Gallery News
Gagosian announces new Paris gallery and three Alexander Calder exhibitions
September 17, 2021
Gagosian is pleased to announce the opening of a new location in Paris this October. Situated at 9 rue de Castiglione, in the 1st arrondissement, the space is part of the historic Hotel Lotti development, built in 1910. The location is steps from Place Vendôme, where Leo Castelli and René Drouin opened the storied Drouin Gallery in 1939, and within walking distance of the Musée du Louvre, Musée de l’Orangerie, and Musée d’Orsay.
The architectural design of the gallery was led by Rémi Tessier and features elevated ceilings and 15.5-meter windows that provide a view of the gallery’s interior from the historic arcades.
To mark the opening of the new gallery, Alexander Calder’s monumental sculpture Flying Dragon (1975) will be installed in Place Vendôme as part of FIAC Hors les Murs, which presents artworks in emblematic public spaces throughout the city.
The inaugural exhibition at rue de Castiglione will underscore the unique visual language of Flying Dragon, presenting diverse archival materials related to the sculpture and its original maquette, alongside additional works from 1975.
Selected works will also be presented at the rue de Ponthieu gallery to further emphasize Calder’s visual vocabulary and the interplay between nature and abstraction, stillness and motion, and monumentality and ephemerality in his practice.
Almine Rech now represents Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe
September 15, 2021
Almine Rech is pleased to announce the representation of contemporary Ghanaian artist Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe in Europe, the UK, and China.
Born in 1988 and raised in Accra, Ghana, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe now lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Quaicoe presents his subjects in the form of portraiture, where he engages with ideas of empowerment through his bright and luminous depictions of figurative portraits. This is embodied in the postures of his sitters, who appear set against vibrant monochromatic backgrounds.
As a young man, Quaicoe developed a fascination with stylized posters seen at the movie theatre in his hometown, Accra. It was there that, one day, he discovered a group of artists painting large canvases for the posters behind the main stage. This was a catalytic moment for Quaicoe, who then began drawing and painting incessantly from collected magazine clippings and ‘anything he could get his hands on’. After his studies at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design and during his photography studies, Quaicoe became deeply involved in the subject of figuration and portraiture, specifically Black portraiture.
Quaicoe began to paint from his photographs, creating highly personal and intimate yet formal and premeditated portraits. In 2019, during his residency at La Brea Studio in Los Angeles, Quaicoe began to work on the style he is known for today, utilizing pure pigment on canvas with thick, coarse textures. The paintings he produced during this period were then exhibited in his first solo show at Roberts Projects, LA.
Portrait of Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, 2021 / Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech - Photo: Dan Kvitka
Sotheby’s announces details of two landmark sales of The Macklowe Collection
September 14, 2021
On 9 September, at a global livestream event, Sotheby’s revealed details of the forthcoming landmark sales of The Macklowe Collection – one of the most important collections of any collecting category ever to appear on the market. Each of the 65 works is a consummate masterpiece; together they constitute an unrivaled ensemble that meticulously traces the most important art historical achievements of the last 80 years. Acquired over the course of half a century, the collection reflects decades of pursuit, honing and refining, driven by immense patience and an innate understanding of quality. Estimated to realize in excess of $600 million – the highest estimate ever placed on any collection to come to auction — The Macklowe Collection will be offered across two dedicated evening single owner sales at Sotheby’s in New York, on November 15 this year and in May 2022.
The first of the two sales will feature 34 works which together encompass an extraordinary breadth of 20th- and 21st-century art, ranging in date from the 1940s to works painted less than a decade ago, and including masterworks by Alberto Giacometti, Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol. The sale will also shine a light on a distinguishing feature of the collection as a whole: its enormous depth. Many artists – among them Jeff Koons, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol – are represented by multiple works, each one marking a distinct and critical moment in their respective careers, and together forming an insightful portrait of the artists’ evolution over time.
Hans Arp exhibition to launch Hauser & Wirth’s new Zürich gallery at Bahnhofstrasse 1
An exhibition of works by Hans Arp titled ‘Arp: Art is a Fruit’ will launch Hauser & Wirth’s new space at Bahnhofstrasse 1 on 17 September, in Zürich’s historic central cultural district. Helmed by Partner and Executive Director, James Koch, the space will focus on exhibitions by the 35 artists’ estates represented by the gallery and will be a headquarters for Hauser & Wirth’s increasing private sales activity.
Centrally located close to Lake Zurich and adjacent to the landmark Baur au Lac hotel, the conversion of the ground floor at Bahnhofstrasse 1 into a gallery space is being overseen by Swiss architectural practice, Schmidlin Architekten. The floor to ceiling windows of the ground floor gallery space create a strong street presence on the legendary Bahnhofstrasse. The new venue complements the existing galleries in Switzerland in Zurich, St. Moritz and Gstaad and the Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ HQ. In each location, the goal is to create strong, well-proportioned spaces that place the art on view at the forefront of the experience.
‘The creation of this new space, dedicated to our artists’ estates program and private sales, enables us to shine a spotlight on works of the very highest calibre presented in the cultural heart of Zurich.’ — Iwan Wirth
Hauser & Wirth Bahnhofstrasse © Schmidlin Architekten (Images by Nightnurse Images), Stiftung Arp e.V.,Berlin/ Rolandswerth/2021, ProLitteris, Zurich
Mohammed Sami joins Modern Art
September 7, 2021
Mohammed Sami approaches painting as an allegorical representation against the striking image of conflict and violence. His paintings explore belated memories triggered by common everyday objects and banal, from when he immigrated to Sweden as a refugee from his native Iraq. Rather than using the theme of trauma as a testimony to the Iraq conflict, which he witnessed first-hand, Sami deploys painting to articulate war and memory, and loss obliquely. The semi-abstract register and multi-textured paint create a nuanced relationship between the original event and its present recollection in Sami’s artworks. These often appear playful, yet traditional genres such as the still-life, internal-external spaces and landscapes acquire a strange twist, muted, and turn into uncanny illusions.
Sami was born in Baghdad, Iraq, 1984. He studied drawing and painting at The Institute of Fine Arts, Baghdad, Iraq 2005. He immigrated to Sweden in 2007. Later, in 2015 he earned a first-class honours degree from Ulster University-Belfast school of art, Northern Ireland. He has completed his master’s degree in fine art at Goldsmiths College, London, 2018. Mohammed lives and works between London and Norrköping, Sweden.
The artist will be on view in the forthcoming group show ‘Mixing It Up: Painting Today’ at the Hayward Gallery in London opening to the public on 9 September 2021, and will have his first solo exhibition with the gallery in the Spring of 2022.
David Zwirner now represents Steven Shearer
September 2, 2021
David Zwirner is pleased to announce the representation of Steven Shearer in partnership with Galerie Eva Presenhuber. Galerie Eva Presenhuber will present an exhibition of new work by Shearer from September 4 to October 16, 2021, at its Zurich space. David Zwirner will present an exhibition of new work by Shearer in New York in 2023. A comprehensive new monograph of Shearer’s paintings will be released in 2022, published by DCV with support from Galerie Eva Presenhuber and David Zwirner.
Over the span of nearly twenty-five years, Canadian artist Steven Shearer (b. 1968) has developed a painting practice that weds canonical art history to the contemporary moment, specifically its more plebeian or subterranean expressions. His work, which also includes drawing, assemblage, sculpture, and installation, deploys a wide range of references as well as a vast archive of historical and contemporary found images. Rendered in a visceral fauvist palette, his compositions feature figures that recall classical subjects like the artist in his studio or the Rückenfigur, and incorporate his interest in the lo-fi iconography of popular music and the allure and alienation of participatory youth cultures grounded in these musical netherworlds. Shearer’s sources conflate androgynous, long-haired metalheads, 1970s teen heartthrob Leif Garrett, and the cover of Black Sabbath’s 1983 album Born Again with the proto-modernist archetypes of Edvard Munch and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the ambiguously gendered figures of symbolist Gustave Moreau, as well as Renaissance masters such as Pieter Bruegel and Leonardo da Vinci. The archival impulse that unites these disparate referential systems is rooted in a rigorous, quasi-forensic interest in how images are made, and how the world is constituted by images, in both a symbolic and literal, bodily sense. Shearer’s abiding interest is in making artworks that explore how we remember and idealize each other—in the romance of retrospection. Today’s hypertrophic image culture echoes how people have captured and depicted each other throughout history, and his work poignantly seizes upon these very references, reimagining them in his own distinct visual vocabulary.
The Fauves, 2008–2009 © Steven Shearer
Tolarno Galleries announces representation of Georgia Spain
August 31, 2021
Georgia Spain (b.1993 UK) is a visual artist and musician currently living and working in Sandford, Tasmania on palawa land.
In the same week of June this year, Spain’s paintings won the 2021 Sir John Sulman Prize for Getting down or falling up, and the Women’s Art Prize Tasmania for Six Different Women. In 2020 Spain was the recipient of the prestigious Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship.
Spain’s paintings explore the complexities of human behaviour; using narrative and storytelling to examine the cultural, political and personal. Her work frequently looks at ideas around human spectacle, theatricality, ritual and ceremony.
She is interested in the emotional and performative exchanges between people in social and psychological spaces and in her paintings physical connection is explored through bodies in groupings.
For her first work available through Tolarno Galleries, Georgia Spain is auctioning a brand new painting You, me and the weight 2021. All proceeds will go to the For Afghanistan fundraiser, organised by Ben Quilty.
Sally Mann inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame
Throughout her career, Mann has investigated the visual and metaphorical potential of employing nineteenth-century technologies. She has long used an 8 × 10 bellows camera and has explored platinum, bromoil, and wet-plate collodion processes to make prints that capture the complexities of familial relationships, social realities, and the passage of time.
The International Photography Hall of Fame recognizes those who have advanced the field of photography. The induction ceremony will take place on October 29, 2021, in St. Louis and online.
Photo: Annie Leibovitz
The Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation acquires over 800 prints by Jim Dine
August 24, 2021
Cristea Roberts Gallery is delighted to announce that the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, USA, has acquired a major archive of prints, dating from 1962 – 2020, by Jim Dine (b. 1935).
The acquisition transforms the Foundation’s holding of Dine’s art, which it has been collecting for over 20 years. Dine has built a career exploring and pushing the boundaries of printmaking, alongside his practice in other mediums. Now aged 86 years, he is one of the most important printmakers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The largest acquisition, ever, of Dine’s work includes etchings, woodcuts, lithographs, unique variants, studies and trial proofs. The works feature the artist’s iconic imagery of hearts, skulls, Pinocchio, Venus de Milo, tools and bathrobes, the latter two often appearing as autobiographical motifs.
These phenomenal pieces of printmaking, made over six decades, contain a full overview of Dine’s earliest prints, from his Tool Box portfolio made in 1966 to the artist’s most recent works such as Asleep with his Tools, Jim Dreams (Black and Silver), 2018, a black woodcut on paper painted by Dine in silver, measuring over 3.5 x 2 metres.
Jordan D. Schnitzer, director of the foundation, says, “I am honoured and delighted to have acquired such an exceptional body of prints by Jim Dine, which began with my first purchase of his work in 1988. Through the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation exhibition and publication program, I have championed Dine's work ever since. This acquisition of more than 890 prints transforms the holdings of my collections, affording audiences access to the full breadth of Dine's career in printmaking. Having worked with Cristea Roberts Gallery over the past three years to acquire this collection, we look forward to sharing it.”
Hollis Taggart now represents the Dusti Bongé Estate
August 23, 2021
A trailblazing artist, Dusti Bongé (1903-1993) developed a distinctive style that embraced the visual vocabularies of Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. Based in Biloxi, Mississippi—and recognized as one of the south’s first modernist artists—Bongé also developed strong ties to New York’s inner art circles and had a long association with iconic gallerist Betty Parsons, with whom she showed for nearly three decades. Despite Bongé’s many artistic innovations, she has been conspicuously absent from the mainstream art discourse, within the narratives of art history, and contemporary understanding of the artists that shaped modernist art movements.
With its representation of the Bongé estate, Hollis Taggart is committed to furthering scholarship of the artist’s work and bringing well deserved attention to the artist by illuminating the significance of her artistic contributions. This builds on the gallery’s prior successes in deepening scholarship on and expanding visibility for female artists such as Audrey Flack, Grace Hartigan, Kay Sage, Marjorie Strider, Idelle Weber, and Michael (Corinne) West. To launch its new collaboration with Bongé’s estate, Hollis Taggart will present a selection of works by the artist as part of its exhibition of Abstract Expressionist painters at the upcoming edition of The Armory Show, opening in September 2021. The presentation at the fair will mark the first time that Bongé’s works will be on view in New York in approximately 50 years, offering an important opportunity for collectors, scholars, and the public to re-engage with Bongé’s vision and work.
The presentation at the Armory Show will then be followed, in fall 2022, with an exhibition at Hollis Taggart’s flagship location in Chelsea. That exhibition will explore Bongé’s close association with Betty Parsons, illuminating for the first time their long-standing friendship and professional collaborations.
Chuck Close 1940-2021
August 20, 2021
"I am saddened by the loss of one of my dearest friends and greatest artists of our time. His contributions are inextricable from the achievements of 20th- and 21st-century art." - Arne Glimcher, Chairman, Pace Gallery
Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Close used art as a means of navigating a learning disability. He continued to develop his artistic skills through private art lessons, drawing and painting live models. As a student at the University of Washington (BA, 1962) and later Yale (BFA 1963; MFA 1964), he began to emulate the styles of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, considering himself a third-wave Abstract Expressionist. As he explored this vocabulary, he pivoted from biomorphic forms to figuration.
After studying at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna (1964) on a Fulbright grant, Close returned to the United States in 1965. He taught painting at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he would present his first solo exhibition. Seeking to break from the gestural style that had characterized his student work, Close shifted toward Pop-inflected figuration before embracing the tools of commercial art and illustration. Basing his paintings on photographic images, Close reduced his palette to black-and-white. One of the artist’s most famous works from this period is the large-scale painting Big Nude (1967). His solo presentation at the University of Massachusetts Art Gallery in 1967 featured paintings of male nudes, a move that proved controversial and resulted in a landmark court case that sought to extend freedom of speech in the visual arts.
Upon relocating to New York, Close continued to explore realism, using an airbrush to paint black-and-white, highly detailed photographic portraits of himself, family, and friends onto large-scale canvases. He participated in his first New York exhibition in 1970 at Bykert Gallery alongside Lynda Benglis and Richard Van Buren. Around this time, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, acquired Big Self Portrait (1967) directly from his studio. Close relinquished his black-and-white palette in the early 1970s and began employing a three-color process as well as various imposed systems and techniques. A year later, he opened Recent Work, his first major museum exhibition, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Exploring different modes of representation, Close began in the late 1970s to make explicit use of a grid system or an irregular grid based on a physical relationship to his support. The resulting works read like pixelated mosaics wherein the viewer blends distinct areas of juxtaposed colors, shapes, lines, and fingerprints, into a unified image. The artist’s first retrospective, titled Close Portraits, was organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 1980. That show traveled to the St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago before closing at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Since suffering a spinal aneurysm in 1988 at the age of 48, Close battled a myriad of health issues. Through rehabilitation, he regained his ability to paint by using a brush-holding device strapped to his wrist and forearm. Beginning in 1991, he continued his explorations of portraiture through the production of silk tapestries. Since 2003, he has furthered this investigation, creating editions of large-scale Jacquard tapestry portraits. In June 2015, he was diagnosed with Frontotemporal Dementia (also known as Frontal Lobe Dementia), which causes brain atrophy that leads to a progressive loss of brain function.
The artist is currently the subject of a solo exhibition co-organized by Pace at Tatintsian Gallery in Moscow, and in 2020 he had solo exhibitions with Pace and White Cube in Hong Kong. Major projects by Close in recent years include the traveling solo exhibition Chuck Close Photographs, which opened at the NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 2016, and the unveiling of his mosaic portraits at the 86th Street station on New York’s Second Avenue subway in 2017.
Chuck Close, Self-Portrait I, 2015 © Chuck Close
Lehmann Maupin celebrates the life of Kim Guiline
August 18, 2021
Kim Guiline (1936–2021)
We remember the life and legacy of celebrated Korean artist Kim Guiline, who passed away on August 12, at the age of 85. He is survived by his wife and two children.
Kim Guiline graduated from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies with a degree in French in 1960. After moving to France, Kim studied art history at Dijon University and graduated from Ecole Nationale des Beaus-Arts in Paris. He is widely recognized as one of the foundational members of the Dansaekhwa movement that emerged in South Korea during the 1970s. Throughout his 50 year career as an artist, Kim consistently pursued the idea of flatness. While he showed a tendency to objectify pure black and white flat paintings in the 70s, Kim improved flat monochrome works which consist of small squares and egg-shaped dots as basic units within rectangular canvas in the 80s. Reaching the 1990s, Kim used bright primary colors to present works that affirmed the dualistic relationship.
As a whole, Kim Guiline’s practice can be identified by his dedication to the medium of oil paint and the accentuation of color and flatness across all periods of his work. To achieve a matte surface, the artist perfected a technique of using newspaper to absorb the excess oils from the paint. Equally unique was his treatment of layering individual colors on the canvas, rather than pre-mixing his pigments. The accumulation of these layers, upwards of 30 in a single painting, is what achieves the intensity and depth of color that reverberates in his paintings, despite the restrictive palette.
In 2017, Lehmann Maupin hosted the artist's first solo exhibition in the United States. The presentation featured a survey of work that included rarely shown paintings from the 1960s, his well-known black and white paintings from the 1970s, and bright monochrome paintings from the 1980s–2000s.
“I view my paintings as windows of my soul, that longs for a kind of purity” - Kim in The Asian Art Newspaper
김기린(1936-2021)을 추모하며
리만머핀은 지난 8월 12일 향년 85세를 일기로 별세한 한국의 대표적인 추상화가 김기린의 삶과 그가 남긴 유산을 추모하고자 한다. 유족으로는 아내와 두 자녀가 있다. 고(故) 김기린은 1960년 한국외국어대학교 불어불문학과를 졸업한 후, 프랑스로 건너가 1965년 디종대학교((Dijon University)에서 미술사를 공부하였고, 국립고등미술학교(École and Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris)에서 수학하였다.
1970년대 한국에서 태동한 단색화 운동의 초기 멤버 중 한 명으로 널리 알려진 작가는 30 여년의 작업 기간 내내 평면성의 개념을 꾸준히 탐구하였다. 그의 1970년대 작품이 흑백의 평면 회화를 객관화하는 경향을 보였다면, 1980년대 작가는 작은 정사각형과 달걀 모양의 점으로 이루어진 단색의 유닛을 캔버스를 구성하는 기본 단위로 발전시켰고, 1990년대에 이르러 밝은 원색을 사용하여 이중적 관계를 확인하는 작업을 제시했다.
고(故) 김기린의 작업은 유채라는 작업 매체에 대한 작가의 헌신과 그 모든 기간에 걸쳐 이루어낸 색채와 평면성의 강조로 정의될 수 있다. 무광의 표면 처리를 위해 그는 신문지를 사용하여 페인트에서 나온 오일을 흡수하는 기술을 완성했다. 마찬가지로, 안료를 미리 혼합하지 않고 캔버스에 개별 색상을 겹겹이 얹어 처리하는 것도 그만의 독특한 기술이다. 제한적인 색의 사용에도 불구하고 하나의 회화에 서른 겹 이상의 층위가 쌓이는 이러한 축적은 작가의 그림에 울려 퍼지는 색채의 강렬함과 깊이의 달성을 가능하게 한다.
2017년 리만머핀 뉴욕에서 마련한 김기린의 전시는 미국 첫 개인전이었다. 이 전시는 거의 공개된 바 없는 1960년대 회화를 비롯하여 그의 잘 알려진 1970년대 흑백 회화 및 1980년대부터 2000년대까지 제작된 밝은 색조의 모노크롬 회화를 소개하며 김기린의 작업을 포괄적으로 선보였다.
나의 그림은 일종의 순수를 갈망하는 내 영혼의 창이다.
Lehmann Maupin New York, 2017. Photo by Elisabeth Bernstein
Tolarno Galleries announces representation of Kieren Karritpul
August 10, 2021
Tolarno Galleries announces the representation of Kieren Karritpul (b. 1994), a Ngen'giwumirri artist who lives in the small community of Nauiyu (Daly River) south west of Darwin. He lives in a community of artists including his mother Patricia McTaggart Marrfurra AM, aunties and cousins.
A 2021 Ramsay Art Prize finalist, Karritpul won the inaugural Youth Award at the 2014 Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. In 2020 he won the National Indigenous Fashion Award for Textile Design, resulting in a collaboration with Country Road Homewares. The judges congratulated Kieren "on his ability to tell stories through his textiles and bring about a truly emotional experience". Additionally, they commended Kieren’s use of movement and truly breathtaking colours.
As a Ngen'giwumirri man, Karritpul is not permitted to weave, instead he paints magnified views of woven objects and fibres. Weaving Myself: the Landscape and the Land, currently on view at Art Gallery of South Australia as part of the Ramsay Art Prize 2021 exhibition, was painted using two brushes, one made with his own hair. He uses the weaving process as a visual metaphor for land and landscape. This painting is a magnified view of the woven surface that stands for the breathing lands of his Country. Karritpul feels he was born woven into the land. Using repetition and line he creates a surface that moves like human breath.
Born into a family of artists, he announced to his family at 5 years of age, as he sat with them drawing and painting, that he would also be an artist. When Karritpul paints and draws, it appears his arm, hand and the brush or pencil are all interconnected. It is both compelling and mesmerising to watch as he seamlessly moves the brush to paint his world.
Karritpul works across painting, printmaking, fabric design and ceramics. When making art, he disappears into his own imaginary world where he reimagines totems and dreamings. This is a world where he can reconnect with his ancestors. He works on the floor so the ancestors above can watch and guide his progress.
Karritpul's work is in several major collections including National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Museum of Applied Arts and Social Sciences, Sydney and Artbank. He is the youngest Director ever appointed to the Association of Northern, Kimberley and Arnhem Aboriginal Artists (ANKAAA).
A young leader in his community, Karritpul is on the land hunting and fishing for bush tucker every day, carefully watching and listening to the breathing earth: the trees, the wind, the stars and the water holes. These daily excursions feed his soul and his artwork. He continues his promise to his mother and ancestors each day: to tell, reinterpret and visualise his landscape and culture to the world, through art.
Tolarno Galleries will present a Kieren Karritpul solo exhibition in 2022.
René Block appointed chief curator for the third edition of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA3)
August 3, 2021
One of Germany’s leading art world figures, Block has worked as an independent curator for over fifty years. His established career includes holding the positions of director of the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, and curator for numerous international biennials, including Belgrade October Salon (2006), Gwangju (2000), Istanbul (1995) and Sydney (1990). In 2008 he co-founded the Kunsthalle 44 Møen in Denmark and continues to operate as its artistic director.
Working alongside Block, Nico Anklam will act as associate curator for RIBOCA3. Anklam was recently appointed as director of the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen and Recklingausen’s museums in Germany and has previously curated at Block’s Kunsthal 44 Møen. Nico Anklam will also develop the public programme for RIBOCA3.
The third edition of RIBOCA will run from 15 July to 2 October 2022 in Riga, Latvia.
James Cohan announces new Tribeca location
August 2, 2021
The new 5,000 square foot space, on the second floor of the historic 52 Walker Street building and adjacent to James Cohan’s 48 Walker Street location, will open on 7 October 2021, with a solo exhibition of work by Gauri Gill. The space is being designed by longtime gallery collaborator HS2 Architects.
“Opening a neighboring space allows us to present concurrent exhibitions that resonate. In October we will present the first U.S. solo gallery shows for two international superstars, reflecting the international breadth of our program: photographer Gauri Gill, and multimedia artist and activist Emeka Ogboh. Looking forward, we will present the gallery’s first solo show with New York-based artist Christopher Myers, featuring his new tapestry works at 52 Walker, and will present new ceramic sculptures by another New York artist, Kathy Butterly, at 48 Walker. Both artists use craft media to explore contemporary concepts of narrative and form," said Jane Cohan in a statement.
Thomas Dane Gallery announces the passing of Phillip King CBE PPRA
July 29, 2021
It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Phillip King, one of the most ground-breaking British artists of the last 70 years.
Phillip died peacefully with his wife Judy at his side.
We were blessed to have worked with Phillip in the last eight years of his life, during which time he re-taught us that art and sculpture-making should know no rules or limitations. His curiosity, joy, and sparkle were boundless and contagious, and we will miss him dearly.
Phillip was born in Tunis in 1934 to a French mother and English father. In 1945 he moved to London and went on to study modern languages at the University of Cambridge. He eventually enrolled at St Martin’s School of Art where he met Anthony Caro and the New Generation group of artists, who would go on to completely revolutionise sculpture from the 1960s onwards.
A real free-spirit and risk-taker, Phillip worked tirelessly throughout his life experimenting with materials, forms and colours, seldom repeating himself, as he moved from periods of working in steel, ceramic, polyurethane, found objects as well as bronze and stone. He would rarely make preparatory drawings, rather referring to shapes and colours that would appear to him in dreams. He was a modest man, entirely committed to his rigorous exploration, rarely missing a day in the studio right up to the end of his life.
Phillip loved to be surrounded by younger artists and loved to teach, taking up professorships in the UK, Europe and the US. In 1967 he was appointed a trustee of Tate, and from 1999 to 2004 he was President of the Royal Academy of Arts.
His works are installed in public spaces around the world, from Australia and Japan to Scandinavia, China and the US, and are represented in some of the most important museum collections including Tate, Pompidou and MoMA. His final major public project, La Ronde de Rennes, will be unveiled later this year in the French city of Rennes.
Photo: Judy Corbalis King
Asymmetry Art Foundation and Whitechapel Gallery announce Zoe Diao as Curatorial Fellow for 2021-22
July 28, 2021
Zoe Diao, a Chinese scholar and curator currently based in New York, has been awarded the six-month Fellowship, which begins on 20 September 2021. Selected from a high quality shortlist following an Open Call, Zoe Diao will focus on two related projects – conducting research on art dealers in the 1970s who supported the development of artists way beyond any commercial remit and contributing to the delivery of a major exhibition about modern and contemporary artists' studios across the world.
The Asymmetry Curatorial Fellowship at Whitechapel Gallery is offered to one mid-career curator who identifies with Greater Chinese culture and heritage (including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan), based in the region or internationally. The programme provides the curator with a unique opportunity to gain training, skills, and experience in the curatorial workings of Whitechapel Gallery, which has a strong track record of providing training for curators, including through its new MA Curating Art and Public Programmes with London South Bank University.
Asymmetry is an independent non-profit foundation dedicated to nurturing curatorial practices and the development of cultural knowledge in and about Asia through global exchange. The Curatorial Fellowships place curators in pioneering European institutions, sharpening their skills and expanding their networks, whilst enabling the institutions to gain from the Fellow’s specific expertise and perspective on Chinese and East Asian contemporary art. By facilitating international opportunities for curators and academics from this region, Asymmetry seeks to integrate Chinese and East Asian contemporary art and curatorial practice into a wider art world discourse.
Kat Lyons joins Pilar Corrias
July 22, 2021
Kat Lyons’ (b. 1991, Louisville, Kentucky) practice explores the complexities of earthly life to question the limitations of human categorisation and understanding. Her compositions aim to transcend anthropocentric realities as a way of welcoming the natural world into our sphere of moral concern. Presenting her subjects across various planes of existence, Lyons challenges normative frameworks of perception. Her theatrical vignettes of animals and insects are wrought with an eeriness that is indicative of the anxiety and grief materialised amongst non-humans living in the Anthropocene.
Lyons is currently focusing on a series which is reflective of her time spent living and working on a small livestock farm, where she explores the ritualism of production and labour of both the human and non-human inhabitants.
“Painting provides time to reflect on the ways I have been conditioned to relate to the non-human subjects of the work. How, instead, do I understand who they are based on my own terms and experiences, outside of the preconceptions I have been taught to hold? How might this reconsidering bring a starker awareness of my own distorted expectations and limitations in understanding? Maintaining a position of unknowing is essential in the work.”
An exhibition of Lyons’ new body of work will be presented at Pilar Corrias Savile Row from 8 December 2021 - 15 January 2022.
Photo: Adam Reich
Galerie Kandlhofer announces representation of Richie Culver
July 19, 2021
Born in Hull in the North of England into a working-class family, Richie Culver was not exposed to art growing up and left school with no qualifications to work in a factory making caravans. His practice encompasses diverse elements that range from painting, sculpture and photography to digital performance. Within this, Culver’s work is largely biographical wrestling with aspects of contemporary masculinity, the class system and the digital lens through which we live our lives.
A large proportion of Culver’s practice lies in his antagonistic relationship with technology, the ultimate impermanence of social media and the effects upon human interaction, linguistics alongside personal and cultural memory. In this regard, much of the material for Culver’s works are formed from images collected on his phone including mundane mobile photography, google translate and notes apps screenshots containing excerpts of conversations, phrases and information.These screenshots are then blown up and printed on canvas, ultimately forming a visual record of an inner monologue that is fractured and at times disconnected. For example, short phrases translated into different languages and obscured by overpainting creates a visual metaphor for the quick ease at which these digital innovations create a superficial human connection that is ultimately alienated from true apperception.
This tone of alienation also bleeds into other thematic elements in Culver’s practice including the interrogation of masculinity. Motifs including fatherhood, love, sex, rejection and abandonment combine to project a brutal honestly about the vulnerability of male emotions. Although often done with humour, these elements have an unnerving sincerity that forces us to engage in a more nuanced perspective on contemporary masculinity.
Christian Boltanski, French Conceptual artist, has died at 76
July 15, 2021
Born in Paris on September 6, 1944, to a Ukrainian Jewish father and a Corsican mother, Christian Boltanski was a photographer, painter, sculptor, and installation artist whose work dealt with the concepts of loss, memory, childhood, and death, often functioning as memorials or shrines to collective cultural rituals and events.
At the age of twelve, Boltanski began fabricating sculptures from plasticine and creating large-format figurative paintings centering around macabre themes. His earliest works directly referenced his childhood, often featuring idealised families in fantastical settings, blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction. In the 1960s he began to develop a “personal ethnology” marked, among others, by the influence of anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and by curator and art historian Harald Szeemann. At the same time, drawing on museology, Boltanski exhibited inventories of items of anonymous owners. In the 1980s, he began making altarlike works incorporating boxes he had constructed, as well as light and photographs of Jewish schoolchildren taken in the early 1930s.
Boltanski was recognized with several awards over his lifetime, including the Praemium Imperiale Award (2006) and the Kaiser Ring Award (2001). He participated in Documenta (1977 and 1972) and numerous Venice Biennales (2011, 1995, 1993, 1980, and 1975).
