Cuban-born, American artist Carmen Herrera dies at 106

February 14, 2022

A master of crisp lines and contrasting chromatic planes, Carmen Herrera (born in Havana, Cuba, on 31 May 1915) created symmetry, asymmetry and an infinite variety of movement, rhythm and spatial tension across the canvas with the most unobtrusive application of paint. As she moved towards pure, geometric abstraction in the post-war years in Paris, she exhibited alongside Theo van Doesburg, Max Bill and Piet Mondrian and a younger generation of Latin American artists, such as members of the Venezuelan Los Disidentes, Brazilian Concretists and the Argentinian Grupo Madi. Her work also chimes with her peers from the U.S. school such as Barnett Newman and Leon Polk Smith. Reflecting on this period, she said, “I began a lifelong process of purification, a process of taking away what isn’t essential” (2005). While allied with Latin American non-representational concrete painting, Herrera’s body of work established, quietly but steadily, a cross-cultural dialogue within the international history of modernist abstraction.

Although her first major accolades and museum exhibitions famously came later in life, during her eighth decade, she had been developing a path towards her unique painterly style for the preceding 50 years, beginning with expressionistic compositions developed in Paris and culminating with her unique hard-edge painting and sculpture that she would continue to make for the rest of her life in New York.

Jonathan Watkins steps down as Director of Ikon Gallery

February 11, 2022

After nearly 25 years, Jonathan Watkins, Ikon Director, has announced he is stepping down from the role in October 2022. As the flagship contemporary art institution of the UK's second city, Ikon’s worldwide reputation and international outlook was developed under Watkins’ directorship.

Since joining in 1999, he has continued Ikon’s commitment to making the very best in contemporary art available to all by maintaining its policy of free entry. The ethos of Ikon’s founding artists, namely striking a balance between excellence and accessibility, still endures; Ikon now welcomes over 200,000 visitors each year, with over 75% of its audience aged between 16 to 44.

Ikon is known for its strong exhibitions of UK and international artists, commissioning of major public artworks, and a public programme imbedded in the local community. Over the years Ikon has placed a curatorial emphasis on artists hailing from Birmingham, such as Hurvin Anderson, Vanley Burke, Ruth Claxton, John Walker, Gillian Wearing and Osman Yousefzada. At the same time, Watkins has showcased emerging international talent, including Marjolijn Dijkman and Nástio Mosquito, and more established figures such as Georges Adeagbo, Francis Alÿs, Carmen Herrera, Beatriz Milhazes, On Kawara and Giuseppe Penone.

Louisa Gagliardi now represented by Galerie Eva Presenhuber

“I have been observing Louisa Gagliardi’s work for some years and am thrilled to announce that she has joined the gallery. An exceptional artist, Louisa uses her distinct form of portraiture and surprising techniques to pull you into the glow of her paintings, only to subvert your expectations and confront you like a mirror. I look forward to seeing how Louisa’s practice evolves as she works on her first solo show with us next year and beyond.” - Eva Presenhuber

Gagliardi's paintings exist as reflections: internally, of artist and viewer, and of the rapid acceleration of technology in our visualized and socialized worlds. Their liminal status, as both digitally rendered images and physically confronting objects, speaks as much to contemporary concerns of self-mediated personas as they do to the compositions and narratives of the classics of art history.

At its heart, Gagliardi’s oeuvre plays with expectations, fulfilling and subverting them simultaneously. When one views the work, ideas of authenticity and authorship are begged for and rebuffed; the smooth digital surfaces of the paintings blossom into echoes and refractions of their handworked surfaces as they are approached and circled. Brushstrokes exist physically and printed, as clear gel medium creates texture and melodrama, forcing the signature marks of the artist executed with mouse on screen to confront total issues of reality within painting.

Louisa Gagliardi, Photo; Adam Cruces

Pace Gallery announces representation of Hermann Nitsch

February 10, 2022

Pace Gallery announces its global representation of Hermann Nitsch in collaboration with the Nitsch Foundation and Galerie Kandlhofer. The gallery will present its first solo exhibition of Nitsch’s work in New York in 2023.

Over the course of more than 60 years, Nitsch has cultivated an intensive practice that spans performance, painting, drawing, printmaking, film, photography, and music. A leading figure of the Austrian avant-garde, Nitsch was a co-founder of the Viennese Actionism movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The disruptive ethos of this movement brought irreverent performance work to the forefront of Vienna’s art scene in the latter half of the 20th century.

Nitsch’s extensive performance work often features nudity, multifarious noises, and enactments of tragedy as part of explorations of spiritual rituals and primordial urges. The artist’s seminal work is the large-scale, six-day Orgies Mysteries Theatre, which he began developing in the mid-1950s. For this work, the artist drew inspiration from literature, art, music, and philosophy to produce “a total work of art” that engages all five senses. In the Orgies Mysteries Theatre, Nitsch incorporates substances like blood and meat to elicit intense and varied reactions from viewers. The work, which was first performed in full as the 6-Day-Play in Prinzendorf, Austria in 1998, centers the celebration of being. With the performance, life itself becomes an aesthetically heightened artwork.

Portrait of Hermann Nitsch © Roland Rudolph

GRIMM announces representation of Angela Heisch

The gallery’s representation and work on behalf of the Brooklyn-based painter Angela Heisch will be focused in New York and Amsterdam, and will be shaped in close collaboration with Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London. GRIMM will first present an exhibition of new paintings by Heisch in Amsterdam in September 2022, followed by a solo exhibition in New York in 2023.

Known for her luminous application of color, Heisch (b. 1989, Auckland, New Zealand) composes paintings of repeated motifs, curving forms, and delicate, gestural lines. Drawing inspiration from organic bodies, patterns in nature, and the cosmos, Heisch’s paintings are infused with waves of energy and tension, capturing triumphant yet fleeting moments of balance and stillness.

Patricia Leite joins Thomas Dane Gallery

February 9, 2022

Thomas Dane Gallery is delighted to announce representation of Patricia Leite, working in collaboration with Mendes Wood DM.

Patricia Leite (b. 1955, Belo Horizonte) lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.

Leite first exhibited with Thomas Dane Gallery in 2019 as part of the group show, Terra Trema. Her solo show, Caninana, opened at Thomas Dane Gallery in Summer 2021. Leite works in oil on solid wood panels, and her paintings often involve the layering of pigment as a rumination on temporal and evanescent states such as qualities of light, ephemeral atmospheres and fleeting sensations.

Notable institutional exhibitions include: Mínimo, múltiplo, comum, Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo (2018); Aprendendo Com Dorival Caymmi - Civilização Praieira, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2016); The Circus as a Parallel Universe, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2013); Outra Praia, Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (2005).

Photo: Vicente de Mello

Chase Hall now represented by Galerie Eva Presenhuber

February 8, 2022

A self-trained artist, Hall works in painting, sculpture, photography, video, and audio to scrutinize America’s past and present while interrogating the realities of being biracial. As a mixed-race male raised across America, Hall examines humanity through his individual hybridity and his usage of coffee as a pigment and cotton canvas as a conceptual white paint. Each canvas is imbued with the legacy of Hall’s personal history and a non-monolithic Black experience. Hall stains the whiteness of the cotton, a material intrinsic to American history and landscape, with the ground and brewed beans of plants from Africa while considering coffee’s relationship to addiction, commerce, labor, and exhaustion.

Chase Hall was born in 1993 in Saint Paul, MN, US, and lives and works in New York.

Hall’s first solo exhibition in Europe and with the gallery will open at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Waldmannstrasse, Zurich, on March 4, 2022.

Angel Otero joins Hauser & Wirth

February 4, 2022

Hauser & Wirth has announced global representation of the New York and Puerto Rico-based artist Angel Otero. The gallery’s first exhibition with the artist will be presented in New York within a year.

Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico in 1981, Otero has achieved critical acclaim for his powerful, process-based work that transcends the boundaries of traditional painting. Merging painting with collage and sculpture, his work situates itself between abstraction and figuration in order to engage themes of history, memory, and identity. The uniquely palpable visual impact of Otero’s work is achieved through a technique that echoes the ways in which the passage of time reconfigures our perception of the world and our place within it: the artist lays down representational imagery in oil paint on glass panels, waits for the paint to partially dry, and then scrapes up its solidifying surface layers. The paint ‘skins’ Otero creates in this process are reconstructed onto canvas, yielding complex and vibrant results that showcase his material in new and radical ways, celebrating the pure materiality of paint as well as the depth of experience rewarded by looking.

Otero’s work has been exhibited in solo museum exhibitions internationally, including Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York NY (2017); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston TX (2016); Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain (2015); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah GA (2013); and Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh NC (2012). He is the recipient of the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Visual Arts.

Pace Gallery partners with Kayne Griffin to open new West Coast flagship in Los Angeles

Marc Glimcher, CEO and President of Pace Gallery, together with Bill Griffin and Maggie Kayne, Founders and Partners of Kayne Griffin, have announced the union of their galleries to create a Los Angeles home for Pace, under the stewardship of Griffin and Kayne.

Pace and Kayne Griffin, which has operated in Southern California for over a decade, have a strong history of collaboration. Over the past five years, the two galleries have developed an unprecedented working partnership, after James Turrell first brought them together, sensing a natural synergy. Pace and Kayne Griffin are both champions of key artists from the Southern California Light and Space movement and its continued legacy in the work of emerging contemporary artists; they already share representation of artists including Mary Corse, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell. In 2020, the galleries mounted a joint presentation of Turrell’s work at Frieze Los Angeles and have collaborated on several other projects, including the group show “At the Edge of Things,” with Jo Baer, Mary Corse, and Agnes Martin in 2019, and most recently a Louise Nevelson exhibition at Kayne Griffin.

In April 2022, Kayne Griffin’s James Turrell-designed space on S. La Brea Avenue will become Pace’s new west coast flagship. The 15,000-square-foot Los Angeles gallery space, which occupies the site of a 1940s Californian auto showroom, features a permanent Skyspace by Turrell unique to the city. The indoor-outdoor design and expansive courtyard will become a site for Pace Live public programming, as well as outdoor sculpture exhibitions and other events, cementing the space as a fixture in the local art scene.

Petzel appoints Francesco Longenecker as Director

January 31, 2022

Longenecker, who holds an MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art, joins Petzel from Nara Roesler gallery. Previously, he has held positions at Pace, Cheim & Read and Pace/MacGill galleries. At Petzel, Longenecker will spearhead secondary market sales.

“I am thrilled to be joining such a prestigious program and look forward to working with the talented roster of artists and my Petzel colleagues,” says Longenecker. “We are delighted to welcome Francesco to the gallery,” says Andrea Teschke, Partner at Petzel. “His experience and professionalism will play a vital role in our primary sales and secondary market endeavors. As we prepare to relocate to a new location at 520–530 West 25th Street in Chelsea this summer, we are excited that he has joined our team.”

Lari Pittman inaugurates Lehmann Maupin’s expanded space in Seoul

January 27, 2022

An ambitious new body of work by acclaimed Los Angeles painter Lari Pittman will inaugurate the gallery’s expanded space in Seoul’s Hannam neighborhood in March.

Marking the artist’s first exhibition in South Korea, Opaque, Translucent and Luminous offers an homage to big cities, reaffirming their vitality, dynamism, and importance in the face of the destabilizing effects of the global pandemic on urban life.

Spanning two floors of the newly renovated 2,600 square-foot gallery, the exhibition will spotlight Pittman’s unique visual aesthetic, characterized by his skillful layering of signs and symbols, varied techniques, and intricate patterns. Selected works from Pittman’s newest series will also be on view as part of the gallery’s upcoming Frieze Los Angeles and Art Basel Hong Kong presentations.

Petzel artist Rodney McMillian included in the Whitney Biennial 2022

Congratulations to Petzel artist Rodney McMillian, one of the 63 artists participating in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, which will be titled “Quiet as It’s Kept.” Established to chart developments in art of the United States, it is the longest-running exhibition of its kind. Now in its eightieth edition, the Whitney Biennial 2022 will be on view April 6 through September 5, 2022 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It's Kept is co-organized by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, and Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Gabriel Almeida Baroja, Curatorial Project Assistant, and Margaret Kross, former Senior Curatorial Assistant.

Rodney McMillian (b. 1969, Columbia, South Carolina) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. McMillian explores the complex and fraught connections between history and contemporary culture, not only as they are expressed in American politics, but also as they are manifest in American modernist art traditions. Aspects of his work negotiates between the body of a political nature and the politic of a bodily nature.

Art Basel selected to stage new contemporary and Modern art fair in the iconic Grand Palais of Paris

January 26, 2022

The Réunion des musées nationaux – Grand Palais has announced this morning that Art Basel has been awarded a seven-year contract to stage a new Modern and contemporary art fair in Paris’s iconic Grand Palais, following a public competition. The new fair will initially take place at the Grand Palais’s temporary venue the Grand Palais Éphémère, located in the historic heart of Paris in the Champ-de-Mars, until the restoration of the Grand Palais is completed in 2024.

Launching in October 2022, the new project will bring together artists, collectors, curators and gallery owners from all over the world, and will unite Parisian cultural actors far beyond the Grand Palais. Art Basel will bring its 50-year history of convening the most prestigious and up and coming galleries to create the world’s leading art fairs in Europe, the Americas and Asia. As in Basel, Miami Beach and Hong Kong, Art Basel will work closely with the city’s museums, private institutions, galleries and other cultural spaces, to create an active cultural program from morning to night, all week, and throughout the city.

Veronica Ryan OBE in the Whitney Biennial 2022

Alison Jacques congratulates Veronica Ryan OBE on her forthcoming participation in the Whitney Biennial 2022, the 80th edition of this landmark exhibition. Titled ‘Quiet as It’s Kept’, the exhibition will include the work of 63 artists and will be on view from 6 April–5 September 2022 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Ryan’s inclusion follows ‘Along a Spectrum’, a major exhibition at Spike Island, Bristol (2021), and the recent unveiling of Custard Apple (Annonaceae), Breadfruit (Moraceae) and Soursop (Annonaceae) (2021) in Hackney, London, the UK’s first permanent public sculptures to celebrate and honour the Windrush Generations. In September 2022, Ryan will present her debut exhibition at Alison Jacques, London.

The Whitney Biennial is co-organized by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, and Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Gabriel Almeida Baroja, Curatorial Project Assistant, and Margaret Kross, former Senior Curatorial Assistant.

Veronica Ryan at Spike Island, Bristol, 2021; photo: Lisa Whiting

Serpentine start 2022 with a multi-layered global project with the internationally acclaimed artist KAWS

January 18, 2022

Launching on 18 January 2022, Serpentine will start the New Year with a multi-layered global project with the internationally acclaimed artist KAWS, developed in collaboration with Acute Art and the globally popular online video game Fortnite. This follows Serpentine’s series of unique collaborations bringing artists together with the latest technology which it launched with BTS in 2020.

In his first major solo exhibition in London, NEW FICTION, KAWS (Brian Donnelly b.1974) will present new and recent works in physical and augmented reality at Serpentine North from 18 January - 27 February 2022. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Acute Art and curated by Acute’s Artistic Director, Daniel Birnbaum. A virtual recreation of the show will launch simultaneously (at 3pm GMT on 18 January) in Fortnite, allowing millions of players from all over the world to experience the exhibition from anywhere. All built by the Fortnite Creative community, players will be able to explore the Serpentine’s grounds and experience KAWS’ artworks and his iconic sculptures in a completely new way.

Brooklyn-based KAWS is considered one of the most innovative artists of his generation. Within the Pop Art tradition, he has created a prolific body of influential work, which both engages young people with contemporary art and straddles the worlds of art and design to include street art, graphic and product design, paintings, murals and large-scale sculptures. KAWS regularly exhibits in museums and galleries internationally and his work continues to appeal to diverse audiences within and beyond the artworld as well as the commercial sector. He has collaborated with creative industry leaders including Nike, Comme des Garçons, Dior, and Uniqlo.

Artist Spotlight: Liz Larner

January 12, 2022

In this exhibition, you bring together ceramic asteroids which float in outer space, with plastic floating on the surface of the earth. Can you discuss why you were drawn to each of these and the interplay between ceramic and plastic?

During this time, I was thinking about plastic, and how asteroids are this thing that we cannot control. And our plastic use is theoretically something that we could control. In thinking about these two different kinds of potential catastrophes, it made me want to bring them together to create an impossible landscape, a seascape or skyscape at once. The exhibition brings together two places that can never actually be together.

Read the full interview here.

kamel mennour announces global representation of The Estate of Maryan

January 6, 2022

Born in 1927 in Nowy Sacz (Poland), Maryan's unclassifiable work unfolds at the crossroads of expressionism and figuration. With hope, derision, sarcasm and bite, the artist, whose sensitivity is rooted in traumatic personal experience, became, throughout his career, a singular witness of his time.

“I don't force anyone to like my painting, but I don't want it to be labeled anything, for example: denunciatory painting, unbridled aggressiveness... [...] As far as my painting is concerned, I officially declare that I would rather have it called ‘truth‑painting’.” (MARYAN, excerpt from the catalogue Ariel42, from Ariel gallery, Paris, February 1977)

Maryan's first solo exhibition at kamel mennour is planned for spring 2022, offering an opportunity for the public to discover an essential body of work that, in all its fascinating and enigmatic dimensions, continues to speak with great beauty and relevance to the collective psyche today.

Maryan S. Maryan died in 1977 in New York. His works are part of prestigious collections around the world, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Museum of Jewish Art and History (mahJ) (Paris), the MuMa (Le Havre, France), the Museum of Tourcoing (France), the LAAC - Lieu d’Art et d’Action Contemporaine (Dunkerque, France), the Centre d’Art Contemporain de l’abbaye d’Auberive (France), the Museum of Grenoble (France), the Collections de l’État Français, the mumok (Vienna, Austria), the Staatliches Museum (Berlin, Germany), the Staatliches Museum Schwerin (Germany), the Municipal Museum of The Hague (Netherlands), the Kunsten - Museum of Modern Art Aalborg (Denmark), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Israel), the MoMA (New York), the Guggenheim Museum (New York) the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, USA), the Art Institute of Chicago (USA), the Spertus Museum (Chicago, USA), the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art (Chicago, USA), the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, USA), the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (MOCA).

Iwona Blazwick OBE to step down as Director of Whitechapel Gallery

January 5, 2022

Iwona Blazwick joined Whitechapel Gallery in 2001 with a vision to grow its world-class exhibition, education, commissioning and publishing programmes. Under her 20-year leadership, the Gallery’s reputation as ‘the artist’s gallery for everyone’ has grown exponentially; in 2009 she doubled the Gallery’s physical footprint, transforming the adjacent former Whitechapel Library into new galleries and creative studio spaces. She notably strengthened Whitechapel Gallery’s commitment to showing pioneering women artists; the programme has featured major solo exhibitions of Nan Goldin (2002), Cristina Iglesias (2003), Isa Genzken (2009), Elizabeth Peyton (2009), Sophie Calle (2010), Alice Neel (2010), Gillian Wearing (2012), Zarina Bhimji (2012), Sarah Lucas (2013), Hannah Höch (2014), Emily Jacir (2015), Mary Heilmann (2016), Anna Maria Maiolino (2019) and Eileen Agar (2021). Under her tenure the Gallery continued its famous history of ‘firsts’, with immersive exhibitions by Mark Wallinger (2002), Franz West (2003), Paul McCarthy (2005), Albert Oehlen (2006), William Kentridge (2016), Mark Dion (2018), Elmgreen & Dragset (2019) and Kai Althoff (2020).

Alongside significant surveys and solo exhibitions, Blazwick commissioned or curated ambitious historical surveys, including A Short History of Performance (2002-2005), Back to Black: Art, Cinema, and the Racial Imaginary (2005), Faces in the Crowd (2005), Adventures of the Black Square (2015), Electronic Superhighway (2016), Eduardo Paolozzi (2017) and A Century of the Artist’s Studio (2022).

Blazwick will be stepping down in April 2022. She will continue to work as an independent curator both with the Gallery into 2023, and on a wide range of international projects.

Wang Bing awarded CHANEL Next Prize

December 15, 2021

Galerie Chantal Crousel wishes to congratulate Wang Bing as the winner of the CHANEL Next Prize.

With rare beauty and uncompromising gravity, Wang Bing depicts in his films those on the margins of contemporary Chinese society.

CHANEL’s Next Prize has been developed to provide an emerging generation of creative risk-takers with the resources to tackle ambitious new projects - each of the ten winners will receive one hundred thousand euros in funding as well as access to mentorship and networking opportunities facilitated by Chanel.

photo © CHANEL

Outset awards major grant to performance art organisation Performa

December 8, 2021

Outset Contemporary Art Fund, an international arts charity, has announced the recipients of six grants being awarded by the Outset Partners programme. In 2021, a total of £275,000 is being awarded across a range of museums, galleries, and public institutions – both within the UK and internationally.

The Transformative Grant, the largest grant of its kind, affords the opportunity for a significant project to radically rethink the art institution of the future. The 2021 recipient, Performa (USA), will launch a new digital platform, ‘Living Archives’, that will transform its global reach and publicly document the organisation’s pioneering work since 2005.

In addition, Artists in Residence (UK), Bold Tendencies (UK), Centre Pompidou (France), Green Papaya Art Projects (Philippines) and International Curators Forum (International) have been awarded Impact Grants, totalling £125,000.

Established in 2018, Outset Partners is the largest international private grant programme funded by a collective of individuals who work together to meet the evolving needs of the global cultural sector. Awarding impactful grants through a consensus-driven process, the partnership has invested over £1m in the creative ecosystem to date.

Photo: Kia La Beija, ‘The Black Act’, 2019. A Performa Commission for Performa 19. Photo Paula Court, courtesy of Performa