NYC Art Shows- Camille Henrot at Hauser & Wirth

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Glasswork, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Apr 102025
 

For Camille Henrot’s imaginative installation for A Number of Things at Hauser & Wirth, a variety of sculptures, including several from her Abacus series, are surrounded by paintings from her Dos and Don’ts series. There’s a playfulness to both, but something a bit darker too. Walking on the soft floor among the sculptures there is a feeling of childlike wonder, while at the same time, in combination with the paintings, you are reminded of the rules and restrictions that are imposed on us, starting when we are very young, and how they become more oppressive with age.

From the gallery’s press release-

Evoking children’s developmental tools, shoes, distorted graphs and counting devices, new large-scale bronze sculptures from the artist’s ‘Abacus’ series (2024)—presented alongside recent smaller-scaled works—address the friction between a nascent sense of imagination and society’s systems of signs. The exhibition will also feature vibrant new paintings from Henrot’s ongoing ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series.

Initiated in 2021, the ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series combines printing, painting and collage techniques where etiquette books become the palimpsest for play with color, gesture, texture and trompe l’oeil. The artworks will emerge from a flooring intervention—conceived and designed with Charlap Hyman & Herrero—that transforms the gallery into a site of sensory experimentation. Henrot’s exhibition vivaciously sets the stage for the arbitrary nature of human behavior to circulate freely between rule and exception.

As viewers enter the gallery, they will be greeted by a pack of dog sculptures tied to a pole, as if left unattended by their walker. Shaped from steel wool, aluminum sheets, carved wood, wax, chain and other unexpected materials, Henrot’s creatures speak to the ever-unfolding effects of human design and domestication. As an extension of Henrot’s ongoing interest in relationships of dependency, the dogs stand in as the ultimate image of attachment.

Henrot’s latest ‘Abacus’ sculptures unite the utilitarianism of the ancient calculating tool with the arches and spirals of a children’s bead maze—a toy popularized in the 1980s as a heuristic diversion in pediatric waiting rooms and nursery schools. Through these formal associations, an instinctive sense of play collides with the learned impulse to search out patterns and impose order. With their biomorphic contours, opaline patinas and quadruped or biped anatomies, these works seem charged with a lifeforce of their own. Hovering between pure abstraction and their multivalent referents, Henrot’s bronzes invite our unfettered, sensuous engagement, even as they allude to the symbolic systems that tyrannize our imaginations.

Behavioral conditioning is a central concern of Henrot’s ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series. These richly layered paintings consider the idea of ‘etiquette’ as it relates to society at large: its codes of conduct, laws and notions of authority, civility and conformity. The works feature collaged fragments of invoices from an embryology lab; a note conjugating the German verb ‘to be;’ dental X-rays; digital error messages; children’s school homework; and to-do lists, among other things. Together, they build on Henrot’s interest in making sense of the urge to organize and categorize information—a theme that has been prevalent in her practice since her groundbreaking film ‘Grosse Fatigue’ (2013). The ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series distorts its source material to reveal the constructed, performative nature of any social identity, while acknowledging the emotional security that behavioral mimicry and groupthink can provide.

As the exhibition’s almost childlike title suggests, ‘A Number of Things’ brings together a disparate but related group of works that collectively address the enormously difficult task that is living, learning and growing in society. With tenderness for the most banal traces of our existences, Henrot offers a meditation on the competing impulses to both integrate and resist the unquestioned structures of society in our everyday lives.

‘There’s a reason why, in English, the word ‘politics,’ ‘polite’ and ‘police’ all sound the same—they are all derived from the Greek word polis or city, the Latin equivalent is civitas, which also gives us ‘civility,’ ‘civic’ and a certain modern understanding of ‘civilization.’

—David Graeber, ‘The Dawn of Everything’ (2021)

In the video walkthrough with Henrot (below) she discusses many of the inspirations for the work.

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

NYC Art Shows- Catherine Goodman at Hauser & Wirth

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 102025
 

“Pahari Picnic”, 2024, Oil on linen

“Abe”, 2024, Oil on linen

“Lago”, 2024, Oil on linen

The paintings in Catherine Goodman‘s Silent Music, her current exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, are filled with energetic brushstrokes and bright colors have the eye moving all around the canvas. Although abstract, it’s the hint of recognizable forms that encourage a more contemplative look.

From the gallery-

Opening in January, ‘Catherine Goodman. Silent Music’ presents a series of new, large-scale paintings by the British artist, where her characteristically expressive brushwork yields animated surfaces that pulse with the dynamic energy of their making. For Goodman, the studio is a place of spiritual meditation. Each painting represents an act of intimate transmutation—a way for her to turn closely held memories and personal vulnerabilities into newfound stability.

As the artist trustee at the National Gallery in London, Goodman has spent hours drawing from the collection and has developed a particular affinity for Old Master paintings, which she describes as her ‘only real teacher.’ Inspired by the intensity and drama of Renaissance masterworks by artists such as Titian and Veronese, and influenced by the poignantly psychological work of such groups as the London School, Goodman’s highly personal paintings transcend her individual experience, opening outward and inviting us in.

For decades Goodman has maintained a daily practice of drawing from observation. Through this she has constructed charged pathways between the physical world she observes and her own inner landscape. In these most recent abstractions, she often begins from landscapes and portraits that hold meaning for her. She then obscures these figurative grounds, building up evocative and densely layered compositions that invite sustained attention. ‘Lago’ (2024), a whirlwind of crimson, cobalt and lush green is one of many works named for a meaningful location or loved one whose spirit they embody. Other compositions, like the exuberant ‘Pahari Picnic’ (2024) or ‘Echo’ (2024)—monumental in scale and bursting with energy—give form to poignant memories. The substantial physical presence of these paintings, with their thick impasto and richly layered pigments, materialize intangible impressions of moments, places and people alike, as well as the psychological terrain encountered during the creative process itself. As the artist has confided to writer Jennifer Higgie, her artmaking ‘was never about problem solving. It’s about releasing something.’

Though rooted in the personal, Goodman’s oeurve uses the intimate act of painting to address the expansive macrocosm of collective experience. Her paintings act as a form of silent communication, resonating beyond the written or spoken word. Persistently forward-looking, Goodman’s latest body of work continues her tireless pursuit of art’s unique capacity to nurture connection.

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

Throwback- Los Angeles Art Shows- Gustav Metzger at Hauser & Wirth

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Events, Los Angeles Music, Mixed Media, Music, Musicians / Bands, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Feb 272025
 

“Liquid Crystal Environment” (1966)

Last year Hauser & Wirth presented several works by artist and activist Gustav Metzger for And Then Came the Environment at their downtown Los Angeles location. Metzger was an artist and an activist with strong concerns about environmental issues, ones that continue to this day. Works that address these issues are mixed with others that are explorations of science and technology including his use of liquid crystals before they became a common part of our technology, and the delightful energy of Dancing Tubes (videos of both below).

The press release provides more information on the exhibition and the artist’s history-

And Then Came the Environment presents a range of Metzger’s scientific works merging art and science from 1961 onward, highlighting his advocacy for environmental awareness and the possibilities for the transformation of society, as well as his latest experimental works, created in 2014. The exhibition title comes from Metzger’s groundbreaking 1992 essay Nature Demised wherein he proclaims an urgent need to redefine our understanding of nature in relation to the environment. Metzger explains that the politicized term ‘environment’ creates a disconnect from the natural world, manipulating public perception to obscure pollution and exploitation caused by wars and industrialization, and that it should be renamed Damaged Nature.

An early proponent of the ecology movement and an ardent activist, Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) was born in Nuremberg to Polish-Jewish parents, and fled Nazi Germany to England when he was 12 with his brother via the Kindertransport. While working as a gardener, he began his art studies in 1945 in war-embroiled Cambridge, a nexus for scientific experimentation and debate as the Atomic Age was dawning. By the late 1950s, Metzger was deeply involved in anti-nuclear protests and developed his manifestos on “auto-destructive” and “auto-creative” art. These powerful statements were aimed at “the integration of art with the advances of science and technology,” a synthesis that gained wide recognition in Europe in the 1960s through his exhibitions, lecture-demonstrations and writing.

Metzger’s quenchless curiosity about new materials and gadgets—from projectors and electronics to cholesteric liquid crystals and silicate minerals such as ‘mica’—led him to conduct experiments in and out of laboratories in collaboration with leading scientists in an effort to amplify the unpredictable beauty and uncertainty of materials in transformation: ‘the art of change, of movement, of growth.’ By the 1970s, increasingly concerned with ethical ramifications, Metzger became closely involved with the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science, raising awareness of ‘grotesque’ environmental degradation and social alienation and arguing for ‘old attitudes and new skills’ to bring science, technology, society and nature into harmony. He initiated itinerant projects to draw attention to the immense pollution caused by car emissions, a pursuit that gained momentum with his proposal for the first UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 and was later partially realized in 2007 at the Sharjah Biennial.

The artworks on view in And Then Came the Environment reveal Metzger’s lifelong interest in drawing and gesture, presenting works on paper from the mid-1950s alongside models, installations and later, Light Drawings that underpin the artist’s desire for human interaction amidst the reliance on technology that continues to this day. Following his death, The Gustav Metzger Foundation was established to further Metzger’s work and carry on his legacy.

Exhibited for the first time in Los Angeles, works here include the earliest film documentation of Metzger’s bold chemical experiments on the South Bank in London (Auto-Destructive Art: The Activities of G. Metzger, directed by H. Liversidge, 1963); his first mechanized sculpture with Liquid Crystals—Earth from Space (1966)—and the stunning, large-scale projection, Liquid Crystal Environment (1966), one of the earliest public demonstrations of the material that makes Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs), now omnipresent in our computer, telephone and watch screens.

And Then Came the Environment also presents Dancing Tubes (1968), an early kinetic project Metzger developed in the Filtration Laboratory of the University College of Swansea; various iterations of his projects against car pollution including the model Earth Minus Environment (1992); and the Light Drawing series (2014), using a plotter machine, a technology he first used in 1970, with fiber-optic light directed by air or hand.

The exhibition will be complemented by a new short film created by artist Justin Richburg, who animated Childish Gambino’s 2018 hit Feels like Summer, which references climate change. Richburg’s piece was inspired by and responds to Metzger’s 1992 essay Damaged Nature. The film represents the first time Metzger’s ideas have been directly expressed through a new medium, thus reflecting his interests in ongoing transformation and his conviction that younger generations were the most essential, urgent audiences for his work. In 2012, five years before his death at the age of 90, Metzger wrote:

“The future of the world is what we are after. We start with the young and then when the young are twelve, fifteen, and then twenty-one, they can enter politics, and if they have got this initiation/introduction to key issues … it will make an enormous difference to the future of the world.”

Below are videos from two of the most engaging works- Dancing Tubes and Liquid Crystal Environment.

For Gustav Metzger’s Liquid Crystal Environment (1966/2024), five projectors each contain a single slide with liquid crystals that is projected through a heating and cooling system causing them to change form.

Also worth a read is Forbes’ article on the exhibition which provides additional background including Metzger’s influence on The Who’s Pete Townshend.

This exhibition was also part of The Getty’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide programming. On Saturday, 3/1, The Getty is hosting Open House at The Ebell in Los Angeles- “a free day-to-night exploration of science and art” that will include a pop-up art book fair from Printed Matter; panel discussions; a Doug Aitken multi-screen installation with a live performance by Icelandic musician Bjarki; a performance by Julianna Barwick, and more.

Los Angeles Art Shows- Firelei Báz at Hauser & Wirth

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Collage, Conceptual Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Dec 302024
 

“Atabey (or change the body that destroys me)”,2024, Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas

“Zemi (A New Spelling of My Name)”, 2024

“Zemi (A New Spelling of My Name)”, 2024 (detail)

“Ayida-Weddo (freed from all that is not marvelous)”, 2024, Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas

“Ayida-Weddo (freed from all that is not marvelous)”, 2024, Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas (detail)

“Mawu-Lisa (I build my language out of rocks)”, 2024, Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas

“Mawu-Lisa (I build my language out of rocks)”, 2024, Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas (detail)

“Huracán (beyond the triumphs of rootedness)”, 2024, Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas

Firelei Báez has created several stunning paintings for her exhibition The fact that it amazes me does not mean I relinquish it, currently on view at Hauser & Wirth’s downtown Los Angeles location. The historical documents that serve as a background for her beautiful ciguapa figures add another dimension to the complex works.

From the gallery’s press release-

New York-based artist Firelei Báez has achieved wide acclaim over the past decade for her rigorous paintings, drawings and immersive installations that explore the influences of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Conjuring forgotten narratives, Báez carefully fills history’s lacunae with joyful rebellion.

This September, in her first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth since joining the gallery in 2023, Báez will present new large-scale canvases, drawings and her first-ever bronze sculpture at the gallery’s Downtown Arts District center in Los Angeles. Complex and layered, Báez’s work depicts fantastical hybrid figures and reimagined worlds. Employing beauty to reprocess the enduring effects of violence and trauma, Báez challenges traditional representations of history, nationality, gender and race. United by common cause, the paintings incorporate a wide range of subjects including art history, science fiction, anthropology, pop culture, folklore and fantasy.

‘The fact that it amazes me does not mean I relinquish it’ is a reference to the work of Martinican writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant, a key figure in shaping theories informing the Caribbean’s influence on the global stage. Drawing inspiration from Glissant’s text, ‘Poetics of Relation’ (1990)—from which the title directly quotes— Báez navigates the tensions between identity and place, using Glissant’s concept of opacity to explore modes of resistance, namely the ability to navigate the world freely within a refusal of being fully understood—both to others and to oneself.

Báez considers mythology an important tool, “a way of correcting the past and projecting a different future. Growing up in the Dominican Republic, the artist heard local folk stories about a mythic femme trickster called a ‘ciguapa’ who was known for her elusiveness. While such lore was shared to discourage unruly and wild behavior, Báez has embraced the ciguapa in her work as a figure of endless possibility. Ever-morphing and multiplying, her composite creatures are often depicted with human legs, a coat of delicate fur and backwards facing feet so that she remains traceless and ultimately unknowable. In the ciguapa, Báez explores the body as a living archive, a shape-shifting repository of meaning and history, whose continuous transformation is inherently defiant.

In the painting, Zemi (A New Spelling of My Name), (2024), a supernatural figure appears at the entrance of a cave. Rather than standing before a blank canvas, Báez begins her paintings over plans that conceal narratives of violence and exploitation. In the aforementioned painting, Báez builds her imagery atop a 19th-Century drawing of the Taíno caves in Santana, Hispaniola. At the time of its production, the illustration functioned as a factual document; however, it was only an approximation of a real location wherein Báez’s hybrid figure materializes, a triumphant manifestation of empowerment and hope in a pieced-together landscape.

This exhibition closes 1/5/24.

NYC Art Shows- Rita Ackermann at Hauser & Wirth

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Drawing, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Printmaking
Jul 192024
 

Rita Ackermann is currently showing work at both of Hauser and Wirth’s Chelsea locations for her exhibition Splits. At their 22nd street location are her paintings and at the 18th street location are large silkscreen prints. The figures in the paintings mix with the more abstract elements to create work that keeps the eye moving and engaged.

From the press release-

Titled ‘Splits,’ Ackermann’s latest paintings mark a pinnacle in the artist’s ongoing concern with the creation of dynamic, moving images. In these canvases, forms cascade downward and upward, at times merging seamlessly into one another. To optimize the potential of such chance transformative processes, Ackermann conceptualized the canvas as divided into three screens, as she aptly calls them. This enabled her not only to guide the flow of line and paint, but also to forestall the coalescence of drawing and painting. No sketch prefigured the images that surfaced, except those carved into the recesses of her memory. Instead, Ackermann allowed an instinctive force to guide her hand as it moved across the fields before her.

The fluctuation between the screens she populated with diaphanous lines and those carrying weightier, gestural strokes of color also conspired to infuse the paintings with an unexpected rhythm. In ‘Shut Eye’ (2023), for example, two screens brimming with fragments of drawn shapes entice the eye to actively pull open the middle register and thereby show more of the painted forms within. This occurs even as the upper and lower screens seem to press inward, creating a dynamic tension between revelation and concealment. To enhance this impression, Ackermann occasionally used luminous yellow pigment to further instill in these paintings a sense of lightness and transparency.

Composed as a sequence of stacked-up semi-translucent frames, these canvases can also be seen as the visual equivalent of images imprinted on a film strip. Ackermann, in fact, draws parallels between the transformative essence of the images in the ‘Splits’ and the dynamic permutations observed when montaged photographic images are projected in a cinema. In both mediums, meaning opens in the infinitesimal split between what the eye sees and the elusive. There, a unique motion also unfolds, one that oscillates between appearance and truth. In all these paintings, there is mystery, one that hints at the presence of the profound and unknowable. Through their enigmatic allure, the ‘Splits’ encourage the viewer to ponder the ineffable, reminding us that while transcendence eludes sight, its essence can nonetheless reveal itself.

This exhibition is on view until 7/26/24.

NYC Art Shows- Mary Heilmann at Hauser & Wirth

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Drawing, Installation Art, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking
Jul 192024
 

Daydream Nation, Mary Heilmann’s exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, is filled with interesting forms, both familiar and abstract.

From the press release-

Curated by artist Gary Simmons, Heilmann’s friend and former student and colleague at New York’s School of Visual Arts, the exhibition celebrates her talent for distilling complex images and ideas into deceptively simple geometric forms and abstract gestural marks. Through rarely and never-before-seen works on paper from the 1970s to early 2000s, this presentation reveals how drawing functions as a form of daydreaming—of conjuring the sights, sounds and events of her past travels or her imagined future—in Heilmann’s creative process.

Heilmann is known for working across mediums and for installations which playfully combine disparate works. Reflecting on the artist’s approach to exhibition-making, ‘Daydream Nation’ brings together works on paper, ranging from watercolor studies for larger paintings to works that function as paintings on paper in their own right, alongside a selection of her ceramic sculptures and sculptural chairs to create an ambiently whimsical yet conceptually rigorous environment. Heilmann often works in series, revisiting and reimagining certain arrangements of form and color over time, as evidenced here in such recurring motifs as the chair, rosebud, spiral, wave and web. But in Heilmann’s oeuvre, repetition begets difference and from this multiplicity emerges important truths about the functions of memory and our process of translating it.

Drawing has always factored significantly into Heilmann’s practice, manifesting in a variety of forms in ‘Daydream Nation.’ The exhibition features a new mural-like installation that reimagines and expands an existing work into a new form of expression. Heilmann’s seventh wall drawing to date, this installation was developed in conversation with Simmons, who frequently explores the monumental scale of this medium in his own work.

The title of this exhibition is taken from Sonic Youth’s groundbreaking album ‘Daydream Nation’ (1988), beloved by both Heilmann and Simmons. Evoking Heilmann’s longstanding interest in daydreaming as a creative exercise and the importance of travel for her in this process, it also situates her oeuvre within the culture of youthful rebellion in New York City, the California-born artist’s adopted home since 1968 and a constant source of energy and inspiration for her both personally and professionally.

This exhibition closes 7/26/24.

For more about the artist and her work, check out this episode of Art21, below.

NYC Art Shows- Charles Gaines at Hauser & Wirth

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography
Mar 282023
 

Charles Gaines’ work never fails to impress and his recent exhibition, Southern Trees, at Hauser and Wirth in NYC, is no exception.

From the press release-

One of the most important conceptual artists working today, the show explores the evolution of Gaines’s complex practice, demonstrating how he has continued to forge new paths within the innovative framework of two of his most acclaimed series, Numbers and Trees and Walnut Tree Orchard. The exhibition’s title, ‘Southern Trees,’ alludes directly to the 150-year-old pecan trees pictured in the new works, and symbolically to the opening lyrics of ‘Strange Fruit,’ Billie Holiday’s haunting protest anthem from the 1930s.

The image of the tree has been central to Gaines’s practice since he first began the Walnut Tree Orchard series in the 1970s. In ‘Southern Trees,’ Gaines advances the series using pecan trees photographed on a visit to Boone Hall Plantation in Charleston County, South Carolina––not far from where the artist was born and lived until he was five years old. Presented alongside a key early example from the walnut tree series, eight new triptych works on paper revisit and expand upon this significant original body of work.

‘Walnut Tree Orchard: Set M’ (1977), on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, pairs a black and white photograph of a walnut tree with two drawings derived from it––an ink outline of the same tree and a grayscale grid that plots all of the trees included in the series up until that point. The newest series, titled Pecan Trees (2022), begins similarly, with a stark black and white photograph of a tree; yet in the drawings that accompany it, Gaines has filled in the outline of the tree with solid ink and used vibrant watercolors to plot all the previous trees in the final drawing. These successive modifications to scale, color and background demonstrate Gaines’s theory that while ‘the system has never changed, the outcome is always different.’

This extends to Gaines’s new Numbers and Trees Plexiglas series, which begin with the artist assigning each tree a distinctive color and numbered grid––breaking down the composition into individual cells that reflect the full form of the tree depicted in the photograph on the surface. However, Gaines reverses his signature process in this new series by overlaying the forms of the trees one at a time and in progression on the back panel of the work rather than on the front. He then brings the photograph to the surface by printing an enlarged detail of the most recently added tree on the work’s Plexiglas surface. This approach brings the tree’s shadowy branches to the foreground, highlighting its textural details and contrasting tones while obscuring the colorful numbered grids painted underneath it. This reversal produces a dramatically different effect, igniting a more somber, yet stirring, reaction to the work as the austere branches, dripping with moss, dominate the picture.

Created through carefully considered systems rather than through the artist’s own imagination or intuition, these new works remove the artist’s subjectivity by following a set of self-determined rules and procedures. The works call into question both the objective nature of the trees and the subjective natural and material human actions that surround them. The fastidious layering process allows Gaines to reveal the differences between the trees’ shapes where the forms do not align. These differences, highlighted by the artist’s systems, suggest the arbitrary nature of other manufactured systems in our society––such as politics, gender, race and class.

This exhibition closes 4/1/23.

Frank Bowling at Hauser and Wirth NYC

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, British Art Shows, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jul 282021
 

Texas Louise, 1971

Where is Lucienne?, 1971

 

Where is Lucienne? (detail), 1971

Where is Lucienne? (detail), 1971

Frank Bowling’s incredible paintings are currently on view at two of Hauser & Wirth’s locations, London and NYC, reflecting the artist’s time living in both cities. The paintings above are from the New York location.

From the press release-

The exhibition charts Bowling’s life and work between the UK and the United States. Born in Guyana (then British Guiana) in 1934, Bowling arrived in London in 1953, graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1962. He later divided his time between the art scenes in London and New York, maintaining studios in both cities. London is the city where Bowling trained as a painter and achieved early acclaim. New York is the city that drew him to itself at the height of the Civil Rights movement, where he became involved in discussions of Black Art – New York was a place of fresh energy and ideas for an artist in search of new ways to make paintings.

Bowling’s transatlantic orientation reveals itself in a shift from his early engagement with expressive figuration and pop art, to an immersion in a uniquely poetic abstraction that continues to evolve even today. Visible in his work are the legacies of both the English landscape tradition and American abstract expressionism. Developing in and between two cities over the course of decades, Bowling’s exploration of light, colour, and geometry can be understood as profoundly influenced by the two great rivers of his life: he has maintained studios close to The Thames in London and the East River in New York, absorbing the brilliance of the rivers’ light into his vision. Bowling would often begin a work in one city and finish it in the other, merging the atmospheres of both. In his own words, ‘I would just roll the lot up and move. And I knew that when I got to the other end, I could roll them out again and continue to work.’

Bowling’s restless innovation on the painted plane endures in his latest works. He continues to break ground through the use of thick impasto textures, acrylic gels, collage, stitched canvas, and metallic and pearlescent pigments. The complexities of his upbringing in Guyana and his constant journeying between London and New York have only served to activate the richness of the different influences of each location. His paintings are a celebration of life lived in varying lights and colours.

Ida Applebroog at Hauser and Wirth NYC

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Drawing, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Politics, Sculptors / Sculpture
Dec 042020
 

 

Ida Applebroog’s exhibition Applebroog Birds at Hauser & Wirth’s New York location is a delightful collection of paintings and sculpture. But there is more to them than meets the eye.

From the press release-

For more than six decades, American artist Ida Applebroog has continuously engaged with the polemics of human behavior, often exploring interrelated themes of power, gender, politics, and sexuality in works that span and challenge the boundaries of her mediums. Her forthcoming exhibition ‘Applebroog Birds,’ opening 12 November at Hauser & Wirth New York, finds the 91 year old artist advancing her trenchant political inquiry through avian portraits, paintings, and sculptures, all of which are ripe with symbolism relevant to this unprecedented moment. This exhibition expands upon the ‘Angry Birds of America’ works she began making in 2016 and reaffirms her status as one of contemporary art’s most consistently inventive political image-makers.

A pioneering artist of the feminist movement since the 1970s, Applebroog constantly evolves her visual vocabulary and draws from a diverse array of themes, memories, and mass media sources. These range from her own genitalia to dolls and mannequins, to cartoon characterizations of people in her life, to fashion models and accouterment – and, most recently, birds. In 2016, Applebroog became captivated by ornithology and John James Audubon’s skill at merging art and nature. She developed an interest in drawing birds nestled in trees. Quickly realizing that Audubon and other ornithologists work from taxidermal birds, Applebroog began collecting birds and reading ornithological books, eventually producing her own models in plaster and paint.

Her series ‘Angry Birds of America’ was developed during a time of grief and rage, expressed with new intensity in American politics: it was the year that saw the beginning of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, the concomitant rise of white nationalism and anti-immigration violence. Mass shootings in Las Vegas and Texas, the #MeToo movement, and women’s long suppressed anger at accepted sexual affront and assault in the workplace were brought into public focus. Some of Applebroog’s ‘Angry Birds of America’ works will be on view at Hauser & Wirth, having been presented at the Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland, in its 2019 exhibition ‘Ida Applebroog.’ Centered on Applebroog’s paintings and sculptures of dead birds, these works provide viewers with analogs for the underlying amalgam of violence and beauty that exist in the world around us, both natural and manmade.

Applebroog’s images and sculptures of birds depict a wide range of avian types. Her ‘White Bird’ sculptures, inspired in part by Applebroog’s studio menagerie of stuffed birds, have the aspect of phantoms in flight, forms that seem to bob gently on unseen air currents, while the ‘Specimens’ works, innate and individually tagged, suggest findings from an ornithologist’s lab. The bird portraits on mylar similarly emit a feeling of taxidermy’s strange temporality. These works evolve from images that are printed with inks that the artist then manipulates by hand. Though the animal depicted in each work has expired, Applebroog’s skill in returning a carcass to life is in full view, creating a metaphor for contemporary political life in America and a call to action.

In an essay titled ‘Bird on a Wire,’ originally published in the Kunstmuseum Thun’s catalogue for Applebroog’s 2019 solo exhibition, art historian Jo Applin notes the irony that President Trump has his own, ‘ill-advised addiction to social media through which, like the proverbial caged canary, he tweets, and tweets, and tweets all manner of bizarre statements, unfounded allegations, and lies.’ In ‘Applebroog Birds,’ the artist’s portrait of a bald eagle – the national symbol of the United States of America – keeps company with a flock of dead birds.

This exhibition is on view until 12/19/20, by appointment.

 Older Entries