solo presentations of Báez’s work include exhibitions at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; and Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Ksenia Dermenzhi: Invisible Paths, BEERS London, London

Fri 19 Jul 2024 to Sat 31 Aug 2024

51 Little Britain, EC1A 7BH

Tue-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat 11am-5pm

There exists an ongoing trope in art wherein the artist, so impassioned in their pursuit to become one with nature, describes this process as a literal dissolvement of the self into the earth. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1623), an elemental spirit sings of a shipwrecked king's human form blending into the ocean floor, detailing for audiences how his body parts have scattered into coral and pearls. And this is a tradition that extends both From German Romanticism to Rousseau's cryptic paintings that seem to pull the viewer into the mystic landscape; and more contemporarily too: Antony Gormley's carbuncle encrusted bronze male statues that reveal themselves with the changing tides, and Doig’s entire body of work seems to relate to desirous surroundings (and, possibly, his perpetual status as a physical and psychological outsider), or even Vija Celmins explorations where the artist’s hand seems to disappear into the process.

This tradition continues with Moldovan artist Ksenia Dermenzhi’s newest body of work, whose Invisible Paths brings her sophomore solo BEERS London after a sold-out exhibition in 2022 and a recent group show with James Cohan Gallery in New York that placed the young artist in the purview of noted American collectors, as well as a forthcoming inclusion in an exhibition focusing on contemporary landscape painters at London’s prestigious Saatchi Gallery.

But in Invisible Paths, Dermenzhi forgoes whatever remnants of realism or representation lingered from her previous works to similarly explore how her brushwork leads her (and us, the viewer) through the painterly process. These are landscape paintings – surely, but they’re also distinctly not landscapes, as Dermenzhi has ramped up the abstraction in her work, which is both exciting and evident. The powerful abundance of mark-making and colour suggests a lessening of the ‘self’ or ‘ego’ in full acceptance of nature’s bounty. She also alludes to embarking on a spiritualist journey in the vein of Thoreau, a notable modern advocate for creative thinking through connection with nature: specifically walking.

However the tradition of exploring “invisible paths” is not a contemporary notion. Both Aristotle and his predecessor Socrates extolled the merits of walking - and artists for centuries have been captivated by this process through art, literature, and philosophy. French Surrealist author René Daumal writes that “your dialogue with nature was just the outward image of an inner dialogue with yourself.”

In a letter to Émile Bertrand dated 1904, painter Henri Rousseau writes: “in order to make progress, there is only nature, and the eye is trained through contact with her.” So too does Dermenzhi’s work invite viewers to lose – or find – themselves. The majesty here is how Dermenzhi manages to make such frenetic, energetic mark-making harmonize; how her colours syncopate with a peaceful, calming rhythm. Us city goers may not have the ability to get back to nature as often as we’d like – in this case we invite you to take a leisurely stroll through Dermenzhi’s Invisible Paths.

***

*Another Place is a piece of modern sculpture by British artist Antony Gormley located at Crosby Beach in Merseyside, England consisting of 100 cast iron figures facing towards the sea. The figures are modeled on the artist's own naked body.

______________________________

KSENIA DERMENZHI (b. 1995, Moldova) currently lives and works in London. Dermenzhi studied at the Academy of Music, Theatre, and Fine Arts in Chisinau, completing her studies in painting in 2019. Prior to this Dermenzhi studied at the College of Fine Arts in Chisinau completing her studies in Fine Art & Painting in 2015. Dermenzhi has participated in exhibitions in New York, London, Chisinau and Beirut.

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Lee ShinJa: Weaving the Dawn, Tina Kim Gallery, New York

Thu 22 Aug 2024 to Sat 28 Sep 2024

525 West 21st Street, NY 10011

Mon-Fri 10am-6pm

Tina Kim Gallery presents “Weaving the Dawn,” the gallery’s first solo exhibition dedicated to Lee ShinJa - a pioneering artist who is remembered in Korean art history for introducing the “tapestry” genre when the concept of “fiber art” was still unestablished in her native Korea. Marking her New York debut, the show highlights Lee’s expansion of the material characteristics and aesthetic beauty of thread as a medium.

The full breadth of her career, which spans more than half a century, will be represented—from her avant-garde embroidered appliqué work from the 1960s to the more recent “Spirit of Mountain” series that pays homage to her hometown. Featuring preliminary sketches of her early compositional ideas and archival materials that highlight her role as a dedicated educator and researcher, “Weaving the Dawn” will be on view from August 22 to September 28, 2024.

Born in 1930 in Uljin, Korea, while the country was under Japanese colonial rule, Lee first encountered textiles through the women in her life. As a child, she played with her mother’s sewing rings, and watched her grandmother weave cloth for household use. In a 1977 conversation with critic Yoo Keun Joon, she remarked that it was natural for women to gravitate towards embroidery within the limited scope of applied arts at the time. (1) Her innovative spirit can be felt early in her practice when she boldly integrated appliqué and dyeing into her embroidery. In Image of the City (1961), she unraveled the plain weave of the base fabric and twisted subtly colored threads to the loosened ones to create a structural tension previously unseen in traditional textiles. Meanwhile, Portrait of My Daughter (1962), modeled after her second daughter, broke formal embroidery conventions with its semi- abstract representation of a face and hands. Lee’s experimentation with technique and form reaches a crescendo in Screen (1979), which divides space by introducing thick cotton yarn to a deconstructed linen cloth. Lee’s avant-garde approach and subversion of the boundaries between craft and fine art, as well as traditional and modernist technique, received mixed reviews at the time. Some critics claimed that she was destroying the practice of Korean embroidery. Others hailed her as a comet in the craft world. (2)

In the 1970s, Lee fully embraced tapestry techniques, developing new dyeing methods and experimenting with unique materials such as bedding and wool sweaters sourced from secondhand markets. Her works from this period, such as Sun and Moon I (1973), feature geometric motifs, lyrical colors, and harmonious horizontal and vertical compositions, achieving a complete abstraction. In the 1980s, after visiting the 1970 Osaka Expo and the 1983 Lausanne International Tapestry Biennale, Lee gained the confidence to expand her textile forms into sculptural installations. During this decade, she also met and engaged with international artists like Magdalena Abakanowicz and Issey Miyake through textile exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. Reflecting her remarkable dedication, Lee’s large-scale woven works became increasingly experimental, incorporating bold colors and extensive weaves. Despite her prolific output, she faced personal sorrow in 1982 with the passing of her husband, painter Chang Woon Sang.

Amid this loss and the challenges of being a single parent, Lee discovered a profound passion for creation. From 1984 to 1993, she had three solo exhibitions with works expressing a resilient will for renewal stemming from the artist’s deep reverence for nature’s life-sustaining and cyclical forces. Pieces such as Dawn, Legend, and The World is Beautiful transform images of nature through abstraction: Their densely populated and meticulously layered threads evoke the sky, wind, sunlight, and ocean, suggesting a powerful vitality rising from the earth and a sense of coexistence, hope, and expansion. Critic Kim Bok-Young articulated this as themes of “metaphor of light” and “space of memory” in Lee’s oeuvre. (3)

Reflecting on her childhood memories of nature, Lee said, “Growing up in a rural area, I vividly remember the intense sunlight at sunrise and sunset. I have cherished memories of climbing mountains with my father every morning to witness these moments. The sunlight rising from the East Sea left a lasting impression on me. I have always believed in creating nature as I see it. However, I still feel that my work has yet to match the beauty of my hometown.” (4)

After her 1993 solo exhibition, Lee focused on further developing her abstract representations of nature in her “Spirit of Mountain” series. This body of work, which epitomizes her later practice, uses a variety of materials to portray dynamic mountain ranges through intricate diagonal structures. Since the 2000s, Lee’s work has highlighted sculptural abstraction and spatial depth by incorporating new materials such as wood and metal into her tapestries. While maintaining her characteristic color palette of red, yellow, black, and gray hues, she has introduced tonal contrasts, enhancing vertical and horizontal structures to create a more static composition. Her serene landscapes often feature rectangular shapes reminiscent of windows, drawing inspiration from traditional Korean houses, or hanok. Seen through these frames, Lee’s mountainous forms reflect her tranquil and humble vision of simultaneously observing and residing within nature.

Critic Kim Hong-hee, former director of the Seoul Museum of Art, commended Lee’s achievements in challenging gender and genre biases in craft. (5) Furthermore, she observed that Lee’s fiber art subtly reflects autobiographical elements, despite their formally abstract style, offering a foundation for feminist critique. “Weaving the Dawn” seeks to reinvigorate this conversation around historically marginalized artistic practices that have been overlooked due to their associations with women’s domestic labor.

Lee ShinJa (b. 1930) is a pioneering first-generation Korean fiber artist and educator. She has been exhibited widely in major solo exhibitions across Korea and abroad at galleries and institutions such as Press Center (1965), Gallery Hyundai (1983), Seoul Arts Center’s Hangaram Art Museum (1993), the Republic of Korea’s National Academy of Arts (2003) and more. In 2023, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Gwacheon, Korea, presented her retrospective “Threadscapes,” which shed new light on the world of a pioneer who opened up the possibilities of fiber art. She has also participated in a number of group exhibitions including ones at MMCA Deoksugung (1986), Ho-Am Art Museum (1988), and Jakarta Textile Museum (2000), and biennials like the 5th Lausanne- Beijing International Fiber Art Biennale at Tsinghua University Academy of Arts and Design (2008). Lee’s works are housed in the collections of major institutions such as the National Museum of Korea, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Seoul Museum of Craft Art, Sookmyung Women’s University, Duksung Women’s University, and elsewhere.

(1) Yoo Keun Joon, “Cover Story, Lee ShinJa and Yoo Keun Joon’s Conversation: Amiable Everyday Life Sculpture,” Monthly Design, June 1977, 5.
(2) Lee ShinJa, oral statement recorded by Choi Gongho, The 2013 Oral History Project of Modern and Contemporary Arts in Korea, Series 230: Lee ShinJa. ARKO Arts Archive, 2014.
(3) Kim Bok-Young, “Metaphor of Light and Space of Memory,” Monthly Art, 1993.
(4) Lee ShinJa, oral statement recorded by Choi Gongho, The 2013 Oral History Project of Modern and Contemporary Arts in Korea, Series 230: Lee ShinJa. ARKO Arts Archive, 2014.
(5) Kim Hong-hee, “Lee ShinJa’s Fiber Art: Breaking the Genre and Gender Bias in Craft,” in Lee ShinJa, Threadscapes (Gwacheon: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 2023).

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Laurent Le Deunff: Whatever This May Be, Semiose, Paris

Sat 22 Jun 2024 to Sat 17 Aug 2024

44 rue Quincampoix, 75004

Tue-Sat 11am-7pm

Whatever This May Be is Laurent Le Deunff’s sixth exhibition at Semiose. The gallery space is transformed into a white landscape, inhabited by figurative sculptures made of both ‘real’ and ‘fake’ wood, set on plinths or placed directly on the floor.

The title of the exhibition, Whatever This May Be refers to the controversy surrounding Constantin Brancusi’s successful lawsuit against the American Customs Service, which attempted to apply import duty to his sculptures—in principle exempt as works of art—when they were transported to the USA for an exhibition in the 1920s. At the heart of this dispute was the sculpture Bird in Space, which customs officials considered to be an industrially manufactured object rather than work of art. This was precisely the kind of anecdote that provides inspiration for Laurent Le Deunff, who practices sculpture as an art of artifice and carefully cultivated illusion.

For his latest Parisian opus, the artist has assembled a dense, modernist-style installation, mainly featuring two groups of sculptural works: wooden totem poles and cement traps and snares. The layout consists of a forest of pedestals forming a labyrinth of islands that encourage the viewers to explore at their leisure. While their iconographic sources are similar, the techniques employed are somewhat contradictory: the direct carving of wood on one hand and rustication (or ‘rocaillage’, depending on whether the aim is to imitate rock or wood) on the other. While the former enables the artist to carve realistic forms from a natural element, wood, the latter imitates wood through the use of industrial materials. Thus, the material used for one technique becomes the motif of the other, while the imperfections of the first act as the characteristic, decorative elements of the second.

Exquisite Corpses

Placed on parallelepipedic platforms of differing heights that seem to be engaged in some kind of 3D game of Tetris, a multitude of tripartite, wooden totem sculptures echo the principle of the cadavre exquis made famous by the Surrealists. These in-the-round sculptures sometimes resemble sports trophies, trinkets or even religious offerings. The visitor might come across, in no particular order, a sunfish with a potato chip balanced on its head, perched on a sharpening tool, an otter sandwiched between a tooth and a key, a safe topped with a bone and a peanut shell, as well as many other hybrid creature-objects, some of which incorporate more or less identifiable elements of modern or contemporary sculpture (Sarkis, Jean Arp, and Phillip King). Adopting their titles from the various types of wood they were directly carved from (boxwood, red oak, Applewood, eucalyptus, pear wood, etc.), the sculptures are grouped together, in different sizes (from the palm of a hand to over a meter) or shapes that are superimposed in improbable relationships of scale to wonderful comic effect, in a similar way to that other monument to sculpture, Fischli & Weiss’s fabulous Suddenly This Overview (1981). In Laurent Le Deunff’s art, forms are dictated by the materials and the instinct that guides his hand. There are no pre-established projects directing the creative act, and nothing to prevent the artist from being himself surprised by the eclectic forms that emerge and collide with unerring humor.

One should be aware that Laurent Le Deunff developed an early passion for sculptural forms derived from traditional practices and cultures—from totem poles in British Colombia (Canada) to contemporary sand sculptures. This fascination has always been present since his discovery of art at the age of 18, when he visited the first retrospective of a certain Romanian sculptor at the Pompidou Center in 1995.

Imitation Materials

While Laurent Le Deunff’s directly carved sculptures are the result of his daily practice of cutting up logs in his garden with a chainsaw, or chiseling away at them on the workbench in his studio, it’s a different kettle of fish for the rustications he creates with a rocaille sculptor in dedicated work sessions.

The original aim was to make copies of his own wooden works and “have the satisfaction of making sculptures of logs” (in his own words). To achieve this, the artist turned to these masonry techniques, used to imitate wood or stone by modelling a mixture of cement, sand and latex, in successive layers, on a structure made of iron, concrete reinforcing rods and wire mesh.

The artist use of these procedures characterizes the second corpus of sculptures distributed throughout the gallery space. All of them are imbued with a certain utilitarian potential that the artist has chosen either not to enable or simply to disarm. As well as the collection of animals recurrent in his work, including a badger-fountain, an owl-barbecue and stick-insects that look like fireplace andirons, this second group includes a series of traps and snares (complex assemblies of rusticated and rocaille ropes and logs, stained once dry and left at the mercy of the elements to develop a natural patina). They are of course, completely harmless as they are set in concrete. There is also a trapdoor set on the floor, representing the threshold of all eventualities.

Thus, with a snap of the fingers, we’re transported to a childhood world, like that of the Famous Five or the Secret Seven, in search of thrills and extraordinary adventures, amidst these safeguarded, sculpted, imitation and hybridized objects… Whatever They May Be. One thing is sure – they are most certainly art!

Alice Motard

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Helen Marden: The Grief Paintings, Gagosian Park & 75, New York

Wed 24 Jul 2024 to Sat 14 Sep 2024

821 Park Avenue, NY 10021

Mon-Fri 10am-6pm

Begun in 2023 as Marden cared for her husband, Brice, and made over the months following his passing, the Grief Paintings are intimately scaled abstractions created with resin, powdered pigment, ink, and natural objects. Flowing layers of vivid color and assemblages of feathers, shells, and sea glass extend beyond the paintings’ circular supports. Imbued with the spirit of life, love, and creativity, this body of work takes on new meaning in accord with the poem “Growing Up in America” by Rene Ricard, a longtime friend of the couple.

Growing Up in America

Then love takes us to faraway
places
Certain theaters,
Public toilets, jail, and that long
highway we all hitch-hike alone.
Then the feathers
of the years fly from their pillows
It was all filmed on that old
nitrate stock—the type that self-
destructs after a while—so, there are
no pictures left. I’m sorry—Just
feeling. Feelings, like clouds
Cloud upon cloud in a sky full
of clouds

— Rene Ricard

This fall, Gagosian will publish a monograph on Helen Marden’s paintings that includes an essay by Anna Godbersen and a conversation between the artist and Kiki Smith.

“Growing Up in America” © 2020 for the Literary Estate of Rene Ricard

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Adrienne Elise Tarver: She who sits

Wed 14 Aug 2024 to Sun 24 Nov 2024

JCDecaux Bus Shelters and Newsstands citywide,

All day, every day

Adrienne Elise Tarver is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist. Following the creative impulses of collage, she uses both personal imagery and found photographs as source materials for the paintings in this exhibition.

She who sits is Tarver’s first solo public art exhibition and features six new works that continue her exploration of the centrality of the Black matriarch. Each subject is seated in an intimate environment and each painting is inspired by the artist’s personal archive as well as media archives–especially that of Ebony Magazine, a cornerstone of culture, news, and entertainment. Tarver’s imagery positions the act of sitting as a reclamation of rest and power. The work nods to the ways activists have used sitting in public space as a tool to shift the socio-political dynamic in the United States. For decades, sit-ins have been used by Black activists to enact direct change within legal systems that aimed to confine and erase Black presence. The seated subjects in Tarver’s paintings quietly confront passengers at bus shelters, which in turn offer moments of physical respite and restful contemplation.

Adrienne Elise Tarver: She who sits is curated by Jenée-Daria Strand, Assistant Curator at Public Art Fund.

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Color Field Queens. Female Artists of the 1970s, Lincoln Glenn, New York

Sat 3 Aug 2024 to Sat 21 Sep 2024

542 West 24th Street, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Artists: Alice Baber - Dorothy Fratt - Vivian Springford - Sherron Francis - Emily Mason - Beryl Barr-Sharrar - Sheila Isham - Hilda Shapiro Thorpe - Takako Yamaguchi - Betty Parsons

Lincoln Glenn Gallery presents Color Field Queens, an exhibition of works by Alice Baber, Beryl Barr-Sharrar, Sherron Francis, Dorothy Fratt, Sheila Isham, Emily Mason, Vivian Springford, and Hilda Shapiro Thorpe. The eight artists in the presentation are united not only by gender, but also by their significant and underappreciated contributions to the Color Field movement in the 1970s.

The term Color Field Painting was coined by American critic Clement Greenberg on the occasion of a 1964 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In considering the selection of works from the 1970s presented in Color Field Queens in the terms of Greenberg’s definition of Color Field painting, key techniques and attributes unify these artists under Greenberg’s movement. In many of the works, paint is thinned into delicate washes and blooming swaths of color. The resultant forms deliver sumptuous tones, uninterrupted by brush strokes that would suggest the presence of the hand behind them.

The Color Field movement had robust roots in both Washington D.C. and New York City in the decade leading up to Greenberg’s defining exhibition. In 1957, Sheila Isham (1927–2024) established a studio practice in D.C. and joined a group known as the Society of Washington Printmakers. In the same period, D.C. native Dorothy Fratt (1923–2017) began showing as a student in D.C. at the Corcoran School of Art and the Phillips Collection, ultimately joining the group that would become the Washington Color School.

Color Field painting became formally linked to Washington D.C with the 1965 exhibition Washington Color Painters at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, featuring work by Gene Davis, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland, among others. The exhibition solidified the formation of the Washington Color School, uniting a “second generation” of artists in the movement who showed at the Washington Gallery as well as the Jefferson Place Gallery, co-founded by Noland. Hilda Shapiro Thorpe (1920–2000) exhibited regularly in this cohort alongside the highest-profile woman tied to the movement, Alma Thomas. “A good part of the reaction against Abstract Expressionism is, as I've already suggested, a continuation of it,” wrote Greenberg; as such, in addition to D.C., the Color Field movement had a robust presence in the birthplace of Abstract Expressionism, New York City. During this key period of growth for the Color Field movement, Vivian Springford (1913–2003) remained an active member of the local artist community, shifting from showing at the Great Jones Gallery, the Preston Gallery, and the Visual Arts Coalition.

Around this same time in the 1960s, Beryl Barr-Sharrar (b. 1935) was living and working in Paris, where she encountered notable American artists working in a similar visual language, including Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, and Alice Baber (1928–1982). Baber spent ample time in Paris as well as in New York, where she co-founded March Gallery, one of the select 10th Street galleries. New York-born Emily Mason (1932–2019), another member of the grouping, ran in these same circles, showing at the artist-run Area Gallery.

It is on the heels of this highly generative period of Abstraction in New York that Sherron Francis (b. 1940) moved to Soho in 1968. Joining a community of artists that included Larry Poons, Larry Zox, and Peter Bradley, Francis began showing with Andre Emmerich upon being introduced to the renowned gallerist by fellow artist Dan Christensen in 1971. In 1973, Andre Emmerich Gallery held solo shows of work by Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, and Washington Color School painter Kenneth Noland.

Color Field Queens reflects Lincoln Glenn Gallery’s core mission to showcase the wide array of American artists who made significant contributions to art history but faced institutional barriers that allowed their names to be forgotten by time.

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Hetty Douglas: narcissistic tendencies, Mott Projects, Catskill

"Narcissistic Tendencies" is a series of works painted during moments of erosion and expansion in Douglas's life. Through this exhibition, Douglas releases the "things that needed to be said.” Refusing silence, she transforms stored words and self-sabotaging narratives into a cleansing rebuilding process.

The artist describes this series as a window of opportunity to grab with guts and turn an exhausted lie into one of heartfelt storytelling.

Douglas’s work creates a gateway into the complexities of human reaction. Marrying abstract painting with intensely personal narratives, inquiries are both introspective and a universal reflection on reconciling her inner worlds/wounds.

A line from Gillian Welch abridges the heart of the exhibition; "but of all the little ways I’ve found to hurt myself, well you might be my favourite one of all."

Join us at Mott Projects, Catskills, New York, on August 2nd for the opening, where Hetty Douglas’s solo show “Narcissistic Tendencies” invites reflection on self-acceptance, encouraging viewers to witness, maybe even empathise with their own healing.

Fri 2 Aug 2024 to Sun 25 Aug 2024

16-18 Livingston Street, NY 12414

Sun 1pm-5pm & by appointment

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Your Mind is Now an Ocean, Pilar Corrias, Savile Row, London

Wed 31 Jul 2024 to Sat 7 Sep 2024

2 Savile Row, W1S 3PA

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

Pilar Corrias presents a group exhibition of works by Koo Jeong A, Ragna Bley, Keren Cytter, Sophie von Hellermann, Manuel Mathieu, Mary Ramsden, Rachel Rose, and Julião Sarmento.

Tapping into the history of the ocean as an image of the sublime and the unconscious, Your Mind is Now an Ocean brings together a range of artworks that evoke the ebb and flow of the tides, rivers, seas and beaches, offering a spectrum of seductive blues in which to lose oneself. At the heart of the exhibition is Keren Cytter’s short film Ocean (2014), a dreamlike arrangement of seemingly unconnected narratives. Cytter’s film begins with a modest family dinner that starts peacefully before descending into a furious squabble. We then meet a Hispanic couple, and a chorus of lovers on a beach rolling around beside a fire; as the film progresses the narrator seems to suggest that the ocean offers a kind of relief or alternative to everyday turmoil. The film concludes with a shot of the beach on a calm day, accompanied by the phrase, ‘your mind is now an ocean’.

Manuel Mathieu’s The Poetry in our Disappearance (2023) churns with rich blues and purples, evoking the flow of water withdrawing from a tide pool, while Sophie von Hellermann’s Out of the Blue (2022) depicts a bunch of bathers at the seaside in a state of what could be either delight or alarm. Mary Ramsden’s well up (2019) depicts what might be a seascape on the left side of the canvas, with sailboats quietly gliding through a moonlit night; marks on the right side, meanwhile, act as formal conceits that both balance the composition and confirm that the painting is palpably abstract. Koo Jeong A’s blue-ink drawings feature minimally rendered cliffs and rocky outcroppings; in one a solitary swimmer dives into an unseen body of water. Based on Koo’s experiences of swimming, the drawings suggest the sublimity of being alone in nature, suspended in water. Ragna Bley conjures a similar sensation of movement and suspension in her painting Drift (2023). Waves of translucent blue flow across the cotton surface, intermingling with sinuous washes of reds and yellows, creating a lush amalgamation of two contrasting energies. ‘If you don’t want to drown, be an ocean’, says Cytter’s narrator, implying that a loss of control or identity might be the only thing to save your life.

Based on Francisco Goya’s Naked woman with a mirror (c. 1794–97), Julião Sarmento’s Mujer desnuda con espejo (Miami Blue) (2020) depicts a naked girl holding a mirror, sat with her back turned to the viewer. Sarmento splashes the girl in pale blue pigment, which he juxtaposes with a sharp rectangle of turquoise. In Rachel Rose’s North Salem Moon (1993) (2022) a hazy full moon in a midnight blue sky hovers above the fluff of a dandelion. The 1993 date in the title indicates the date that Rose took the photograph – shot when she was just seven years old. Capturing the beautiful ephemerality of the moment, a midsummer night’s reverie preserved from the innocence of childhood, the photograph is also a reminder that the tides are controlled by the moon, a source of both lunacy and delight.

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