Pace announces the passing of Robert Whitman

January 22, 2024

Robert Whitman passed away on January 19 at the age of 88.

A pioneer of performance and multimedia installation work, Whitman devoted his career to extending the boundaries of art as we know it. He was a seminal figure in the performances called Happenings - a hybrid art form spanning installation, performance, and other mediums - presented in New York in the early 1960s by a group of artists that also included Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, and Red Grooms, and he was also at the vanguard of scientifically and technologically engaged art making during this period, having co-founded, with artist Robert Rauschenberg, the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a collective that supported creative partnerships between artists and engineers, in 1967.

“It would be difficult to overestimate Bob Whitman’s importance in the artistic milieu of 1960s New York. Bob was a true pioneer. His Happenings blurred the line between dreaming and waking life. Somehow, he made the fantastic real. His many amazing collaborations in performance were unforgettable, none more so than the 9 Evenings he did with Rauschenberg. From the beginning, I was deeply intrigued by his vision, and I remained astounded by his brilliance over the course of seven decades of our friendship. Working together was one of the great privileges of my life.” - Arne Glimcher, Pace

Also in 1967, he had his first solo exhibition with Pace at its West 57th Street gallery in New York. Titled Robert Whitman: Dark, the show featured two laser installations that Whitman created in collaboration with Eric Rawson, an engineer with Bell Telephone Laboratories: Wavy Red Line, in which a spinning red laser produced a fixed red line, growing and shrinking at specific intervals across four walls, and Solid Red Line, in which a laser drew itself around the four walls and, when it met its end, erased itself.

“The thing about theater that most interests me is that it takes time. Time for me is something material. I like to use it that way. It can be used in the same way as paint or plaster or any other material. It can describe other natural events.” - Robert Whitman

photo: George Etheredge for The New York Times

Alexander James joins Marlborough London

January 10, 2024

Marlborough has announced the representation of British-born artist Alexander James. James graduated from Camberwell College of Arts in 2015, and his work deals with the formation of identity within the intersection of digitalisation and materiality. James’s practice draws on a variety of material references such as family letters and photographs, found memorabilia, and ancient artefacts, as well as personal conversations, emotions, and passed-on memories.

Last autumn the London based painter had his debut solo exhibition Tuck Shop for the Wicked at Marlborough London. Other recent solo exhibitions include Dancing on Lava In A Moment of Decadence, Roman Road, London (2020), Look What The Cat Dragged In, Roman Road, London (2020). James has been part of numerous group exhibitions including A Celebration of Portraiture at Marlborough London last year.

Pope.L (1955-2023)

December 28, 2023

Modern Art has announced the passing of Pope.L, who died suddenly on December 23rd at home in Chicago.

One of the foremost conceptual artists of our time, describing himself as a visual and performance-theatre artist, as well as an educator, Pope. L fundamentally challenged and changed the last fifty years of visual art in the United States. His longstanding history of provocative and absurdist performances along with his wide-ranging oeuvre of installations, objects, and paintings undermined conventional notions of language, materiality, and meaning. His elegant, indeterminate, and often humorous, vet bitingly poignant criticism of our history has only recently begun to be fully recognised.

In an interview for the monograph, member: Pope.L, published by The Museum of Modern Art in 2019, the artist noted that "the link between language and performance is duration; both exist only via the
crucible of time and are continually remade in time."

Pope.L's work is currentlv featured in the solo exhibition Hospital at the UK’s South London Gallery.

Other recent solo exhibitions, performances, and projects include Between A Figure and A Letter at Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin (2022); Misconceptions at Portikus, Frankfurt (2021) and Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration a trio of complementary exhibitions of his work in New York organised by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Public Art Fund (2019). Pope. L has had previous solo exhibitions at MOCA Los Angeles, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Cleveland Institute of Art, The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and many other institutions.

photo: Peyton Fulford

Reflex Amsterdam now represents Peggy Kuiper

December 14, 2023

Reflex Amsterdam is pleased to announce that Peggy Kuiper has joined the gallery. The artist’s debut solo show, "The Conversation That Never Took Place" will premiere at the gallery in May 2024.

The gallery is concurrently working towards a book publication, set to be released with the opening of the exhibition in May 2024. The book will contain a large selection of works made in the last 4 years. It will also feature essays by Daniel Humm, the celebrated three-star chef of Eleven Madison Park in New York, and Katya Tylevich, writer of the latest biography of acclaimed artist Marina Abramović.

Peggy Kuiper (1986, Haarlem, The Netherlands) was originally educated as a graphic designer and trained under Anthon Beeke, a monumental figure in Dutch graphic design. Longing for artistic freedom, Kuiper changed career paths and paved her way towards a successful career in photography. In 2019 she returned to painting, and with a distinct signature and undeniable talent, she has established herself as a unique voice, balancing on a fine edge between tenderness and herculean strength.

Hauser & Wirth announces representation of Ambera Wellmann in joint partnership with Company Gallery

December 12, 2023

Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Marc Payot, Co-Presidents of Hauser & Wirth, announced today the gallery’s representation of Nova Scotia-born, New York-based artist Ambera Wellmann, in joint partnership with Company Gallery, NY.

Wellmann has attracted international critical approbation for paintings that depict worlds within worlds, populated by human and animal forms emerging from and dissolving into each other and the atmosphere. Rendered in oils with a technical dexterity that recalls the work of Renaissance and Baroque masters, her canvases are filled with unanchored figures and disembodied faces, shimmering swaths of illumination and darkness, anachronistic details and indeterminate spaces that circle and move in defiance of hierarchy, pointing instead to metamorphosis, vulnerability and collectivity as subjects. In their refusal of familiar typologies and binaries, Wellmann’s apparitions exist in a space where multiple contradictory experiences happen at once—the violent and the tender, carnal and spiritual, abject and transcendent, and the simply inexplicable—at the threshold of a future in which viewers are compelled to imagine themselves as participants.

In January 2024, Hauser & Wirth will present new work by Wellmann as a highlight of its stand at the tenth annual edition of FOG Design + Art in San Francisco (18 – 21 January).

The gallery’s first major solo exhibition with the artist will open to the public in Fall 2024 at Hauser & Wirth’s Soho space on Wooster Street in New York City, complemented by a simultaneous solo exhibition at Company’s nearby location on Elizabeth Street.

In September 2024, Wellmann also will be a featured artist of the 15th Gwangju Biennale exhibition ‘PANSORI – a soundscape of the 21st century,’ curated by Nicolas Bourriaud.

Tolarno Galleries announces representation of Guruwuy Murrinyina

December 6, 2023

Born in 1975, Guruwuy Murrinyina lives with her son at a very remote homeland in Gangan, in the Northern Territory. Gangan is a village of ten houses adjacent to a chain of billabongs, inland from Blue Mud Bay. The nearest town is a four hour drive along dirt roads. This is where her art centre is at Yirrkala. In one of these deep waterholes resides Wititj – the Rainbow Serpent which is encoded in her paintings of lillies.

Guruwuy is the daughter of deceased artist Malaluba Gumana. Guruwuy is one of her five children. Malaluba was a highly esteemed award winning artist who was celebrated for the delicacy of her hand and deft colour mixing skill with earth pigments. Guruwuy's father was Yaŋalka Murrinyina of the Djarrwark clan whose homeland is Balma to the south and equally remote. Guruwuy had been assisting her mother in her paintings of Galpu clan imagery up until her mother's sudden death in February 2020. In grief for her mother and observing spiritual protocols, Guruwuy did not paint again for over two years.

With her first rendering of her new works it became clear that she had taken a fresh approach to her mother’s theme, using a different palette and even more finely detailed compositions. Guruwuy's paintings on stringybark, hard board and larrakitj (memorial poles) are rendered with natural earth pigments, exploring a repetitive motif known in Yolŋu Matha language as Dhatam or Water Lilies (Nymphaea sb.)

On the surface, her organic flowing compositions evoke a sense of beautiful tranquility, symbolic of the lily, however the designs link back to a powerful ancestral site known as Garrimala, an expansive inland body of fresh water which holds a powerful narrative and one of the oldest continuous religious iconographical practices – the story of the Rainbow Serpent. The serpent is manifest in Witij (olive python) who lives amongst the lilies of Garrimala, moving through the water and causing ripples and rainbows against the dark surface of the water represented by Guruwuy’s fine shimmering line work surrounding the lilly leaves and flowers.

Gururwuy lives and works close to this sacred area. She is continuing the representation of Garrimala with her unique palette and compositions inspired by the work of her late mother. These designs encode epic song cycles which chart the movement of this spiritual being through the landscape as a force akin to a cyclone. The poetry of the songs captures the violence and destruction of the tempest embodied as a giant snake, counterposed against the emerging sun and the shimmering iridescence of the rainbow. The challenge for a Yolŋu artist is to render this meaning within the discipline of natural media. In finding new colours mixed from the red, yellow and black rocks with the addition of white clay, Guruwuy is echoing her mother's expertise in new ways. She also mirrors her mother’s infinite patience and dedication to render these images using only a thin brush made from human hair in thousands of tiny layered strokes.

Tolarno Galleries is looking forward to exhibiting works by Guruwuy Murrinyina in early 2024.

Carlos Bunga is now represented by Nara Roesler

November 30, 2023

Nara Roesler is pleased to announce the representation of the artist Carlos Bunga (1976, Porto, Portugal). Known for his site-specific installations made from industrialized materials such as cardboard, adhesive tape, paint, and glue, Carlos Bunga produces sculptures, paintings, drawings, performances, videos, and installations, through which he seeks to explain his own creative process. His works establish a dialogue with the space in which they are inserted, inviting the viewer to reflect on the relationship between the body and the space, questioning the role of architecture and cities as languages of power. One of the key points of Bunga’s poetics is the ambivalence contained in the materials he uses, while being light and apparently fragile, they are simultaneously capable of building extremely resistant structures.

Although installations and performances form the basis of many of his works, painting in the expanded field is a dominant factor in his research since factors such as color and texture are fundamental to his production. With a background in painting, the artist gradually moved away from two-dimensionality in search of a break with the surface and the questioning of traditional painting supports. "Painting is present, directly or indirectly, in all my works, it is the basis of my thoughts, a multifaceted place, full of layers, perspectives, and smells."

photo: Museo Reina Sofia Photography Archive

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
 

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

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