Michal Rovner:Pragim
Michal Rovner: Pragim 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 March 8 – April 18, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
New York – Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Michal Rovner at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Which opened on March 8th and will be on view until the April 18, the show, titled Pragim—the Hebrew word for Poppies—will feature prints, video works, and installations from a series the artist started in 2019. Over the last five years, as part of this long-term project, Rovner has filmed and drawn wild poppies that grow in her field in Israel.
Pragim- 2 (detail), 2024 PRINT archival pigment print 80-1/4" × 50" × 2" (203.8 cm × 127 cm × 5.1 cm), framed No. 90459.01 © Michal Rovner / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
For more than 30 years, Rovner’s practice has centered on universal questions of the human condition—bringing issues of identity, place, and dislocation to the fore. The poppy—which carries different associations and meanings around the world—embodies both fragility and fortitude, as well as memorial and loss. The ongoing war has impacted the artist’s perspective on her Pragim works, as they now also powerfully reflect the state of unrest and anguish afflicting the region. Using a dark palette of black, gray, and red, the artist imbues her human-scale staccato swaying poppies with harsh and tragic qualities.
Michal Rovner: Pragim 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 March 8 – April 18, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
Working across drawing, printmaking, video, sculpture, and installation, the artist often obscures identifying details and specifics of time and place in her layered compositions, creating abstract yet resonant reflections of reality and the human experience. One of her most famous projects is Makom (Place), a series of monumental cubic structures composed of stones of dismantled or destroyed Israeli and Palestinian homes from Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Haifa, the Galilee, and the border between Israel and Syria.
Pragim-3, 2024 PRINT archival pigment print 80-1/4" × 50" × 2" (203.8 cm × 127 cm × 5.1 cm), framed No. 90460.01 © Michal Rovner / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The Makom series echoes conflicts in the past and present. Working with Israeli and Palestinian masons, Rovner addresses the possibility of creating together, in a shared experience of reconstructing and rebuilding.
Red Light, 2024 VIDEO LCD screen 74-13/16" × 42-1/2" × 5-3/8" (190 cm×108cm×13.7cm) No. 91051.01 © Michal Rovner / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Michal Rovner (b. 1957, Tel Aviv, Israel) works with drawing, printmaking, video, sculpture, and installation to reflect on the continuum of human experience. Her work shifts constantly between the poetic and the political, using imagery that invokes the fragility of existence, identity, dislocation, and time. Generally avoiding direct representation of specific issues or events, Rovner reinterprets the present and historical memory. She records and erases visual information, obscuring specifics of time and place through gestural, abstract qualities. For immediate release Important historic exhibitions and installations of her work include Michal Rovner: The Space Between, Whitney Museum of American Art (2002); Against Order? Against Disorder?, Venice Biennale (2003); Incidental Affairs, Suntory Museum, Osaka (2009); Michal Rovner: Histoires, Musée du Louvre, Paris (2011); and Michal Rovner: Transitions, Canary Wharf, London (2019). Rovner’s work resides in numerous public collections worldwide including The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Paris Audiovisuel, France (Collection of the City of Paris); and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel, among others.
Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.
Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remaining at the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program— comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects. Pace has a legacy in art bookmaking and has published over five hundred titles in close collaboration with artists, with a focus on original scholarship and on introducing new voices to the art historical canon.
Today, Pace has seven locations worldwide, including European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where the gallery established an office in 2023. Pace maintains two galleries in New York—its headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, which welcomed almost 120,000 visitors and programmed 20 shows in its first six months, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. Pace’s long and pioneering history in California includes a gallery in Palo Alto, which was open from 2016 to 2022. Pace’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technology industry has had a lasting impact on the gallery at a global level, accelerating its initiatives connecting art and technology as well as its work with experiential artists. Pace consolidated its West Coast activity through its flagship in Los Angeles, which opened in 2022. Pace was one of the first international galleries to establish outposts in Asia, where it operates permanent gallery spaces in Hong Kong and Seoul, along with an office and viewing room in Beijing. In spring 2024, Pace will open its first gallery space in Japan in Tokyo’s new Azabudai Hills development.
For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Pace Gallery’s website here. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.
Loie Hollowell: Dilation Stage
Loie Hollowell: Dilation Stage 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001March 8–April 20, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
New York – Pace is pleased to present Dilation Stage, an exhibition of new large-scale drawings by Loie Hollowell, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York, which opened on March 8 and will be on view until April 20. This presentation marks Hollowell’s second solo show with Pace in New York and her first exhibition in the city dedicated exclusively to her works on paper. Dilation Stage will coincide with her first museum survey, on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, through August 11.
Nine Centimeters Dilated, September 21, 2023 WORK ON PAPER soft pastel on paper 26" × 30" (66 cm × 76.2 cm) framed, 29-15/16" × 33- 15/16" (76 cm × 86.2 cm) No. 89269 © Loie Hollowell, courtesy Pace Gallery
Hollowell is known for her otherworldly paintings and drawings of bodily landscapes. Through a unique lexicon of geometric and organic forms that represent elements of her body, the artist explores experiences of sex, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and motherhood. Manipulating real and illusory space on the canvas, she uses radiant colors, varied textures, and protruding sculptural elements to draw viewers into her energetic compositions.
Loie Hollowell: Dilation Stage 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001March 8–April 20, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
In her show with Pace in New York, Hollowell presents ten new pastel drawings that document the dilation stage of labor, in which the cervix opens and effaces from one to ten centimeters, allowing the baby to move into the birth canal. Displayed sequentially on a rounded wall that reflects the shape of a pregnant belly, these drawings feature, at their centers, depictions of Hollowell’s own pregnant abdomen, rendered to scale. Below each belly is a circle the exact size of the effaced cervix as it expands. Meanwhile, radiating bands of color—which represent the increasingly intense pain of contractions during the dilation stage—fill the spaces around the bellies. In each composition, these rippling colors respond to the hue of the swollen wombs from which they emanate— Hollowell assigns light colors to minimally painful contractions, while intensely painful contractions take on dark colors. The cervical “circles” at the bottom of each drawing seem to pulse as the series progresses, culminating in a blazing cadmium red.
Four Centimeters Dilated, March 22, 2023 WORK ON PAPER soft pastel on paper 26"×28"(66cm×71.1cm) framed, 29-15/16" × 33- 15/16" (76 cm × 86.2 cm) No. 87553 © Loie Hollowell, courtesy Pace Gallery
For this body of work, in which color is a highly charged force, Hollowell adopts a wide ranging palette to express the mental and physical sensations she has experienced while giving birth. “When the first contractions started with each of my pregnancies, I was filled with joy and excitement that I would soon be meeting my baby,” Hollowell says. “I rendered this stage in yellow, like the sun on a cloudless day, full of light and optimism. As my cervix dilated, the pain became increasingly intense and sharp, so I moved into bright, deep reds for that stage. My second birth was at home in a birthing tub—I was enveloped in buoyant, luke-warm water while also having this searing and heavy pain. I felt only an ultramarine blue could rightfully signify that experience.”
Two Centimeters Dilated, March 10, 2023 WORK ON PAPER soft pastel on paper 26"×30"(66cm×76.2cm) framed, 29-15/16" × 33- 15/16" (76 cm × 86.2 cm) No. 87551 © Loie Hollowell, courtesy Pace Gallery
In addition to these drawings, the exhibition includes a unique birthing bench that Hollowell created collaboratively with her husband, sculptor Brian Caverly. The history of the birthing chair—which has been used by women in labor throughout millennia—extends all the way back to 1450 BCE Egypt. In Caverly and Hollowell’s rendition, which visitors are invited to sit on, space is created not just for the birther, but also for the partner, midwife, doula, doctor, or any other witness to the transcendent journey of birth.
Later this year, Pace will present an exhibition of new paintings by Hollowell at its Los Angeles gallery. Details about this presentation will be announced in due course.
Loie Hollowell (b. 1983, raised in Woodland, CA) is recognized for her paintings that evoke bodily landscapes, using geometric shapes to move a figure or its actions into abstraction. Her work explores themes of sexuality, often through allusions to the human form with an emphasis on women’s bodies. An investigation of autobiography became evident in Hollowell’s early work, which explored the use of gradient staining techniques on cotton supports as a metaphor for intimate spaces—meditations on sleep and bodily fluids. These canvases evolved into figurative painting, introducing female nudes as subject matter as well as the use of reflection and mirroring. Her subsequent work exhibited a shift toward abstraction, characterized by radiating silhouettes and a pulsating color palette. With its strong colors, varied textures, and geometrical symmetry, Hollowell’s practice is situated in lineage with the work of the Transcendental Painting Group (1938–41), Georgia O’Keeffe, Gulam Rasool Santosh, and Judy Chicago.
Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.
Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remaining at the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program— comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects. Pace has a legacy in art bookmaking and has published over five hundred titles in close collaboration with artists, with a focus on original scholarship and on introducing new voices to the art historical canon.
Today, Pace has seven locations worldwide, including European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where the gallery established an office in 2023. Pace maintains two galleries in New York—its headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, which welcomed almost 120,000 visitors and programmed 20 shows in its first six months, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. Pace’s long and pioneering history in California includes a gallery in Palo Alto, which was open from 2016 to 2022. Pace’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technology industry has had a lasting impact on the gallery at a global level, accelerating its initiatives connecting art and technology as well as its work with experiential artists. Pace consolidated its West Coast activity through its flagship in Los Angeles, which opened in 2022. Pace was one of the first international galleries to establish outposts in Asia, where it operates permanent gallery spaces in Hong Kong and Seoul, along with an office and viewing room in Beijing. In spring 2024, Pace will open its first gallery space in Japan in Tokyo’s new Azabudai Hills development.
For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Pace Gallery’s website here. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.
Chuck Close : Red, Yellow and Blue: The Last Paintings
Fred/Diptych, 2017-2018 PAINTING oil on canvas 36" × 30" × 1-1/4" (91.4 cm × 76.2 cm × 3.2 cm), two panels, each No. 69339 © Chuck Close, courtesy Pace Gallery
New York – Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of the last paintings of Chuck Close at its 510 West 25th Street gallery in New York which opened on February 23 and will be on view until April 13, 2024. This is the gallery’s first presentation dedicated to the artist's work since his death in 2021; this show features a selection of paintings, photographs, and works on paper—most of which have never been exhibited before—that reflect Close’s significant contributions to the history of art. Since it began representing Close in 1977, Pace has exhibited each new body of his work, and this presentation will complete that cycle.
Brad, 2020-2021 PAINTING oil on canvas 36" × 30" (91.4 cm × 76.2 cm) No. 77931 ©Chuck Close, courtesy Pace Gallery
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue featuring a previously unpublished 2018 interview between Close and the artist Cindy Sherman—originally commissioned by The Brooklyn Rail—as well as a new critical essay by Carter Ratcliff, which considers Close’s final works in depth. These texts appear alongside an essay by Barbara Knappmeyer that examines the artist’s renderings of the face in the context of facial recognition technology.
Chuck Close, Red, Yellow and Blue: The Last Paintings 510 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 February 23 – April 13, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
Since the 1970s, Close has been known for his innovative approach to conceptual portraiture, systematically transposing his subjects’ likenesses from photographs into gridded paintings. Over the course of five decades, his work challenged conventional modes of representation across a wide range of media, including various forms of painting, printmaking, drawing, collage, daguerreotypes, Polaroid photography, and tapestry.
Baby Jane, 2018-2019 PAINTING oil on canvas 102-1/2" × 84" (260.4 cm × 213.4 cm) No. 73510©Chuck Close, courtesy Pace Gallery
The artist posed a radical proposition with his approach to painting, going against the grain of art world trends during the late 1960s and 1970s, when Minimalism, abstraction, and seriality were dominant, and portraiture and photorealism were largely overlooked. Pace’s exhibition spotlights Close’s final body of paintings, which includes works that have never been publicly exhibited. These full-color portraits and self-portraits employ a palette of only three colors: red, yellow, and blue.
Claire, 2020 PAINTING oil on canvas 72" × 60" (182.9 cm × 152.4 cm) No. 77932 ©Chuck Close, courtesy Pace Gallery
Layering transparent glazes of paint, Close created an effect of abstract likeness entirely different from that of his previous work. The complex color relationships that unfold in these paintings are visible at the bleeding edges of each square within the grid, where the ragged ends of each individual color are visible. Meditating on the power of color itself, Close’s final works suggest the constructive aesthetics of Impressionism, where form is built up through a chromatic architecture of brushstrokes. Appearing more abstract than representational to the human eye, the likenesses in these portraits come into greater focus when viewed from a distance or through the lens of a camera, an act of transfiguration that speaks to the artist’s interest in modes of perception and information processing.
Close realized these formal achievements in his last works while grappling with long-term health issues precipitated by a spinal aneurysm that he suffered in 1988 at the age of 48. Having lost the use of his arms and legs as a result of the aneurysm, Close was told by doctors that he would never be able to paint again. Through a grueling process of rehabilitation, he eventually regained his ability to paint by using a brush-holding device strapped to his wrists and forearms. Working through this disability for the rest of his life, he was forced to teach himself how to paint in an entirely new way, reinventing his approach to the medium in the middle of his career. In his final works, Close continued to push against the constraints of his physical disability to reinvent his own painterly language once again.
Even prior to his aneurysm, however, Close struggled with other disabilities. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, he used art as a means of navigating severe dyslexia and prosopagnosia, or face blindness. Having studied at the University of Washington, Yale, and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, he began teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst—where he would present his first solo exhibition—in the mid-1960s. Upon relocating to New York, the artist continued to explore new modes of realism, using an airbrush to paint blackand-white, highly detailed photographic portraits of himself, his family, and his friends onto large-scale canvases, a practice he would continue for the rest of his career. Close began in the late 1970s to make use of a grid system based on a physical relationship to his support. The resulting works read like pixelated mosaics wherein the viewer deciphers a unified image within juxtaposed colors, shapes, lines, and fingerprints. The artist’s first retrospective, titled Close Portraits, was organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1980. That show traveled to the St. Louis Art Museum in Missouri and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago before closing at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In the early 1990s, he began experimenting with portraiture through the production of silk tapestries and, in 2003, he furthered this investigation, creating editions of large-scale Jacquard tapestry portraits. In 1998, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a full-scale retrospective of Close’s career that included more than 90 paintings, drawings, and photographs, cementing his status as one of the most influential artists of his generation.
Fred II, 2017 PAINTING oil on canvas 72"×60"×2"(182.9cm× 152.4 cm × 5.1 cm) No. 68273 © Chuck Close, courtesy Pace Gallery
Chuck Close’s (b. 1940, Monroe, Washington; d. 2021, New York) commitment to process and media characterized his approach to portraiture. He began creating portraits based on photographs in the late 1960s, using a grid to map each facial detail, which he would then recreate in exacting detail through painting. Beginning in the late 1970s,
Close began to diverge from his highly detailed approach, instead constructing images that are still organized by a grid, but with layers of autonomous shapes and colors that cohere into his subject’s face when viewed from a distance. Close constantly revitalized his practice through varied media and modes of representation and his oeuvre encompassed many modes of art-making, including painting, printmaking, drawing, collage, daguerreotype and Polaroid photography, mosaic, and tapestries.
Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.
Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remaining at the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program— comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects. Pace has a legacy in art bookmaking and has published over five hundred titles in close collaboration with artists, with a focus on original scholarship and on introducing new voices to the art historical canon.
Today, Pace has seven locations worldwide, including European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where the gallery established an office in 2023. Pace maintains two galleries in New York—its headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, which welcomed almost 120,000 visitors and programmed 20 shows in its first six months, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. Pace’s long and pioneering history in California includes a gallery in Palo Alto, which was open from 2016 to 2022. Pace’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technology industry has had a lasting impact on the gallery at a global level, accelerating its initiatives connecting art and technology as well as its work with experiential artists. Pace consolidated its West Coast activity through its flagship in Los Angeles, which opened in 2022. Pace was one of the first international galleries to establish outposts in Asia, where it operates permanent gallery spaces in Hong Kong and Seoul, along with an office and viewing room in Beijing. In spring 2024, Pace will open its first gallery space in Japan in Tokyo’s new Azabudai Hills development.
For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Pace Gallery’s website here. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.
Rollie McKenna: Making a Life in Photography
Rollie McKenna, Making A Life In Photography: Rollie McKenna, Installation view, Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center Photo credit: Thomas Barratt Photography
Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center presents Making A Life In Photography: Rollie McKenna, the first survey of the prolific career of American photographer Rosalie (Rollie) Thorne McKenna, the exhibition opened on February 17 of this year and will be on view until June 2, 2024.
Rollie McKenna, Laura Gilpin, 1962, Gelatin silver print, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Gift of the artist, 1987.53.67 © The Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation Dimensions: 5 x 6 15/16 in.
McKenna, Vassar Class of 1940, worked independently as a sought-after architectural and portrait photographer, making unique yet underrecognized contributions to American modernism and documentary photography. McKenna’s work was published in numerous books and magazines including Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Fortune. The Museum of Modern Art’s 1955 landmark exhibition Latin American Modernism Since 1945 featured her architectural photographs. She made iconic portraits of artists and writers, including W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Alexander Calder, Truman Capote, T. S. Eliot, Laura Gilpin, Henry Moore, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas, and Eudora Welty. Using her camera, McKenna forged an unusual path for a woman in mid-twentieth-century America toward personal and creative freedom. She embraced photography to explore the complexities of human experience—including her own queer and feminist life.
Rollie McKenna, Alexander Calder, Acoustic Ceiling, Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Aula Magna, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas, Venezuela 1952–1953, 1954–55, Ferrotyped gelatin silver print, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Transfer from the Vassar College Art Department, SC.55.19 © The Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation Dimensions: 7 1/2 x 8 in.
Making a Life in Photography offers a new thematic frame to consider the significance of McKenna’s contributions to photography: Her career as an independent, working photographer enabled her to make an independent life; and in turn, her self-determination motivated her to pursue photography. In reference to the framework of the exhibition, Mary-Kay Lombino, Deputy Director and Emily Hargroves Fisher ’57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator at the Loeb, says, “We emphasize McKenna’s entrepreneurship and work outside of the darkroom to demonstrate, especially to an audience of undergraduate students thinking about making their own way in the world, that artists are not simply born into creativity, but rather, they make careers as creative professionals.”
Rollie McKenna, Anne Sexton, 1961, Gelatin silver print; printed 1983, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Purchase, Francis Woolsey and Helen Silkman Bronson, class of 1924, Fund, 1983.5 © The Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation Dimensions: 13 1/2 x10 7/8 in.
McKenna’s rich history of self-determination and spirit goes beyond her photography: As the US entered World War II, she enlisted in Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service (WAVES), becoming the first woman to attain the rank of sharpshooter in the U.S. Navy and receiving the Navy Expert Pistol Shot Medal in 1943. During her brief and only marriage, McKenna returned to Vassar in 1948 and 1949 to pursue a master’s degree in the history of art, with special dispensation secured by professor of art history Agnes Rindge Claflin under the G.I. Bill.
Rollie McKenna, Dylan Thomas, 1953, Gelatin silver print; printed 1983, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Purchase, Francis Woolsey and Helen Silkman Bronson, class of 1924, Fund, 1983.6 © The Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation Dimensions: 14 9/16 x 12 3/16 in.
The exhibition, presented thematically in four galleries, features over 100 gelatin silver prints made during the artist’s lifetime, drawn primarily from the Loeb’s collection with the addition of several key loans. Exhibition themes include People & Places, McKenna’s Modernism, Life & Photography, and McKenna at Work, while other issues such as artistic legacy, the complexities of privilege, and accepted conventions of both womanhood and photographic genre are addressed. “This career retrospective of McKenna, who is the most represented individual photographer in the Loeb’s collection, highlights her work as emblematic not only of the Loeb, but as part of her history with Vassar College,” says T. Barton Thurber, the Anne Hendricks Bass Director of the Loeb Art Center.
Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center presents Making A Life In Photography: Rollie McKenna, the first survey of the prolific career of American photographer Rosalie (Rollie) Thorne McKenna, on view February 17–June 2, 2024. Photo credit: Thomas Barratt Photography
Complementing the exhibition in the Loeb, a satellite exhibition, Rollie McKenna’s Photography: In Print and at Vassar, featuring McKenna’s photographs published in books and magazines and photos taken for and of Vassar, will be shown in the Thompson Library. The Library’s Archives and Special Collections houses archival documents and work prints that relate to McKenna’s time on campus as a student and later as a frequent visiting photographer covering student life, campus architecture, special events, and faculty personalities. Among the work is a 1955 story from Seventeen magazine, “Anne Goes to Vassar,” written and photographed by McKenna, which chronicles the story of Anne Breukelman, class of 1958, during her first days at Vassar. The Library exhibition is located on the first floor, just beyond the main entrance and circulation desk, on view from February 22–June 2, 2024.
Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center presents Making A Life In Photography: Rollie McKenna, the first survey of the prolific career of American photographer Rosalie (Rollie) Thorne McKenna, on view February 17–June 2, 2024. Photo credit: Thomas Barratt Photography
The Loeb exhibition is also accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog, co-published by Vassar College and Scala Arts Publishers, including contributions by Jessica D. Brier, Mary-Kay Lombino, Rebecca Senf, T. Barton Thurber, and Luísa Valle.
Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna is generously supported by the Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation and the Hoene Hoy Photography Fund.
Rollie McKenna, Elizabeth Bishop, 1954, Gelatin silver print, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Gift of the artist, 1987.53.35 © The Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation Dimensions: 8 3/4 x 7 1/4 in.
In this two-part lecture by Mindy Seu and Celine Wong Katzman, Seu will do a performative reading of the Cyberfeminism Index followed by Wong Katzman’s introduction to building intersectional feminist, archival, and curatorial frameworks in the contemporary art world.
Co-sponsored by the Vassar Art Department and the Loeb Art Center.
Exhibition curators Jessica D. Brier and Mary-Kay Lombino, joined by Loeb Director T. Barton Thurber and Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Luísa Valle, will lead an exhibition tour focusing on highlights from McKenna’s prolific career.
Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center presents Making A Life In Photography: Rollie McKenna, the first survey of the prolific career of American photographer Rosalie (Rollie) Thorne McKenna, on view February 17–June 2, 2024. Photo credit: Thomas Barratt Photography
About the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center
The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is a teaching and learning museum, free and open to all, supporting Vassar College’s educational mission and communities. Formerly the Vassar College Art Gallery, the Loeb is the first art museum at a college or university that was part of the institution’s original plan. Today, the permanent collection includes over 22,000 works, comprised of paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, textiles, and glass and ceramic wares. The Loeb strives to be a catalyst for scholarly, creative, and social justice work by Vassar students and others. It aims to reflect a commitment to broaden, and amplify, the voices represented in the museum setting, and to ensure that the Loeb’s programs and practices have a positive impact on campus and beyond. To learn more, please visit vassar.edu/theloeb or follow @theloeb.
Rollie McKenna, Juan O’Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra & Juan Martínez de Vasco, Biblioteca Central (Central University), Ciudad Universitaria, Mexico City, Mexico 1951–1953, 1954–55, Gelatin silver print, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Transfer from the Vassar College Art Department, SC.55.4 © The Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation Dimensions: 6 x 9 1/2 in.
Commitment to DEAI
The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College commits to Diversity, Equity, Access, and Inclusion (DEAI) as core values across its culture, systems, and practices. We pledge to allocate resources (human and financial) to create and sustain a museum culture in which difference is celebrated. The Loeb staff is dedicated to integrating DEAI priorities into gallery installations, programming, interpretation, collections management, acquisitions, and internal processes. Our ongoing work is guided by an intention to care for all people engaged with the Loeb while welcoming the exchange of ideas, enriching experiences, and diverse perspectives through art.
Admission to the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is free and all galleries are wheelchair accessible. The Loeb is now open to the public every day (except Monday) from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The Loeb is located at 124 Raymond Avenue near the entrance to the Vassar College campus. Parking is available on Raymond Avenue. Directions to the Vassar campus in Poughkeepsie, NY, are available at https://www.vassar.edu/visit/tour#directions.
The Art Center is also accessible via the Dutchess County Public Transit, Bus Route L. For additional information, the public may call (845) 437-5632 or visit https://www.vassar.edu/theloeb.
Rollie McKenna, Vassar College, Ferry House—Exterior, 1951, Gelatin silver print, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Gift of the artist, 1987.53.99 © The Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation Dimensions: 6 3/4 x 8 5/8 in.
Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that Vassar stands upon the homelands of the Munsee Lenape, Indigenous peoples who have an enduring connection to this place despite being forcibly displaced by European colonization. Munsee Lenape peoples continue today as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community in Wisconsin, the Delaware Tribe and the Delaware Nation in Oklahoma, and the Munsee-Delaware Nation in Ontario. This acknowledgment, however, is insufficient without our reckoning with the reality that every member of the Vassar community since 1861 has benefited from these Native peoples’ displacement, and it is hollow without our efforts to counter the effects of structures that have long enabled—and that still perpetuate—injustice against Indigenous Americans. To that end, we commit to build and sustain relationships with Native communities; to expand opportunities at Vassar for Native students, as well as Native faculty and other employees; and to collaborate with Native nations to know better the Indigenous peoples, past and present, who care for this land.
Rollie McKenna, Lever House, New York City, 1956, Gelatin silver print, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Gift of the artist, 1987.53.105 © The Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation Dimensions: 7 1/8 x 12 3/4 in.
Picasso: Drawing from Life
Installation view: Picasso: Drawing from Life, 2024. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago.
CHICAGO—The Art Institute of Chicago is pleased to announce Picasso: Drawing from Life, opened on November 11, 2023, and will be on view through April 8, 2024. This year marks 50 years since the death of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso in 1973, and the Art Institute of Chicago is joining hundreds of presentations worldwide in honoring the artist’s legacy.
Installation view: Picasso: Drawing from Life, 2024. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago.
Picasso is often presented as a singular artistic genius solely responsible for his creative force, but he would not have achieved his immense success without the many people who supported him. The exhibition will highlight the stories of those who may previously have been lost in the shadow of Picasso—his artistic collaborators, printers, dealers, lovers, and family. Spanning the entirety of his 70-year career, including pieces from 1899 through 1969, this is a celebration of the Art Institute of Chicago’s extensive collection of Picasso’s works on paper and other pivotal works from the prolific artist. It will feature more than 60 objects, including drawings, prints, and illustrated books, along with a handful of paintings, and a sculpture.
Installation view: Picasso: Drawing from Life, 2024. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago.
“Picasso did not become the artist we know today on his own,” said Jay A. Clarke, Rothman Family Curator, Prints and Drawings. “Throughout his long career, Picasso collaborated with dealers, printers, and other artists who helped him to achieve fame and challenge him creatively.”
Installation view: Picasso: Drawing from Life, 2024. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago.
Organized chronologically, the exhibit highlights those who influenced him at different points in time, including his gallerist Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, fellow artist George Braque, lovers including Fernande Olivier, Marie-Thérèse Walter, and Dora Maar, and his family.
Installation view: Picasso: Drawing from Life, 2024. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago.
“A lot of his art gets lost in the drama of his life, or at least what people think they know about his life,” said Emily Ziemba, Director of Curatorial Administration and Research Curator, Prints and Drawings. “But he made his amazing works of art aided by a fascinating group of people around him.”
Picasso: Drawing from Life is curated by Jay A. Clarke and Emily Ziemba
For more information about the exhibition and other exhibitions, please visit The Art Institute of Chicago's website here. The institute can also be found on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan
Installation view: Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan, 2024. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago
CHICAGO—The Art Institute of Chicago is pleased to announce Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan opened on December 16, 2023, and will be on view until June 3, 2024. The exhibition features 40 stunning works by 36 different women artists from across Japan, showcasing the inventiveness and variety of work that is driving the ceramics movement forward.
While women have been historically underrecognized for their contributions to the ceramics field, this show brings both established and emerging women artists to the forefront and focuses on the explosion of innovative and technically ambitious compositions by such artists, particularly since 1970.
Installation view: Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan, 2024. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago
“There are so many strong contemporary women artists from Japan that are truly pushing the limits in ceramics and clay beyond what we’ve ever seen traditionally,” said Janice Katz, Roger L. Weston Associate Curator of Japanese Art, the Art Institute of Chicago. “This show brings together artists on the cutting edge of invention in terms of materials, glaze, and technique, and we are thrilled to recognize their contributions to the global ceramics field.”
The creators featured in the show span several generations of women contemporary artists, and while they have been featured in other shows, this is the first major exhibition to position these artists together to highlight their collective achievements and impact. Three artists featured in the show–Mishima Kimiyo (born 1932), Tsuboi Asuka (born 1932), and Ogawa Machiko (born 1946)–began their careers decades ago and continue to produce groundbreaking sculptures that drive the clay medium in a new direction. Konno Tomoko (born 1965), Aoki Katsuyo (born 1972), and Oishi Sayaka (born 1979) are part of younger generations and are represented by pieces featuring bodily distortion to fantastical decoration. These women have routinely confronted expectations about their practice and often refuse gender-imposed constraints in their work, approaching subjects in unconventional ways.
Installation view: Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan, 2024. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago
The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalog with essays and insights by Janice Katz, Joe Earle, and Hollis Goodall. Additionally, bringing these artists to global attention has been made possible by the generous collaboration with Carol and Jeffrey Horvitz, who shared all of the selected pieces in the show from their exemplary collection.
Installation view: Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan, 2024. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago
Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan is curated by the Art Institute of Chicago’s Janice Katz
SPONSORS
Lead support for Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan is generously provided by Carol & Jeffrey Horvitz.
Additional support is contributed by the Japan Foundation.
For more information about the exhibition and other exhibitions, please visit The Art Institute of Chicago's website here. The institute can also be found on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Ming Smith: Feeling the Future
Photograph by Chanell Stone, courtesy of Aperture
Charleston, S.C. – The International African American Museum (IAAM) will house a special exhibition by Ming Smith this winter and early spring. Ming Smith: Feeling the Future opened on January 31 and will be on view through April 28, 2024. A reception was held on Tuesday, January 30, at IAAM, 14 Wharfside Street, in downtown Charleston; guests had the opportunity to engage with solo artist Ming Smith about her career and legacy. They also had the chance to partake in a self-guided tour of the entire museum from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Amen Corner Sisters (Harlem, New York) by Ming Smith courtesy of IAAM
Ming Smith: Feeling the Future explores the artist’s unparalleled and under-recognized career from the early 1970s through the present. Smith’s first solo exhibition at a major institution is traveling from its debut site, the Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) of Houston. The collection encompasses a multitude of artistic expressions that represent her vibrant and multi-layered practice, which is grounded in portraiture, as it amplifies the heartbeat of Black life in the United States. Drawn from the full complexity of Smith’s oeuvre, Feeling the Future places works from the artist’s five decades of creation in conversation with one another while it embraces the cultural movements she witnessed and participated in. Exploring themes such as Afrofuturism, Black cultural expression, representation, and social examination, the exhibition offers a guided tour into unperceived moments of life as captured by one of the most profoundly gifted artists of her generation.
Chicago Art Ensemble by Ming Smith, courtesy of IAAM.
“Ming Smith is one of the most important photographers of our time. As the first woman to join Kamoinge – a groundbreaking Black photography collective – she has broken barriers that live at the intersection of race and gender. Her work can be found at the most significant institutions in the world, from The Whitney to the Schomburg, and has been shown at many more, including Tate Modern and MoMA. Still, few of us are yet to know her name, though many know her work. Her iconic images of artists like Tina Turner and Nina Simone have come across our timelines and, for a moment, stopped us in time. That’s how remarkable her lens is as it captures the soul of the moment, the movement, and the person. With this solo exhibition, traveling from CAM, we will have the opportunity to not only discover more of her work, but through the work, we will get to meet and to know Ming Smith,” noted Malika Pryor, chief engagement and learning officer at IAAM.
Installation view: Ming Smith: Feeling the Future January 31 through April 28, 2024. The International African American Museum (IAAM), Charleston, South Carolina. Courtesy of The International African American Museum (IAAM)
The International African American Museum (IAAM) explores the history, culture, and impact of the African American journey on Charleston, the nation, and the world, shining light and sharing stories of the diverse journeys, origins, and achievements of descendants of the African Diaspora. Across eleven galleries and a memorial garden with art, objects, artifacts, and multi-media interaction, IAAM is a champion of authentic, empathetic storytelling of American history. As a result, the museum will stand as one of the nation’s newest platforms for the disruption of institutionalized racism as it evolves today. The mission of IAAM is to honor the untold stories of the African American journey at the historically sacred site of Gadsden’s Wharf and beyond.
Installation view: Ming Smith: Feeling the Future January 31 through April 28, 2024. The International African American Museum (IAAM), Charleston, South Carolina. Courtesy of The International African American Museum (IAAM)
Editor's Note: The attached photos include a current picture of Ming Smith photographed by Chanell Stone, courtesy of Aperture, as well as Amen Corner Sisters and Chicago Art Ensemble by Ming Smith, courtesy of IAAM.
Please visit the International African American Museum's website here for more information about its current and future exhibitions.
ATUL DODIYA 'I KNOW YOU. I DO. O' STRANGER'
Toutes les images / All images :© Courtesy de l’artiste et TEMPLON,Paris —Brussels — New York
Painter Atul Dodiya, regarded as one of the greatest Indian artists of his generation, is showing in Paris a new series of canvases inspired by Bollywood classics.
In the early 1990s, while studying at the famous Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai, Atul Dodiya spent a year at the Paris École des Beaux Arts. The experience proved decisive in the career of an artist who has been building bridges between the history of Indian and Western art ever since. Passionate about literature and film, he uses a unique language, fluctuating between the figurative and the abstract, where he incorporates references to popular culture, poetry and modern art masters, from Matisse to Motherwell, Picabia to Mondrian. Atul Dodiya possesses an astonishing capacity to reinvent himself and his style, equally happy to draw on photorealism or symbolism. He paints on metal roller shutters, creates photographic assemblages and devises largescale installations combining object and painting. Embedded in his works is a reflection on the history of India and emergence of new political aspirations.
Toutes les images / All images :© Courtesy de l’artiste et TEMPLON,Paris —Brussels — New York
The exhibition's entry point is the Mumbai movie world of the 1960s that marked the artist's childhood. The title “I know you. I do. O’ stranger” is inspired by the film Charulata (1964) by Satyajit Ray. The deceptively ordinary chosen scenes are the fruit of complex compositions where the actor's fame takes a back seat to anonymity. “A recurring theme in my cinematographic stories,” explains the artist, “the characters encounter each other just like strangers.”
Toutes les images / All images :© Courtesy de l’artiste et TEMPLON,Paris —Brussels — New York
Liberated from all narrative context, their mysterious beauty is revealed, leaving the viewer free to interpret their meaning. In the manner of a filmmaker, Atul Dodiya directs our gaze through space, from one canvas to the next.
Certain fragments of a roll of film seemingly pay tribute to the technical feats of cinema. Others highlight the emergence of a new consumer society, with hand-crafted movie sets becoming, in the hands of artist, some sophisticated furnishings and interiors.
Toutes les images / All images :© Courtesy de l’artiste et TEMPLON,Paris —Brussels — New York
The outward appearance of an economy of means conceals a demanding and meticulous painting technique. Atul Dodiya transforms freeze frame photographs in a preliminary monochrome print. Projected onto the canvas, he goes over the scene in black and white until chiaroscuro transcends movement. He completes the image's metamorphosis by covering it in translucent oil paint, swapping the vibrant palette favoured by Bollywood films for a pastel, almost ephemeral, colour range. This transformation of the image as it is filmed, photographed, illuminated and colourised becomes a metaphor for the impact of modernity and globalisation on perception and traditions. “In this very personal selection of moments frozen in time,” he continues, “the unreal becomes a new story, another truth.”
Toutes les images / All images :© Courtesy de l’artiste et TEMPLON,Paris —Brussels — New York
Atul Dodiya was born in 1959 in Mumbai where he lives and works. His work features in the collections of a host of international museums, including the Mnam-Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London and Philadelphia Museum of Art. He has taken part in most major exhibitions of Indian art held in the USA, Europe and Asia over the last twenty years: Atul Dodiya, Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, Detroit, USA (2020), After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India at Queens Museum in New York (2015), India: Art Now at the ARKEN Museum of Modern Art in Denmark (2012), La Route de la soie at Tri Postal in Lille and Paris Delhi Bombay at the Centre Pompidou (2011), Inside India at Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana Turin and The Empire Strikes Back at the Saatchi Gallery in London (2010), and Indian Summer at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris (2000). He also participated in Documenta 12 in Kassel (curated by Roger Buergel) in 2007, the Gwangju Biennale (curated by Okwui Enwezor) in 2008, Moscow Biennale (curated by Jean-Hubert Martin) in 2009, Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2012, and 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT7) in Brisbane in 2012.
Toutes les images / All images :© Courtesy de l’artiste et TEMPLON,Paris —Brussels — New York
In 2013, the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi organised the first retrospective of his work in India (curated by Ranjit Hoskote). In 2014, Bhau Daji Lad in Mumbai paid tribute to his work with a major exhibition: 7000 Museums. In 2019, he was among the artists showcased at India’s Venice Biennale participation, with a largescale installation dedicated to Gandhi.
This is the fourth exhibition of Atul Dodiya’s work at Galerie Templon.
For more information about this exhibit and other exhibits at the Templon Gallery, please visit their website here. Also, find the Gallery on Instagram and Artsy.
New Realism: Looking Forward and Back
After running galleries in New York for the past decade, Isabel Sullivan launched her eponymous gallery in the heart of Tribeca’s design and gallery district at 39 Lispenard Street.
The Gallery launched a group show on March 14 and will conclude on April 21 of this year. There was an opening reception for New Realism: Looking Forward and Back , which was held on March 14, 6 pm-8 pm. The exhibition features six New York-based artists, New Realism: Looking Forward and Back, curated by/featuring recent works of Neil Jenney (who has remained ardently committed to curating & exhibiting shows associated with Realism) alongside recent works by Elisa Jensen, Victor Leger, Joseph Santore, Mercer Tullis, and Frank Webster (Santore was also teacher to both Jensen & Webster). The show will feature approx. 30 works and the gallery is currently filming mini-documentaries about each artist to be played at the gallery during the show. Through Jenney’s painted, sculptural skyscapes, to Jensen’s shadowed, yet vibrant, intimate interiors, to Santore’s dynamic and existential paintings reflecting the human condition, to Tullis’ meditative yet piercing graphite works, and finally to Webster and Leger’s serene topographical canvases, the gallery poses the question: what is Realism today? Their reflections of nature and humanity are presented for us to behold, to momentarily possess and perhaps to stir a particular affect. The exhibition presents a survey of artists looking both forward and back – painting through the tides of today; attached is a small sampling from each artist of what will be shown (2 images for each artist, plus an initial artworks list with 18 works).
Installation view Realism Today: Looking Forward and Back, Isabel Sullivan Gallery New York, New York, March 14- April 21 2024, photo @ Isabel Sullivan Gallery
A myriad of iterations of Realism have emerged since its inception in late 19th century France. Gustave Courbet and Jean-Francois Millet sought to convey truth and objectivity through embodied depictions of modern life and its array of social classes. German artists Otto Dix and George Grosz’s meticulous Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) paintings, created during the short-lived Weimar Republic, responded to the brutality of the First World War. Their American counterparts, Edward Hopper and George Bellows, created a new American visual idiom through their depictions of the urbanization of America and its shifting class structures. Despite the disparate geographical production of these Realist painters, what each respective iteration shares most prominently is their emergence and proliferation following great moments of social, political, or cultural change. The past few years have been no exception to this artistic penchant, as there has been an increase in artists turning to themes intrinsic to Realism, and a recommitment to time-honored subjects, such as genre, landscape, and figurative. Realism has always functioned primarily as a means to record our epoch and its dwellers, however in its present context, the paintings included in this show possess both objectivity and expression.
Realism Today: Looking Forward and Back presents a selection of paintings that utilize various concepts and technical aspects of Realism, which today stands as the rebirth of the three-dimensional picture plane, and a turning away from abstraction. The artists included explore both internal and external space, the natural world and urban life, memory, and imagination, offering a respite from the modern world.
More on the artists:
Neil Jenney - Neil Jenney is an American painter and sculptor born in 1945, in Torrington, Connecticut, and working in New York City. His last solo exhibition was at Gagosian gallery, titled AMERICAN REALISM TODAY, from November 9, 2021–January 29, 2022 at 976 Madison Avenue, New York.
Neil Jenney - Morning (2022, acrylic on canvas 18x32in)
Elisa Jensen - Elisa Jensen (b. 1965, Bridgeport, CT) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has received awards for her work from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The National Academy Museum, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Elisa graduated from Smith College and the New York Studio School. She currently teaches at the New York Studio School and Pratt Institute.
Elisa Jensen - Brooklyn Morning (oil on wood panel 20x16in).
Victor Leger - Leger was born in 1961 in Canada. He studied at Pratt Institute and the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1980s. He splits his time between Connecticut and Maine, and was discovered in New York by Neil Jenney. Leger is also a woodworker, building his own frames.
Victor Leger - Elegy to R. Motherwell, no. 25 (2021, oil on panel 55x43x3in)
Joseph Santore - Santore was born in 1945 in Philadelphia. His work was chosen for the poster of the 1991 Whitney Biennial. His works have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tucson Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Staten Island Museum, National Academy of Design, NY, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, The Aspen Art Museum. Santore is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Cincinnati Museum, Chase Manhattan Bank, Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, TN, National Academy of Design, NY, Phoenix Art Museum; Rhode Island School of Design, Tucson Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Denver Art Museum, among others. Santore was a teacher at the New York Studio School, where he taught artist Elisa Jensen, and at the Skowhegan School of Painting, where he taught Frank Webster.
Joseph Santore - The Studio (2024, watercolorand gouache on paper 35x49in).
Mercer Tullis - Tullis was born in 1994 in New York. Mercer began formally studying at the Art Students League in 2013, taking drawing classes under Robert Cenedella, whose studio was across the hall from the loft he grew up in. Soon after beginning at the Art Students League, Mercer began assisting realist & “bad painting” pioneer Neil Jenny. Tullis is a self-taught painter and woodworker, building all of his own frames.
Mercer Tullis - Officers (2016-2018, oil on gessoed ply 50.25x39.25x2.50in).
Frank Webster - Webster was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1966, and received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Some of the residencies he has been granted include the Arctic Circle Residency, Burren College of Art in County Clare, Ireland, the NES Artist Residency in Iceland, The Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, The MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire and the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn. He has participated in many group and solo exhibitions at museums and galleries, such as the Zimmerli Museum of Art, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Steffany Martz Gallery, the Parrish Art Museum, Blackston Gallery, and many others. In early 2022, Webster was commissioned to execute The Stone—a monumental Icelandic landscape—by the Durst Organization for the library for the newly constructed SVEN residential project in Long Island City, New York. Webster currently lives and works in Queens, New York.
Frank Webster - Hunafloi Bay (2020, acrylic on canvas 36x84in).
Diego Samper : The Jaguar’s Eye
Courstey of Diego Samper
Wild Symphony is an exploration of sound as essential energy and of the archaic origins of music as invocation and spell, a fundamental music that reclaims our belonging to the natural order in resonance with the breath and pulse of Life.
In Calanoa Natural Reserve, a conservation project deep in the Amazon Forest, professional musicians are invited to share with local indigenous singers and storytellers in long improvisation sessions, listening to the natural music, the Symphony of Life, and responding to it. From the first encounter, a Symphony and a film were created. The second one, The Jaguar’s Eye, is a live performance and audiovisual experience to be projected in full-dome spaces, with a premier happening at the Medellín Planetarium, Colombia, on May 15th, 2024.
Diego Samper, the project’s director and audiovisual designer, has been involved with the Amazon Forest for 5 decades, living and exploring the deep forest. This work synthesizes his life-long search of the Wild.
Musicians First Wild Symphony
Pablo Segundo, Aníbal Samuel, Raimundo Makuna, Enrique Yukuna, Teto Ocampo, Alejandra Ortiz Almunis, Marcus Berg, Juan Camilo Paulhiac, Coque Gamboa, Dominique Vaughan, Gabriel Hernández, El Vergel children’s choir, José Villa Ticuna(director). Marlene Escobar, production.
Musicians The Jaguar’s Eye
Darío Yukuna, Luciano Yukuna, Angélica Ocaina, Moises Criollo, Diana María Restrepo, Gina Sabino, Sandra Parra, Juan Camilo Paulhiac, Cristina Rubio, Luis Torres, Peter Harper. Marlene Escobar, producción
Diego Samper, direction, field recording, audio and video edition.
Marlene Samper, production.
Recorded in the Calanoa Natural Reserve, Colombian Amazon.
Edited in The Rainforest Studio, Gibsons, BC, Canada.
Marlene and Diego Samper have worked extensively on the research and recording of wild soundscapes and the voices of traditional cultures. As a result of this came the CD and book Voces de la Tierra (Voices of the Earth), an exploration of the geography of wild soundscapes in Northern South America, published in 1999. Amazon Chant, 2017, is a sound installation commissioned by the Museum of Anthropology of UBC, a five-hour weaving of voices in seven indigenous languages and soundscapes of diverse regions of the Amazon basin.
Please visit his site here for more information about this project and Diego’s work. Also, Diego’s interview with Arte Realizzata can be found here.
DANIEL DEZEUZE : Mesoamerica Lost Cities and Last Refuges
Toutes les images / All images :© Courtesy de l’artiste et TEMPLON, Paris —Brussels — New York
Galerie Templon is dedicating its spring show in Paris to the founding member of the avant-garde movement Supports/Surface, Daniel Dezeuze. Now 82, he is showing his latest work, which encompasses sculptures, paintings, drawings, and an installation. The exhibition opened on March 2nd and will conclude on April 27th, 2024.
Mesoamerica is a personal reflection inspired by Daniel Dezeuze's travels to Mexico and local Maya architecture. Daniel Dezeuze visited Mexico for the first time in the mid-1960s. The year he spent there proved to be a lasting influence. His latest works, wall assemblages made using offcuts of painted wood, hark back to the pivotal experience in the jungle, home to long-gone civilizations. The ground floor of the exhibition features a "negotiating table" surrounded by an installation of "weapons" and "shields," evoking the tensions between nature and culture.
Toutes les images / All images :© Courtesy de l’artiste et TEMPLON, Paris —Brussels — New York
Indigenous people and colonizers. The simplicity of the artist's chosen materials, wood, mesh, and corks, and the delicacy of the way he combines them offer a disturbing exploration of the frontiers between art and crafts, the untouched and the policed, as well as the fragility of civilizations and modernity. In contrast, the gallery basement is inhabited by a collection of drawings Daniel Dezeuze has put together, a jungle of flowers, insects, mosquitoes, and snails. Bordering on the abstract, the series of pieces depicts fragile yet untameable nature, illustrating the artist's obsession with "capturing the uncapturable.” Daniel Dezeuze has spent almost fifty years deconstructing the notion of painting, exploring its traditional techniques and materials in a quest to delve into the role, history, and practice of painting. The impulse to spurn the canvas began very early on in his career: he flipped ped stretchers against the wall, playing with empty spaces and three dimensionality to push the boundaries of artistic traditions. His work is steeped in craftwork practices and anthropology, reflecting his interest in nomadic and non European cultures. His remarkable journey has led him to experiment with what is seen as “poor” materials —wood, gauze, net, and fabric, as well as subverted objects. His oeuvre has heavily influenced new generations of European artists, and features in numerous public collections, including at the Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Musée Fabre in Montpellier, Carré d’Art in Nîmes and Musée d’Art Contemporain (MAC) in Marseille.
About the Artist:
Born in 1942 in Alès, Daniel Dezeuze lives and works in the southern French port town of Sète. His work has been widely exhibited since the 1970s in France and internationally. The Musée de Grenoble held a retrospective of his art in 2017, while the FRAC Occitanie in M Montpellier held an exhibition of his drawings in 2015. MAMAC in Nice (2012), Centrale Electrique in Brussels (2009) and the Musée Fabre in Montpellier (2009) have also shown his work. In 2008, he exhibited his entire oeuvre at the Musée Paul Valéry in Sète.
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His art has featured in a wide variety of group exhibitions: at Collection Lambert in Avignon in 2022, FRAC Poitou Charentes in 2020, Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte -Croix in Les Sables d’Olonne (MASC) and MOCAD in Detroit, USA, in 2019, Carré d’Art in Nîmes In 2017, Abattoirs in Toulouse in 2015, Villa Datris in L’Isle sur la Sorgue, Musée du Louvre Lens and Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg in 2014, Musée Picasso in Antibes and Centre Pompidou Metz in 2013, MAMAC in Nice in 2012, Centrale El ectrique in Brussels, Belgium, in 2009 and Fundació Suñol in Barcelona, Spain, in 2007. Daniel Dezeuze has been represented by Galerie Templon since 1999.
For more information about this exhibit and other exhibits at the Templon Gallery, please visit their website here. Also, find the Gallery on Instagram and Artsy.
Ross Simonini: Scrolls
Installation view: Ross Simonini, Scrolls, 2024. François Ghebaly, New York. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly Gallery. Photo: Brad Farwell
François Ghebaly New York has proudly presented the opening of Scrolls, Ross Simonini’s first exhibition with the gallery at its Lower East Side location on March 7, 2024, and will conclude on April 2, 2024. Ross Simonini’s artistic project hinges on a kind of generosity— open, plural considerations of connection, meaning, and form. Simonini is a painter, musician, author, and multi-hyphenate wordsmith. Over the past two decades, he’s produced a singular oeuvre, one dedicated to the crossing and recrossing of boundaries of medium (anywhere from a roman à clef novel to site-specific performances to studio LPs) in the pursuit of an unmistakable personal poetics.
Simonini’s use of homophones, double entendres, and hidden writing schemes creates an overarching linguistic register that becomes an invisible force within his images.
Installation view: Ross Simonini, Scrolls, 2024. François Ghebaly, New York. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly Gallery. Photo: Brad Farwell
Scrolls, his latest exhibition of new paintings, is perhaps the most direct expression of this impulse in his work so far. “The language of the conscious mind is text, and the language of the unconscious mind is image,” Simonini says. “You can’t read in a dream. So when you turn text into image, you’re taking a conscious experience and sending it into the unconscious.”
Installation view: Ross Simonini, Scrolls, 2024. François Ghebaly, New York. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly Gallery. Photo: Brad Farwell
For Simonini, the ‘hidden’ writings in question are actual phrases he writes and draws into the shapes of the painted figures, celebratory refrains repeated over and over again throughout a single painting, but never spoken aloud. A letter becomes a smile, an eye, a waving arm. “My hope,” he says, “is that language is felt.”
Installation view: Ross Simonini, Scrolls, 2024. François Ghebaly, New York. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly Gallery. Photo: Brad Farwell
The Scrolls invoke a feeling of narration through their rolling, longitudinal design. Across time and culture, the ‘long’ form has been a visual mode instrumentalized for the depiction of epics—stories that chart development, decline, and transformation.
Simonini’s images, fittingly described by the artist as ‘bachannals,’ recall the jostling, polychrome masked crowds of a James Ensor painting. Across the eight scenes that comprise Scrolls, streams of colorful, pareidoliac sprites aggregate in fête-like formations, at once jubilant, endearing, and hallucinatory. The artworks themselves are crafted from a list of materials with origins dating back to Fra Angelico frescoes and Greek antiquity: egg tempera, casein milk paint, and plain cotton. The almost sculptural sense of organic materials accentuates the animistic quality of Simonini’s painting. Milk and egg are, after all, building blocks of life.
Installation view: Ross Simonini, Scrolls, 2024. François Ghebaly, New York. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly Gallery. Photo: Brad Farwell
At the same time, Simonini is referencing the “scrolling” that has become our contemporary world’s primary means of beholding images, reading text and the various combinations of both we all encounter daily. To scroll is to enter a mode of perception that almost mirrors our natural, panoramic experience—a flowing motion that cannot be expressed in a single, static glance. Like an unfurling poem, an exploratory sentence or even a musical score, these scrolls must be felt one look at a time. Ross Simonini is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Simonini received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California and his MFA from Bennington College. Recent solo exhibitions include sun.works, Zurich; SHRINE, Los Angeles; Anonymous Gallery, New York; Sharjah Biennial 13, UAE; Et Al, San Francisco. and Shoot the Lobster, Luxembourg. Recent group exhibitions include Vielmetter, Los Angeles; François Ghebaly, Rome; and Altman Siegel, San Francisco.
For more information about this exhibition and others please visit the François Ghebaly gallery here. The gallery can also be found on Instagram, Artsy, and Facebook.
Tavares Strachan: Magnificent Darkness
(Front view) Inner Elder (Mary Seacole), 2023 Inner Elder (Biko as Septimius Severus), 2023 Inner Elder (Nina Simone as Queen of Sheba), 2023 Ceramic (Background) Andromeda (Green, Pink and White Galaxy), 2023 Sunflower (Yellow, White, and Blue Galazy), 2023 Cartwheel Galaxy (Blue, Purple, Red and White Galaxy), 2023 Oil, enamel and pigment on acrylic Installation view, Tavares Strachan "Magnificent Darkness" Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles, 2024 Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Elon Schoenholz
Marian Goodman Gallery Los Angeles is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of Tavares Strachan. The exhibition had an opening reception on February 17th and will conclude on April 13, 2024. Titled Magnificent Darkness, this immersive exhibition will feature several new bodies of work across six diverse and site-specific environments. Through an interconnected array of works comprising ceramic, bronze, marble, hair, neon, sound, and painting, this exhibition collectively professes a visual allegory toward the overarching exploration of light and darkness.
Encyclopedia of Invisibility (Pocket Guide), 2024 Leather, gilding, archival paper, lucite box and stand Overall: 9 1/4 x 12 1/8 x 10 in. (23.5 x 30.8 x 25.4 cm) Installation view, Tavares Strachan "Magnificent Darkness" Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles, 2024 Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Elon Schoenholz
Strachan’s work summons historical and cultural references, creating essential contextual collisions and connections to his celebrated, ongoing research project, The Encyclopedia of Invisibility. For this exhibition, a central installation from the Encyclopedia forefronts the surrounding gallery spaces, bringing light to a number of ‘invisible histories’ that have largely fallen by the historical wayside. A special, smaller format of the Encyclopedia in book form will also be on view. Nearby, a new work in neon, There is a Light in Darkness, draws on the words of James Baldwin and serves as the source for the audio work that can be heard throughout the exhibition space.
In the Seward Gallery, a vast and transportive earthen floor grounds two near-life-sized ceramic sculptures, Matthew Henson (Hunter’s Shirt Stacked with Football and Spear) and Andrea Crabtree (Potter’s Shirt Stacked with Diver’s Helmet), representing the figures of Matthew Henson, the African American explorer who discovered the North Pole, and Andrea Motley Crabtree, the first African American female diver for the U.S. Navy. Themes intrinsic to Strachan’s practice—ranging from human aspiration to the chronicle of elided histories—are evoked here through depictions of Arctic exploration and deep-sea discovery. Clay, as integral to human evolution and the creation story, is found repeatedly throughout the exhibition, from the Seward Gallery floor to the numerous ceramic sculptures on view.
Mind Field No. 1, 2023 Flocked hair on canvas 60 x 60 x 2 in. (152.4 x 152.4 x 5 cm) Amina (A Map of the Crown), 2023 Bronze, flocked hair 23 5/8 x 9 7/8 x 5 7/8 in. (60 x 25 x 15 cm) Installation view, Tavares Strachan "Magnificent Darkness" Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles, 2024 Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Elon Schoenholz
In an intimate space off the main lobby sits Amina (A Map of the Crown), a bronze bust sculpture adorned with a traditional West African hairstyle. The closeness of these materials offers an insightful reconciliation of the distance between the deeply personal, political, and present nature of hair and the venerable qualities bestowed upon bronze sculpture—some of the earliest and most accomplished bronze works date to Africa in the 10th century. A new series of paintings also debuts here. Mind Field No. 1 sits in dialogue with Amina, together begetting references ranging from the history of the monochrome to metaphorical notions of hair as a protective layer, symbol of knowledge, and means for communication and transport.
Jah Rastafari with Rice Field (Stacked with Pineapple, Shield, and Football), 2023 Ceramic, rice field installation 110 1/4 x 59 x 59 in. (280 x 149.9 x 149.9 cm) Installation view, Tavares Strachan "Magnificent Darkness" Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles, 2024 Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery
In the adjacent Hudson gallery, a ‘meadow’ of dried rice grass transforms the space into a landscape, referencing rice as a staple of the Afro-Caribbean diet. Viewed from above, the terrain is shaped in the form of the Ghanaian Adinkra symbol for Nsaa, which symbolizes quality and durability, and metaphysically denotes excellence and authenticity. The dramatic floorscape finds its focal point in Jah Rastafari (Stacked with Pineapple, Shield and Football), 2023, a multifaceted ceramic sculpture illustrating a bricolage of spiritual and cultural forms from disparate centuries.
The Main Gallery continues the dialogue of the interrelation of light and darkness opening with the related words of Baldwin. Split in two, the divided spaces become each other’s complements. In the darkness of one half, new Galaxy paintings, depicting distant constellations and galaxies as symbols of the invisible systems that structure our world, are placed in relation to three ceramic sculptures: Inner Elder (Mary Seacole); Inner Elder (Biko as Septimius Severus); and Inner Elder (Nina Simone as Queen of Sheba), historical figures who carry their own symbolic cosmology and are symbols of a lost language. These works explore the traditions of storytelling in West African and Afro-Caribbean cultures, serving the dual purpose of vessels made of earth that host the daily materials of rice and water, and canvases to document stories through symbols and patterns. The contrasting, light-filled gallery presents a white painting of hair, Mind Field No. 8, alongside three white marble sculptures, Makeda (A Map of the Crown), Moremi (A Map of the Crown), and Amanirenas (A Map of the Crown), collectively drawing questions around whiteness and related visual discourses of ancient sculpture.
Current and upcoming projects include a new sculptural installation, The First Supper, presented in the context of an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and a solo exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, to open in June 2024. Two new publications, The Awakening and In Total Darkness, have been published by Marian Goodman Gallery and will be available during the exhibition.
Strachan was born in 1979 in Nassau, Bahamas, and currently lives and works between New York City and Nassau. He received a BFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003 and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2006. He draws on both the resources and community of his birthplace, dividing his time between his studio in New York and Nassau, where he has established an art studio and scientific research platform B.A.S.E.C. (Bahamas Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center) and OKU, a not-for-profit community project encompassing an artist residency and exhibition spaces, a scholarship program, and after-school creative programs.
Strachan’s work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions including You Belong Here, Prospect 3. Biennial, New Orleans (2014); The Immeasurable Daydream, Biennale de Lyon, Lyon (2013); Polar Eclipse, The Bahamas National Pavilion 55th Venice Biennale, Venice (2013); Seen/Unseen, Undisclosed Exhibition, New York (2011); Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home Again, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2011); among others.
He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship (2022), Artist in Residence at the Getty Research Institute (2019-2020), the Frontier Art Prize (2018), and the Allen Institute’s inaugural artist-in-residence (2018), LACMA Art + Technology Lab Artist Grant (2014), Tiffany Foundation Grant (2008), Grand Arts Residency Fellowship (2007), and Alice B. Kimball Fellowship (2006). In his TED talk in April 2023, Strachan discussed the need to restore lost stories, as exemplified within his work, The Encyclopedia of Invisibility.
For more information about the exhibit, please visit the Marian Goodman Gallery’s site. The gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.
Justine Mahoney: VIGIL
Image courtesy of Hayden Phipps/Southern Guild.
Southern Guild Cape Town presents VIGIL, a solo exhibition of ceramic sculptures and paintings by South African artist Justine Mahoney, which opened on February 8th and will end on May 23rd, 2024. In this exhibition, the artist reimagines the 12 Jungian archetypes in a series of sculpted figures and large-scale paintings on heavy-weight fabric. Rooted in a wealth of esoteric theory, Mahoney’s archetypes embody and mythologize facets of the collective human unconscious.
The King courtesy of Hayden Phipps/Southern Guild.
Over an extended period of isolation during the pandemic, Mahoney began a daily practice of self-enquiry through Jungian meditation. Encountering what Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung referred to as “Mythopoetic Imagination” – the dark and fertile landscape of active imagination – the artist conjured vivid manifestations of each archetype. Jung believed these archetypal models underpinned man’s innate and universal personas, behaviours and motivations. They appeared to Mahoney as messengers, carriers from the invisible terrain, arriving as “giant psychic forces” from within. She crystallised their final forms after extensive research into Tarot, Plato’s theory of forms, and a close reading of Jung’s journals (The Black Books) and manuscripts (The Red Book: Liber Novus). She also drew heavily from esoteric knowledge systems that pre-date the advent of Judeo-Christianity. Treating imaginative thought and fantasy as vital creative functions, VIGIL surfaces from a subversive reality; one that belies rationality to ground itself more freely in the ancient, essential and human.
Love courtesy of Hayden Phipps/Southern Guild.
Mahoney’s process of sculpting this body of work echoes the digital collages in her previous series. Shaping the clay into the desired form, each figure was then deconstructed – bisected, hollowed out, interchanged and reassembled to take their final expression. This act of disruption and reconfiguration extends throughout Mahoney’s three decades-long career, which has been characterised by a preference for transgressive, hybridised figuration. This hybridity is the result of a distinct self-awareness that has seen the artist remain active in and awake to both the making of her work and the larger examination of her own identity.
The works in VIGIL regard the figure as an amorphous vessel, transforming each body into irregular contortions. Mother arches backward, life-giving milk flowing from her breasts as 10 fingers reach through her stomach as if growing from within. She is the creator and destroyer, both the abundant life-force and the abyss. The Child looks skyward, mouth agape, holding up two large hands in what could be interpreted as either acquiescence or protest. The figure stands at the precipice of a new beginning, the cosmic infant of boundless possibility. The Wanderer, wearing a hooded cloak, eyes peering out from a painted face of red, holds the head of a wolf. They are the hungry seeker, returning with the spoils from the divine hunt. Some figures read as plant-like, with braided hair or limbs reaching downward to ground themselves in the earth. Mahoney considers these apparitions as the denizens of our inner worlds, encompassing the duality and rapture of our universal humanity.
The painted earthenware figures stand on ebonised plinths of indigenous cedar and pine, which Mahoney treated using the centuries-old Japanese wood-burning technique of Shou Sugi Ban. Each plinth has been torched with a flamethrower, blackening the wood before being sealed with an ebony stain.
Installation view of Justine Mahoney: VIGIL Southern Guild Cape Town. Image courtesy of Hayden Phipps/Southern Guild.
Returning to painting after years of working solely in bronze, clay and digital collage, the artist created a corresponding series of enamel paintings on large segments of fabric. The two-dimensional figures appear flattened, reducing the form of their sculptural likenesses to deliberate silhouettes of line and colour. The immense paintings – hanging almost from floor to ceiling - converse with the clay bodies, retaining each archetype’s energetic weight in a reimagined graphic figure.
In a moment of epistemic restlessness and global upheaval, Mahoney’s VIGIL finds renewed meaning in ancient, inner knowing. The body of work elevates the primal and perhaps forgotten knowledge of our collective humanness and shared mythologies.
VIGIL by Justine Mahoney runs concurrently with Dzuvula (Shedding Skin) by Rich Mnisi at Southern Guild Cape Town from 8 February – 23 May 2024. For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Southern Guild Website here; the gallery can also be found on Artsy, Instagram, and Facebook.
The cure will be completed in my body, silence your spirit to let me reach you, my skin will secrete angels and you will have forgotten and forgiven all.
Tau Lewis, The cure will be completed in my body, silence your spirit to let me reach you, my skin will secrete angels and you will have forgotten and forgiven all., 2023 (detail) Tau Lewis, courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Justin Craun.
ICA Miami awarded the fourth Ezratti Family Prize for Sculpture to Tau Lewis. Working in an array of techniques—including hand-sewing, appliqué, carving, and assemblage—Lewis honors the materials and creative modalities intrinsic to communities of the African diaspora.
Using found, inherited, and secondhand cloth and objects, Lewis contemplates the affective histories of her materials. Disparate stories and voices are salvaged from the fibers during these processes of transformation; en masse, they imbue Lewis’s forms with potency and life.
Tau Lewis, The cure will be completed in my body, silence your spirit to let me reach you, my skin will secrete angels and you will have forgotten and forgiven all., 2023 (detail) Tau Lewis, courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Justin Craun.
The artist’s new sculpture The cure will be completed in my body, silence your spirit to let me reach you, my skin will secrete angels and you will have forgotten and forgiven all. (2023) evokes a mythic world of her own creation. Lewis creates in iterations, conceiving of her bodies of work similarly to chapters spread across different volumes. The newest exploration of Lewis’s Saint Mozelle—which she describes as a tutelary deity—forms the center of the installation and spills over with transmuting blossoms and other small life forms. The materials, including found jewelry, leather scraps, drum skins, teeth, and other talismans, carry unique attributes and mysteries beyond what the eye can see—much like the spirit of Mozelle itself.
Tau Lewis, The cure will be completed in my body, silence your spirit to let me reach you, my skin will secrete angels and you will have forgotten and forgiven all., 2023 (detail) Tau Lewis, courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Justin Craun.
Tau Lewis (b. 1993, Toronto) has had recent solo exhibitions at 52 Walker, New York, (2022); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2021); and Oakville Galleries, Ontario (2020). Her work has been prominently featured in prestigious exhibitions including the Venice Biennale: “The Milk of Dreams” (2022). Lewis’s work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library Collection, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; among many others. Lewis lives and works in Brooklyn.
Tau Lewis, The cure will be completed in my body, silence your spirit to let me reach you, my skin will secrete angels and you will have forgotten and forgiven all., 2023 (detail) Tau Lewis, courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Justin Craun.
Inaugurated in 2019, the Ezratti Family Prize for Sculpture is awarded by ICA Miami to a living artist in recognition of their exceptional contributions in sculpture and supports the creation of a new commission. Building on the museum’s history of commissioning and presenting new works, the prize reflects ICA Miami’s ongoing commitment to promoting experimentation in artistic practice and providing an international platform for influential voices in contemporary art. Earlier recipients of the Ezratti Prize for Sculpture are Chakaia Booker, Damián Ortega, and Robert Grosvenor.
Tau Lewis, The cure will be completed in my body, silence your spirit to let me reach you, my skin will secrete angels and you will have forgotten and forgiven all., 2023 (detail) Tau Lewis, courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Justin Craun.
The exhibition is located on the Ground Floor / Arlene H. and Laurans A. Mendelson Gallery. With the exhibition opening on Nov 16, 2023 it will close on Apr 28, 2024. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami is located at 61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137. For more information, visit here or follow the museum on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. Explore the ICA Channel for inside looks at ICA Miami exhibitions and the practices of the most exciting artists working today.
Ahmed Morsi in New York: Elegy of the Sea
Portrait by Yehia El Alialy Courtesy of the artist, photo credit: Yehia El Alaily, Egypt
A major figure in Egyptian modernism and the contemporary art canon, the painter, poet, and critic Ahmed Morsi has only recently begun to gain recognition in the West. “Ahmed Morsi in New York: Elegy of the Sea” brings together a number of paintings from 1983 to 2012 that the artist made in New York, where he continues to live. Morsi came of age in the 1940s and was part of the Alexandria School, a key cultural movement that placed the Egyptian city on the map as an emerging Mediterranean metropole in the postwar period. When Morsi arrived in New York in 1974, his paintings transformed, taking on a lyrical blue and solemn landscape that evoked his seaside homeland, the port city of Alexandria.
Green Horse, Courtesy of the artist (and owner if they choose as per Loan Request)
In this distinctive body of work, Morsi creates surreal, fantastical landscapes populated by recurring figures, real and imagined: fish out of water, androgynous subjects, mythological horses, human-size clocks, and images within images. This Surrealist vocabulary emerges from Morsi’s experience of dislocation, memories of the city and sea in Alexandria, and the simultaneous experience of crowdedness and solitude living in diaspora.
Four Eyes, Courtesy of the artist and mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art Collection, Qatar
Morsi’s universal maritime scenes represent multiple seas, as well as feelings of placelessness, repetition, and loss. His aesthetic corpus reflects a uniquely Egyptian Surrealist practice that bridges the visual and the textual, where painting and poetry are intimately connected. They also concretely reflect the loss of an Alexandria that once was, the stories and memories the artist carries, and the political conditions that shape modern and contemporary life. Morsi’s sea is a portal for dreams and a mode of envisioning the world: elegiac, mythological, and otherworldly. To engage with Morsi in New York is to encounter the sea’s hold on the material of the city, or, as Morsi ponders in his poetry: “Did the sea dry up? / A question kept returning to me time and again / as I was dragging my defeated ship over asphalt stones.”
Ahmed Morsi (b. 1930, Alexandria, Egypt) has exhibited work in solo and group exhibitions around the world including, most recently, “Detail From a Mural,” Salon 94, New York (2021); “Greater New York,” MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Queens (2021); “When Art Becomes Liberty: The Egyptian Surrealists (1938–65),” National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul (2017); and “Ahmed Morsi: A Dialogic Imagination,” Sharjah Art Foundation (2017). Morsi’s work is held in numerous collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art; Kiran Museum of Art, New Delhi, India; Sharjah Art Foundation; and the Museum of Egyptian Modern Art, Cairo, among others.
Installation view: "Ahmed Moris in New York: Elegy of the Sea," at the Institute of Contemporary Art,Miami. Dec 5, 2023-Apr 28, 2024. Photograph Zachary Balber.
“Ahmed Morsi in New York: Elegy of the Sea” is organized by ICA Miami and curated by Donna Honarpisheh, Associate Curator.
Exhibition Support Exhibitions at ICA Miami are supported by the Knight Foundation.
About the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami) is dedicated to promoting continuous
experimentation in contemporary art, advancing new scholarship, and fostering the exchange of art and ideas throughout the Miami region and internationally. Through an energetic calendar of exhibitions and programs, and its collection, ICA Miami provides an important international platform for the work of local, emerging, and under-recognized artists, and advances the public appreciation and understanding of the most innovative art of our time. Launched in 2014, ICA Miami opened its new permanent home in Miami’s Design District in December 2017. The museum’s central location positions it as a cultural anchor within the community and enhances its role in developing cultural literacy throughout the Miami region. The museum offers free admission, providing audiences with open, public access to artistic excellence year round.
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami is located at 61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137. For more information, visit here or follow the museum on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. Explore the ICA Channel for inside looks at ICA Miami exhibitions and the practices of the most exciting artists working today.
Anne Collier
Anne Collier, "Unraveling (Are You Out Of Your Mind)", 2023. Adhesive vinyl on wall. 535x 139 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Zachary Balber. Courtesy Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.
ICA Miami presents a newly commissioned work by Anne Collier in the museum’s central stairwell. This is the first site-responsive wallpaper by the artist, and her first major presentation in Miami. In her photographic work that combines staged and often appropriated images, Collier examines mechanisms of representation, circulation, and objecthood of images.
Anne Collier, "Unraveling (Are You Out Of Your Mind)", 2023. Adhesive vinyl on wall. 535x 139 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Zachary Balber. Courtesy Institute ofContemporary Art, Miami.
Critically reflecting on the representation of women in mass media, her analog photographs feature found imagery, including posters, records, and comic strips from the 1950s and 1960s. Juxtaposing a sober, near-forensic approach to image-making with the charged gender dynamics of the found images she appropriates, Collier frames the apparatus of the camera as both an instrument of domination and emancipation.
Anne Collier, Eye # !, (2014) Courtesy of artist: Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Galerie Neu, Berlin, Gladstone Gallery, Brussels; and the Modern Institute, Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow
Anne Collier (b. 1970, Los Angeles) has exhibited her work widely internationally in solo and group presentations. Recent survey exhibitions include Lismore Castle, Waterford, Ireland (2023); Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (2018), which traveled to Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2019); and a major survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, which traveled to the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (both 2014), the Aspen Museum of Art (2015), and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2016); among many others. Collier’s work is part of numerous museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate Modern, London. The artist lives and works in New York City.
Anne Collier, "Unraveling (Are You Out Of Your Mind)", 2023. Adhesive vinyl on wall. 535x 139 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Zachary Balber. Courtesy Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.
The exhibition opened on December 5, 2023, and will run through until October 16, 2024; the location of the exhibition is in ICA’s Stairwell.
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami is located at 61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137. For more information, visit here or follow the museum on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. Explore the ICA Channel for inside looks at ICA Miami exhibitions and the practices of the most exciting artists working today.
Lee Mingwei: Rituals of Care
Our Peaceable Kingdom, 2020–present 40 framed paintings, each 17 3/8 x 23 5/8 in. (44 x 60 cm), easels TKR Installation dimensions variable
Courtesy of Lee Studio Photo Courtesy of Gropius Bau, photo by Laura Fiorio
Inspired by personal experiences and world events, Lee Mingwei (b. 1964) creates interactive installations and performances. Asking how art can encourage social connection and healing in a time of so much trauma and loss, the exhibition features projects made between 1995 and 2024 that place the visitor at the center of radical acts of generosity and care. The Letter Writing Project (1998–present) invites visitors to sit and write a letter they have always meant to send but never did. Guernica in Sand (2006–present), a temporary reinterpretation of Picasso’s famous painting in sand that is then erased, meditates on the cyclical nature of creation and destruction. Transforming ordinary actions like writing, sweeping, mending, or breathing into rituals of care, Lee Mingwei’s works encourage us to find beauty and solace in the small acts that define everyday life.
In-depth
Conceived in 1995 as part of Lee Mingwei’s graduate school application, 100 Days with Lily anticipated several themes of his practice since: the creation of interactive experiences that encourage social connection and care. Five photographs of the artist engaged in mundane activities with a planted lily are overlaid with 100 lines of text, 20 per photograph, describing how he incorporated the flower into his daily routine as a memorial for his maternal grandmother.
The Letter Writing Project, 1998-present Mixed media interactive installation Wooden booth, writing paper, envelopes 3 pieces, 290 x 170 x 231 cm each Photo Courtesy of Mori Art Museum, photo by Yoshitsugu Fuminari
The Letter Writing Project (1998–present) arose from the artist’s need to continue communication with his maternal grandmother after her death. Visitors are invited to sit and write the letter they have always meant to send but never took the time to write. Lee Mingwei leaves it up to each person whether to address their letter and have the Museums mail it or leave it unsealed for other visitors to read.
The Mending Project, 2009–present Table, two chairs, spools of thread, and fabric items provided by visitors, dimensions variable Collection of Rudy Tseng Photo Courtesy of Mori Art Museum, photo by Yoshitsugu Fuminari
In The Mending Project (2009–present), Lee Mingwei uses the simple act of sewing as a means to connect and share an experience. Visitors are invited to bring items of clothing in need of repair that Lee Mingwei or his designated host will mend and embellish. The mending is done with the idea of celebrating and commemorating the act of repair. This conscious embrace and highlighting of the fabric’s scar(s) speaks to the emotional work of mending as a means to deal with trauma and loss. Select garments will be chosen and added to a growing installation of items connected by thread to spools on the wall.
In Sonic Blossom (2013–present), a singer approaches visitors with the offer of a song selected from the Schubert lieder (songs written for one voice). Lee Mingwei listened to this music with his mother while caring for her after heart surgery in 2012. If a visitor accepts this offer of beauty and solace, the singer then serenades them with a song of their choice.
Guernica in Sand, 2006-present Mixed media interactive installation Sand, wooden island, lighting 1300 x 643 cm
Photo Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum
During the Iraq War, Lee Mingwei revisited Pablo Picasso’s iconic painting Guernica (1937). The experience resulted in the work Guernica in Sand (2006–present): a sand painting that partially recreates Picasso’s original. A meditation on impermanence and transformation, the work will be both completed and erased in a performance in March, and left in an unrecognizable state for another week. The work points toward both the weight of history and the persistence of hope through change.
Our Peaceable Kingdom (2020–present) unites a group of paintings that reinterpret the 1833 painting by Edward Hicks in the collection of the Worcester Museum of Art in Massachusetts. It is one of 62 works bearing the title Peaceable Kingdom that Hicks created between 1820 and 1849, a version of which is in our collection and on view at the de Young. Based on an Isaian prophecy appealing to Hick’s Quaker beliefs, it depicts animals, children, Lenape, and Quakers peacefully coexisting. Lee Mingwei invited 11 artists to reinterpret Hicks’s painting, then asked each to choose two other artists to do the same, thus creating “a family tree of copies with multiple descendants.” For the de Young, he asked artist Chelsea Ryoko Wong to create her version of peace; she in turn invited Emily Fromm and Emilio Villalba.
Chaque souffle une danse (Each Breath a Dance, 2024) reflects on the physical and social threats that the simple act of breathing has come to embody since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd’s murder. For this artwork, Lee Mingwei concluded his daily meditation practice by placing a few droplets of sumi ink on an alabaster slate as the sun set, spreading the ink over the surface with several contemplative breaths. This work will be presented at the de Young as a video beginning in April, as well as a physical installation at Minnesota Street Project.
The exhibition opened on February 17th, 2024 and will conclude on July 7th of, 2024. Also Rituals of Care the catalogue can be purchased here. For more information about this exhibition and others at de Young/Legion of Honor and the fine arts museums of San Francisco, please visit here. The museum can also be found on Instagram, on Facebook, and YouTube.
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Refik Anadol: Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive
Refik Anadol, Artificial Realities: Coral, 2023. Courtesy Refik Anadol Studios
Serpentine is thrilled to present Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, an exhibition of new and recent works by internationally renowned artist, technologist, and pioneer in artificial intelligence arts, Refik Anadol.. Anadol, a pioneer in AI Arts presented his largest institutional solo exhibition in the UK, featuring new and recent works which opened on February 16th and will end on April 7th 2024.
Known for his digital works and large-scale public installations that present real-time generative environments, Anadol’s collaborative creative process with AI plays on human perception. Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive presents years-long experimentation with visual data of underwater landscapes and rainforests.
Refik Anadol, Artificial Realities: Coral, 2023. Courtesy Refik Anadol Studios
The exhibition features Artificial Realities: Coral (2023), an immersive installation enveloping viewers in an AI's imagination of underwater landscapes. For this artwork, Refik Anadol Studio trained a unique AI model with approximately 135 million images of corals openly accessible online. Generating abstracted coral images, the AI constructs new visuals and colour combinations based on the dataset.
Anadol’s solo exhibition also features the UK premiere of Living Archive: Large NatureModel a new site-specific installation which was first introduced at the World Economic Forum 2024 in Davos, Switzerland. At Serpentine North, the installation transforms the gallery into the AI model’s interpretation of a rainforest. It is the first installation in a growing body of work that is created employing The Large Nature Model, the world’s first open- source generative AI model dedicated to nature. For this ongoing research, the artist worked with the data of major institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution and London’s Natural History Museum. As additional data partners, such as universities, museums, foundations, government entities and libraries join the effort, the model, centred around archival images of fauna, flora and fungi, will expand over the coming years.
Refik Anadol said: “I am thrilled to bring our Studio's most ambitious AI Art projects to date to Serpentine this year. A ground-breaking initiative that we call the Large Nature Model, developed by our Studio, stands as the world’s first open-source, generative AI multimodal focused on nature, trained on an extensive and ethically sourced dataset of the natural world. Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive displays multisensory artworks derived from this model, featuring visuals and sound. Collaborating on such a significant project with my long-time mentor, Hans Ulrich Obrist, with whom I've shared many stages discussing the future of AI art, is an immense privilege.”
Refik Anadol, Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, 2024. Installation view, Serpentine North. Photo: Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy Refik Anadol Studio and Serpentine.
Bettina Korek, CEO, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine, said: “Refik Anadol brings art, science and technology together to create generative, immersive environments that fascinate, educate and enchant audiences. This show kicks off a year of research and projects by the Serpentine Arts Technologies department focused on AI, and we could not be more pleased than to collaborate with him.”
Taking the data that surrounds us as primary material, and using a neural network, amethod of AI that is inspired by the human brain, as a collaborator, Anadol creates compelling visualisations of our digitised memories and expands the possibilities of interdisciplinary arts. His work explores the meaning of humanity in the era of artificial intelligence as well as the challenges that ubiquitous computing has brought forth. He investigates the profound ways in which the dominance of technology in our daily lives alters our perception and experience of time and space.
Refik Anadol, Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, 2024. Installation view, Serpentine North. Photo: Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy Refik Anadol Studio and Serpentine.
The exhibition is part of the New Alliances strand of the Serpentine programme which aims to widen audiences through engagement and collaborations. Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive is presented in collaboration with 1OF1, led by patron and philanthropist Ryan Zurrer, which partners with forward thinking artists and institutions by contextualising and supporting art of the digital age.
Since 2014, Serpentine has developed AI projects with Cécile B. Evans, James Bridle, Jenna Sutela, Ian Cheng, Pierre Huyghe and Hito Steyerl that have prefigured subsequent technological developments in the field. The establishment of Creative AI Lab in collaboration with King's College London in 2019 offered a space for research into AI systems from artistic and cultural perspectives and interests, generating a solid foundation for thought leadership on this topic as AI gains increasing mainstream attention in 2024 which will also see Serpentine Arts Technologies develop a new AI project with Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst later in the year.
Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive is curated by Claude Adjil, Curator at Large, with Liz Stumpf, Assistant Curator and produced by Brittany Stewart, Creative Producer and Halime Özdemir, Production Manager.
Refik Anadol by Efsun Erkilic
About Refik Anadol
Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) established Refik Anadol Studio in Los Angeles, USA, in 2014. The Studio’s research practice centres around discovering and developing trailblazing approaches to data narratives. Anadol also teaches at UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts from which he obtained his Master of Fine Arts.
By proposing the possibility of “post-digital architecture,” Anadol invites his audience to imagine alternative realities by redefining the functionalities of both interior and exterior architectural elements. He tackles this by moving beyond the integration of media into built forms and translating the logic of a new media technology into art and design. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Istanbul Museum of Modern Art; and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Anadol has participated in Venice’s Architecture Biennial (2021); NGV Triennial in Melbourne (2020); Ars Electronica Linz (2017); and Istanbul Biennial (2015). His works have widely been presented internationally, including recent exhibitions at Kunsthal Rotterdam (2023); Arken Museum of Modern Art (2023); ArtScience Museum, Singapore (2023); Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (2023); Espoo Museum of Modern Art (2022-23); Centre Pompidou-Metz (2022); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2022); and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2022). Refik Anadol’s global projects have received a number of awards and prizes including the Lorenzo il Magnifico Lifetime Achievement Award for New Media Art, Microsoft Research’s Best Vision Award, iF Gold Award, D&AD Pencil Award, German Design Award, UCLA Art+Architecture Moss Award, Columbia University’s Breakthrough in Storytelling Award, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts Award, SEGD Global Design Award, and Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence Artist Residency Award. A pioneer in his field, and the first to use artificial intelligence in a public artwork, Anadol has partnered with teams at Microsoft, Google, NVIDIA, Panasonic, NASA/JPL, Intel, IBM, Siemens, Epson, MIT, UCLA, Harvard University, Imperial College, Stanford University, and UCSF, to apply the latest, cutting-edge science, research and technologies to his work. Living Architecture: Casa Batlló, inspired by Antoni Gaudí’s building in Barcelona, Spain is one of Anadol’s most significant public art projects. The piece was displayed on a large media screen in New York’s iconic Rockefeller Plaza with a simultaneous live projection mapping performance on the actual facade of Casa Batlló which was viewed by a crowd of nearly 50,000 people.
About Serpentine
Building new connections between artists and society, Serpentine presents pioneering contemporary art exhibitions and cultural events with a legacy that stretches back over half a century, from a wide range of emerging practitioners to the most internationally recognised artists, writers, scientists, thinkers, and cultural thought leaders of our time. Based in London’s Kensington Gardens, across two sites, Serpentine North and Serpentine South, Serpentine features a year-round, free programme of exhibitions, architectural showcases, education, live events and technological activations, in the park and beyond the gallery walls.
The Serpentine Pavilion is a yearly pioneering commission, which began in 2000 with Dame Zaha Hadid. It features the first UK structures by some of the biggest names in international architecture.
Public art has emerged as a central strand of Serpentine’s programme. Major presentations include a collection of Eduardo Paolozzi’s sculptures (1987), Anish Kapoor’s Turning the World Upside Down (2010), Lee Ufan’s Relatum – Stage (2018-19), Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s London Mastaba in the Serpentine Lake (2018), I LOVE YOU EARTH by Yoko Ono (2021), Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s In remembrance of the coming alien (Alienor), (2022), and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s Pollinator Pathmaker (2022 - ongoing).
Proud to maintain free access for all visitors, thanks to its unique location, Serpentine also reaches an exceptionally broad audience and maintains a profound connection with its local community.
Serpentine Arts Technologies programme explores the impact of technology through art, research and experimental projects. It supports artists to produce projects that use advanced technologies and convenes people working in art, technology, law, policy, and academia to share knowledge and develop new ideas about technology and society.
The foundation of Serpentine Arts Technologies’ programme is in an evolving R&D Platform that nurtures innovation for future art ecologies by securing a crucial institutional space for pragmatic interventions and necessary risk-taking at the intersection of art, science and technology. This is achieved through dedicated research labs (Blockchain Lab, Creative AI Lab, Legal Lab, Synthetic Ecologies Lab), orientation and knowledge-sharing with the wider sector through Future Art Ecosystems, and co- facilitation of a national Creative R&D Working Group.
For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit Serpentine’s website. Please also visit and follow Serpentine on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, along with TikTok.
BARBARA KRUGER THINKING OF Y̶O̶U̶. I MEAN M̶E̶. I MEAN YOU.
Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.,(Installation view, 1 February – 17 March 2024, Serpentine South) Photo: George Darrell
Serpentine is honoured to present a solo exhibition of recent works by American artist Barbara Kruger (b. 1945, Newark, New Jersey, USA). The exhibition will be presented at Serpentine South from ] The exhibit opened February 1st at the Serpentine South and will close March 17th 2024. On March the 4th the exhibition will open and close on April 22 2024 with the viewing hours being from 6- 9 ppm in the public realm with Outernet Arts.
This is Babara’s first solo institutional exhibition in London in 23 years, presented both at Serpentine South and in the public realm.
The site-specific exhibition will feature Kruger's iconic pieces reconfigured in recent years as video works, including Untitled (I shop therefore I am] (1987/2019] and Untitled {Your body is a battleground] (1989/2019.
Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.,(Installation view, 1 February – 17 March 2024, Serpentine South) Photo: George Darrell
Titled Thinking of ¥Ou. I Mean Me. I Mean You. the exhibition will feature a unique selection of installations, moving image works, and multiple soundscapes installed across the Serpentine building, bookshop, and outside banners, electric taxis as well as on large-scale, immersive wraparound screens at Outernet Arts. Lastly, the artist has been trying with Tik Tok for the first time to create an effect.
It will be the artist's first solo institutional show in London in over 20 years and a return to Serpentine. Kruger previously exhibited at Serpentine in 1994 as part of the group exhibition Wall to Wall.
Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.,(Installation view, 1 February – 17 March 2024, Serpentine South) Photo: George Darrell
Devoted to the exploration of visual culture and image production, Kruger is known for her work with imagery and words, frequently borrowing from the languages of advertising, graphic design, and magazines. Her practice often explores complex mechanisms of power, gender, class, and capital.
Barbara Kruger said: "It would be great if my work became archaic, if the issues that they try to present, the commentary that I'm trying to suggest was no longer pertinent. Unfortunately, that is not the case at this point."
Bettina Korek, CEO of Serpentine said: "Serpentine is thrilled to present Barbara Kruger's first institutional exhibition in London in more than twenty years. This show will extend beyond gallery walls to engage Kensington Gardens and other sites around London, building on a history of public art collaborations I am proud to have facilitated with Kruger in Los Angeles - from wrapping school buses with her signature larger than life graphic texts in 2012 to staging massive billboards and murals in 2020 for the second edition of Frieze Los Angeles."
Hans Ulrich, Artistic Director of Serpentine said: "Barbara Kruger is one of the most transformative artists of our time. For her exhibition Thinking of ¥mi. I Mean Me. I Mean You., at Serpentine, the artist connects to the South Gallery's architecture visually and sonically, and draws the viewer into the space, reflecting on context, histories, cultures, and hierarchies.
The future is invented with fragments from the past, and in her recent work, which is seen here for the first time outside the US, Kruger reanimates some of her previous works through puzzles, aerosols, and other distortions. Summarising her practice, Kruger told me in a recent interview that her art 'is about how we are to one another'. For more than half a century, she has created a commentary on living in our times." For this exhibition, the artist has adapted works, which were recently presented at museums in the United States, to specific locations within Serpentine, both indoors and outdoors.
Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.,(Installation view, 1 February – 17 March 2024, Serpentine South) Photo: George Darrell
Untitled (I shop therefore I am), 1987/2019 plays on the philosopher and scientist Rene Descartes' (1596-1650) famous words 'I think, therefore I am'. The video begins with the original image being shattered into multiple pieces of puzzles, which are then assembled to 'rebuild' the work. Once complete, the phrase in the centre changes from the original 'I shop therefore I am' to other variations of it: 'I shop therefore I hoard' / 'I need therefore I shop' / 'I love therefore I need' / 'I am therefore I hate' / 'I sext therefore I am' / 'I die therefore I was.'
Four more replays are in this exhibition, including Untitled (Our Leader), 1987/2020. In these works, the original image transforms and dissolves, then comes back to offer further variations of the written message it carries.
The original work referenced in Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989/2019, is a rare example of a work that Kruger made in relation to a specific event, as the artist often emphasises that her 'work is not issue-specific. [...] It's more of an ongoing commentary'. In this instance however, it was created as a poster for the Women's March on Washington in 1989, organised in support of reproductive freedom. Kruger uses the visual language of division - the woman's face is split in two halves with contrasting colours, which also can be read as a frontline. In the following years since the work was created, it was translated to many languages and used across the globe at protests.
In a recent conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Kruger emphasised the ongoing relevance of this work, she said: 'I think it's a very free-floating statement about bodies also. It can allude to men, women, non-binary people - it is important for us to realise that the only binaries that count now are digital binaries. I believe in the possibility of the multiplicity of bodies, and those bodies are all vulnerable.'
The site-specific work wrapping all the walls of the first gallery, Untitled (That's the way we do it), 2011/2020, manifests Kruger's embracement of recent digital and commercial appropriations of her work that have all been posted online. It is a further variation of the work Untitled (I shop therefore I am) displayed on the LED screen in the gallery, as it uses the same image of a hand holding a placard, but in this instance the hand presents the different images and objects made across the years by other people in Kruger's 'style'. A single image from this work is also installed in the Koenig bookshop at Serpentine South, playing further with the context of consumerism.
The exhibition is also a UK premiere of Untitled (No Comment), 2020, an immersive three channel video installation, in which short snippets of footage found on social media platforms are accompanied by the artist's work directly addressing viewers with questions, statements, and quotes by French philosopher and writer Voltaire and American rapper Kendrick Lamar. Footage of hairstyle tutorials, animated cats, acrobats, blurred out selfies,
Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.,(Installation view, 1 February – 17 March 2024, Serpentine South) Photo: George Darrell
installation images of Kruger's work, and gemstones mix to stress our era's short attention spans.
Pledge, Will, Vow, 1988/2020, is a three-channel video work, recently presented at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. In this work, Kruger takes on the texts of the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance, traditional marriage vows, and the last will and testament.
In Untitled (Forever), 2017, enveloping the walls and floor of a gallery rarely open to visitors, Kruger assembles her words with those of others. A quote from George Orwell's novel 1984 is installed on the floor. The rest of the area is covered with textual works, one of which finishes with the words THIS IS ABOUT -¥G-th- I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU..
The exhibition will also feature an audio chorus of greetings, emotions, and sentiments that address visitors at the entry and throughout the building.
The project is curated by the artist in close collaboration with Natalia Grabowska, Curator at Large, Architecture and Site-specific Projects, and produced by Brittany Stewart, Creative Producer, and Mike Gaughan, Gallery Manager.
About Barbara Kruger:
Barbara Kruger (born 1945, Newark, NJ, USA) is an artist who works with pictures and words. She lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. After spending two years at Syracuse University and Parsons School of Design in New York, she began working as a designer and picture editor at the Conde Nast magazines Mademoiselle and House &Garden. Frequently borrowing from the language of advertising and graphic design, her practice often explores the complex mechanisms of power, gender, class, and capital. Her work has been shown in international art institutions and across public spaces, including installed and projected onto buildings, billboards, hoardings, cars, buses, and skate parks, and printed in newspapers. She is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor in the Department of Art at UCLA.
Solo shows include the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2022), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2022), The Art Institute of Chicago (2021), AMOREPACIFIC Museum of Art, Seoul (2019), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2016), High Line Art, New York (2016), Modern Art Oxford (2014), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2013), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2011), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2010), Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2005), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1999), Musee d'art contemporain, Montreal (1985), and Kunsthalle Basel (1984). Group shows include those at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2021), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2018), V-A-C Foundation, Palazzo delle Zattere, Venice (2017), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014), Biennale of Sydney (2014), Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2013), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2010), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010, 2009, 2007), Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2006), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2004), Tate Liverpool (2002), Serpentine, London (1994), Centre Pompidou, Paris (1988), and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
(1987). Her work was included in The Milk of Dreams, the 59th International Art Exhibition
- La Biennale di Venezia (2022).
Thinking of ¥mt. I Mean Me. I Mean You. is an adaptation of the exhibition organised by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Thinking of¥eit. I Mean Me. I Mean You. was on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from 19 September 2021 to 24 January 2022, and was co-organised by James Rondeau, President and Eloise W. Martin Director, and Robyn Farrell, Senior Curator at the Kitchen and former Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. At LACMA, the exhibition was presented 20 March 2022 to 17 July, 2022 and was organised by Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, and Rebecca Morse, Curator, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department. The installation at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, was on view from 18 July, 2022 to 2 January 2023 and was organised by Peter Eleey, former Chief Curator, MoMA PS1, and Lanka Tattersall, Laurenz Foundation Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints.
Beyond the gallery walls
Thinking of ¥ou. I Mean M̶e̶. I Mean You. will extend beyond Serpentine South. From 4th March to 20th May 2024, from 6 pm to 11.30 pm in its second collaboration with Outernet Arts - located at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Charing Cross Road alongside Centre Point - a presentation of Barbara Kruger's work will be displayed on the world's largest wrap-around public screens.
In Silent Writings, 2009/2024, Barbara Kruger explores how we communicate and connect with global events and with each other. The piece weaves images and words in an attempt to engage issues of control, power and dominance. Kruger incorporates her own words alongside quotes from writers and philosophers including Aime Cesaire, Goethe, Thomas Mann and Mary Therese McCarthy. These quotes allude to themes of violence, political modes of operation and spectatorship. Kruger manipulates selected words, enlarging or removing them to highlight their meanings and create new ones. Opposing terms like contact/isolation, order/horror, stupid/clever become fluid and interchangeable.
Throughout the piece, cropped found documentary photographs of conflicts, politicians and mass media images briefly appear between sentences, serving as illustrations of the words or evidence of their relevance. As in many of her works, the artist addresses the viewers directly to make us question our beliefs, perspectives and how we perceive the world.
About Serpentine
Building new connections between artists and society, Serpentine presents pioneering contemporary art exhibitions and cultural events with a legacy that stretches back over half a century, from a wide range of emerging practitioners to the most internationally recognised artists, writers, scientists, thinkers, and cultural thought leaders of our time.
Based in London's Kensington Gardens, across two sites, Serpentine North and Serpentine South, Serpentine features a year-round, free programme of exhibitions, architectural showcases, education, live events and technological activations, in the park and beyond the gallery walls.
The Serpentine Pavilion is a yearly pioneering commission, which began in 2000 with Dame Zaha Hadid. It features the first UK structures by some of the biggest names in international architecture.
Public art has emerged as a central strand of Serpentine's programme. Major presentations include a collection of Eduardo Paolozzi's sculptures (1987), Anish Kapoor's Turning the World Upside Down (2010), Lee Ufan presentedRelatum-Stage (2018-19), Christo and Jeanne-Claude's London Mastaba in the Serpentine Lake (2018), I LOVE YOU EARTH by Yoko Ono (2021), Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster In remembrance of the coming alien (Alienor), (2022), and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg's Pollinator Pathmaker (2022 - ongoing).
Proud to maintain free access for all visitors, thanks to its unique location, Serpentine also reaches an exceptionally broad audience and maintains a profound connection with its local community.
A Serpentine limited edition by Barbara Kruger will be launched to coincide with the exhibition, to purchase please contact here. Barbara Kruger's limited run drop of apparel will also be sold exclusively at Serpentine South throughout the exhibition.
About Outernet Arts
Outernet Arts is an independent arts organisation located in the heart of London, offering free and accessible exhibitions in one of the world's largest digital spaces. With screens spanning the height of four stories, the organisation presents a year-round programme every Monday from 18:00 to 23:30. It aims to bring together a diverse network of both established and under-represented artists, commissioning projects that explore the complexities of the media space. Through artist-led initiatives, Outernet Arts sparks meaningful discussions about our existence in a digitally dominated world.
For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit Serpentine’s website. Please also visit and follow Serpentine on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, along with TikTok.