Perrotin announces the opening of a new gallery in Dubai

March 3, 2022

Located in the DIFC, the heart of Dubai, the new 100-square-meter space will open its doors later this year and present primary market works by artists represented by the gallery, alongside secondary market works.

Already present in six cities—Paris, Hong Kong, New York, Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai—the gallery continues to expand its reach with the opening of this new permanent address in the Middle East.

The new gallery will create connections and strengthen Perrotin’s ties with the Arab world, which have been developed over many years to promote its artists in the region; whether through participation in the Dubai and Abu Dhabi art fairs, or with large-scale projects such as Murakami-Ego at ALRIWAQ in Doha or Jean-Michel Othoniel’s Alfa installation at the National Museum of Qatar.

Simulation / © Photo: Altamash Urooj

Kevin Choe joins Petzel

February 28, 2022

Petzel welcomes Kevin Choe to the gallery as Director.

Choe, who holds a BA in Art History and French from Vassar College, joins Petzel from Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

“I am delighted to join Petzel Gallery, which has remained at the forefront of contemporary art for almost 30 years and which, I believe, is ideally positioned to play an ever-larger role in the current remapping of the art market,” says Choe.

“We are excited to have Kevin join Petzel," says Andrea Teschke, Partner at Petzel. "His talent for facilitating sales is outstanding and his skills greatly complement the expertise of our team. We can’t wait to have him aboard.”

what’s on at Petzel

Inaugural Director announced for Zaha Hadid Foundation

The Zaha Hadid Foundation (ZHF) has announced the appointment of Professor Paul Greenhalgh as its inaugural director. He is an art historian and museum director with considerable international experience, a curator and scholar of art, design, and architecture. His previous roles have included Director of the Sainsbury Centre (UK), Director and President of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art and Design (Washington DC), President of NSCAD University (Canada), and Head of Research at the V&A Museum (London). He has curated many major exhibitions internationally, and published widely on art, design and architecture in the Modern period.

Professor Greenhalgh said: “It is an enormous honour to be leading the Zaha Hadid Foundation in its inaugural phase. We intend to preserve the magnificent creative legacy of Zaha, by making publicly available our unrivalled collection of her works, and presenting these to the world through exhibitions at home and internationally. In the creative and intellectual spirit of Zaha, we will also address the condition of architecture and related arts of our times, through education and research programmes. Zaha loved to teach and to promote understanding of Modern architecture and art. She constantly sought to give access to the world of architecture and design to young people and a wider public. Through programmes of bursaries, grants, and awards, ZHF will operate in this same spirit.”

kamel mennour announce exclusive representation of the work of Eugène Carrière

February 25, 2022

“I appreciate only what is kept by memory” - Eugène Carrière

Kamel Mennour announce the exclusive international representation of the work of Eugène Carrière.

With Véronique Dumesnil‑Nora, Carrière's great‑granddaughter, the gallery follows in the steps of the Galerie Bernheim‑Jeune – his historical dealer who presented a first solo exhibition in February 1903 – to pay tribute and take part in the recognition of this major artist, whose work finds multiple echoes in our contemporary context.

A celebrated artist during his lifetime, equally at home among the Symbolists and the Naturalists, Carrière (1849‑1906) never ceased to elude the stylistic categories of his time, without claiming to belong to a specific movement.

Resisting all classification, this painter, engraver and draughtsman - who was the contemporary of Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon and Paul Gauguin, among others - surrounded himself very early on with the most influential figures of the artistic and literary world of his time: Roger Marx, Jean Dolent, Alphonse Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt, Gabriel Séailles and Paul Verlaine. His friendship with Auguste Rodin marked his pictorial work which, like that of a sculptor, was inspired by tangible reality and the discovery of matter. “For him, as for his masters, painting, which is a work on the surface, gives the sensation of volume and weight. [...] In each portrait painted by Carrière lies the solid and mechanical beauty of a skeleton” wrote the journalist and art critic Gustave Geffroy in 1906.

A modernist before his time, Carrière founded the Carrière Academy in 1890 on the rue de Rennes in Paris. He taught, among others, those who were to become the Fauves: André Derain, Francis Jourdain, Henri Matisse, but also Pablo Picasso who arrived in the capital in 1901, and whose blue and pink periods are known to owe much to Carrière’s quasi‑monochrome painting.

Often compared to Vélasquez, Carrière demonstrated throughout his life a great mastery of chiaroscuro, allowing him to privilege light over colour, and to achieve a complex and mysterious play of transparency and depth. “To embellish life through art is to enrich it with our in‑depth knowledge of the relationship between man and nature”, he said. Like furtive or evanescent apparitions impossible to capture in an image, his figures seem to abstract themselves from a landscape, a background, another time‑space.

“I have only known my trade since the day I discovered that the curved line,
and not the straight line, was the contour of everything. [...]
You see, it must be drawn like the undulating lines of a plant...
And this is how a woman, a horizon, everything must be drawn.” - Carrière

Gagosian opens new shop in London’s historic Burlington Arcade

February 24, 2022

The ground-floor boutique will feature an array of offerings including prints and editions, Gagosian publications, rare books, exhibition posters, and artist-designed objects and apparel such as jewelry, sculpture, and decorative items. Upstairs, on the first floor, a rotation of small exhibitions, artist takeovers, and special collaborations will be presented. Situated just steps from the Royal Academy of Arts, and off of Old Bond Street, the celebrated destination for luxury retail and fine art since the eighteenth century, the space has been designed by Caruso St John Architects, the Stirling Prize–winning architecture firm that collaborated with Gagosian on the Grosvenor Hill and Britannia Street galleries in London, as well as gallery locations in Rome and Paris. The shop will officially launch on March 1 and will be open each week Tuesday through Saturday.

© Caruso St John Architects. Courtesy Gagosian

David Richard Gallery opens new second location in Chelsea

February 22, 2022

The inaugural exhibition presents a series of abstract color paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Carl E. Hazlewood (born 1951, Guyana, South America) that have never been presented as a group until now. The paintings began initially by staining, then built up with layers of color, medium, and additions of metallic, fluorescent and mirrored materials that brought complexity, depth and texture.

Since its inception in 2010, David Richard Gallery has produced museum quality exhibitions that feature Post War abstraction in the US. The presentations have addressed specific decades and geographies as well as certain movements and tendencies. While the gallery has long been recognized as an important proponent of post-1960s abstraction—including both the influential pioneers as well as a younger generation of practitioners in this field—in keeping with this spirit of nurture and development the gallery also presents established artists who embrace more gestural and representational approaches to the making of art as well as young emerging artists.

De Wain Valentine 1936 – 2022

De Wain Valentine was born in Colorado and arrived in L.A. in 1965 to teach a course in plastics technology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is regarded today among the earliest pioneers in the use of industrial plastics and resins to execute monumental sculptures that reflect the light and engage the surrounding space through its mesmerizingly translucent surfaces that arrest one's gaze.

This technical knowledge, combined with his subsequent experience working with fiberglass-reinforced plastic in boat building shops and painting automobiles, air planes - and even, according to some, UFOs - led to his fascination and artistic involvement with sculptures made out of colored plastic and polyester resin, all materials evoking a futurist era.

De Wain Valentine in his studio with Red Concave Circle, 1970, Valentine Studio, Venice Beach, CA - Photo: Harry Drinkwater

Dan Graham has died

February 20, 2022

Dan Graham died this weekend in New York. His influence over the past half century as a writer, photographer, architect, sculptor, filmmaker and performance artist is widely felt in the contemporary art world

Despite his recent disavowal of Conceptual Art as a term, he was one of its earliest pioneers through early text-based works, typographic wall pieces and schematic poems, not to mention the seminal illustrated magazine essay, Homes for America (1966). He exhibited the work of his peers Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson at the John Daniels Gallery in New York, where he was briefly the curator and director, before showing alongside these and many other Minimalists and Conceptualists during the 1960s and 70s.

The main focus of Graham’s art since the late 1970s was an ongoing series of public architectural installations, which he called pavilions, derived from geometric forms and rendered in plate glass, two-way mirror, and steel armatures. Graham intended his pavilions to function as punctuation marks, pausing or altering the experience of physical space, providing momentary diversion for romance or play, or else as places to delve into other activities, like reading or viewing videos. These deceptively simple structures recall many of the artist’s earlier experiments with perception, reflection, and refraction, but depart from them in their non-gallery setting as long-term additions to the landscape.

Graham had an encyclopedic sphere of references and wrote about everything from Dean Martin and rock music to astrology and urban architecture. He is survived by his wife, the artist Mieko Meguro. His wit, generosity and irascibility will be sorely missed by all who knew him.

portrait: Patrick Fetherstonhaugh

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.