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Gagosian announces global representation of Lauren Halsey
October 26, 2023
Halsey’s debut exhibition with Gagosian will be in 2024 in Europe - her first institutional exhibition in the UK opens at the Serpentine Galleries, London, in October 2024.
Based in South Central Los Angeles, where her family has lived for generations, Halsey creates immersive installations that bridge sculpture and architecture, and collages that blend fantastic geographies with real ones. Her practice draws on local vernacular sources such as flyers, murals, signs, and tags - icons of pride, autonomy, initiative, and resilience that she recontextualizes and reinterprets. Both celebratory and archival, Halsey’s work offers a form of creative resistance to the forces of gentrification.
Halsey uses gypsum and glass fiber–reinforced concrete to produce environmental works, harnessing the materials’ ubiquity and adaptability. These projects are complemented by the graphic maximalism of her collages. In addition to the signs and symbols of contemporary South Central, Halsey employs the iconography of ancient Egypt as an Afrocentric means of reclaiming lost legacies and is inspired by the Afrofuturist aesthetics developed by funk pioneer George Clinton and his Parliament-Funkadelic ensemble and avant-garde jazz composer Sun Ra. She is also influenced by the visions of utopian architecture proposed in the 1960s by Archigram and Superstudio.
In 2023, Halsey built a site-specific installation commissioned for the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Titled the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I), the edifice is inspired by the Temple of Dendur and other artifacts from the museum’s collections. Designed to be entered and walked around, the monumental work is visible from Central Park. Incised on its walls are heads of some of the artist’s contemporaries, with words and images that reference her neighborhood. Sculptural sphinxes and Hathor columns are guardian figures adorned with the faces of important members of the community and Halsey’s family, including her mother, Glenda, and her partner, Monique. An emblem of personal and communal expression, the monument draws from the distant past, addresses the vitality of the present, and proposes a vision of the future.
Sited in South Central Los Angeles, Summaeverythang Community Center is an organization founded by Halsey in 2019 to advance Black and Brown empowerment on personal, political, economic, and sociocultural levels. Summaeverythang distributes free organic produce to the neighborhood, helping with the food insecurity crisis that was exacerbated by the COVID pandemic and which remains a critical issue.
Gagosian represents Halsey worldwide, with David Kordansky Gallery representing her in Los Angeles.
photo: Russell Hamilton
Timothy Taylor now represents Michel Pérez Pollo
Timothy Taylor is pleased to announce the joint representation of Michel Pérez Pollo with Mai 36 Galerie in Zurich, Switzerland. The gallery will present an exhibition of new work by the artist in London in fall 2023.
Pérez Pollo's surrealist works hint at a dialogue between creator and creation. Each composition is conceived using miniature clay models which the artist then relates onto canvas with oil-enlarging, warping, and exaggerating as he paints. This process emphasizes texture and transforms reality into strange, liminal scenes. Sitting atop simple stages, these vaguely biomorphic forms glow in luminous shades of ochre, tangerine, and emerald. While rigorous and academic, his paintings also recall lush memories of the artist's upbringing in the Caribbean tropics and the vibrancy of his current life in Spain. Attuned to beauty and balance, Pérez Pollo orchestrates light, shadow, shape, and color into a very singular visual poetry.
"I deeply resonated with Michel's paintings when I first encountered them, and I've followed his practice for some time. I'm pleased to work with him and am looking forward to presenting his uniquely poetic paintings in the gallery later this year." — Timothy Taylor, Founder
Michel Pérez Pollo was born in 1981 in Manzanillo, Cuba and lives and works in Madrid, Spain. He received degrees from the Escuela Profesional de Artes Plásticas de Holguín in 1999 and from the Instituto Superior de Arte de Cuba (ISA) in 2007. The subject of numerous institutional exhibitions, work by Pérez Pollo was featured at the Brownstone Foundation in Paris, France in 2021 and the National Gallery of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba in 2018. His recent exhibitions also include Un Automne, a solo show at Lempertz, in collaboration with Mai 36, in Brussels, Belgium in 2023; Vidas Paralelas, a group show at Galleria Continua La Habana in Havana, Cuba in 2022; and PERFUME, a solo show at Mai 36 Galerie in Zurich, Switzerland in 2020.
photo: Flavia Fuentes
Pace Gallery remembers Robert Irwin
Pace is deeply saddened to announce the passing of artist Robert Irwin on October 25 at age 95.
A monumental figure in the California Light and Space movement, Irwin made innovations across painting, sculpture, and installation-based work over the course of nearly seven decades, expanding the contours of the canon and continually pushing the limits of what art can be. Through his influential and experimental practice—marked by both scientific and philosophical rigor—he proposed a new kind of art making centering on phenomenology and subjectivity as subjects unto themselves. Through his profound artistic inventions that make use of light and space as key materials, he cultivated a reputation as a visionary figure at the vanguard of what is known today as experiential art.
Irwin’s work is currently on view at Pace’s London gallery as part of the two-artist presentation Robert Irwin and Mary Corse: Parallax, and A Desert of Pure Feeling, a new documentary tracing the artist’s storied career, is available to stream on Amazon and Apple TV. The film, co-produced by Glimcher, makes its European premiere at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London on October 26.
“In my long career, I have been privileged to work with some of the greatest artists of the 20th century and develop deep friendships with them, but none greater or closer than Robert Irwin. In our 57-year relationship, his art and philosophy have extended my perception, shaped my taste, and made me realize what art could be” - Arne Glimcher
Born in Long Beach, California in 1928, Irwin began his career as a charismatic painter in the Los Angeles “cool school” scene, presenting his first monographic exhibition at the city’s Felix Landau Gallery in 1957. By the early 1960s, his work took on increasingly illusionistic dimensions. It was during this period that he began creating his more restrained line paintings—guided principally by questions of structure, color, and perception—along with his dot paintings, works on gently bowed supports composed with small, illimitable dots rendered in near-complementary colors.
A few years later, in 1966, Irwin started producing his series of curved aluminum and acrylic discs. Extending out from the wall, these works cast shadows of elegant geometries as part of their display. Liberating this body of work from the constraints of two-dimensionality, Irwin further obscured the boundaries between the physical and the sensory in his art.
The artist gave up his studio in 1969, departing entirely from traditional modes of making to embark on a decades-long investigation into the relationships between light, space, and perception. In this pursuit, he took up what he termed a “conditional art,” growing his practice of making installation-based works into the broader field of architecture. He became known for using various media—including fluorescent lights, fabric scrims, colored and tinted gels, paint, wire, acrylic, and glass—to create site-conditioned works that respond to the specific contexts of their environments. "Catching lightning in a bottle” was the artist’s favorite metaphor for his practice.
Over the past decade, Irwin returned to his studio, using it as an experimental space to develop sculptural works with florescent lights and acrylic—such as his Sculpture/Configuration works exhibited at Pace in New York in 2018 and his Unlight series, presented by Pace in New York in 2020 and 2022—while continuing to develop his site-conditioned installations.
Lorena Levi joins Marlborough London
October 25, 2023
Lorena Levi is a narrative portraiture painter. Her practice is research based where she uses the internet, speaking to strangers on chatroom sites and listening to podcasts with real people to gain stories for paintings. Lorena has been collaging found images with her own to create compositions which display an imagined narrative, telling a story in a snapshot.
Levi completed her degree in fine art at Edinburgh University in 2021 and is participating in the RSA New Contemporaries 2023. She was awarded the Astaire Prize and the 2022 Jackson Painting Prize. Lorena was part of ‘A Celebrate of Portraiture' at Marlborough London earlier this year.
Recent solo exhibitions include MAXXED, MAMA, London (2023), The in between, Nicole Zisman, The Sidings, London (2023), Would give zero stars if I could, The Alchemy Experiment, Glasgow (2022).
photo: Daniel Jackont
Ida Applebroog, 1929 – 2023
October 24, 2023
Hauser & Wirth has announced the passing of American artist Ida Applebroog, at age 93 in New York. She is survived by her four children and their families.
Born in the Bronx in 1929, Applebroog emerged from the vibrant arts scene in SoHo, New York in the 1970s. Her daring and disturbing works have ranged in medium over more than six decades of practice, including artists’ books, painting, drawing, sculpture, film and installation, but have persistently been concerned, as the artist once said, with ‘how power works—male over female, parents over children, governments over people, doctors over patients.’
A self-proclaimed ‘generic artist’ and an ‘image scavenger,’ painter and feminist pioneer Ida Applebroog spent her career conducting a sustained inquiry into the polemics of human relations. She explored themes of violence and power, gender politics, women’s sexuality and domestic space using images stylistically reminiscent of comics, at once beguiling and disturbing.
Applebroog first came to attention in New York in the mid-1970s, formulating her practice with a series of small self-published books, ‘Stagings’ of identical cartoon images presented in succession, evocative of flipbooks or film stills, which she mailed to other artists, writers and individuals. From this beginning, she developed an instantly recognizable style of simplified human forms with bold outlines. In an Applebroog exhibition, the visitor becomes an observer and a participant in a domestic drama where fragmented narrative scenes are neither beginnings nor ends to the story.
Portrait of Ida Applebroog, 2011 © Ida Applebroog. Photo: Emily Poole
Pace welcomes Alicja Kwade
October 18, 2023
Pace announces the representation of Alicja Kwade.
The gallery’s debut presentation with the artist will take place at Paris+ par Art Basel, where they will show Kwade’s sculpture, “Trait Transference”, 2015.
In May 2024, the gallery will present a curated exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery bringing together historical positions and works by Kwade.
“Alicja is an artist who reveals the unknowable. In her practice, Alicja transforms our sense of perception and draws attention to nature’s relationship to human existence. There is a deep affinity with our program in the philosophical and spiritual nature of Kwade’s work, and I’m honored to welcome her to our program” - Marc Glimcher, CEO of Pace Gallery.
We look forward to supporting Kwade in the development of future exhibitions, realizing ambitious public and institutional projects, and collaborating on programming with her existing galleries: Mennour, 303 Gallery, and i8 Gallery.
photo: Doro Zinn © Alicja Kwade
Perrotin announces the death of Park Seo-Bo
October 16, 2023
Born in 1931 in Korea, Park Seo-Bo was a central figure of the Dansaekhwa movement which sparked the diffusion of an original artistic language on the international scene.
Like the Korean scholars and Buddhist monks who saw writing as a purifying process, Park Seo-Bo saw painting and the repetitive gesture from which his monochromes emerged as a catharsis.
Park Seo-Bo first received training in oriental painting at Hongik University. His education was interrupted when he was drafted to fight in the Korean War in 1950. The devastation inflicted by the conflict forced him to abandon this path when he returned to the university, and he shifted to learning Western painting. In a poverty-stricken Korea, he financed his studies by selling portraits to American soldiers in the streets and restaurants. In 1955, he adopted the name Seo-Bo.
At the end of the 1950s, a Korean avant-garde began to emerge, resulting from a desire to integrate the country’s modernization into aesthetic production and in a context still marked by the trauma of war. Park Seo-Bo was a central figure, and presented his work in an exhibition dedicated to contemporary Korean art in New York in 1957 and as part of the “Jeunes Peintres du Monde” residency program in Paris in 1961. That same year, he stayed in Paris on a UNESCO scholarship and became familiar with Art Informel. The artist then immersed himself in traditional Buddhist and Korean philosophy as he questioned the tenets of his own identity in the light of modernity.
Following these reflections, he produced his first Écritures in 1967. These monochromatic canvases have an abstract character linked to calligraphy and became emblematic of the Dansaekhwa movement, of which Park Seo-Bo was a pioneer together with Lee Ufan and Chung Chang-Sup.
Park Seo-Bo's art is the result of a meditative state achieved through the repetition of gesture, texturing the paint on the surface of the canvas; the result of the encounter between mind and materiality. His work, like that of other Dansaekhwa artists, claims a connection with the ontology of traditional Korean thought disowned in the post-war period in favor of Western naturalism: Nature is not conceived in opposition to man and culture, but as an entity intrinsically linked to society.
Perrotin has supported and promoted Park Seo-Bo’s career for nearly a decade, including hosting in Paris his inaugural solo exhibition in Europe, and in March 2023 supporting the groundbreaking ceremony for a museum dedicated to the artist.
London Eateries for this Year’s Frieze
October 11, 2023
Cafe
Food Market
Pub
Restaurant
Restaurant & Bar
Wine Bar
Malik Al-Mahrouky is named partner at kurimanzutto
October 9, 2023
kurimanzutto announced today that Malik Al-Mahrouky has been named partner at the gallery
“Malik joined the gallery in 2016 and has since demonstrated a profound dedication to artists, the gallery and to the art ecosystem more widely. Malik possesses a keen sense of aesthetics, exhibiting exceptional leadership and fostering strong relationships with artists, curators, and international institutions alike. His vision has also led to the expansion of the gallery's reach, opening new ventures through his incursion in strong art scenes across Asia and Europe.”
Before joining kurimanzutto, Al-Mahrouky studied at Durham University, followed by a Masters in History of Art with Professor Briony Fer at University College London. Since 2019 he has also been an active member of the Development Committee of the South London Gallery, UK.
photo: pj rountree
Galerie Chantal Crousel announces representation of Nick Mauss
October 5, 2023
Nick Mauss develops a multidisciplinary practice at the interstices in between established histories of the arts. In his works, he uses drawing to navigate between medium and spaces, overcoming categorizations, where the line expands different formats such as reverse glass painting, ceramic, textile, paper, sculpture, performance, and writing.
His work probes into contemporary art productions, through exhibitions that he conceives, using the medium as integral part of his practice. Nick Mauss sheds light on forgotten historical archives connecting different histories and artistic genres. Thus, he offers a new genealogy to the works and reassesses the artist’s positioning and modes of representation.
A solo exhibition of the artist will open at the gallery during spring 2024.
Lisson Gallery announces representation of Kelly Akashi
October 2, 2023
Lisson Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of Los Angeles based artist Kelly Akashi. Akashi’s work is currently the subject of a major ten year survey, 'Formations', which opened at the San José Museum of Art in 2022, traveled to the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, and is now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. A solo exhibition of her work also opens September 30th at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.
Executed with deft manual skill and astute material knowledge, Akashi’s visual language emphasizes the impermanence of the natural world, recording and indexing fragmented moments in time. The repeated use of the hand as motif serves as a symbol for Akashi’s ongoing investigation into the temporality of the human experience. Often cast in bronze or crystal, her hands bear the mark of time on her body, her growing fingernails, and aging flesh. Towering sculpted weeds, delicately glass-blown flowers, a to-scale depiction of her body in polished travertine, enlarged casts of extinct species of shells; Akashi poetically and objectively encapsulates the notion of mortality in a ritualistic gathering of objects. However, her take on her own practice is not a morbid one. Akashi references the phrase mono no aware. “It refers to a wistful awareness of impermanence—the ‘pathos of things.’ It’s central to hanami, the Japanese custom of venturing out to enjoy the brief season of cherry blossoms.”
Akashi studied photography at Otis College of Art and Design, and trained in darkroom, chemical-based photography which ignited her interest in time, arresting its impermanence in her work. Investigating the momentary gesture, Akashi asks the viewer to consider a broader perspective, to look beyond the human experience and in turn, appreciate the body, the physical world, within a deeper, geological timeline. Akashi’s singular practice is characterized by a rigorous conceptual approach, yet her work is distinguished by a deep reverence for process. Always a student, she is perpetually studying new practices and physical techniques such as glass-blowing, casting, candle-making and stone carving. The constellations that Akashi creates depict her archival impulse and material sophistication, while maintaining a respect for the scale of craft objects and the limitations of the human body.
Akashi is also represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York.
photo: Brad Torchia
Idris Khan now represented by Mennour
September 27, 2023
Mennour is immensely proud to announce the representation of the internationally acclaimed British artist Idris Khan (1978‑).
Based in London, Idris Khan creates work inspired by profound philosophical and theological texts, music and art. Khan's artistic process is characterized by a continuous interplay of creation and erasure, where he skilfully layers new elements while preserving traces of what has come before. His signature large-scale works and sculptures exemplify his mastery of layering techniques, which converge to distill the essence of an image while forging something entirely novel through the repetition and superimposition of visual elements. His art invites viewers to contemplate the intricate layers of memory, creativity, and human experience, leaving a lasting impression on the contemporary world.
One of his new works will be featured at Paris+ par Art Basel and his first solo show at Mennour will take place in 2024.
Born in Birmingham in 1978, Idris Khan lives and works in London. He was appointed OBE for services to Art on the Queen’s Birthday 2017 Honours List. He had numerous solo shows at the British Museum, London (UK); Whitworth Gallery, University of Manchester (UK); Gothenburg Konsthall (SE); Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (CA); Kunsthaus Murz, Mürzzuschlag (AT) and K20, Düsseldorf (DE).
The Milwaukee Art Museum will present his first survey in the USA, bringing together more than 100 artworks from more that 20 years of artistic practice, curated by Marcelle Polednik, Ph.D., the Donna and Donald Baumgartner Director of the Milwaukee Art Museum.
photo: Steven White and Company
Modern Art now represents Michael Simpson
September 26, 2023
Over the past five decades Simpson has become known for an ongoing series of large-scale paintings that revisit a small number of rigorously selected motifs. The artist's admiration for fifteenth century Venetian and early Flemish painting has inspired a unique painting language, characterised by its austerity, use of repetition and a concern with surface.
Reduced to the most essential geometric forms, Simpson's soaring paintings of ladders, levitating benches and confessiona boxes, each reflect his long-held belief in the infamy of religious history.' Often vast in scale, Simpson's paintings have maintained an aesthetic position over decades, one in which solitary objects often appear to levitate within a shallow painted space, others rooted to the ground, casting shadows. These architectural objects, such as pulpits, confessional boxes, Islamic Minbars, as well as steps and ladders, confront existential and political themes, especially the subject of faith. Each work is painted with a potent economy.
In the Leper Squint series, what might first appear to be a recurring reference to the black square of Kazimir Malevich, is in fact a geometric depiction of a hagioscope, or a 'squint. These small architectural details (or 'apertures' as the artist has called them) are rectangular or square holes positioned in the exterior walls of medieval churches, for the purpose of allowing lepers to see and hear the sacraments without being amongst the congregation.
Simpson's ongoing bench paintings, which he started painting in 1989, are concerned with the Italian Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was burnt alive in 1600 for heresy. Bruno was known for his vision of an infinite universe, and for publicly espousing Copernicus' theory that the earth revolves around the sun. Bruno's death, after seven years of inquisition and torture by the Catholic church, typifies the extreme cruelty found throughout religious history, a profound theme that has endured throughout the artist's entire oeuvre.
Michael Simpson was born in 1940 of Anglo-Russian parents. He lives and works in Wiltshire. He has been the subject of solo shows at the Serpentine Gallery London, Spike Island, Bristol, David Roberts Foundation, London, and Minsheng Museum, Shanghai. His work is held in many collections including Tate and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. In 2016 he was awarded the John Moores Painting Prize.
His first solo show with Modern Art will open in January 2024
Julian Charrière joins Perrotin
September 25, 2023
Perrotin is excited to announce its representation of the French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière. A new large-scale installation by the artist will be presented at the gallery’s booth during Paris+ in October 2023. Charrière’s first solo exhibition with Perrotin will take place in Paris in April 2024.
Perrotin jointly represents Charrière with Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Galerie Tschudi, Sean Kelly, and Sies+Höke.
Julian Charrière (1987) is a French-Swiss artist based in Berlin. Marshalling performance, sculpture, film and photography, his projects often stem from remote fieldwork in liminal locations, from sites of industrial extraction to volcanic calderas; remote icefields to nuclear testing grounds. By encountering such places where acute geophysical and cultural identities have formed, Charrière speculates on alternative histories and our changing ideas of "nature", often utilizing materiality and deep time as lenses for doing so. Seeking to deconstruct the cultural traditions which govern how the natural world is perceived and represented, Charrière's multidimensional practice frequently leads him to cross-field collaborations with scientists, musicians, engineers, and philosophers. From artistic expeditions to the staging of immersive installations, the core of his practice concerns itself with how the human being inhabits the world, and how it in turn inhabits us.
His work has been the subject of monographic exhibitions at major institutions worldwide, with recent solo presentations including Erratic at SMOMA, San Francisco (2022), Controlled Burn at Lange Foundation, Ness (2022) and Towards No Earthly Pole at the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas (2021). Further notable solo exhibitions have been presented at Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau (2020); MASI Lugano, Lugano (2019); MAMbo, Bologna (2019); and Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2018) among others. Charrière's work has been featured in multiple international Biennales, such as the 16th Lyon Contemporary Art Biennale (2022); the Guangzhou Image Triennial (2021); the Taipei Biennial (2018); and the 57th Biennale di Venezia (2017).
Charrière has upcoming monographic exhibitions planned for Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2024), ARKEN – Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen (2024), and Museum Tinguely, Basel (2025).
photo: Nora Heinisch, 2023
Jelena Kristic joins Galerie Chantal Crousel
September 22, 2023
Galerie Chantal Crousel announces the appointment of Jelena Kristic as Director of Sales.
Kristic will develop the gallery’s secondary market business in addition to promoting its represented artists. She brings a diverse background to her engagement with art. As an art advisor for the past ten years, she has built collections of Impressionist, Modern, and Contemporary art. As an independent scholar, she specializes in the work of Marie Laurencin.
Kristic was a former director of Reena Spaulings Fine Art in Los Angeles, as well as a lawyer practicing intellectual property law in New York before starting her art advisory.
photo: Jiayun Deng — Galerie Chantal Crousel
Tina Kim Gallery to represent Kang Seok Ho
September 21, 2023
Tina Kim Gallery announces Kang Seok Ho (1971-2021) as the latest addition to their gallery roster. Kang Seok Ho's innovative paintings mark a bold endeavor to explore and redefine the boundaries and structure inherent in the realm of painting.
“Kang Seok Ho is a consequential figure in the history of contemporary Korean painting. Returning to Korea in the early 2000s after being abroad in Germany, he continued to paint, even when the critical discourse was centered on multimedia and conceptual art. His contemporaries include Park Chan-Kyong, Chung Seoyoung, Haegue Yang, and Minouk Lim, all working in different media. However, he surrounded himself with painters, often organizing exhibitions, to remedy the lack of context and opportunities available for Korean painters during that time. I am excited to continue making research and exhibiting Korean painters who came of age during the early aughts, who largely went unnoticed but were nonetheless prolific and pushed the boundary of painting forward.” - Tina Kim
At the heart of Kang's oeuvre are his paintings of torsos, emblematic of his distinctive creative process and style. He developed these by first cropping snapshots that he took of people on the street. These images became his signature portraits of anonymous subjects, revealing his investigation on seeing that he investigated through painting's surface. Bypassing narrative, Kang's inquiry delves into formal details such as color, pattern, and texture, aligning more with abstraction than photorealism. This added layer reflects Kang's penchant for traditional Asian landscape painting.
Kang Seok Ho received his Bachelor of Fine Art in sculpture at Seoul National University, then left for Germany to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he received his Masters of Fine Art in painting. After winning the UBS Art Award in Basel, Switzerland in 2000, he returned to Korea and won the Seoknam Art Prize (Seoul, Korea) in 2004, and he was the selected artist for "2008 Young Korean Artist: I AM AN ARTIST" by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. From 2003 to 2020, he held 16 solo exhibitions and organized a number of exhibitions. He served as a professor at Seoul National University of Science and Technology from 2018 to 2021. His first retrospective exhibition Kang Seok Ho: Three Minute Delight (2022-2023) was held at Seoul Museum of Art, as well as his first New York solo exhibition Deep is the Rising Sun, Far is the Falling One (2023) at Tina Kim Gallery.
Hauser & Wirth announce global representation of Firelei Báez
September 18, 2023
Hauser & Wirth today announces the global representation of New York–based artist Firelei Báez (b. 1981, Dominican Republic). Báez has achieved wide acclaim over the past decade for immersive paintings, installations and sculptures that explore diasporic histories against the backdrop of colonial narratives and conventional ways of seeing. A self-described bibliophile and voracious reader, Báez has been likened to a historian, mining the foundational and forgotten archives of the Americas and beyond in order to challenge and expand the ways in which we perceive and relate to one another. Her constructions are marked by erudition and an intimate physicality that gives way to vibrant abstraction and exquisite detail. Though richly layered in cultural and historical references, her practice is equally rooted in a palpable connection to the human body—her own and that of the viewer. Báez’s sensitivity to the conditions within which she creates extends to the physical experience of looking at her work. The visceral abstractions, multisensory approach and arresting beauty of her art capture the viewer on a deep intuitive level before conceptual understanding coalesces, catalyzing a sensory reorientation where new ways of perceiving and imagining become possible.
“Firelei takes on history and transforms it into poetry—visual, visceral, technically inventive, breathtaking works of art that go beyond merely telling us something, to fully enveloping and implicating us. By consistently reasserting the importance of the Caribbean in the wider context of world history and revealing the pervasive presence and impact of Caribbean and Black cultures that have been previously obscured, her art demands we become more astute world citizens. In her courage and sheer virtuosity, Firelei aligns perfectly with so many pathbreaking artists in our gallery's program. We're thrilled and honored to welcome her to Hauser & Wirth and look forward to all that lies ahead in our collaboration.” - Marc Payot, President, Hauser & Wirth
Firelei Báez was born in Santiago de los Caballeros, a city bordering Haiti in the Dominican Republic, in 1981. Informed by having a Dominican mother and father of Haitian descent, Báez’s early sense of place and belonging deepened once she relocated to Miami, Florida at the age of eight years old. From a very young age, art had become an essential source of expression for Báez, as did reading and maintaining a collection of books. Instinctively aware that formal historical categories limit imagination, perception and identity, Báez has since used her art to explore what she calls ‘the freedom of decategorization.’ Consistently pushing the boundaries of established knowledge, Báez combines the rigor of a historical researcher with the worldmaking capacity of a storyteller. Mythology is an important tool for Báez, ‘a way of correcting the past and projecting a different future.’ A generative and recurring figure in her work is the ‘ciguapa,’ a mythic femme creature from Dominican folklore known for her trickery and elusiveness. A multidirectional being characterized by mutability, the ciguapa has feet that point in opposite directions, an attribute that allows her to never be traced. Growing up in the Dominican Republic, Báez heard ciguapa stories intended as cautionary tales against unvirtuous and wild behavior. As someone deeply curious about both ‘the risks and...gains of belonging and not belonging,’ she has held onto her fascination with this mythological being and to the trickster, an archetype that, as curator Julie Crooks has noted, takes on a political valence in Báez’s work as a means or pathway to new freedoms.
In her largescale paintings, Báez takes on disavowed histories, often beginning a work by pouring paint over the surface of an enlarged reproduction of an archival document. The shape her pour takes and the way in which it spreads within a particular environment guides the artist’s initial interaction with the foundational artifact, connecting it to her body, time and space. Báez describes the temporal dimension of this pouring process as follows: ‘There's the tilt of the floor, the humidity level, what I could physically reach. These are very specific limitations that become like archaeological time capsules.’ Her pours and other visual interventions allow the contemporary to come into contact with a distant past that still profoundly shapes our language and perception. Through these encounters, Báez opens the doors to a clearer understanding not only of the past’s horrors, but also the enduring persistence of beauty, resistance, and healing.
Báez proposes through her art that we actively participate in the making of history to imagine different futures. She has said, ‘Making connections between seemingly disparate ways of working and histories is one of the best parts of being a visual artist. This often necessitates seeing history not as a linear process, but rather a series of repeating or overlapping patterns.’ By destabilizing historical narratives, Báez allows for a different kind of historical measure, one which embodies the intricate entanglement of opposing forces. Her work is corrective; it makes space for the stories and people who have been erased or excluded from dominant narratives.
photo: Amilcar Navarro
Mai 36 Galerie announce representation of Markus Saile
September 14, 2023
Cologne-based Saile’s work convenes the space of painting, in a subtle interplay between the space where it is situated, the space it represents and the space it constructs in dialogue with architecture. Beyond the in-situ and the context, it is an investigation into painting in volume, the depth of the surface, and the extension of this practice into a performative field of action.
Broken colors, diluted in oil with turpentine, applied in numerous layers on a small-format wooden background – Markus Sailes works are intangible, fleeting, abstract, whereby a painterly gesture may develop figuratively without ever becoming concrete. The gestural structures in the pictures function as agents who, through their interrelated movements, open up interrelationships of space and time.
Markus Saile was born in Stuttgart in 1981. He lives and works in Cologne. Recent institutional shows include the solo exhibition "separate | related" at NAK - Neuer Aachener Kunstverein and the group exhibition "Jetzt! Junge Malerei in Deutschland" at Museum Gunzenhauser of the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Museum Wiesbaden, Kunstmuseum Bonn and Deichtorhallen Hamburg.
photo: Alwin Lay
Modern Art to open in Paris
Modern Art announces the opening of a new gallery space in Paris.
On the second floor of a Haussmann building in Place de l’Alma in the 8th arrondissement, the gallery will present three exhibitions a year and will be open by appointment.
The first exhibition will be works by gallery artists, running from October 16 to December 2, with the private view on Sunday the 15th of October.
Modern Art, 3 Place de l’Alma 2nd floor, 75008 Paris, FRANCE
Thomas Dane Gallery announces representation of Jake Grewal
September 12, 2023
Jake Grewal (b. 1994, London) lives and works in London. He first exhibited with Thomas Dane Gallery in 2022 with his solo show, Now I Know You I Am Older, curated by Andrew Bonacina. A forthcoming exhibition, Some days I feel more alive, will be held at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, from 28 October 2023 to 20 April 2024.
In Grewal’s paintings and drawings, figures merge with their surrounding landscapes in a dream-like quality unmoored from time and space. Often nude and based on the artist’s own image, the figures are situated against dramatic sunsets or gazing into verdant green pools. Time and its transition play a central role with the same figure often repeated within a scene. Narratives are left open-ended and the viewer is encouraged to project their own conclusions onto the dramatic tableaus. Informed by photographs that Grewal has taken of himself outdoors, there is an underlying desire for ambiguity and abstraction within his figures.
Drawing is central to Grewal’s practice and it is where an idea for a new work largely begins. Using predominantly charcoal, Grewal insistently repeats figures and scenes, often in different mediums and scales until his narratives are realised. Landscape and figure merge together and become one. Figures and trees dissolve and reappear on a journey together, sometimes cohabitating, sometimes being consumed, but always investigating the artist’s fascination with the passing of time.
photo: Annie Tobin
