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Hauser & Wirth announces new collaborative partnership with Nicola Vassell Gallery to represent artist Uman
November 29, 2023
Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Marc Payot, Co-Presidents of Hauser & Wirth, announced today the gallery’s representation of the artist Uman in equal partnership with Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York.
In undertaking this collaboration on behalf of the critically admired Somalia-born, New York based painter and sculptor, Hauser & Wirth and Nicola Vassell hope to model a new kind of alliance between galleries operating at different scales—an approach wherein full transparency and intensive resource sharing can contribute to the further development of artists’ careers and the future health of the wider gallery ecosystem.
Both Nicola Vassell and Hauser & Wirth will present new paintings by Uman in their stands at the forthcoming edition of Art Basel Miami Beach (8 – 10 December). Their first jointly organized exhibition of Uman’s work will open to the public on 30 January 2024 at Hauser & Wirth in London, where the show will remain on view through 1 April 2024.
In October 2025, Uman’s first US museum solo exhibition will open at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut, curated by Amy Smith Stewart.
Uman’s ebullient visual vocabulary reflects her expansive cross-cultural experiences. Born in Somalia and raised in Kenya, she emigrated to Denmark as a teenager and later to New York as a young adult. Now living and working in upstate New York, Uman paints lavishly detailed, opulently colored worlds replete with gesture, geometry and evocations of the sublime. While these works are executed primarily with oil paint, she also combines acrylic paint, oil stick and collage techniques. An intuitive artist and voracious autodidact, Uman draws upon her memories of East African childhood, rigorous education in traditional Arabic calligraphy, deep engagement with dreams, and fascination with kaleidoscopic color and design. With nods to self-portraiture and fictional topographies, Uman’s paintings fluidly navigate in-between realms to explore both the physical and spiritual, intertwining abstraction, figuration, meditative patterning and a reverence for the natural world.
About the artist
Uman was born in Somalia in 1980. She moved with her family to Kenya in 1989 as a result of the Somali Civil War, before relocating to Denmark at the age of 13. From an early age, Uman loved to draw and was fascinated by color and illustration. In the 2000s, when in her 20s, Uman moved to New York City. There, she met Swiss-born, Manhattan-based psychiatrist Annatina Miescher, who encouraged the artist’s intuitive approach to painting and served as a mentor.
In 2015, Uman’s first solo exhibition opened at White Columns, attracting significant attention for her paintings, sculptures and assemblage works that dazzled with their unorthodox and wholly original approach to layering cross-cultural, art historical and textile-based references. As poet and critic Ilka Scobie explained, ‘[Uman] embodies a fluidity that transcends borders, genders, abstraction, and figuration’.
photo: Luigi Cazzaniga
Almine Rech now represents Tia-Thuy Nguyen
November 28, 2023
Almine Rech is pleased to announce the global representation of Vietnamese artist Tia-Thuy Nguyen. The gallery will present her first solo exhibition Sparkle in the vastness at Almine Rech Paris, Matignon, opening on January 11, 2024.
Tia-Thuy Nguyen (Tia-Thủy Nguyễn, born in 1981 in Hanoi) is a Vietnamese artist who has made significant contributions to contemporary art in Vietnam. After completing her education, including a PhD in Fine Arts in Ukraine, she returned to Vietnam and founded The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, the country's first purpose-built space for contemporary art. She has ventured into fashion with her Vietnam oriented brand Thuy Design House, and also into film production with Xuong Phim Mau Hong, aiming to tell extraordinary Vietnamese cultural stories and inspire the community.
"When I first saw Tia-Thuy Nguyen paintings of skies I was immediately attracted to her imaginary vision of the space around us: the sky in its different atmospheres, from sunset to sunrise, to night. I was interested to know about her fascination with and interpretation of space.
I discovered her father was a pilot in the Vietnamese Air Force; he had retired after the Vietnam War before she was born, but Tia says: " I could only know these wartime stories through my dad. Even though I was not there in person, I can totally feel the suffering and the fury of war."
Her work conveys both the beauty and sense of apprehension the sky can bring; using a patient, time-intensive process to embellish her oil paintings on canvas with beads, the work expresses emotions such as the love, fear, and hope felt during the long days of waiting for a soldier or pilot to hopefully return from war."
— Almine Rech
photo: Ngo Nhat Hoang
Chiara Conte appointed new director of Patricia Low Venezia
November 23, 2023
Patricia Low announces the appointment of Chiara Conte as director of its Venice gallery.
Chiara is a native of Venice, and joins the gallery from her position as a sales director at Massimo De Carlo.
In this new role “Chiara will steer the direction of Patricia Low Venezia as it continues to innovate and cultivate an extensive and established network of artists, collectors, and curators”.
Clare Woods joins Stephen Friedman Gallery
November 16, 2023
Stephen Friedman Gallery announces the representation of British artist Clare Woods. Hovering between abstraction and figuration, Woods’ visceral paintings are characterised by fluid mark-making and vibrant colours.
Originally trained as a sculptor, much of the Woods’ is occupied with exploring physical form in two-dimensional space. Fusing diverse influences from Paul Nash and Barbara Hepworth to Marlene Dumas and Wolfgang Tillmans, Woods destabilises traditional art historical genres including landscape, portraiture, and still life. Themes such as beauty, mortality, and loss underpin her practice.
Woods’ compositions evolve from an archive holding thousands of found and personal photographs. Using instinctive, free-flowing brushstrokes, Woods defamiliarises her source imagery by breaking them down into their formal elements. The artist begins with a single image, drawing a simple outline on gessoed aluminium before considering how to approach its flattened structure in paint. Combining oil and resin to “make the paint move”, Woods adjusts colour and tone through the weight of her brush as a sculptor might manipulate clay. Working from above enables Woods to act from her shoulder rather than her wrist, adding further movement to her paintings as she pushes and smears the wet pigment across the surface.
Like her initial subject matter, the artist’s titles are selected intuitively from an immense archive of quotations. Intended to trigger an emotional response in the viewer, it offers “another way into the work”. In this respect, she can be seen as “an inheritor of the Surrealist baton,” Simon Martin writes in an essay for her solo exhibition at Pallant House Gallery in 2016. “Woods is able to identify and interpret in paint unconscious associations that others would not see.”
Clare Woods was born in Southampton, UK in 1972 and she lives and works in Hereford. Woods was elected a Royal Academician in 2022. She received a BA in Fine Art Sculpture from Bath School of Art in 1994 and an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmith’s College in 1999. Solo exhibitions by the artist will take place at Norrtälje Kunsthal, Sweden in 2024 and Towner Eastbourne, UK in 2026.
Her work is found in major public collections including Buffalo AKG Art Museum, USA; Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Arts Council Collection, UK; Government Art Collection, UK; Southampton City Art Gallery, UK; Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle, UK; The National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, Wales; The Towner, Eastbourne, UK and The Hepworth Wakefield, UK. Woods is also represented by Buchmann Galerie, Berlin; Cristea Roberts Gallery, London; Martin Asbaek Gallery, Copenhagen and Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
Sean Landers Joins Timothy Taylor
Timothy Taylor announces the representation of Sean Landers in London. The gallery will present an exhibition of new work by the artist in the UK in spring 2024. Landers will continue to be represented by Petzel Gallery in New York.
“I have admired Sean's work for many years and have been consistently surprised and impressed by the way in which his paintings reflect the realities of contemporary life. It's a privilege to have him join the gallery.” - Timothy TaylorLanders is critically acclaimed for his conceptual approach to painting, alternately drawing from his life experience and canonical references. His work features an arsenal of idiosyncratic personae that have personal resonance: marooning mariners, clowns, and animals both wild and domesticated. In depictions of natural disasters, the artist has shifted his practice to sardonic critiques of the ongoing climate crisis. In the tradition of Winslow Homer, his recent work fixates on maritime subjects, including boats, lighthouses, whale skeletons, and the sea itself. Landers’s diaristic, text-based paintings were instrumental in defining the art landscape of the 1990s, and he has continued to employ text throughout his career, both alone and in darkly poetic conversation with his subjects. He is celebrated for his deeply empathetic figurative works, which shine a searing light on both our collective insecurities and the artist’s own.
Sean Landers was born in 1962 in Palmer, MA and lives and works in New York City. He received his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1986. Surveys of his work were mounted by Kunsthalle Zürich in 2004; Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis in 2010; and Le Consortium, Dijon in 2020. His recent exhibitions include solo shows at Petzel Gallery, New York; Various Small Fires, Dallas; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; greengrassi, London; Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; Capitain Petzel, Berlin; and Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo. In October 2023, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature à Paris presented Sean Landers: Animal Kingdom, a solo presentation of the artist’s animal portraits.
Landers’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Dallas Art Museum; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Fundación/Colección Jumex, Mexico City; Brooklyn Museum of Art; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others.
photo: Michelle Reyes Landers
“I knew that the leaves on the trees would fall but the stones remain”
November 1, 2023
“when I look at the stone I know what it is … I look for the sense of its age and quietness and its stillness” – Young
Hostler Burrows celebrates 25 years
October 27, 2023
“offering a broader platform for full artistic expression … the gallery’s program highlights work that is created by hand through deep material investigation and with the intention of the artist at its core”
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
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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
