galerie frank elbaz now represents Chloé Delarue

June 1, 2022

galerie frank elbaz is pleased to announce the representation of Chloé Delarue. She is the recipient of the Fondation Patiño - City of Geneva grant and will have a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris from September 2022. Her first solo exhibition at the gallery is scheduled for 2023.

Chloé Delarue observes the interactions between the technique and the living acting on our systems of representations and identifications. Thinking in particular on the notions of reproducibility and simulation and their effects on our perception of reality, she explores the transformation of the tangible, of bodies, of affects that have become sensors.

Chloé Delarue lives and works in Geneva (Switzerland).

Workplace announces move to 50 Mortimer Street, the gallery’s new permanent space in London

May 26, 2022

The gallery will open to the public on 9 June 2022, and will launch with a group show of new and recent works by represented and invited artists.

With a floor to ceiling glass street frontage and arranged over two floors, the 1,500 square foot gallery in the heart of Fitzrovia combines the best features of Workplace’s current spaces into one and is motivated by the necessity for more space in a central location following the growth of the gallery’s programme; in the last year Workplace has added four new artists to its roster: James Prapaithong, Olivia Jia, Miko Veldkamp and Katinka Lampe.

Bringing together international and British artists who respond to the art historical legacies of specific media whilst focussing upon an interrogation of socio-political contexts, the gallery is underpinned by a constant commitment to excellence and the development of artists at all stages of their career.

Alfonso Artiaco announces the representation of Diego Cibelli

May 25, 2022

Cibelli’s design practice is mainly based on the use of ceramics and porcelain, never to highlight technical virtuosities. These media become an open link ready to connect a variety of artistic techniques, visions and historical references.

The design culture is an act of generosity and with this value Cibelli creates his collections, understood as a real “motor activity of the image”. The resources are connected to each other through a skilful interplay of references and, in this accelerated intertwining, the artist designs collections in which past, present and future coexist together.

From this method Cibelli reinvigorates his imaginative power and each production becomes a narrative system capable of merging the dimension of the domestic landscape with the external territorial context.

Diego, in his artistic research, has always explored humanistic geography, interpreted as the study of territories, their history and the related sense of belonging that human beings develop, generating new spaces of the living. With the activation of a series of cultural and visual references, Cibelli build scenarios that drive themselves the design of the installations. Each scenario, composed by several sculptures, is understood as a set of tangible and intangible relationships between mankind and landscape and it is conceived as an habitat.

photo: Francesco Squeglia

Karsten Schubert London announces representation of Charlotte Verity

May 16, 2022

Karsten Schubert London announces the representation of British artist Charlotte Verity - following two recent solo exhibitions at the gallery, “Echoing Green” and “Echoing Green Part II: The Printed Year”, which presented Verity’s recent paintings and watercolour monotypes respectively.

“Things move quickly, fleetingly, barely noticeably. How to respond?” Verity

Whether working at a large or small scale, Verity maps the ephemerality of her immediate surroundings, evoking the cycles of nature. The sense of light and space compels the viewer to look more closely. Transient moments and feelings are captured whether in the blossom of the pear tree in spring, or the starkness of holly in winter, the sky reflected in its shiny leaves. With her brush she seeks out the subtle shifts in tone and colour, or the exact line and curve of what is in front of her. Her handling ranges accordingly - from broad strokes to intense passages of fine brushwork.

“Nothing in a Verity painting is ever motionless […] How Verity achieves this sense of movement - birth growth, blossom, decay, four seasons on a single surface -with such an economy of subject is what makes her a truly contemporary painter” - Rachel Spence

photo: Sophie Davidson

Gagosian announces representation of Ashley Bickerton

Gagosian announces the gallery’s representation of Ashley Bickerton. The artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery is scheduled for 2023 at Gagosian New York.

Bickerton made his name with ironic, abstracted constructions focused on ideas of consumerism, identity, and value. Establishing his own personal (and pointedly “feminine”) brand, Susie, he produced a succession of slickly manufactured “self-portraits” that juxtapose his imaginary company’s logo with familiar real-world examples, including those of Bayer, Marlboro, and Renault. Bickerton also produced “still lives” incorporating digital screens that display the work’s fluctuating market value - a satire of art as the object of commercial speculation.

When Bickerton relocated permanently to the Indonesian island of Bali in 1993, his work took a self-consciously “exotic” turn. Its tongue-in-cheek feel and ornate, crafted look contrast sharply with the conceptual detachment of his previous output, though a slippage between mediums, genres, and subjects remained. Employing polished figuration to parody Western fantasies of a hypersexualized expat life, Bickerton depicts himself, his family, and his friends in lurid colors, introducing the grotesque “blue man” character as an archetypal European male in an “othered” tropical setting. “I consider him an escapee from the grand canons of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” Bickerton comments, “but now lost and adrift in an alien twenty-first century, awash in a whole other set of sociocultural and psychological metrics—ones that he is clearly unable to grasp.”

Over the past few years, Bickerton has brought his practice full circle, synthesizing its heterogeneous modes and gestures into an all-encompassing visual language. In the Ocean Chunk series, originally conceived of in New York shortly before his move to Bali, he uses resin and fiberglass to create the impression of shimmering water, while in the mixed-media Flotsam paintings, he employs the framing devices of his earlier work to recontextualize objects—such as ocean-borne waste and assorted marine gear—in a way that contradicts their natural milieux. The industrial trappings of his 1980s and ’90s output also find their way into the Vector series, in which various forms of hardware appear alongside logos that recall his early works’ self-consciously detached focus on commerce. However, far from trumpeting a reductive opposition between nature and technology, the series navigates our exploitation of natural resources while implying that the planet will outlast humanity’s disruptive impact.

Former Institut Giacometti Artistic Director Christian Alandete joins kamel mennour

May 11, 2022

Christian Alandete has been the Artistic Director of the Institut Giacometti in Paris for the past ten years, and was also in charge of relations with contemporary artists.
He has coordinated more than twenty publications on Alberto Giacometti and co‑curated Giacometti retrospectives at Pera Museum in Istanbul, Yuz Museum in Shanghai, LaM in Villeneuve‑d'Ascq and Grimaldi Forum in Monaco. He was the curator of the following exhibitions: “Giacometti, The Late Work” in Nice, “Picasso ‑ Giacometti” in Doha, “Giacometti, After Models” in Seoul, “Giacometti Face to Face” in Stockholm and “Giacometti / Sade, Cruel Objects of Desire” in Paris.
He also curated the major retrospective Henry Moore at Fonds Hélène & Édouard Leclerc in Landerneau, a dozen exhibitions of contemporary art in France and abroad, and the program “Partitions (Performances)” at Fondation Pernod Ricard from 2008 to 2021.
His research mainly focuses on the relationship between contemporary art and art history — and in particular from the modern period.

His latest project “Alberto Giacometti / Douglas Gordon. the morning after” is currently presented at Institut Giacometti, Paris until 12 June.

Almine Rech announces representation of Mehdi Ghadyanloo

Almine Rech has announced representation of the Iranian artist Mehdi Ghadyanloo in France, Belgium and Shanghai, following his first solo exhibition at the gallery’s Brussels space in the spring of 2021.
There will be a solo exhibition of the artist at the London space in 2023.

Born in Karaj, Iran in 1981, Ghadyanloo began his career as a muralist in Tehran in the early 2000s, when, following a call for proposals by the city, he produced almost one thousand gigantic wall paintings, including dreamlike landscapes and science-fiction scenes.

His work combines minimalist themes and a surrealist aesthetic in his paintings, using acrylic, oil, or watercolor. He uses the trompe l’œil technique of his murals to compose his paintings that take on the shape of square boxes with dreamlike imagery and hyperrealistic technique. Each of his works reveals his brilliant ability to trick our eyes and our perception of reality. Their architectural appearance reflects the artist’s investigation into designing and representing space on the canvas.

Shadow and light overlap and challenge each other endlessly in Ghadyanloo’s practice, and the symbolism of the movement from darkness to light is at the heart of his vision. All the elements that he depicts in his paintings — ladders, fences, holes in the ceiling — are methods of representing a way out, a kind of hope.

Mehdi Ghadyanloo is based in Sarrebrücken, Germany and New York, US.

— Martha Kirszenbaum, independant curator and writer

Richard Prince takes over Gagosian Shop in London’s Burlington Arcade

May 10, 2022

Beginning 10 May, Richard Prince is taking over the Gagosian Shop in the historic Burlington Arcade in London on the occasion of the exhibition Richard Prince: Hoods at Gagosian, New York.

Included in the takeover are the artist’s books, posters, and other merchandise, with a special selection from the Katz + Dogg line created by Prince in collaboration with Darren Romanelli. Richard Prince: Hoods, 1988–2013, an artist’s book documenting a series of paintings made using the hoods of muscle cars as supports, will also be available in advance of its official release by Fulton Ryder in June 2022. Upstairs, on the first floor, the presentation will include a recent painting (2021) and a grouping of High Times drawings (2019) that have never before been exhibited.

HB381 inaugurates new gallery with an exhibition of works by Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen

May 9, 2022

HB381 is pleased to announce Tentacular Thinking, an exhibition of new ceramic sculptures by Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen (Danish, b. 1987). Opening on 12 May, Tentacular Thinking is the gallery’s inaugural show and the artist’s first solo presentation in the United States.

Pontoppidan Pedersen’s work is inherently pluralistic, concerned with notions of kinship as they extend to the “more than human” interspecies realms and relationships in which we participate. Drawing on ideas of Ecofeminism and Norse mythology, she fertilizes a distinctly feminine paradigm, working from a place of freedom and intuition. Her physicality is visible—fossilized as she pushes, coils, pinches, and layers clay on a human scale, infusing it directly with her energy. Through a process of theoretical and political composting, she imagines a speculative future based on interconnectedness and caring.

HB381 is a new contemporary art gallery founded by Juliet Burrows and Kim Hostler. Located in the heart of Tribeca’s gallery district, HB381 serves as a dedicated space for solo artist presentations, focusing on contemporary Nordic sculpture and ceramics. The gallery’s program will highlight 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 Anna Weyant

May 6, 2022

Gagosian is pleased to announce the gallery’s global representation of painter Anna Weyant. The artist will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the gallery in New York this fall.

Weyant’s precisely rendered paintings depict figures embroiled in tragicomic narratives, and still-life compositions in which everyday objects adopt an uncanny, portentous air. Far from presenting these individuals and items as generalized types, however, she employs a keen ironic wit to evoke their myriad idiosyncrasies and contradictions.

Among the first works that Weyant exhibited is a sequence of darkly cinematic vignettes depicting a dollhouse and the strange, cloistered lives of its inhabitants. A more recent series deconstructs the representation of American suburbia in made-for-TV movies, casting it as a surreal realm in which violence lurks just beneath the surface. And in her still lifes, Weyant depicts flowers and other items in a similarly unsettling light; Lily (2021), for example, juxtaposes the titular bloom with a revolver bound in gold ribbon.

After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, Weyant studied at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, and in these images her technical accomplishment is clear. Drawing on influences ranging from seventeenth-century Dutch masters such as Frans Hals and Judith Leyster to contemporary painters Ellen Berkenblit and Jennifer Packer, she conveys an understanding of her work’s roots while eliciting an immediate and emotional response.

Ouattara Watts joins Almine Rech

May 3, 2022

Almine Rech is very pleased to announce that Ouattara Watts has joined the gallery. Almine Rech will feature Ouattara Watts' work at TEFAF New York 2022, at Art Basel Unlimited 2022 and in a solo show at Frieze London 2022. Ouattara Watts will also have his first solo exhibition at Almine Rech Brussels in 2023.

In his works, Ouattara Watts summons imaginary worlds and mystical visions, from ancestral to contemporary, to observe the metaphysical relationship between creatures. Vibrant colors, mysterious figures, and allusions to spiritual rites in the form of equations and cryptic symbols are apparent, and the interrelationship of these elements creates a dimension unique to Watts. His source material is colorful and varied, from traditional fabrics and paint to cut-out photographs and digital prints. The added layers forge a sense of his multicultural identity and reflect upon an increasingly multicultural society. Regardless of the origin of these elements, the discernable spiritual power of his works conveys another world that is both instantaneous and timeless.

Born in the Ivory Coast in 1957, Watts lives and works in New York and considers himself an American artist. He was persuaded to move to the city in the late '80s by Jean-Michel Basquiat, after meeting the artist at an opening in Paris. Lifelong friends, a thematic similarity is evident in their art, both of which highlight African culture, philosophy, and spirituality.

Ouattara Watts is represented by Karma and Almine Rech.

Perrotin announces a collaboration with the Estate of Anna-Eva Bergman

April 28, 2022

Perrotin is pleased to announce a collaboration with the estate of Anna-Eva Bergman, a central figure in the development of European abstraction. The gallery will debut its partnership at this year's iteration of TEFAF New York, with a nested solo presentation by the artist, opening on May 5.

Later this year, the gallery will present an extensive exhibition of work by Anna-Eva Bergman at Perrotin New York, marking the first-ever survey dedicated to the late artist in the Americas. Concurrently, her biography, written by Thomas Schlesser (director of Fondation Hartung-Bergman), will be published by Gallimard in October 2022.
Additionally, the Fondation Hartung-Bergman, an organization devoted to the legacy of Hans Hartung and Anna-Eva Bergman, will open to the public for the first time, on May 11, while inaugurating a new research program in the former home and studio of Hartung and Bergman.
Perrotin, which has represented Hans Hartung’s estate for five years, is pleased to promote the work of Anna-Eva Bergman through the staging of this historic exhibition, reinforcing the remarkable work Galerie Poggi has been doing since 2012.

Anna-Eva Bergman was born in Stockholm on May 29, 1909. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo (1927) and at the School of Applied Arts in Vienna (1928). Bergman’s writings and drawings show her sense of humor and observation, and demonstrate a virtuosic talent for drawing. Later, she would prove herself as an illustrator and journalist. In April 1929, she moved to Paris and enrolled at the André Lhote Academy, where she met Hartung. They got married the same year in Dresden.

Sonia Boyce OBE RA wins Golden Lion

April 23, 2022

Simon Lee Gallery announces that Sonia Boyce OBE RA has won the prestigious Golden Lion award for Best National Participation at La Biennale di Venezia 2022 - for her exhibition FEELING HER WAY at the British Pavilion.

Artist and academic Boyce came to prominence in the early 1980s as a key figure in the burgeoning Black Arts Movement of that time with figurative pastel drawings and photo collages that addressed issues of race and gender in Britain. In 1987, she became one of the youngest artists of her generation to have her artwork acquired by Tate and the first Black-British female artist to enter the collection.

Since the 1990s Boyce’s practice has taken a significant multi-media and improvisational turn by bringing people together in a dynamic, social practice that encourages others to speak, sing or move in relation to the past and the present. Incorporating film, photography, print and sound in multi-media installations, Boyce’s practice is fundamentally collaborative and inclusive, fostering a participatory approach that questions artistic authorship and cultural difference. At the heart of her work are questions about the production and reception of unexpected gestures, with an underlying interest in the intersection of personal and political subjectivities.

Pace remembers Hermann Nitsch

April 20, 2022

Pace, along with the Nitsch Foundation, announce Hermann Nitsch’s passing at the age of 83 on April 18, 2022, following a serious illness.

As a result of his passing, the artist could not personally experience one of his great successes - the exhibition of his 20th Painting Action during this year’s 59th Venice Biennale.

Nitsch was guided throughout his life by the intense, life-affirming philosophy that “everything that ever was and ever will be is to be”. It will keep his work eternally alive.

One of the main figures in Viennese Actionism, he will be missed not only for his contributions to the world as an actionist, painter, graphic artist, and composer, but also as a husband, father, friend, mentor, and companion.

photo: Philipp Schuster

David Zwirner to represent Huma Bhabha

April 13, 2022

David Zwirner is pleased to announce the representation of Huma Bhabha. The gallery will present new work by the artist in New York in 2024. Bhabha will continue to work on special projects with Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, and will continue to be represented by David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles and Xavier Hufkens in Brussels.

Since the 1990s, Bhabha has become known for layered and nuanced work that centers on a reinvention of the figure and its expressive possibilities. In her formally inventive practice, which encompasses sculpture, drawings, and photography, Bhabha draws from a wide range of references, from those that span the history of art—including Egyptian reliquaries, African sculpture, Greek kouroi, Gandharan Buddhas, as well as the work of such modern and contemporary artists as Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Alberto Giacometti, Robert Rauschenberg, and Franz West, among others—to quotidian influences such as science fiction and horror films and the makeshift structures and detritus of urban life. Employing found materials including Styrofoam, plastic bags, cork, scavenged wood, clay, and paint, in addition to traditional materials such as bronze, she builds around a central armature in an additive process before carving, modeling, gouging, painting, or otherwise marking the surfaces of her sculptures. Bhabha combines and transforms her materials into profoundly resonant hybrid forms in which the past, present, and future coalesce. At once monstrous, animal, alien, and deeply human, her totemic figures hover between states of ruin and repair, recalling cycles of growth and decay, destruction and restoration, thereby challenging our understanding of permanence and monumentality and of personal and collective histories.

David Zwirner states, “Huma Bhabha’s art making has always struck me as truly singular. Her formal references, which can take you back to the very beginning of sculpture as well as into the future, are often jarring and dissonant, yet always project an otherworldly beauty. I find it fascinating that discussions around aesthetics have been moving ever more in her direction in recent years, and, increasingly, her practice feels like it will be central for our times. I’m honored that Huma has decided to join our gallery.”

Huma Bhabha was born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1962 and moved to the United States in 1981 to attend Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, from which she received her BFA in 1985. She later studied at the School of the Arts at Columbia University, New York, from which she received her MFA in 1989. The artist presently lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York.

A solo presentation of Bhabha’s work curated by Nicholas Baume is currently on view at Fundación Casa Wabi, Puerto Escondido, Mexico, through January 2023. In 2020, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England, presented Huma Bhabha: Against Time. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, organized Huma Bhabha: They Live, on view in 2019, and published an accompanying catalogue. An installation of the artist’s work, Huma Bhabha: We Come in Peace, was commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2018 for their roof garden.

photo: Daniel Dorsa

Almine Rech now represents Minjung Kim

Almine Rech is pleased to announce the representation of Korean artist Minjung Kim in Shanghai, United Kingdom, France, Belgium, and New York.

Her first collaboration with the gallery will be a solo exhibition at Almine Rech New York in 2023, and then a solo show at Almine Rech Paris, Matignon in 2024. Almine Rech will also feature Minjung Kim's work at TEFAF New York 2022 and Art Basel Basel 2022.

Born in South Korea and working in Italy, Minjung Kim is well-known for her layered translucent ink works. Using traditional Korean Hanji paper in her paintings, the flow and perceived three-dimensionality of her works evoke a sense of serenity that embraces light and space. The pleasing color palette is subdued and gentle while maintaining a powerful representation of beauty and commentary on her vision of the world.

Minjung Kim’s work connects deeply with the likes of James Turrell, the first artist exhibited by the gallery. A sense of abundant space and cosmos is a characteristic shared between Kim and Turrell. Interestingly, in its meditative gestures, Kim’s work depicts this sentiment through marking Hanji paper with water, inks made of smoke or natural pigments, and cut-paper collages.

Portrait of Minjung Kim / Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech

Maysha Mohamedi joins Pace Gallery

Pace Gallery announces the global representation of Los Angeles-based artist Maysha Mohamedi, known for her singular approach to calligraphic abstraction and Color Field painting.

A self-taught artist raised in San Luis Obispo, California, Mohamedi creates paintings that function as maps of sensation, cognition, and experience. Her compositions are indices of the complex manifolds of selfhood and identity.

Through a distinct visual lexicon of forms, symbols, and calligraphic marks, the artist infuses her canvases with a rhythmic energy that suggests the unfolding of poetry.

Mohamedi will present her first solo exhibition in New York with the gallery in 2023.

Photo: Megan Cerminaro

Veronica Ryan OBE nominated for Turner Prize 2022

April 12, 2022

Ryan is recognised for “Along a Spectrum”, her 2021 solo exhibition at Spike Island, Bristol, and “Custard Apple (Annonaceae)”, “Breadfruit (Moraceae)” and “Soursop (Annonaceae)”, the UK’s first permanent monument to honour the Windrush Generations, unveiled in Hackney, London, in 2021.

The other artists on the shortlist are Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard and Sin Wai Kin. The winner will be announced in Liverpool in December.

Helen Legg, Director of Tate Liverpool and co-chair of the Turner Prize jury, said of the selection process: “The result is a diverse group of artists, each with a singular vision, who impressed the judges with the intensity of their presentations, while also dealing with important issues facing our society today.”

The members of this year’s Prize jury are Irene Aristzábal, Head of Curatorial and Public Practice, BALTIC, Gateshead; Christine Eyene, Research Fellow, School of Arts and Media, University of Central Lancashire; Robert Leckie, Director, Spike Island, Bristol; and Anthony Spira, Director, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes.

Ryan’s debut exhibition at Alison Jacques, London, opens on 20 October 2022.

Photo: Lisa Whiting

Serge Attukwei Clottey joins Simon Lee Gallery

April 11, 2022

Simon Lee Gallery announces its representation of the Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey.

Clottey (b. 1985) primarily employs found materials from his hometown in Accra, Ghana to create a dialogue with the city’s cultural history and identity. Utilising everyday objects such as discarded Kufuor gallons, car tyres, and recycling boat wood as his canvas, Clottey inscribes patterns and text that uplift the miscellaneous materials into symbols of Ghana’s vernacular economic system of trade and reuse.

The celebration of the yellow gallon containers, applied throughout Clottey’s work, stems from a desire to find ways to inspire people to work with plastics and recycle in creative ways. This has become a prominent motif throughout his oeuvre, and the artist has named this distinctive practice “Afrogallonism”.

Clottey’s fragmented approach to figuration recalls Western Cubist portraiture, a genre that drew heavily on formal elements of traditional African sculpture.

photo: Stefan Simchowitz

Skarstedt now representing Cristina BanBan

Skarstedt announces the joint representation of Cristina BanBan, with Perrotin.

The gallery will debut a new BanBan painting at TEFAF New York in May 2022, followed by a solo exhibition of new works in New York in the fall of 2022.

In BanBan’s paintings and works on paper, the exaggerated portrayals of the female form configure into emotive compositions imbued with intimacy and poise. Evading distinct narratives, the works fuse references to the painterly canon of Modernism with the artist’s personal memories and reflections on the present moment. Sinuous contours enveloping the figures operate in contrast with planes of thick color, which evoke the parity of human flesh and oil paint seen in the works of Willem de Kooning and Lucian Freud.

Emphasizing the physicality of the human body, BanBan’s tranquil characters appear to have clandestine power, their enormous hands promising colossal strength. Engaged in melancholic contemplation, the figures rarely meet each other’s gaze, pointing to the human isolation inflicted by the social and political disruptions of recent years. BanBan’s nudes are at times punctuated with intimate apparel or adorned with hoop earrings and hair clips. They become resolutely contemporary, presenting powerful images of women secure in their relationships and space. Often bearing features of the artist, the paintings are in part autobiographical.

The representation of Cristina BanBan advances the gallery’s continued focus on the artists who pioneered innovative approaches to figurative painting, such as Francis Bacon, Eric Fischl, Martin Kippenberger, Pablo Picasso, and David Salle.

Photo: Rafael Rios