Mar 262025
 

Todd Gray’s photo juxtapositions in While Angels Gaze at Lehmann Maupin challenge the viewer to think about the legacies of the past and the ways in which they affect our perceptions of the world today. From classical statues and European paintings, to pop artists, to the stars in the universe, the eye moves between the various layers finding the connections.

From the gallery’s press release-

 Best known for his photo assemblages that feature subject matter ranging from imperial European gardens, to West African landscapes, to depictions of pop icons, to portraits of the artist himself, Gray builds critical juxtapositions in his work that examine accepted cultural beliefs—particularly around ideas of the African diaspora, colonialism, and societal power dynamics. In While Angels Gaze, Gray presents a suite of new pieces that combine images from his music photography archive, work made in the early 2000s, and photographs taken during his fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 2023…

In his newest body of work, Gray integrates Roman Catholic imagery and architecture with photographs sourced from his own archive, including self portraits, images of the Ghanaian landscape, and figures from pop music. The mining of his multi-decade music photography archive is an important component of Gray’s practice and one that offers a view into the history of music, featuring recognizable figures from Al Green to Iggy Pop. In While Angels Gaze, Gray combines these titans of the music industry with images of Roman Catholic cathedrals and ancient Roman statuary, drawing parallels between religious or mythical personages and the idols of today. In these compositions, modern pop stars are cast as the contemporary equivalents of historical figures—where societies might once have inlaid images of saints in golden basilica ceilings or erected statues of religious leaders on building facades, modern idols play on elevated stages to crowds of tens of thousands, becoming enshrined as mass media icons.

Throughout the exhibition, Gray’s lens extends beyond imaging pop icons, with some works devoid of figures all together. In Blues Ship (makes me wanna holla) (2024), for example, Gray depicts an image of a ship in the foremost panel, which appears to sail out of an image of the cosmos captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Both photographs are set in circular frames against a rectangular foundation image that shows an ornately decorated ceiling. The ship is a model of a French slave ship from the Maison des Esclaves (House of Slaves) museum on Gorée Island, a UNESCO world heritage site and former center of slave trading on the African coast, while the ceiling is located in Villa Torlonia, the former residence of Benito Mussolini in Rome. Here, Gray’s use of cosmic imagery functions as a conceptual bridge, condensing the time between the painting of the ceiling and the photographing of the ship. In works like these, Gray moves beyond celebrity adoration to examine the veneration of other false gods—commerce, wealth, power—exploring the enduring nature and consequences of such idolatry across centuries.

While Angels Gaze also showcases Gray’s use of formal compositional techniques. The curving ovals and circles the artist employs in this body of work disrupt his consistently rectangular format, creating portals through time that bridge the far past and the present. Throughout the series, Gray creates a sense of visual reverb—body gestures are mirrored from one figure to the next in works like Other tellings (Hollywood, Florence, Cosmos) (2024), architectural shapes blend across images in Gorée Island, Villa Torlonia (2024), and color palettes echo across compositions, from the gold-ground mosaics of St. Marc’s Basilica in Venice to the glittering sequins of Michael Jackson’s shirt in Glitter ’n Gold, 2(St. Marks) (2024).

Although Gray’s scenes are overlaid and juxtaposed, his work is never meant to be dissected—rather, each image can be thought of as a discrete stanza that composes a poem of completed work, reflecting his deeply intuitive process. In The Song Remains (assumptions about the nature of time) (2024)—one of the exhibition’s smallest works, composed of just two panels—Gray depicts Iggy Pop in black and white, his image overlaid against a statue from Villa Torlonia of a figure holding a pan flute. The gesture of the statue’s outstretched arm on the left is mirrored in Iggy’s raised hand on the right, connecting the two figures across time as if by an invisible thread. The image suggests an enduring human archetype, different and yet unchanged over the course of many centuries, and invites wider questions about the essence of human nature. Throughout While Angels Gaze, Gray invites us to ask not only who we are, but who we have been—and how much, if at all, this has changed over the course of millennia.

This exhibition closes 3/29/25.

Jun 072024
 


Kurimanzutto is currently showing two bodies of work from Argentinian artist Marta Minujín’s remarkable and varied career. The brightly colored soft sculptures are captivating but the darker pieces provide an intriguing balance.

From the press release-

“Easel painting is dead,” Marta Minujín explained in 1966, “Today man can no longer be satisfied with a static painting hanging on a wall. Life is too dynamic.” This pronouncement on painting’s demise centers a “death v. life” dialectic that propelled Minujín’s artistic experiments throughout the tumultuous 1960s. Her pursuit of a radically dynamic and temporal art that could, in her own words, “register changes that take place minute by minute” turned Minujín into a trailblazer of happenings, performances, participatory environments, and mass media art in her home country of Argentina as well as in France and the U.S.

Such a pioneering trajectory was first set into motion by two bodies of work created before 1965: Minujín’s soft sculptures, known as “Los eróticos en Technicolor [The Erotics in Technicolor]” and her chthonic paintings and assemblages in an informalist style. Together these discrete chapters of her oeuvre form a tensely intertwined conceptual dyad ruled by opposite forces, Eros and Thanatos, respectively. Their common ground—what they evoke as a site registering changes—was the body. Both series generated radically anthropomorphic artworks while implicating the body of the artist, the viewer, and the body politic, too.

For the first time since 1963, when Minujín’s informalist assemblages shared her Paris studio with “Los eróticos”, these two series of work have been brought exclusively together, allowing for their dialogue on the vulnerabilities and joys of the embodied condition to unfold. They speak of crises that go well beyond painting’s purported expiration—houselessness, chronic disease, ailing democracy, and the sexual revolution, among others—and that, though proper to the 1960s, resonate with present circumstances. Yet, by virtue of their Janus-faced nature, Minujin’s early works also suggest the possibilities of community, healing, and jubilant defiance before such upheavals and predicaments.

This exhibition closes 6/8/24.

Nov 282023
 

Lisa McCarthy “Joy Ride”, 2023, mixed media on paper (left) and Georgia Vahue, “Peacock”, 2023, mixed media

(clockwise from upper left) Georgia Vahue “Isn’t it Romantic”, 2022-3 mixed media; Lisa McCarthy “Awkward Attachment”, 2023, mixed media on canvas; Georgia Vahue “Time to Finish My Hand”, 2023, mixed media; Lisa McCarthy “Shot Gun”, 2023, mixed media on paper

Lisa McCarthy “All the books I bought and never read”, 2023, mixed media on paper (left) and Georgia Vahue “Turquoise”, 2023, mixed media and “Las Vegas”, 2023, mixed media

Clockwise from left- Georgia Vahue’s mixed media works- “Felicitations” 2023, “Travel Log”, 2023 and “Robert Browning”, 2023

Currently on view at HCCFL’s Gallery 221, located on their Dale Mabry campus, is Leftovers- assemblages by Georgia Vahue and mixed media paintings by Lisa McCarthy.

From the artists about the exhibition-

Things that are “left over” in our lives speak to our priorities. Regardless of their composition, the fact that something remains after a time can elicit strong reactions of nostalgia or urgency. Whether they are collectibles, old books, identities, leftover meals, or simple mementos, these things can be prized just as easily as they can be neglected. Even though tastes and perceptions change over time, we find ourselves drawn to the past for novelties and material to create with something new.

Leftovers are a loaded source, full of possibility and untapped potential. Their hold on us can remain for one second, a minute, an hour, day, or century. As leftover items sit, hide, or are abandoned for whatever reason, they mature into something else. In the context of art, the act of examining these elements closer, again and again, makes the artist aware of qualities one did not see or appreciate beforehand. Only with this careful attention can we help these leftovers transition into the future.

Although very different in medium, the works play off each other well, creating interesting conversations between the pieces. McCarthy has even created drawings on the pedestals based on objects and elements from Vahue’s work.

The closing reception for the exhibition on Thursday (11/30/23) will include an artist talk beginning at 6pm.

Below are additional paintings by McCarthy including the incredibly detailed wall length mural.

Lisa McCarthy “Enter Here”, 2022, mixed media on mylar

Lisa McCarthy “Enter Here”, 2022, mixed media on mylar (detail)

Lisa McCarthy, “Bon Marché”, 2023, mixed media on paper

Lisa McCarthy “Passers by the window”, 2023, oil and acrylic on canvas

May 092023
 

“Curtains”, 1972, Acrylic and fabric on canvas

“Curtains”, 1972 (detail)

“Voyage”, 1973, Acrylic and collage on canvas

“Shrine: Homage to M.L.”, 1963, Oil on canvas

“Big Ox”, 1967, acrylic on canvas

There’s only a few days left to see Miriam Schapiro: The André Emmerich Years, Paintings from 1957–76 at Eric Firestone Gallery.

From the press release-

Miriam Schapiro (1923–2015) is now well-known as a pioneer of the Women’s Art Movement, and for her contribution to the Pattern and Decoration Movement. She fused craft work, traditionally made by women, with modern painting in collages termed “femmage.” However, this exhibition will additionally shed light on her early Abstract Expressionist canvases, and her pioneering approach utilizing computer technology to create Hard Edge geometric painting in the 1960s. Spotlighting the legacy of this feminist artist, the exhibition will explore three stylistic phases, with significant examples from these two decades of Schapiro’s career.

This exhibition closes 5/13/23.

Apr 142023
 

Thornton Dial, “Memory of the Ladies That Gave Us the Good Life”, 2004, Tin, carpet, wood, glove, washbasin, scrub brush, yard ornament, motor-oil bottle, paint brush, clothing, wire, enamel, and spray paint on wood

David Hammons, “Untitled”, 1976-77, Wire, rope, pipe cleaner, hair, rubber ball, mesh, aluminum, sand paper, thumb tack

Robert Rauschenberg, “Matt’s Defense (Scenarios)”, 2005, Pigment transfer on polylaminate

Dial / Hammons / Rauschenberg at David Lewis presents several works by the three artists that, although different in many ways, work together well.

From the press release-

This is the first-ever exhibition to solely bring together these three great American artists, each of whose conceptual ingenuity is expressed by way of material transformation and possibility. In particular, Dial / Hammons / Rauschenberg seeks to articulate the intersection between the American Duchampian legacy, as expressed in the material invention and possibilities of postwar Neo-Dada, and African-American traditions of redemptive, alchemical, and visionary practices based in found and discarded objects.

The exhibition ranges over more than 50 years; the earliest work presented is in Rauschenberg’s iconic 1962 assemblage Cartoon, then includes an early Duchampian wire, rope, pipe cleaner, hair, ball, and tack construction by David Hammons (Untitled, 1976-77), and then focuses on the 90s and 2000s, featuring four magisterial assemblages from Thornton Dial’s ‘high,’ most modernist phase of work, as well as an example of each of Hammons Kool-Aid and Tarp series from 2006 and 2007 and additional later Rauschenberg works. The exhibition also features two important sculptures: Dial’s Top of the World (1998), and Rauschenberg’s extraordinary The Lurid Attack of the Monsters from the Postal News, August, 1875 (Kabal American Zephyr) (1981). The largest work in the exhibition, Dial’s astonishing Master of Space (2004), conjures and critiques the iconography of American imperialism, military and corporate both (the eagle is made of neckties), while simultaneously calling upon and vengefully subverting the most classical of all modernist devices: the grid.

Every piece in the exhibition deploys, invents, and reflects upon the logic of assemblage: the Duchampian act of appropriation, transmuted in postwar America, into the language of assemblage, the Rauschenbergian combine. Dial / Hammons / Rauschenberg highlights these acts of American alchemy, and asks us to imagine their power and possibilities in ways which revise, expand, and complicate the history of modern and contemporary art, and weave a broader tapestry.

This exhibition closes 4/15/23.

Mar 032023
 

Renée Stout, “Navigating the Abyss”, 2022

Renée Stout, “A Question for Christoper Wool“, 2022

Renée Stout, “Escape Plan D (with Hi John Root, Connecting the Dots)”, 2022

Renée Stout, “Wall of the Forlorn”, 2022

Renée Stout, exhibition room

Renée Stout, “Armored Heart/Caged Heart”, 2005

Renée Stout’s exhibition at Marc Straus in NYC,  Navigating the Abyss, presents a collection of her recent work in various mediums. From sculpture and painting to photography, her skillful and inventive work draws you in.

From the press release-

Starting out as a photo-realist painter depicting life in everyday urban neighborhoods, Stout soon developed an interest in the mystical and spiritual traditions in African American communities. Fascinated with fortunetelling and the healing power of Hoodoo, Vodou and Santeria still practiced within the African Diaspora in the American Southeast and Caribbean, she delved into ancient spiritual traditions and belief systems. She has drawn inspiration from a wide variety of sources such as current social and political events, Western art history, the culture of African Diaspora, and daily city life. While her artistic practice is rich with references and resonances, her works are eventually unique manifestations of her own imagination, populated by mysterious narratives and imagined characters derived from the artist’s alter ego.

In this exhibition, we encounter a group of portraits depicting Hoodoo Assassins and Agents (#213 and #214) who, in Stout’s imagination, are healers, seers, and empaths from a Parallel Universe in which fairness and balance rules. Erzulie Yeux Rouge (Red Eyes) is a spirit from the Haitian Pantheon of spirits whose empathic nature makes her a fierce guardian or protector of women, children, and betrayed lovers. Ikengas, originating in the Igbo culture of Southeastern Nigeria, are shrine figures that are meant to store the owner’s chi (personal god), his ndichie (ancestors) and his ike (power), and are generally associated with men. Stout’s Ikenga (If You Come for the Queen, You Better Not Miss) is a powerful female figure with her breasts and horns turned into weapons, and she is adorned with jewels and charms to boost her powers. Beyond the playful yet powerful imagination of these female characters are serious undertones of political commentary as Stout ponders the concepts of these deities while witnessing the recent rulings in our society that infringe on women’s rights.

In Escape Plan D (With Hi John Root, Connecting the Dots) Stout maps out her potential escape to the Parallel Universe when the daily news weighs unbearably on her psyche.

Visions of the Fall, in Thumbnails is a series of five small paintings that comments on the current state of our world and its imagined future with the titles as upcoming stages of its evolution.

American Memory Jar is an entirely black sculpture consisting of a glass jar covered with thin-set mortar, plastic and metal toy guns, topped with a doll head and adorned with a bead and rhinestone cross pendant. Memory Jugs are an American folk-art form that memorializes the dead adorned with objects associated with the deceased. Stout’s jar is a bitter but painfully accurate assessment.

While Stout’s work alludes to history, racial stereotyping, societal decay, and a set of alarming tendencies in our socio-political structures and ecosystem, it also reveals possibilities and the promise of healing. Various works reference healing herbs, potions, and dreams. Herb List, Spell Diagram and The Magic I Manifest speak of Stout’s belief in the power of consciousness, in the existence of more solid and fertile grounds, and of individual responsibility.

There is one overarching narrative that clearly emerges from Stout’s work – her personal history and spiritual journey as a woman and as an artist.

This exhibition closes 3/5/23.

 

Jul 302020
 

Happy Birthday to Betye Saar who turned 94 today! This work Still Ticking, (2005), was part of LACMA’s exhibition Betye Saar: Call and Response which opened at the museum in September of 2019.

From the wall description of the work-

Made shortly before Saar’s seventy-eighth birthday, the assemblage includes years and astrological glyphs on the inner left side that correlate to various important dates in her life. The work’s title wittily refers both to the timepieces in the sculpture- which, of course, are not ticking; indeed they are either frozen in time or missing their hands- and to the artist herself, who is alive and well, still ticking, now at age ninety-three.

Jan 032020
 

Black Girls Window, 1969

Mystic Window for Leo, 1966

As part of MoMA’s Opening Season, they are showing Betye Saar’s 1969 work, Black Girl’s Window, along with several of her works on paper.

The exhibition “explores the relation between her experimental print practice and the new artistic language debuted in that famous work, tracing themes of family, history, and mysticism, which have been at the core of Saar’s work from its earliest days.”

This exhibition closes 1/4/20.